Erin
It was better to come here, she saw now, without any clear idea of what you wanted from the world.
That way you could pick sensibly from viable options.
The biggest lesson she’d learned on this campus was that what she wanted wouldn’t happen, couldn’t happen, so she was leaving lost and listless, with no idea what she was going to do next.
She didn’t even know what she wanted to do any more.
She’d never felt more uncertain, less capable, this confused.
The world was at her feet, but her hands were tied behind her back.
At least she had Jason.
Some surety was better than none at all.
He was working full-time as a deputy floor manager in a department store in town.
Coming home full of tales of his own brilliance, like how his line manager had told him he was definitely going to get promoted whenever he moved up, and how they were going to send him on this merchandising course in London in September, all expenses paid.
He’d made new friends and sometimes even went out with them at the weekends.
Erin savoured these unprecedented nights to herself, although she usually went home to her parents so she could actually enjoy them.
They lived in a house-share in Bishopstown.
She was the only student; the others all worked full-time in town in bars, restaurants, retail.
The house was a mess – grotty, even – but Jason had vetoed nicer places because, he said, he didn’t want to live with the students who already lived there.
He claimed this was because they’d be having loud parties all the time, but Erin suspected it was more that his being a college dropout made him feel insecure and inadequate around people who’d stayed the course, which made her wonder sometimes how he felt about her doing it.
And their housemates were awful anyway, constantly playing music whose beat thundered through shared walls, treating the lock on the front door as an optional accessory, and letting food spoil and rot in almost every corner.
Meanwhile Sharon was living with medical students in a brand-new building at the end of the Western Road – one of whom was Sarah, her girlfriend – and having things like pot-luck dinner parties and people over for coffee and pastries on a Sunday morning.
Erin didn’t like to go.
It only made coming home even more depressing.
Trying to get Jason to come out with her and her college friends always went the same way.
He’d initially agree to attend but then, closer to the date, he’d start saying he didn’t know if he could, until, on the day, he’d declare he was too tired or just not in the mood and somehow make the idea of them both staying in seem like the more attractive option.
So when he said he wanted to come along on her last ever end-of-term class night out, she assumed he’d change his mind and didn’t bother telling him that, actually, it wasn’t a girlfriends-and-boyfriends thing.
Even as they headed towards campus, hand in hand – everyone was meeting in the Old Bar – she was still braced for an excuse, for him to suddenly remember other plans or even feign an illness.
It wasn’t until they were actually there, holding drinks and greeting people, that she accepted Jason had actually come out with her.
Almost immediately, she found herself wishing he hadn’t.
First, he disappeared. Then, when she saw him again more than an hour later, he was already messy-drunk and holding court in the centre of a group, saying something about the new Star Wars movie – the sixth one that was somehow also the third – to faces ranging from blank to confused to bemused.
She didn’t want to go get him, didn’t want to have to claim him as hers, so she left him to it.
And so it went for the rest of the night.
By the time they headed home, Jason had spoken to every single member of the Biological and Chemical Sciences Class of 2005 except his own girlfriend, whom he’d only embarrassed.
His coming out tonight hadn’t been a gesture but an act of sabotage.
In the cab, she was silent and seething, turned away from him, eyes fixed on the amber-lit streets rushing by.
‘You know what’s funny?’ he said, oblivious.
‘When we first met, I thought you were so cool. I remember thinking, she is way too cool for me.’ He chuckled.
‘Blinded by love, I suppose.’ When she didn’t respond, he added, ‘I don’t mean in a bad way.
What I’m saying is, tonight I realized how much we really know each other. ’
She wondered how he could possibly have landed on that revelation when he’d barely spoken to her for the entire night.
‘So,’ he went on, ‘I can immediately see through the bullshit you put on with other people.’
She turned to him with a sharp, ‘What?’
‘Oh, come on,’ he said, smiling with a confidence that infuriated her.
‘We all do it. We’re not our real selves with everyone we meet, are we?
We can’t be. And I’ve seen what you’ve done with these guys.
What they think you are. Who they think you are.
And it’s cool. I get it. I like it, actually.
’ He reached across the distance between them to put a hand on her thigh and squeeze it.
‘I like that I’m the only one who gets to know the real you. ’
The next morning, she met Adrian, a guy from her class, in the deli queue for their hangover-busting breakfast rolls.
‘I think I confused Jason,’ he said. ‘For some reason I thought he was a rower.’
‘He was.’ It seemed so long ago now – and it was, four and a half years ago and counting – but she remembered being so impressed when he’d told her that he’d been offered a sports scholarship to an American university but had, ultimately, turned it down. ‘Why? What happened?’
A beat passed before Adrian smiled and said, ‘Nine pints of Bulmers on an empty stomach, that’s what happened. I never want to even smell that shit again.’ And then he changed the subject.
On the walk home, Erin found herself thinking about how difficult it was to square the sports scholarship with everything else she knew about Jason.
He’d gone to a community school on Cork’s southside – did they do rowing there?
Could they, even? Logistically? Did they have the kind of international links that led to US college offers?
It seemed so unlikely. And if Erin had learned one thing from her adolescent obsession with Dawson’s Creek, it was that US colleges demanded SATs.
You could take them here – she’d even looked into it at one point, back when she was still naive enough to feel anything was possible – but Jason had never mentioned it, not even once.
And if he loved rowing so much, why hadn’t he continued to do it when he went to Limerick? Why did he never mention that either?
A few days later, she asked him a question about US sports scholarships, having invented a classmate who’d been offered one.
Jason shrugged and said, ‘Fucked if I know.’
There was one, brief moment when everything felt possible again.
After a chance conversation at a graduate job fair, Erin got an incredible offer: a place on a six-month training programme at the ECDC – the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control.
She accepted and then told Jason she was going – in that order – and was surprised when his congratulations and excitement felt pure.
He told her not to worry about her half of the rent while she was away and said he’d visit.
He even took her out to dinner to celebrate.
Her parents were excited too, and unable to hide the fact that they were also relieved.
There’d been no need to worry about the all-too-serious boyfriend, the loss of drive and direction, the moping through most of her college days.
Their daughter hadn’t strayed from her path.
She’d only seemed to. Now, finally, everything was back on track – and just in time.
But Solna turned out to be nothing at all like Erin expected.
Within the first fortnight she realized that, actually, this entire thing wasn’t.
Virology, in practice, wasn’t spacesuits and exciting, emerging diseases.
Public health was mostly sitting at a desk, answering phones and inputting data.
She was there nearly six weeks before she even saw the inside of a lab.
Maybe she really would be looking at cervical smears for the rest of her life.
She was also crushingly lonely. All the other participants seemed so serious, so unlike her, that it was impossible to connect.
She sent long, colourful emails to Sharon and a few of her college friends, but they either didn’t have the time or inclination to match them with their responses; she was lucky if she got two or three sentences a few days later.
She spent hours on the phone to Jason, who she missed so much it took her by surprise.
Erin booked a trip home for the weekend to give herself something to look forward to. Jason came to pick her up from the airport. They held each other like it had been years instead of weeks.
‘It’s so good to be able to do this,’ he said, sighing into her hair. ‘I missed it so much.’
They’d arranged to go straight to her parents’ house for a welcome-back dinner. On the drive there, Erin spotted something colourful in the pocket of the passenger door. When she pulled on it, it unfurled into a patterned silk scarf that she assumed must be his mother’s.
‘Oh shit,’ Jason said, seeing it. ‘Orla was looking for that.’
Erin waited.
She waited longer.
But he was watching the road ahead with an intensity that told her there was no point – she’d have to ask.
So, finally, she said as casually as she could, ‘Who’s Orla?’
‘My manager.’
His tone implied he was reminding her of this but, last she knew, his manager was a man and she was sure she’d never heard him mention any Orla before.