by Naoise Dolan
‘Anyway, in fifty years we’ll be speaking Mandarin,’ I said. ‘If you believe Julian. He says most of the clients are mainlanders now.’
‘Why have they kept him on?’
‘He’s very tall.’
Edith said he sounded like a guy from her firm she went running with. He was an overpronating arsehole, she said. Overpronating was when your foot moved too far inward as it landed on the ground. Arsehole was when you had a personality like his.
‘So why do you run with him?’ I said.
‘He’s on my team at work, so it’s that or drink beer with him.’
Edith could make most words sound cutting, and ‘beer’ was one such word.
‘Do you think he has a crush on you?’ I said.
‘Men never fancy me,’ she said complacently.
‘I think Julian might when he gets back. I’ll have to warn him you’re a lesbian. Have I shown you his ex?’
We looked at pictures of Kat. The screen glared in the sun. Edith said Kat was gorgeous and questioned how on earth Julian had convinced her to go out with him. ‘But I don’t know him, so I shouldn’t be uncharitable,’ she added, not necessarily in a tone of regret.
Then Edith asked if I thought I’d ever leave Hong Kong.
The Hakka ladies were watching, so I just stroked her hand. ‘We could leave together,’ I said. ‘London has law firms.’
‘I’ve heard there’s a hiring freeze coming. Brexit and all that. And why London?’
‘I don’t know. It seems livable.’
‘Because it’s away from your family?’
‘Probably.’
‘I think you like your space,’ Edith said.
I couldn’t say: everyone in Dublin hated me, such that I came to hate myself, too, and I came out here trying to change that and it’s kind of worked but not fully. I didn’t think Edith would get it. I also wasn’t sure if it was even true about everyone hating me. It had felt that way, but maybe it did for everyone at that age.
She went back to a document on her iPad, and I considered what I’d said about us leaving together. It had just come out. I’d never really given it much thought. I could barely think about what might happen whenever Julian came back, let alone afterwards. But I could see us living somewhere very tidy, and neither of our families ever finding out. The worst thing would be being out to hers but not to mine. It would give her more power: she’d be able to talk to them about me. Then I felt like a horrible person for wanting her relationship with her parents to be as secretive as mine just because it would keep us even. I wondered if other people had to consciously expel thoughts like that, or if they just never had them in the first place. But it was presumptuous to think about any of that. Probably I was jinxing the whole thing.
That night in Julian’s apartment, I said: ‘Is it true there are loads of lesbians at boarding school?’
‘If there are, they don’t come out,’ said Edith. ‘The teachers were worried there wasn’t enough compulsory heterosexuality, so they made us do socials with Eton.’
I was about to say she might have bumped into Julian, then remembered he’d have started at Oxford by the time she came to the UK.
‘No one was out in my year either,’ I said. ‘You’d have got a door slammed on you.’
She looked at me like she didn’t know if I was joking. I wasn’t sure either. There were reasons besides men I’d been unhappy in Dublin.
Next morning, we walked in Sun Yat Sen Park. Edith asked how she could become my girlfriend. She said: ‘Is there a process involved?’
* * *
Julian messaged from London about Hong Kong politics. He knew more than I did. He asked if I’d heard that the High Court had upheld a gay civil servant’s spousal benefits. It might go to the Court of Appeal, but was watershed stuff all the same. An Aussie at his bank was out, but no locals he knew. Maybe things would change now. During this conversation I was especially grateful not to have to keep my face arranged.
I asked how he found it back in England. He wrote:
Mum’s happy I’m here. Happier if I quit my job but she’s accepted I won’t. Some people married now, which should be illegal. Don’t know why anyone’s proud of having found someone. Statistically likelier than not that they will, particularly if they lower their standards. And someone from Balliol is having a baby. I suppose the world needs people to have babies.
We chose what to share. Through composition I reduced my life, burned fat, filed edges. The editing process let me veto post-hoc the painful, boring or irrelevant moments I lived through. Necessarily Julian curated what he told me, and that, too, made me happy. Together we were making something small and precise.
There was one area of my life I didn’t tell him about that was neither painful nor boring nor irrelevant, but I saw other grounds for excluding it.
31
Edith had me over to meet her family on the second-to-last day of June. ‘Will it not be weird?’ I said. ‘I presume they still don’t know.’ Edith said it was fine. They’d be much more suspicious if they thought she was hiding me from them.
‘Besides,’ she said, ‘it’s been over a month. You can’t not meet them.’
The fact that ‘over a month’ brought Edith and me into meeting-the-family territory, whereas I had known Julian for months before he’d even mentioned Miles, told me all I needed to know about dating gay women versus straight men.
The Zhangs’ apartment was in Happy Valley, a residential area at the high altitude I had come to expect from rich people’s homes. The floors were treacherous with polish. There were oil paintings propped against the walls, as if the Zhangs had bought them on a whim and would get around sooner or later to hanging them. On the shelves and side tables stood plain figurines: swans, stallions, elks. Edith explained that Mr Zhang had got from somewhere the idea that Mrs Zhang collected porcelain. She didn’t, and scolded him for never remembering, but displayed it anyway so people would see that her husband was thoughtful.
Above the TV was a large framed photograph of a toddler in a gown and mortarboard. I assumed it was Edith at a ceremony for child geniuses, but she told me it was her sister at her kindergarten graduation, which everyone did – except Edith, who’d thrown up in the car and refused to go in. That evening Mrs Zhang took Edith to see the Principal and give a rehearsed apology for her absence. Mrs Shek squinted and said: ‘Thank you, Edith – but Mrs Zhang, this wasn’t necessary,’ and all the way home Mrs Zhang said: ‘Wasn’t necessary!’ sometimes alternating with ‘Unnecessary!’ for syllabic texture.
We watched TV. At the ad break Edith read out posts from her friend Audrey, a micro-influencer. Sometimes she showed her boyfriend’s wallet in brunch flatlays, but never his face. That way when she switched boyfriend the brand endured.
We wondered about the straights.
‘They’re like pandas,’ Edith said. ‘You pity them in the zoo, but fling the cage open and they’ll stay there, chewing.’
‘You know there’s nothing intrinsically radical about us both being women.’
‘No, not intrinsically’ – as if to say: challenge accepted.
She added that her mother would be back soon. ‘Don’t mention the facelift,’ she said.
Mrs Zhang entered. I didn’t mention the facelift. She’d come home from grocery shopping with their helper, Cristina, who was a head shorter than them and wore a T-shirt and track shorts. Mrs Zhang told Edith she was getting fat, then ordered the maid to make us dumplings. The china was painted with leaves and flowers. While we ate, Cristina stood there refilling our water. Edith and Mrs Zhang acted like this was normal, so I did, too. That’s good to know about me, I thought. It’s good to know how I behave in this situation.
Mrs Zhang told us about last night’s charity gala, then looked at Edith, who asked obediently if Tatler had come. ‘Perhaps,’ said Mr
s Zhang, eyes cast upwards as though Tatler’s spirit hath moved her.
She didn’t pay me much attention. She asked what I did, and when I said I taught TEFL, she had no further questions. I was grateful. It would have embarrassed us both if she’d pretended to take an interest in someone as unsuccessful as me. Briefly I contemplated standing up, yanking at the tablecloth, watching the silverware crash into Mrs Zhang’s lap, and yelling at her that she had no business giving Edith complexes. But it wasn’t my place.
After dinner, Mrs Zhang showed us her wedding photos. I could see the resemblance to Edith more clearly in them, either because their ages were similar or because Mrs Zhang’s face was as yet unmarked by surgical intervention. Mr Zhang was handsome and wore thick Eighties glasses. The couple looked favoured by destiny, like the subjects of a glossy history-book picture taken before they were famous.
Mr Zhang was in Guangzhou for the day. Edith said I’d meet him soon, and her sister Gabrielle, and her brother Angus when he was back from New York, and her grandparents at some point of course, and then I’d have met the Zhangs.
* * *
The following evening, Edith and I went to see Vampire Cleanup Department at the Paterson Street cinema. The plot followed Tim Cheung, a Hong Kong student who became an orphan when his parents got bitten on an anti-vampire mission. As Edith said, it fulfilled the functions of a B-movie and if you expected anything else then you’d missed the point.
The light from the theatre screen blinked against her profile. Her lips were slightly open and her neck was long and pale like the filament of an orchid. I nearly reached out to touch her face, but she looked so still in that suspended moment that I didn’t want her to flinch. I mouthed: you’re so beautiful. Then: I love you. Edith broke her pose to chuckle when a character swallowed the protagonist’s iPhone. I laughed, too. Our eyes met and we couldn’t stop. Someone coughed pointedly from several rows down, which only set us off again. She covered her mouth with her hands. She did that when she found something genuinely funny, but didn’t when she was only laughing to be polite. I liked knowing that about her.
It was 2 a.m. when we left. Neither of us needed to state aloud that we’d walk instead of getting a taxi so we could discuss things privately in the night air.
‘Thanks for – you know, my mum,’ Edith said.
‘What?’
‘For how you handled that.’
‘What did she do?’
‘Just her, in general. She’s so rude to Cristina and I act normal about it, like that’ll make it less awkward. But it’s not about social graces anyway. There’s no way of treating her that would make her working conditions okay.’
‘Aren’t working conditions part of how you treat someone?’ I said. ‘That’s why I hate Benny. It’s not that he doesn’t ask nicely. It’s that he’s not really asking.’
‘True.’
We turned right on Yee Wo Street past cut-price perfumes and medicine shops. Four bovine Australian men trudged abreast in front of us. We silently agreed to weave around the blockade. One of them whistled at Edith. She glided ahead like she was declining him admission to the category of people she was willing to notice.
‘Sometimes I imagine the conversation where I come out to my mum,’ Edith said. ‘When I can’t get to sleep at night, I go through the script.’
Like much of Edith’s phrasing, this sounded slightly rehearsed, and I wondered if I gave her that same feeling of needing to prepare. I wanted to tell her she didn’t need to, but felt this would only make her more self-conscious. On another level I liked that I could embarrass someone as flawless as Edith. I could hurt her. I didn’t want to, but I could.
I didn’t need to know how other women went about being together. I could see it forever, for us: walking through cities, laughing at things that weren’t that funny.
A few metres down from the Shanghai Commercial Bank was a Yun Fat Pawn Shop. It was part of a chain. I’d seen another in Wan Chai. There were no windows, but you could see blurred colours through the frosted glass door. At the top of Pennington Street we crossed the China Congregational Church and a dwarfing Armani billboard. We waited at the lights, then marched forward with the crowd onto Leighton Road. Edith strode with such command that I stayed a step behind to watch her movements. She wore red suede point-toe flats. In a more private setting, I’d have heard them against the cement.
32
July
Dad was visiting his sister’s family in New York. Mam said he sent his love. I found that strange because it wasn’t like his being in the US was suddenly depriving me of his company. New York was probably closer to me than Dublin, if anything. While Mam talked I messaged my girlfriend, Edith, whom I was going out with.
‘Sorry for not calling last night,’ I said. ‘I was having dinner with a friend.’
‘Which friend?’ Mam said.
‘You don’t know her.’
Mam’s assumption that she’d already be acquainted with any friend of mine had started in Junior Infants and, seemingly, endured after I’d moved continent.
‘What’s her name?’ Mam said.
‘Edith.’
‘Would she be from Hong Kong?’
Because Edith was one of the few Hong Kong people I’d mentioned, Mam was disproportionately curious about her. I avoided revealing that Edith was a lawyer for much the same reason I’d regretted mentioning that Julian was a banker. Since I hadn’t told Mam Edith was my friend when we were friends, and had now called her my friend when we were girlfriends, I would probably announce her as my girlfriend only when we got married.
I regretted letting myself think that far.
‘Ava?’
‘Sorry, what?’
Mam told me off for daydreaming and repeated that Tom had started an internship at a bank.
‘Good on him,’ I said.
‘He’s a smart boy, Ava,’ as if that had anything to do with it. ‘Your father’s proud of him. And George misses you’ – this appended as if it flowed naturally from what had come before. ‘He doesn’t say so, but that’d be him. Keeps everything bottled up. Your dad would be the same. It’d mean the world to them if you’d come back to visit.’
Mam didn’t ask for things on her own account.
‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.
I knew I owed them a week back, but I wanted to wait until Julian returned. One of us needed to stay in Hong Kong to anchor our connection. The apartment was nautically high up, closer to the sky’s amassed water than to anywhere roots grew, and it needed steady witnessing. If I left, everything between us would drift. Worse: it would remain, but I wouldn’t see it.
‘The Edith one,’ said Mam, ‘she’s welcome to come and stay with us.’
That would be a spectacle: Edith’s spindly legs dangling off the couch, Edith dressing before anyone was up so we wouldn’t be embarrassed by the sight of her in her pyjamas. The Edith one. But she’d said before that she didn’t do well in cold weather and that her stint at Cambridge had been a spiritual test. A very expensive spiritual test, she’d said.
‘Thanks,’ I told Mam. ‘I’ll pass it on. Listen, I need to go soon.’
‘Tom’s here. Will I put him on?’
When she did, he sounded tired.
‘How’s things?’ he said.
‘Grand. Mam says you’re a banker now.’
‘Fuck off. It’s just Bank of Ireland.’
‘What do you do?’
‘Piss-all, but then I stay late so it looks like I’ve been working.’
‘That’s face time for you,’ I said, in a tone implying I’d come across the term in my natural environment and hadn’t just learned it from Julian. ‘Hope it gets better.’
There was a girl at work, Tom told me, but it wasn’t a thing yet. They were still seeing. I didn’t ask what they were still seeing a
bout. He enquired about Julian with a degree of scepticism I found brazen in a younger sibling. I told him about Edith – not that she was my girlfriend, but that she was an important person in my life and I’d like him to meet her. He said she sounded nicer than Julian.
‘I miss you,’ I said. ‘I need to go now.’
‘Yeah, sure. Keep me posted on Edith.’
* * *
Sometimes the children had questions about my life. The younger ones wanted to know if I slept in the school, and if Ireland was the same as England. (Julian’s banker friends had often seemed just as confused on this point.) The older ones asked if I had children of my own. I found this question horrifying, but knew that around 10 per cent of my salary was for projecting a nurturing aura, so I just smiled and said no. When they asked about men, I remembered that many of their parents would not want me teaching them if they knew about Edith. Probably some of them were old enough that they themselves would not want me as a teacher. I wouldn’t want me as a teacher either, but not because I had a girlfriend.
33
Edith turned twenty-three on 5 July. I used Julian’s card to buy her a pair of quilted leather gloves. I wrote claiming they were for me and asked whether I should get them in black or cognac. He replied: ‘I can’t believe you think I’d have an opinion on this.’ Then, five minutes later: ‘Cognac.’
That night Edith took me along to a group dinner on Connaught Road. Her friends were all our age and mostly women. Cyril Kwok and Tony Ng arrived together and gave Edith a joint present. She’d mentioned before that some Hong Kong parents were more liberal than hers.
I wondered if anyone there knew that she and I were dating.
The restaurant had exposed red brickwork and clipboarded menus that called every item ‘artisan’, ‘percolated’ or ‘deconstructed’. They’d got the head count wrong. Edith arranged for another table to be gerrymandered over to the end of ours, then through brisk intimation showed each of us where to sit. She was a spry conversationalist and used tailored strategies for drawing everyone out. Whatever I said, I felt people were only listening because I was responding to a question Edith had asked. She poured everyone water.