Conversations with Friends by Sally Rooney

Author:Sally Rooney [Rooney, Sally]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571333141
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2017-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

After a lot of waiting around they gave me a bed in the Accident & Emergency ward. My mother said she would go home and get some sleep for a couple of hours, and that I was to ring her if there was any news. The pain had thinned out a little, but it wasn’t gone. I held onto her hand when she said goodbye, the big warm plane of it, like something that could grow from the earth.

Once I got into bed, a nurse hooked me up to a drip, but she didn’t tell me what the drip was doing. I tried to look calmly up at the ceiling and count down from ten in my head. The patients I could see from my bed were mostly elderly, but there was one young guy on the ward who seemed to be drunk or high. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear him crying, and apologising to all the nurses who went past. And the nurses said things like, okay Kevin, you’re all right, good man.

The doctor who came to take my blood sample didn’t look much older than I was. He seemed to need a lot of blood, and a urine sample also, and he asked questions about my sexual history. I told him I had never had unprotected sex, and he moved his lower lip disbelievingly and said: never, okay. I coughed and said: well, not fully. Then he looked at me over his clipboard. It was clear from his expression that he thought I was an idiot.

Not fully unprotected? he said. I don’t follow you.

I could feel my face get hot, but I replied in as dry and unconcerned a voice as possible.

No, I mean, not full sex, I said.

Right.

Then I looked at him and said: I mean he didn’t come inside me, am I not being clear? He looked back down at his clipboard then. We hated each other energetically, I could see that. Before he went away, he said they would test the urine for pregnancy. Typically the hCG levels would remain elevated for up to ten days, that’s what he said before he left.

I knew that they were testing for pregnancy because they thought I was having a miscarriage. I wondered if the clots of tissue were making them think that. A searing anxiety developed inside me at this thought, in the same form it always took no matter what external stimulus triggered it: first the realisation that I would die, then that everyone else would die, and then that the universe itself would eventually experience heat death, a kind of thought sequence that expanded outward endlessly in forms too huge to be contained inside my body. I trembled, my hands were clammy, and I felt sure I would be sick again. I punched my leg meaninglessly as if that would prevent the death of the universe. Then I found my phone under my pillow and dialled Nick’s number.

He answered after several rings.

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