Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

  After the first play, I’d googled her boarding school tuition and the international student fees at Cambridge. I was unsurprised when she said her parents worked in finance. In the interval of the second play, I said something in passing about posh English people, and Edith said the concept of poshness didn’t exist in Hong Kong. It was like Ireland: all money was new money. Rich was posh and posh was rich. Given that I was neither, I wasn’t sure why I found that comforting, but I did. There wasn’t even an upper-class accent, Edith said, although mainland Cantonese was regarded by ‘some’ as sounding nicer.

  On each outing she spouted facts at me. She used her hands when she talked, and often her whole body. To show me the regions of China, she scribbled on a napkin. I kept it. I liked her enthusiasm. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d met someone who got excited about things.

  Each play she had a different handbag. She managed this by putting the same abundantly pocketed travel case inside them all, so that the outer bag on any given day was just a shell. The designer bags cost thousands of Hong Kong dollars, and the travel case was maybe a hundred, and the latter was where she actually kept her things. I’d never understand rich people. Edith’s keys, Octopus card and wallet all ‘lived’ in a given crevice, so that she could quickly locate them. This I admired and tried to implement in my own life. But I would choose bad places for things to ‘live’, forget they lived there, and still not be able to find them.

  When I closed shop with Joan before seeing the third play, she asked what I was up to. I said: off to the theatre. Joan’s face said: I’m clearly paying you too much, and Joan’s mouth said: enjoy.

  * * *

  My days off were Sunday and Monday. In the staffroom I complained with everyone else that working on Saturdays was killing my social life, but I didn’t have one. That was fine. I liked having space to think. Besides, the rush-hour train served for company. I settled in under a man’s armpit, felt the stud of a woman’s handbag digging into me, and thought: I am a part of something.

  Weekends were harder. The flat was louder without Julian. The taps dripped like waterboards, and the neighbours argued next door. Some mornings I didn’t leave the bed because then I’d have to brush my teeth, followed by a series of actions that amounted to living my life as the person I was. I was unable to drum up positivity about either dental hygiene or the rest of my day, so I told myself I was disgusting and lazy and I’d be late and they’d fire me, and then I got up. If you were really sick you couldn’t just harness your self-loathing like that, so I knew I was fine. And Edith was becoming something to look forward to.

  19

  The Sunday after my third theatre date with Edith, I went to see Miles at his flat in Kennedy Town. Julian had asked me to. I suspected he wanted to make sure I was getting out of the flat, since he’d never gone much himself. But it would have been childish to tell him I knew what he was up to.

  The main room in Miles’s flat was painted mustard and stuffed with clashing furniture. For an academic’s home, there weren’t many books. I guessed from the Kindle on the table that he was moving with the times.

  We talked about his university, and then how it compared to where I’d gone. Miles said Julian had told him I’d got a ‘very good first indeed’, and asked if I’d thought about academia.

  ‘It seems interesting,’ I said, ‘but I don’t know what I’d write about.’

  I couldn’t tell if Miles was quoting or paraphrasing the ‘very–indeed’ construction. Julian sometimes went sarcastically antiquated, which showed he meant what he was saying or he wouldn’t bother sounding like he didn’t. Miles, though, might say ‘very–indeed’ quite naturally. My degree was a fact, being a number, and Julian’s opinion couldn’t change its value. But I often thought about things that were silly to think about.

  ‘Is your book going well?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ Miles said, ‘but it’s never going well.’

  He asked if Sudoku interested me and said he had a book of puzzles if it did. We played in silence. Soon I got bored and sharpened his pencils. He kept them in a box on the table.

  ‘You’re a gem,’ he said. ‘Julian’s done well for himself.’

  It was the most explicitly Miles had ever alluded to the relationship. I felt short-changed that my lead-whittling abilities had triggered this acknowledgement.

  Then I wondered if I’d really just come to add texture to dinner with Florence – to see if Miles mentioned anything about her taste in decor, for instance. This seemed depressing if true. If I was stockpiling curlicues for Florence evenings while doing nothing to improve my real situation, it would mean I cared more about my interior life than the tangible one. Julian didn’t daydream, and thus was off in London with a real job while I was a TEFL waster – though he read so much that maybe he did have an imagination and was just better at controlling it. I’d never know if other people were as graphic as me in their daydreams and we all just pretended we weren’t. I’d once googled ‘what do serial killers think about’. There was surprisingly little overlap, but I hid my thoughts anyway. The more I imagined things, the more personal they felt.

  ‘It can be challenging making friends when you’ve first moved here,’ Miles said, snapping me out of it. ‘A lot of my exchange students find it quite isolating.’

  ‘I have one or two,’ I said. I thought: one here, one there. The word ‘friend’ did Herculean work in terms of describing me and Julian. And now I had another friend.

  * * *

  A new class of ten-year-olds started on Tuesday. To break the ice, I asked why they wanted to learn English. They looked at each other across a room so small they could barely pull out the chairs, and seemed unsure that the premise held.

  Lydia Tam introduced herself, then said, ‘My Chinese name is –’ before another girl dug her in the ribs and said she couldn’t give it here. Their motives for studying English were, from most to least commonly cited: school, travel, to watch movies, and to talk to me. This last was from Denise Chan, a lick-arse, but you couldn’t call your students that.

  Next came Fergus Wong, who wanted to learn English because everything had an English name as well as a Cantonese one.

  ‘You’re crazy,’ said Denise. This seemed to be what Hongkongese ten-year-olds said to someone when they didn’t understand what they meant.

  I hated wielding authority. The kids could tell that, and responded poorly whenever I tried. So I let them talk, and thought: Edith Zhang, Zhang Mei Ling, Edith Zhang Mei Ling. I said the words to myself like I was unwrapping something.

  20

  April

  When Julian had been gone just over a month, Edith and I went to Cinema City JP on Paterson Street. The movie was dubbed badly in Cantonese. We knew what would happen before the opening credits. Edith liked that: formulaic plots were easier to follow while she edited documents on her iPad. We sat away from everyone else, the film started, and her keyboard clacked like chattering teeth. She didn’t tell me how much her firm paid her, but I guessed it was a lot.

  The following week we went for coffee in Sheung Wan. In the queue, Edith told me she liked how I’d done my hair. I was momentarily happy, but then she complimented the barista in the same animated way.

  ‘Tell me about your family,’ she said at the table, as if fascinated that I had one.

  I did. In return, she told me her father was from Hunan province in mainland China. Her mum was Singaporean. She only considered herself Hongkie in that she’d grown up there, and even then, she was born abroad. Her mum had nipped over to Toronto to get Edith a Canadian passport, a trek Mrs Zhang regularly invoked for maternal leverage. She’d remind Edith that she flew while so pregnant she could barely walk and without Edith’s father there, all to get her daughter a document that would make it easier to one day leave her.

  In Mr Zhang’s defence, he had planned to be present at Edith�
�s birth but had missed his flight. Mrs Zhang almost named Edith ‘Toronto’ to commemorate the affair. Mr Zhang convinced her it was gauche. The only way Mr Zhang could turn Mrs Zhang’s mind against a given course of action was by convincing her it was gauche.

  ‘If I’m making my family sound really quite something,’ Edith said, ‘that’s because they’re really quite something.’

  We’d known each other four weeks at that point, but it felt like longer.

  She said she fancied a pastry and queued up to get one. I watched her from the table. Edith disliked waiting but liked the order of queues. I saw from her tactfully impatient expression that she was doing her best to reconcile these stances. She was such a polished and resolute individual that tiny breaches stood out: stray thread on skirt, wisps where hairline met back of neck. Before I met her I’d wondered if uncouth meant uncouth then what did couth mean, and now I knew: couth meant Edith. That day, I realised I didn’t care what anyone else thought. We could be thrown out of the café and I would think it just showed that they did not recognise genius.

  Alone in bed that night I googled her. She was a trainee solicitor and her headshot was on the firm’s website. There was a video underneath where she told prospective applicants that if she had to pick one thing, just one thing, that she loved most about work, it had to be the people. Her hair was in loose curls that bounced when she moved her chin. She nodded out her enthusiasms: the culture, nod, the ignition, nod, the fettle, nod, the élan. Such was corporate law.

  I envied her conviction, and wondered if this was because I wanted to feel better about my own job.

  Then I checked my phone: she’d just followed me on Instagram. When you followed someone first, you knew they would click on your name to see if they should follow back. And of course I saw her pictures when I did that. I wasn’t strictly obliged to keep scrolling and flick to the ones she was tagged in, but it was expected behaviour.

  * * *

  The next day, Victoria mined me about Julian in a French tearoom with striped upholstery. She thumbed the quilting of her Chanel bag, the squares threaded in penitential lines, and she dug. Questions. I’d known she wanted him since she told me when drunk, but I couldn’t gauge if her sober self realised how transparent she was being.

  More curious still: I played along. I wanted nuggets about Edith, and Victoria gave me them.

  ‘How have you been, Ava?’ Victoria said, stressing the auxiliary so I’d know she didn’t care.

  ‘Fantastic,’ I said, hitting the middle syllable to remind her I was thriving specifically in Julian’s apartment. ‘It’s been so long’ – vowels elongated to clarify, in case I’d been too subtle, that I lived there and she didn’t.

  ‘Your hair looks lovely,’ Victoria said – I should cut it. ‘Have you cut it?’ – Victoria saloned monthly, but kindly remembered to ask as though for me it was a triennial treat, when to her it was a basic living expense – conveying the latter, too, though, since we had to be honest about these things.

  Women are good at talking.

  Menu, linen paper. The teas were in French, English and Chinese, in that order. Victoria ordered thé au citron. Her slight mispronunciation of ‘citron’ presented a quandary. I could order it, too, and say it properly. I wouldn’t if she’d really butchered it, since that would be crass – but a slight difference would prickle her without letting her feel cathartically wronged. Alternatively, I could ask for lemon tea and make her feel gaudy for having used French in the first place. I would read out the English, then meet her eye: my niveau de français is between me and God.

  I could also just order a different tea, as I’d planned to before she said ‘thé au citron’ wrong, but that was no fun.

  ‘The lemon tea,’ I said. Then, waiting long enough that it was plausible the waiter was confused, but not so long he’d obviously already understood: ‘– sorry, the thé au citron.’

  Men weren’t all I could do.

  The waiter brought our tea with a military step. Victoria asked when Julian was back. I said I didn’t know. Normally I wouldn’t have admitted that – I would have implied I knew but was only authorised to share it with our very closest friends – but I wanted it settled so we could get to Edith.

  From this implied level of communication with Julian, Victoria could gather I also didn’t know if he was sleeping with other people in London, or indeed in Hong Kong. Whether Julian had multiple women on the go was in any case too ambiguous for her purposes. If he didn’t, that might indicate he was – of all things to picture him saying – a one-woman man. If he did, his bandwidth might be full, between the side hustles and the regular Irish. Gobbets about Julian without clear implications did not interest Victoria. She was businesslike in this. If she could have offered him money to have sex with her, I knew she would. Equally, she wouldn’t go near him if he accepted.

  Next, Edith. She and Victoria were only acquaintances. No boyfriend, to Victoria’s knowledge. Back in Hong Kong from England a little over a year, just finished the PCLL, now on her training contract. Victoria was an associate. (I hadn’t asked Victoria if she outranked Edith, but Victoria thought I ought to know.) Most of Edith’s friends were from boarding school, Cambridge and law, and so, functionally, had money. (Victoria didn’t clarify ‘functionally’, since it was unimportant to Victoria whether someone cultivated a circle of rich people or just found themselves in one, but I supplied it myself.)

  None of this was news, but I still liked hearing it.

  It was obvious why Victoria wanted to know about Julian and much less apparent why I was grilling her on Edith. Victoria, too, would be puzzled if she considered it – but she had a pit viper’s brain. She saw not by looking but by rendering images of prey. She noticed all of Julian and the parts of me that pertained to him, and the rest she ignored.

  If interested in Victoria, Julian would undoubtedly have some take about monogamy being contractual and the cheating element therefore being her and Ralph’s problem. Going on precedent, Julian showed attraction by purchasing gifts and being inadvertently rude about your background, neither of which I’d seen him do to her. Anyway, I hated her, felt ill picturing them together, and told myself my information made no difference so I could trade it for facts about Edith.

  We split the bill.

  * * *

  English has a subjunctive. I learned that fact the morning I taught it. I knew French had one and suspected Irish did, but hadn’t noticed its moody fingerprints on my native language.

  It turned out I didn’t know because the English subjunctive required phrasing I would never use. Apparently, you didn’t say: ‘What if I was attracted to her.’ You said: ‘What if I were.’

  You deployed the subjunctive for the less-than-factual. If I avoided it, did that mean I only said true things? Or since I didn’t section off the imaginary, perhaps everything I said was just a wish or a feeling. And maybe I sounded stupid for not knowing grammar. I wondered if Edith had been fighting the urge to correct me.

  ‘What’s the difference?’ asked Kenny Chan.

  I wasn’t confident of it myself, so I read slowly from the textbook, then rephrased until they pretended to understand. But Sybil Fu got all the exercises right. She wouldn’t have a few months ago. I knew it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with the fact that her parents literally paid her for getting good results, but it still made me happy.

  * * *

  I’d discovered that as well as her main Instagram account, Edith had one for her art. There were no references to it on the one she’d followed me from, but her friend Heidi had tagged it in a post she’d made a year ago. (Heidi had gone to boarding school with Edith, which was a normal thing for me to know because Edith had mentioned this in a comment that had come up on my newsfeed. My clicking Heidi’s name and going through her posts was less obviously the algorithm’s fault.)

  On the a
rt account Edith posted pencil sketches of buildings. Her scratchy, crosshatched style surprised me, but you could tell it was her from the odd careful detail. She was good. This came as some relief. I’d found the journals Julian had written poetry for at Oxford but hadn’t dug further because I was worried the poems would be bad and I’d have to keep living in his apartment.

  Edith’s personal account was also an aesthetic triumph. The images were cool-toned and slightly faded, just enough to give reality a glaze. Her posts were like clues: here is some Edith, and some more over here, and an entire Edith somewhere beyond the squares. The things in the pictures obsessed me – the vintage gold-plate watch, the brown Saffiano iPhone folio case, the jade bracelet.

  I wanted her life. I worried this might endanger our friendship, but so far it seemed to be facilitating it. Because she was richer and more important than me, I had an out from the suspicion that I was in fact her lesser on intellectual or moral grounds. She answered her phone or tapped at something on her iPad, and I thought: everyone else wants a piece of her, and here she is with me. This was stupid because when Julian had done that, I’d just resented him for not paying me attention – and I’d known him far longer than a month. Probably I was a bad person and could not correctly process emotions.

  My collarbone was a comfort. I could find myself otherwise grotesque and still trace the lines in front of the mirror, thinking: this is sexy. This I would fancy if I were Edith and if I, Edith, liked women.

  21

  Edith and I were now hanging out a few times a week, but I had no idea why she spent time with me, let alone why she liked me. I supposed I was of anthropological interest. She’d ask why I didn’t ‘just’ do things. Why, she’d say, didn’t I ‘just’ check the weather before leaving the house, or ‘just’ use an app for this or that – and she found it fascinating when I said I hadn’t thought of it. Nothing escaped her. At a brunch place she referenced my not liking cheese, and when I asked how she knew that, she said I’d told her a few weeks ago. I never admitted to remembering things people had told me in passing. But I knew that this trait, which made Edith look frank and organised, would only make me seem like I didn’t get out enough.