The Night Belongs to Us

Chapter 1-1

Chapter 1June 1993

I read the Aeneid when I first moved to London. Trying to fight off that unmerciful voice at the back of my head coaxing me into submitting to my loneliness I delved into a pile of second-hand books I picked up from the bookshop around the corner, something I hadn’t done since I was a child. I loathed the Aeneid more than any other book I had ever read, what with its one-dimensional hero, its flimsy plot, its lack of focus. If not for its portrayal of fate and destiny I imagine I would have long forgotten about it by now. Virgil’s depiction of fate still resounded in my memory for a long time afterward. Throughout those lonely months I spent my days pondering fate, and destiny, and life paths. I wondered if everything is set out before us long before it transpires, everything under the control of fate, each of us victim to a premeditated game of dice, an unknowing victim of some ice blooded god. I wondered if there was no such thing at all—if our existence truly was a mistake, a slip-up in the mechanics of the universe, and if we were all just sauntering around with no upper hand influencing our destinies and so unfathomably insignificant that our selfish, ignorant minds could never comprehend it.

It wasn’t a pleasing topic to ponder over, but I deduced eventually that when the worst things befall us in life it is so much easier to shrug all of the blame off of ourselves and accuse the cards we were dealt, firm in the belief that there was nothing we could have done to escape our personal tragedies. But when luck strikes, we boast that we alone orchestrated our fortune and that our winnings are won by our own hands—no gods, no fate, no predestination.

It would be hard, in years to come, to even remember that there once existed a version of myself before I came to know Connie O’Reilly. I suppose you could quite easily divide my life into two decidedly uneven halves; the Alex before Connie, and Alex after Connie. Two barely reconcilable figures, I suppose, who lived very different lives and embodied very different ideals. A girl who was meek and well-mannered and mundane, compared to she who flirted with trouble and blasted caution and common sense to the wind. The time that came before is hardly memorable to me now. I was plain and unassuming before there was Connie, so much so that I struggle to picture clearly what I must have been like before she catapulted into my world and transformed the very essence of who I was.

Standing on the edges of crowded rooms, blending into the background. Never speaking unless spoken to. Childhood is a time of excitement and freedom, carefree innocence that can never be recaptured. My own childhood was never something I saw as such. I was not an unhappy child; merely forgettable, even to myself. My entire childhood I was holding my breath, awaiting something that would release me from my own prescribed monotony and self-diagnosed gutlessness. That something, as it turned out, just so happened to come in the shape of Connie.

I discovered who she was rather quickly upon starting secondary school in St. Michael’s. Everybody knew her whether they were in our year or not. She usurped her elder sister to become captain of the junior hockey team by Halloween, an impressive feat for a First Year, and the fact that she was both stunningly beautiful and filthy rich ensured that half our classmates were jealous of her, unsure of whether they wanted to be her or befriend her. Sometimes I would find myself staring unabashedly at them when they walked by, invisible on the periphery of the crowd. I couldn’t imagine that they might ever notice me, that they might be aware of anything beyond themselves. That was the aura they gave off, with their boisterous laughter and their elegant gliding, elated above the rest of us.

Connie, of course, was the most beautiful. Her hair fell halfway down her back, strawberry blonde, which she would probably describe as golden. It bounced when she tipped her head back, when she closed her eyes in laughter and wet her bright red lips with the corner of her tongue. Molly Gable and Orla Sheridan, flanking her on either side, were two of the only other girls in our year to come even close to matching Connie’s effortless beauty.

I never cared much for appearances or ranked myself against other girls my age, but I felt a sharp sense of inadequacy whenever they were near. Her small collection of close friends was just as intimidating as she was, each of them both wealthy and attractive in their own right, and girls who weren’t counted among them fought for the right to declare themselves, at the very least, her acquaintance. In many ways, she existed on the fringes of my life at first. Connie was untouchable, someone I, the docile Alex Ryan, with askew glasses and frizzy hair, would never dare interact with. We didn’t even share a class together in First or Second Year and just English in Third Year; the only class she had where she wasn’t surrounded by any of her friends.

She sat at the desk next to me and for the first few weeks of Third Year she was easy to pretend to ignore. I thrived in English, as I did in almost every class, but it fell in the late mid-morning, and so I developed a habit of smuggling in chocolate to stave off my hunger until lunch. After she noticed me nibbling away on a piece of Turkish Delight one afternoon, she took to leaning across the desk every afternoon and asking for some. The first time she asked me caught me completely off guard and left me a veritable mess for the rest of the day. Sister Anna was standing with her back to the class and I was scribbling intently in my notebook, silently chewing. Connie cleared her throat twice, loud enough to catch my attention, and when I glanced in her direction, I saw she was leaning across to me.

“Um—everything okay?” I whispered, blinking twice.

“Peachy,” she replied, and the clipped edge to her voice had me wondering if perhaps I did something to offend her. Nothing before that had ever startled me so much, and my mouth went dry. ”What kind of chocolate is that?”

“Oh, it’s just Turkish Delight,” I answered, unsure.

“Can I have some?”

Nobody at school really tended to notice me most of the time, and no one like Connie O’Reilly had ever actually spoken to me before. I gulped and handed her a square which she practically snatched out of my hand before holding out her palm for another. “Turkish Delight is my favorite,” she whispered again. I looked up quickly to see if there was mockery behind her words but there was none. My mind could not fathom why she might be talking to me other than to mock or jeer. That was something popular girls did, I knew. They put others down to make themselves feel better. And yet, I never heard anything bad about Connie O’Reilly. She barely spoke to anyone outside her circle but when she did, she was rumored to be nothing but polite. I studied her closely for a moment before allowing myself to believe her.

I didn’t bother trying to suppress the smile that burst through, then, when I decided to trust her. “Really? I tried some after reading The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe a few years ago and I’ve been obsessed ever since.”

“Reading the what?”

I raised an eyebrow. “The uh—The Chronicles of Narnia? It’s a book series…”

“Never heard of it.” She leaned back slightly in her chair just as Sister Anna turned back around. I continued watching her a minute longer. Up close I could see that her eyes weren’t brown, as I had originally supposed, but hazel. She wore dusty gold eyeshadow and her lashes were long and dark. Everyone knew Connie was the only girl in the Junior Cycle who got away with wearing makeup every day to school. Others tried and were sent to the toilets almost instantly with a makeup wipe and detention on Friday afternoon. Teachers rarely seemed to give out to Connie for anything she did. Eventually, she turned back to me, her lips twitching upwards into what could almost be considered a smile. “Thanks, Ryan.”

She didn’t speak to me again after that first day. Instead, she simply waited until I fumbled to silently open the wrapper, and then she would reach across the desk with an open palm. I ended up giving her nearly half of my bar every time and rather than audibly thank me she would grace me with a smile. A quick one, just as our eyes would hesitantly meet and I would flick the wrapper away. Those small, silent, inconsequential interactions became the shameful highlight of my day. My heart skipped when I entered the classroom. My fingers trembled when I opened the wrapper. Sometimes when I handed her the chocolate our hands would touch and electricity would shoot through my veins in an instant, and it would take all the self-control I possessed not to audibly gasp. I spent entire afternoons recreating her smile in my head, the way the edges of her eyes would crinkle. I imagined the way our touches lingered and wondered if she felt it too. I wasted hours of my life that year reading so much into something so inconsequential as sharing a piece of chocolate when really, a smarter girl than I might have studied for the impending Junior Cert.

Sister Anna was absent from the last class of the year and our substitute dismissed us with a wave of her hand, telling us to do whatever we wanted so long as we kept the noise level down. I reached into my bag for my Walkman and prepared to doze off for the next hour, but the sound of someone clearing their throat next to me forced me to pause. When I looked up, I found Connie gazing at me curiously, much as she had the first and only time we spoke. I offered her a thin smile and bowed my head before she began to shuffle her chair toward mine.

“So, I read that book you told me about.”

“Huh?”

She raised one of her perfectly sculpted eyebrows. “The one with Turkish Delight. The Narnia one.”

“Oh! Oh. What did you—uh—think of it?”

“Don’t tell anyone this,” she muttered, leaning in slightly. “But I actually liked it.”

Up close I could smell her perfume. Citrus, I decided. She smelled vibrant and ambrosial. It was mild enough that I didn’t feel that usual jolt of pain between my eyes that I associated with overbearing fragrances. In spite of myself, I grinned before glancing down at my twiddling thumbs. “I’m glad you did.”

Connie’s lips twitched. “It wasn’t half as nerdy as I expected it to be.”

“Why did you think it was gonna be nerdy? It’s a kid’s book.”

“Well—you recommended it, for one.”

I stammered, trying to subdue my blushing cheeks. “Wha—I don’t—I’m not a nerd!” My eyes lowered. “I’m not a nerd.”

Connie laughed, a fascinating sound that I longed to hear again. Something tugged in my chest—a sense of pride, perhaps, that I was the source of that sound. Very often I saw her in the corridor laughing with her friends but knowing that I caused her green eyes to dance with such mirth made that the most beautiful sound in the world. “Yes, yes you are. You might be notoriously quiet and you don’t speak up in class, but I’ve seen your test results. You’re top of the year in English.”

“How do you know that?”

“My head isn’t completely up my arse, you know. I like to learn things about people.”

“That’s beside the point. I’m not a nerd. Narnia are kids’ books.”

“It didn’t feel like a kid book to me.”

“Well…” I cleared my throat. “What is your favorite book then?”

She laughed again, a little lighter, her eyes crinkling at the corner. “As if I’m going to tell you that. I’d bet money that you’re a massive book snob.”

“Not true.”

“I bet you’re a pretentious git, Alex Ryan.”

“You don’t know me at all! You’re basing this on silly presumptions you have about me.”

“Alright. Prove me wrong.” She clicked her teeth and peered at me, a challenge quivering in her gaze. “What’s your favorite book?”