The following text was delivered by Sally Rooney at the Dublin launch of Thomas Morris’s short story collection,
Open Up, in September 2023.
*
I want to begin by saying what a privilege it is for me to be here this evening, and to have a chance to talk to you all about Thomas Morris’s new collection of stories Open Up. I’ll try not to keep you too long, but there are a few things I want to say about this wonderful book, and about its author—who is both a writer I admire very much, and also, not to brag, one of my best friends.
Open Up comprises five stories, each with a very different protagonist. In the opening story, “Wales,” we meet a ten-year-old football fan; in “Aberkariad,” a seahorse on a journey of discovery; in “Little Wizard,” a frustrated office worker; in “Passenger,” a tourist on holiday with his girlfriend; and in “Birthday Teeth,” a young man who believes he’s a vampire. Reading these stories, we’re permitted to dip for a short time into the lives of these protagonists, to inhabit their minds and bodies, and to feel the intense intermingling of sympathy, identification, desire and aversion that is such a distinctive characteristic of good fiction.
In the space of a few short, intense pages, we grow to love these characters, and at the same time to fear them, to root for and disapprove of them, to be both attracted and repelled by the depth and intensity of their presence. This overdetermined relation between character and reader seems to me like the special preserve of fiction among all the other arts; and this book proves beyond doubt that Thomas Morris is a master of the form.
I’ve described this book as a work of “psychological realism,” but, in a way, that might be a misleading description. These stories are not always bound by the confines of what is usually called reality. One story, after all, is set entirely underwater, among a family of seahorses; in another, the protagonist remembers in detail his experience of being abducted by aliens at the age of eight. Even in the more straightforwardly “realistic” of the stories, this destabilizing sense of unreality has a way of creeping in. In the opening story, “Wales,” [printed in full, below] our ten-year-old protagonist Gareth remembers getting separated from his mother in a shop when he was four.
Looking for the DVDs, he found a narrow blue corridor. He passed through alone. The floor was slanted and everything was so, so quiet and he realised he had entered a secret realm between this world and another. Years passed before he emerged beside his mum at the stationery.
Did this, the reader wonders, “really happen”? Maybe, or maybe not. What we know is that it really happened for Gareth. In order to be true to the internal worlds of his characters, Thomas Morris is prepared to dispense with any conventions, even what we might call the convention of reality itself. Not because he wants to escape the ordinary human problems of how to be ourselves, how to be with others, how to live; but because he wants to address those problems in a new way, using a new language. In this book, Open Up, even more than in any of his former work, I think he succeeds thrillingly in the attempt.
These stories all pose philosophical questions; and each of our protagonists has to struggle to answer those questions, or else to live with the lack of an answer. Gareth, at the age of ten, is beginning to confront the gulf between his own private, magical world, in which he can read minds and send energy to others, and the less co-operative real world, in which his family home is in danger of being repossessed by the bank.
Tom Morris is a writer who thinks deeply about the work of writing fiction.
In “Aberkariad,” our seahorse hero is starting to ask questions about his own family and what he has been raised to believe. Big Mike, trapped in an oppressive job, tries and sometimes fails to articulate the source of his unhappiness, increasingly aware that the world isn’t fair, but obstructed by his own circumstances from seeing what that means. In “Passenger,” Geraint is frantic to just be himself, to be at ease, to open up, but he doesn’t know how. What does it mean to “be yourself” anyway? How do you find the “self” that you’re supposed to be? Glyn, the aspiring vampire in “Birthday Teeth,” is perhaps the most openly philosophical of all the book’s protagonists. “I just didn’t know what to believe,” Glyn says at one point.
I realised that in the end our theories were just stories, and our reasons for choosing one theory over another would have nothing to do with the truth; we would just believe the story we wanted to believe, the story which said about us the things we wanted to hear.
The stories in this collection, by contrast, do not say about us the things we want to hear. They do not comfort and console us with images of smoothly rational behavior, well-regulated emotions, balanced and healthy relationships. There is something liquid about each of these stories: they enter where they are not supposed to go, they seep into foundations, they threaten to dissolve what once seemed solid. The power this book exerts on its readers is not only intellectual and philosophical, but physical and emotional also. It is a book that reminds us of the often repressed relation between philosophy and life.
Glyn’s philosophical thoughts in “Birthday Teeth” are genuinely engaging, provocative, not easily dismissed. But the story also shows us that these thoughts take place on a particular day, in a particular location, inside the head of a particular person, with all his individual eccentricities and failings. Open Up reminds us, like Nietzsche, that all philosophy is autobiography, that all ideas begin as the ideas of some particular person in a particular time and place.
As a friend of Tom’s, I can say that I had the pleasure of reading earlier drafts of some of these stories. Maybe for that reason I feel especially attuned to just how brilliantly each one of them works as a standalone piece. Taken individually, each story is inventive and surprising, taking unexpected turns, subverting our expectations, demanding more and closer attention, asking us to think differently. Every story finds its own rhythm, its own peculiar and precise style, its own formal shape and concerns. Any one of them would, I think, be enough to mark the writer out as a major talent, more than worthy of the many accolades Tom has so deservedly won in the course of his career.
But it was not until I read the finished manuscript that I realized just what an accomplishment this book really is. Slowly, gradually, over the length of the collection, while the reader is, we might even say, distracted by the individual brilliance of each story in turn, something else is going on underneath. A set of images rises into the unconscious. A feeling, an undefinable sensation, almost a memory. We begin to sense that a certain kind of question is being articulated, not by any one story or character, but by the relations between the stories, which is to say, by the book itself.
I can’t begin to speculate on how such an effect is accomplished. I don’t think it’s a matter of anything as simple as a “common theme.” I’m not sure whether this book has any themes at all; rather it seems to have images, feelings, questions, maybe dreams, maybe even a subconscious of its own. Again and again in these stories we encounter the triangular relations between a child and his parents; again and again we see a protagonist recalling and re-interpreting something their mother said to them a long time ago. More than once, characters encounter unpleasant images of themselves, as in “Passenger” when an unflattering photograph of our protagonist gets deleted from his girlfriend’s phone, or in “Little Wizard” when Mike takes a picture of himself in the office toilets. The effect is subtle, gradual; we may not even notice at first these faint threads of recurrence and connection; but slowly, over the course of the book, these threads wrap around us and pull us inside.
I hope I’ve managed to convey to you in some small way just what a monumental achievement I think this book is. But before I go, I want to say a few words about its author. Tom Morris is a writer who thinks deeply about the work of writing fiction. But he also thinks deeply, and much more deeply than most, about the broader structures that are needed to enrich, nourish and make possible that kind of work. Tom’s encouragement of new and emerging writers has been such a foundational part of literary culture here in Ireland over the last ten years that it’s difficult to know where we would be without it. I know that many of us here this evening have experienced firsthand the generosity and kindness of Tom’s support at an early stage in our development as writers. Speaking personally, I quite literally don’t know where I would be without him.
Writing might seem like a solitary practice, and it is, but it’s also intrinsically an act of communication, a contribution to an ongoing dialogue. The best, most exciting new work tends to emerge from the best, most exciting, most open, and most diverse literary communities. I’m not sure I’ve ever met anyone who has worked harder to create that kind of community than Thomas Morris. It gives me such enormous pleasure to be here this evening to thank him: for his friendship, for his support, and above all for writing this beautiful book. Thank you Tom.
–Sally Rooney
_____________________________________
“Wales”
by Tom Morris
It’s been three months since they saw each other, and Gareth wonders if his father will recognise him. He pictures his mother upstairs, sitting at her dressing table, practising her face. He wonders if his father will come into the house. He thinks: if Dad comes in, Wales will lose.
Hearing his mother on the stairs, he moves from the window and settles on the couch – the gap in the curtains the only evidence he was standing there, waiting for his father’s car.
Got your phone? she asks. Yep.
Text when you’re on your way back, alright? Yeah yeah, he says.
A car horn beeps outside: his father has arrived – and he isn’t coming in.
There’s a pause, then his mother smiles.
Well, have a good time, she says. And make sure you get something to eat. I’ve told your father, but you know what he’s like.
Gareth nods, absorbs it all. If Wales win tonight, everything will turn out okay. His mother will find a wad of cash stuffed in the walls and they won’t need to move out. But if Wales lose, the repo man – with his bulging muscles – will return and take Gareth’s bike. Or the ceiling will cave in and fall down on him while he’s watching cartoons on the couch.
Wouldn’t it be mad if you see me in the crowd on the telly? he says.
His mother grins.
I’ll keep an eye out for you, she says.
Outside, the March evening air is fresh on his cheeks.
Young man, his father says in greeting. Alright? Gareth replies.
They drive up Caerphilly Mountain, Gareth secretly studying his father’s head. One day he’ll be able to read people’s minds. He just needs to learn to focus harder.
What you looking at? his father asks. I think you’re going bald, Gareth says.
Wonderful, his father replies. Another thing for me to worry about.
They drive on. When they hit traffic, his father instructs Gareth to open the glove compartment, where he finds the two tickets, sacred and shiny: his first real match at a real stadium.
So what do we know about Northern Ireland? his father asks. Any predictions?
They’ve got some good defenders, Gareth says. But Wales will win. I’m gonna say . . . two–nil. Ramsey header and . . . a Gareth Bale bikey from the halfway.
His father laughs, then in a quiet voice explains that because it’s only a friendly, Ramsey and Bale have been rested and won’t be playing.
Oh right, Gareth says.
It’ll still be a good game. Just don’t get your hopes up, alright? And put those tickets back now, before you lose them.
His father refuses to pay for parking, so for twenty minutes they drive round one residential avenue after another, finally finding a spot in a street lined with trees.
Let’s just hope we can remember where we’re parked, his father says, as they walk past houses three storeys tall, with tiled porches and coloured glass in the doors.
They’re lovely houses, Gareth says.
They’d probably cost you . . . pfft . . . a million pounds? his father says.
A million quid! Gareth says. That’s insane, that is.
They walk on, Gareth taking two steps for every one of his dad’s.
Slow down, will you? I’m literally only ten. Well, hold my hand then.
Nah, you’re alright, Gareth says.
On the high street, the air throbs with horns and whistles. Crowds with flags draped over their shoulders spill into the road, the cars slowing and honking. Outside a pub, a group of men in red T-shirts toot trumpets and trombones, and one man plays the sax and another bangs a drum. Arms aloft, the fans sing I LOVE YOU BABY! and a woman, dressed like a daffodil, jumps up and down, her pint spilling onto the pavement.
Let’s get some grub, his father says.
They eat outside the chippy, leaning against the window. The chips are hot and moist with vinegar. Inside, a girl with a red dragon stencilled on her cheek stands beside her dad, with a burger and a can of Coke. If she looks at Gareth, Wales will win.
Enjoying the chips? his father asks. Yeah, Gareth says. They’re lovely.
As they’re about to leave, the girl smiles through the glass.
Onwards they go now, among the stream of fans, down sneaky avenues and busy roads, onwards towards the stadium. Wearing coats and scarves and bucket hats the fans sing, Don’t take me home, please don’t take me home, I just don’t want to go to work. Up above, the sky is purple black.
It’s a long walk, Gareth says.
Best way to soak up the atmosphere, his father replies.
You should have parked closer to the stadium, Gareth says. This is a bloody marathon.
Football is all about opinions, his father says. And in my opinion: you can shut up.
Gareth laughs, and the crowd shoals through the dark streets until suddenly the stadium is before them, glowing like a flying saucer. His father buys a programme and Gareth holds it proudly. In the queue, a bald security guard shouts, COATS OFF! ARMS IN THE AIR! He looks like the repo man, the man who took away his mother’s car.
Alright son? he asks, patting Gareth down. Any knives in your pockets?
As if! Gareth replies.
Good boy, the man says, smiling. Have a good game.
Through the beeping turnstiles now, into what feels like an underground car park. Bodies hassle past, and there’s the smell of sizzling onions and hotdogs. A woman in a high-vis jacket checks their tickets and directs them up a flight of concrete steps, and then they are somehow, magically, outside again, and there it is – the pitch! It’s way different to how it looks on the telly. The grass is a giant green stage; lit so bright beneath the floodlights, it seems unreal. Their seats are behind the goals. As the players warm up, he feels the thud of each kick in his chest, and he hears the coaches’ echoing shouts. He pictures stepping onto the grass, striking a penalty, the net rippling.
When the anthem begins, they rise to their feet, and his father’s voice is deep and rumbling. Gareth has sung it in school before, but this is completely different. The anthem is massive, it fills his chest and roars out of him as if everything – Wales, the world, his whole life – depends on it. At the end, his father claps and yells C’MON WALES. And Gareth yells it too, then bellows the chant that’s whirling around the stadium: WALES! WALES! He is screaming, he is letting something go.
The game is difficult to follow. There are no video replays, no commentators, just the players on the pitch and the sound of the crowd. For every Wales tackle, a swelling roar fills the air, and any decision against them means thousands of people howling at the referee. The crowd urge the players and the players drive the crowd, and it’s electric, and it feels out of control. The match is a blur and before he knows it, it’s half-time.
Nil–nil, his father says.
They leave their seats and head back out to the concourse. Gareth blows on his hands to warm them up. His father asks if he wants a hot chocolate, but Gareth says he needs a wee.
At the urinals, sandwiched between two men, nothing comes out. Beside him, a man sways and leans on the wall to steady himself. Gareth does up his zip and comes back to his dad.
Did you go? Yeah, Gareth lies.
Wash your hands then.
At the sink, he sends his special energy to the players. When he was four years old, he got separated from his Mum in WHSmiths. Looking for the DVDs, he found a narrow blue corridor. He passed through alone. The floor was slanted and everything was so, so quiet and he realised he had entered a secret realm between this world and another. Years passed before he emerged beside his mum at the stationery. Later, at home, he tested his powers: with his hands above his head, he stood still in the corner of the living room. His father walked past and did not see him, and Gareth only returned to the world when his mother called him for his dinner.
*
As the team run out for the second half, Gareth closes his eyes and transmits messages: come on, he tells them. We can do this. And it seems to work – Wales play well, but then Northern Ireland start to attack, and the fans begin muttering. And in the 60th minute, when Northern Ireland score, all the air is sucked out of the stadium.
I bloody knew it, his father says.
The crowd falls silent, except for the few hundred cheering green shirts in the corner.
His heart is a bashed-up football. Every time Wales get possession, it’s just a matter of time until Northern Ireland take it back. With every Northern Ireland attack, he pictures them scoring.
This won’t do. It just won’t do. He tells himself to shape up, to focus, to really try his best. With his mind, he keeps pulling the ball towards the Northern Ireland end. He focuses and focuses, and he wishes and he wishes, and he summons all the magic in his body. But it’s no use: on the clock, 70 minutes become 75 becomes 80. There’s only ten minutes left. If Wales lose, he just knows that something terrible will happen. He breathes deep, and this is it: he focuses on the ball, he wills it, insists with all his power, and with one minute to go Simon Church is in the box, and Gareth screams GO ON! and Church touches the ball away from the defender, then tumbles – and with a sharp whistle, the referee awards Wales a penalty.
Oh my god, Gareth says. His father turns his back. I can’t look, he says.
Please, Gareth says to himself. Please, please, please. Hands on hips, Simon Church tries to compose himself, and Gareth is back in the blue corridor, the timeless place between worlds, where it’s quiet and still, and everything is at his command.
When Church runs up and sweeps the ball into the net, the stadium erupts and Gareth roars YES, and his father hugs him tight, his stubble bristling Gareth’s cheek.
Then the referee blows for full time, and the game ends one-all.
They stay behind to clap the players and the manager off the pitch. Gareth waves, but Chris Coleman doesn’t see him.
Exiting the stadium, the night air feels raw on his face, and his legs are aching.
And now for the marathon back to the car, Gareth says. Don’t you start now, his father says. God, we were terrible tonight. If we play like that in the Euros we’ve got no hope.
Neither Gareth nor his father know this, but in four months’ time, on a July afternoon, they’ll come back to the stadium and cheer the Wales team on their return from the European Championships. For Gareth, it will have been a summer of dizzy days and holy nights watching Wales play football on the telly. He’ll watch one game with his dad, one game with his mum, and he’ll even watch a game with his friends in the hall at school. And when the repo man comes – and takes the TV, and the bank repossesses the house, and Gareth and his mum move in with Aunty Avril – they’ll watch the Quarter Final in Avril’s living room. Gareth will wear his lucky socks, reeling around the carpet every time Wales score. And when Wales are finally knocked out in the Semi-Finals, he’ll collapse on the bed he shares with his mother and cry. Afterwards, when she comes in and strokes his head, he’ll say to her: I’m not sad. I just feel proud.
But right now, they don’t know any of this. The summer is way off. It is March, the start of spring, the air still chilled with winter. But the evenings are stretching, and the days are warming, and Gareth, you can feel the change already, can’t you? That feeling is coming back, the belief that your life is forever on the cusp of magic. Walking with the crowd now, watching your father’s breath curl white into the dark night as the flowing fans chant and sing for Wales, you know, somehow, that everything will be okay. It’s a private feeling, fizzing like a sparkler inside your chest. Thinking about it makes you laugh.
What’s so funny? your father says. Share the joke. It’s nothing, you say.
No, go on, your dad says, tell me.
Well, I’ve just got this feeling we’re gonna do amazing at the Euros.
Your father blows out his cheeks.
Look, he says. I don’t want to be a downer, but I’ve supported Wales a long time now. Honestly, it’s better not to expect anything. They’ll only let you down in the end.
Actually, that’s probably not a bad life lesson: you’re better off not expecting much, or you’ll only be disappointed.
At that, you stop and look him in the eye.
Yeah well, you say. Football is all about opinions and in my opinion you should just shut up.
Your father smiles, then laughs, and hand in hand, together you make your way back through the city, back the way you came, back in search of the car.
