We present the shortlisted stories from the RTÉ Short Story Competition shortlist 2023 – read You by Nadine O'Regan below.
About the story: "This short story is a tale of romantic betrayal," Nadine says, "and it's also about the way we live now. So many of us devote our lives to social media posts and WhatsApp messages, but is this serving only to increase our sense of isolation?"
You think about him all the time. It's been a month since you broke up and you have a lump in your throat, permanently. His favourite band release a new album and you wonder if he likes it. You see a black leather jacket he’d look nice in and you fantasise about buying it for him. You turn up in places you think he’ll be – the cheap hamburger place off Dame Street, the Gingerman bar on Fenian Street, the indie club night in Lost Lane. You are addicted to his Twitter feed. You look at your WhatsApp constantly in case he texts or even just to see if he’s online. You search for the profiles of his friends and love interests, in case they post a picture with him on Instagram or write a tweet that gives you fresh information about him. You lose your appetite. You get insomnia. You become withdrawn. You think you should go to therapy, but you’re feeling too low to make the appointment. (Even you can see the irony.)
One of your colleagues comes up to you in the kitchen of the film production office in Capel Street, where you’re a researcher, and asks what's wrong. "What do you mean?" you say. (You haven't told people at work.) "Look at your skirt," she says. "It's hanging off you." You don’t agree. You feel fat – huge actually – although you try to disguise that fact when you text him (you’ve started texting him again), usually with jokey lines or links to movie reviews he might like. He texts back and your heart leaps. They’re shorter texts than before, back when you were together, when you were a couple. But still: he texts.
"Are you in contact with him?" your friends say. "Yes. But it's fine," you tell them. "We're just friends now. We actually get on really well." And you do. People can't understand it. "It’s so mature," your female friends say, doubtfully. "He must have a huge cock," a male friend says in the pub, with bitterness, when you tell him the backstory. (Most of the people you know are getting married, having kids, going to the bank to beg for mortgages. They’re intrigued by you – with your messiness, your snakes-and-ladders relationship mishaps.)
You’re open about what happened because you want to try to take ownership of it, to reduce the embarrassment. Yes, you were cheated on, you say. Yes – ha, poor you! -- he was seeing multiple women, it turned out. You talk about it because it's Dublin and it's small and probably people already know. Probably they knew for longer than you did. Probably they already felt sorry for you. When you think about what they must have been saying behind your back, shame floods through you. How stupid you must have looked, holding his hand.
****
The signs had been there for ages. There was the night he looked shocked, scared even, when you let yourself into his place without warning. You had been at the Olympia for a Pixies gig but left early because you had a headache. Shortly after that, your keys to his flat went missing. He never got another set cut.
When you went to London for the weekend, he posted on Twitter: "Free pad: anyone bored?" A splinter of ice lodged itself into your heart when you read it.
He isn’t by any standards a catch. His hair is minimal, just barely grazing his head. His accent -- Texan, with a Dublin lilt -- is a little grating. He has warm, chocolate-brown eyes, but narrow shoulders and a slight paunch. His place, a one-bed apartment a little out of town, is grimy. Unframed posters from the small cinema house where he works, cover the walls. Tattoos run riot over his skin. His clothing sense is questionable.
And yet women flock to him. He’s funny, feminist, knowledgeable about cult films and pop culture. He’s cool, seemingly without trying, although secretly you know he makes a big effort. He’s always online, always tweeting. He cracks jokes on his feed that sometimes fall flat but land enough times that he has built a following. He has a way of making it seem as though knowing him makes you a member of a special club.
You met him at a movie club night in the IFI, when he sat next to you and knocked over your popcorn. He'd been living in Dublin for a year, he told you, having moved from the States to start again. He didn’t explain further. You didn’t ask. He gave you his Twitter handle and proudly showed you the number of followers he had. You didn't mean to contact him after that night. But then you did.
***
On your first date, he wore a vintage electric blue leather jacket that was slightly too small for him. You wore a denim shirt dress with tan boots. He made you look conventional, Mam-like. You made him look slightly shady, like he might break into a car. But who cared? It was a fling – and you needed something. You’d just moved to a new apartment, deep in the city. It was your first time living on your own and the rooms echoed with silence. The area wasn’t good: in the night-time, kids on the street hurled glass bottles into the big council bins and set them on fire, racing away as the glass exploded. You had only just started in your research job and you were worried about it. Your heart had started beating hard at stupid things, like the lights turning red as you walked the pedestrian crossing. You were waking in the night for no reason. He invited you to dinner, to a cheap place on the quays where the pasta you ordered came in a sauce that was an unfeasible shade of yellow, and the clientele was mainly Spanish students on exchange, chattering in a way that reminded you of the music of birds at twilight.
"I take medication every day," he confided, after you’d shared a bottle of wine. "I was on the radio once and I had to take four times the Xanax I usually take. Whew!" He made a gesture like his head was being carried off his body. You weren’t sure how to respond.
"It’s cool that you talk about it," you said eventually, taking his hand. It was endearing to you, his vulnerability. It spoke to your own, better disguised, insecurities. You decided to not break up with him, at least not for another few weeks.
***
He texted all the time in the early days. He’d double-text. Even triple-text. You didn’t bother replying quickly -- if you were honest, you sometimes found the texts annoying. But you liked how hard he tried to impress you. You liked how he came up with silly, but funny ways to compliment you. You liked how he seemed to be oddly proud to be your boyfriend, even though you knew it was at least partly because you worked in film, and he was a movie obsessive. He’d always find a way to work into a conversation with his friends that you and your boss had once had lunch with Lenny Abrahamson and Domhnall Gleeson. You had nights together in his apartment where you ate pizza, watched old movies, and felt close. He confided that he was writing a screenplay.
You don’t know when it was that you started to really fall for him. But later you wondered if your falling for him was the signal for him to stop falling for you. There were the small things – the dates he began cancelling, odd reasons he didn’t want to have sex. Suddenly you were the one texting him more. You were the one checking your phone all the time, and feeling confused, worried, fretful.
******
Twitter was how you knew in the end. You didn't get access to his phone -- he guarded it too closely for that. But when he went to the bathroom one night after sex, he left his Twitter on his laptop open. You opened up his DMs. Your heart was pounding so hard you felt it could be heard in the room with you. At the same time, you felt despair. You didn't want what you had guessed to be confirmed. But there it was: DM after DM, to four different women, at least two of whom he appeared to have slept with while you were a couple.
You sat with the knowledge for weeks. Felt paralysed. Said nothing. Told no one. Told yourself you were deciding what to do.
Then – the indignity of it. At Christmas, he broke up with YOU. Explained that it wasn't working anymore. "I know about the other women," you told him, crying. He denied everything, said it was casual flirting on social media, fantasising at the most. No big deal.
That same night, after you broke up, you had sex: great sex. "That was wrong," he said afterwards, looking concerned. That was the first inkling you had that the events of the night had been preordained, but not by him. Someone else was applying pressure.
Afterwards, he began a public relationship with one of the four girls he'd been cheating on you with. She was beautiful, much, much hotter than you. They went to a friend’s wedding and posted pictures. The Instagram images of them on the dance floor, surrounded by people you’d spent so much time with, rent your heart.
On International Women’s Day, he posted indignantly about the shoddy way women are treated in the world. It got 16 likes and three retweets.
***
It’s been six months since your relationship ended. You are still texting. Sending selfies now too. He tells you to eat a sandwich, but he says it jokingly. He gives out to you for looking so hot after you've broken up. You begin sexting. You begin meeting in out-of-the-way venues on days like Monday and Tuesday. He buys you a necklace from River Island for your birthday. You begin sleeping together. You tell none of your friends. He is still going out with his beautiful girlfriend. But he complains about her more and more. You agree with him that it is very annoying of her, to be so controlling, to ask so many questions, to be so suspicious.
***
In the bushes in Stephen’s Green, you watch them together. Earlier in the day you’d asked to meet him. You thought that maybe you could go to one of those stupid carvery places he likes, where you could hide. But it was a Saturday. He explained he was busy: he had plans to have lunch with her in the park.
That was when you sent her the DM, from an anonymous Twitter account with an egg for a profile photo. You sent her a screengrab of two of the images he’d sent you most recently, of him holding his erect cock, his new tattoo, a squiggle to represent the infinity sign – still reddened and raw looking – perfectly visible on his chest.
They are staring straight ahead, not looking at each other. "If you're not going to trust me, this can’t work," he says. She is crying. She stands up and walks away. He picks up his phone and looks at it, but doesn’t type.
You look at your WhatsApp, you see his little sign to say he is online. You can feel your heart beating in your chest as you wait to see if the 'is typing’ status will flash up.
He’ll be mad with you, but he’s practical too. He doesn’t like being alone. You expect anger. You expect arguments. But also, maybe later you’ll have sex. Maybe later you’ll order a pizza and sit on his bed like in the old days and talk about movies. Maybe later you’ll be his girlfriend again.
And won’t that be everything you wanted?
About the author: Nadine O'Regan is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster. Editor of the Business Post Magazine, she has presented shows on RTÉ Radio 1, Phantom FM and Today FM. From Skibbereen in Co. Cork, Nadine has an M Phil in Creative Writing from Trinity College Dublin. She lives in Dublin with her husband Shane and son Oscar.
You was read on air by Kathy Rose O’Brien on RTÉ Radio 1 at 11.20pm on Sunday 22nd October.
Read more stories from the shortlist on rte.ie/culture, hear updates on Arena on RTÉ Radio 1, and tune in to the Arena's RTÉ Short Story Competition special, which will go out live on RTÉ Radio 1 at 7pm on Friday 27 October 2023 from Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire, Co. Dublin, with all 10 shortlisted writers in attendance.
Judges Claire Kilroy, Ferdia MacAnna and Kathleen MacMahon will discuss the art of the short story and the stories from this year's shortlist with host Seán Rocks, there'll be live music and performances from leading actors, and we'll find out who's won the top prizes.
Why not join us in person? Audience tickets are now on sale here.
And for more about the RTÉ Short Story Competition in honour of Francis MacManus, go here.
