by Naoise Dolan
‘You got a man first,’ I told Tony. Edith had put me beside him.
‘Men are easy,’ he said. ‘Women are hard.’
I thought I saw him smile.
The food came on slates, with condiments in clay espresso cups. Many of the faces were familiar from Edith’s Instagram – which I could tell her later, but still, obviously, had to hide from the people themselves. They were all Hongkongers. Most had been at boarding school with Edith and had stayed in the UK for university, while others had gone to the US or returned home. They had the kind of brisk English accents that made my mother nervous.
Tony and I got talking to Clara, who taught yoga at a studio near the International Financial Centre. It was a good location. The bankers paid a premium for convenience and if anyone was understocked on the zen front, it was Hong Kong financiers.
‘Ava,’ Tony said, ‘does it weird you out doing the neocolonial TEFL thing?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But no one else will hire me.’
‘I’ll find you something,’ he said.
I shared Edith’s assessment of Tony’s proficiency at pretending not to be rich.
‘There’s nothing for me here,’ I said. ‘I’m a pointless white person.’
‘You’re all pointless,’ Tony said amicably. ‘But I like you.’
I excused myself after dessert when they ordered more drinks. I worried it might hurt Edith, but decided it would embarrass her more if I stayed and didn’t contribute to discussions which all seemed to come back to people everyone else knew and I didn’t.
I’d just gone to bed when she called saying she needed me to come and pay the bill.
‘What?’ I said. ‘At the restaurant?’
‘No, TST. We went drinking. I left my cards at home because I thought if I took out five hundred, I’d only spend five hundred.’
‘How much is it?’
‘I told you, I went drinking. And Holly can only pay half.’
‘Edith,’ I said, ‘where are you? How much is it?’
‘This bar in LKF.’
‘You said you were in TST.’
‘LKF.’
‘Which bar?’
‘I’ll fucking, I’ll show you on Maps.’
‘That won’t work, Edith, because I’m not there beside you.’
‘I’ll send a screenshot.’
The bar was at the top of D’Aguilar Street. I took Julian’s card, grateful he hadn’t specified whose folly it was meant to cover. When I reached Edith, the friend had bailed too, having left enough money to pay half the bill. I felt she probably could have covered the whole thing and hoped someone would make her leave her bed unnecessarily in the near future. Edith’s curls were flat. One of her dress straps had slipped. It was the drunkest I’d seen her in four months of knowing her. On the walls, neon lights spelled out soundbites in upper-case: THE CHILD IS THE FATHER OF MAN; SILENCE IS MORE MUSICAL THAN ANY SONG.
Edith saw the name on the AmEx and told me to tell Julian she said thanks.
‘He doesn’t need to know,’ I said. ‘I’ll say I was out with a male friend and he thought it meant something it didn’t, so I paid for the drinks to clear it up.’
‘Or you can just tell him.’
‘No need.’
‘Does Julian mind when you take his money?’ She seemed unconcerned that this might be a procacious question coming from someone who couldn’t currently support their own head without the aid of both hands. ‘I mean,’ she said, ‘you’re just flatmates.’
‘Actually, he’s worried I’m not interested enough in it.’ This wasn’t necessarily something I’d observed in him, but could plausibly have been true and was interesting to narrate to a third party. ‘He doesn’t want anyone to like him just for him,’ I said. ‘He wouldn’t know what to do with the information.’
I wondered why I’d said that. I wasn’t drunk.
We hailed a cab. Edith tried to talk to the driver, who ignored her Cantonese. ‘Mainlander,’ she said, rolling her eyes, and she negotiated our journey up Mid-Levels in what I assumed was Mandarin. I was afraid to ask if she considered her father a different kind of mainlander. Outside Julian’s apartment block, Edith removed her heels and asked if I could take one for her. I wasn’t sure how she could carry a single heel but not two, but felt it would be unproductive to question this. The complex was virtually empty. Edith complained that the cement hurt her feet, so we rested for a while on a stretch of grass in the courtyard.
‘It’s not fair,’ Edith said. ‘I love you so much and you don’t want to stay in Hong Kong.’
‘I do. I’m always telling you I like it here.’
‘And I always say everything first. I asked if you’d be my girlfriend a couple of weeks back, and now I said I love you first and you didn’t even acknowledge it.’
‘Thanks, Edith. Thanks for saying I love you. I love you, too.’
And I meant it. This surprised me: I could never have been seeing someone for so short a time in Dublin and sincerely say I loved them. But there was room to feel it here.
‘Good,’ Edith said.
‘How often do you get this drunk?’
‘You’re obsessed with Julian,’ she said.
I’d had that exact thought before, in those precise words, and wondered if I’d ever told her. I said nothing.
‘You’re always asking what he’d think of everything,’ she continued. ‘You clearly have no interest in arranging things so it wouldn’t be a problem if he stopped paying your rent. Which, why would he do that? He sounds like a rich freak, and you know he’ll get bored of you sooner or later, because rich freaks are themselves boring people. It’s only their money that’s depraved.’ She spoke quickly and without looking at me very much, like she had said all this to herself before in front of a mirror. ‘And he gives you money. Why? Who leaves literally an AmEx for their flatmate? And why would he tell you not to have people around? I don’t think you’re interested in having a nice life. Which is arrogant, really, because you expect other people to help you maintain an existence that you yourself can’t work up any enthusiasm over. Don’t take this personally, by the way. I’m just observing.’
‘You’re hammered,’ I said. ‘I do love you, though.’
‘My family are disappointed in me. They try to hide it, but I can tell.’
Up in the apartment, I made Edith brush her teeth. She said she wanted to wear a bathrobe. Mine was in the wash, so I loaned her Julian’s, which hung like a ballgown on her five-foot frame. A bluish bruise was surfacing on her thigh. She thanked me for paying her bill. I said I actually quite liked the idea of Julian seeing the tab and thinking I was having fun without him. Then Edith said she loved me again and I repeated it back to her, thinking about how some people were squeamish about wearing others’ dressing gowns, but to some it was just like borrowing a coat.
We sat on the couch and she leaned on me. ‘Your family aren’t disappointed in you,’ I said. ‘No one’s disappointed in you. You’re an incredible person.’
‘Thank you,’ she said.
I had no authority to say that about her family. I’d only met Mrs Zhang, and didn’t know what their internal dynamic was like. Still, Edith looked pleased. She nestled closer into me. I felt like abandoning everything else I did to try to be happy, and just spending the rest of my life finding things Edith needed to be told, and telling her.
34
Next day at work I had a cough that cut off all my sentences. Joan gave me a mint-green face mask. I said I didn’t need one and she told me that if parents saw me coughing without it, they’d worry I’d infect their kid. At lunch I googled and discovered the mask was likelier, if anything, to breed germs by trapping hot air. This Web MD lore did not interest Joan. ‘Wear the mask,’ she said. I considered asking for sick leave since I was sick, but could tell she was in no m
ood for my funny jokes.
The twelve-year-olds were on the perfect aspect, God love them. They had just got to grips with the past tense, and the continuous would be next – if they survived. Present perfect if it’s continued up until now, e.g. ‘They’ve been together.’ Present perfect continuous if it’s been continuing, e.g. ‘They’ve been fucking.’ Past perfect if it: a) continued up to a time in the past, e.g. ‘They had been living together,’ or: b) was important in the past, e.g. ‘I had thought I loved him until I met her.’ There was more, but my windpipe filibustered it.
Eunice Fong said: ‘Miss, are you sick?’
I wasn’t sure if I was allowed to say yes.
Dublin had its own take on the perfect aspect. I didn’t know what to call it, but when you were ‘after’ doing something, it meant you’d just done it but didn’t expect the hearer to know. ‘I’ve just fallen in love’: we thought it might happen and it has. ‘I’m after falling in love’: look, I didn’t think there was a heart in this piece-of-shit chest compartment either, but here we are. ‘Only after’ was ‘just after’ plus exasperation: mud on a carpet you’re only after hoovering, losing someone you’re only after finding.
Julian and his friends were ‘after’ things meaning they sought them. They were after bonuses, after clients, always eating the dust of what they wanted. ‘After’ never meant looking back on what they’d done. My sympathies were limited, given who they were, but I thought it might explain why they weren’t happy people.
Ollie from Melbourne had left Hong Kong without notice to avoid paying income tax. TEFL teachers often did that. His replacement, Derek, was from Limerick. At a staff meeting to welcome him, Joan helpfully informed us that we were both Irish. Madison shared that she was from Dublin, Erath County, TX.
‘ “TX”?’ said Derek.
Joan said: ‘She’s American.’
‘It’s weird how all the Irish leave Ireland,’ Madison said. ‘There’s so much green. And you guys have the cutest accents. I’ve got this picture – hold up, let me find it – just chilling with Molly Malone. She wheeled her wheelbarrow . . . And here’s me hitting up the Guinness Storehouse. “A big bag of the cans with lads.” I’m such an alcoholic. Maybe I’m secretly Irish. And don’t you have a gay president now? I can’t believe I even left and I was there three days. What the heck have the Irish got against Ireland?’
I said: ‘You know we can’t get abortions?’
I did not always feel I was Madison’s favourite Irish person.
* * *
I loved Edith so much it seemed only sensible to worry about losing her. You could hardly stake that much in someone and not think every now and then of what you’d do without them. I analysed the contingencies and concluded: nothing. On the couch or in my bed, I measured various scenarios in which Edith left me and decided my ensuing strategy would be: none. Up and down the escalator, pacing my clammy classroom: if she ended it, I would end too. Sometimes this seemed fine and normal, and sometimes it made me grip whatever I was holding until my fingers hurt. When that happened I messaged Julian. Edith did not exist in the space I shared with him, which let me compose myself again. I wrote: everyone has too many feelings. it’s embarrassing. He agreed. Inside my quarantined dynamic with him, I was safe. He’d made me unhappy, but I’d be in a far deeper gradation of misery if Edith ever abandoned me. She gave me concomitant highs. Sometimes felt I was hiding from those, too, when I talked to Julian.
35
Li Hongzhang, a Chinese general of the late Qing dynasty, claimed not to understand why Europeans worshipped Christ. He didn’t see how anyone could get behind a saviour whose own life had been such a bust he’d ended up crucified, a painful death and a degrading punishment besides.
Miles told me the story. Later I related it to Julian on the phone.
‘He had a point, old Hongzhang,’ Julian said. ‘I doubt you’d catch Warren Buffett nailed to a cross.’
‘Is there anything you’d die for?’ I said.
‘I don’t see what good that would do. Unless you’re of the persuasion that lining all the bankers up against the wall would automatically make the world a better place, which you may well be.’
‘So what should Jesus have done?’ I said. ‘Since getting crucified is beta carry-on.’
‘Ideally, he’d have founded a start-up.’
During the call I made herbal tea. The mug was initially too hot to hold. It was a long call. I knew because slowly I could touch more of my skin against the ceramic. I thought: this is an efficient way of tracking my personal correspondence.
‘By the way,’ I said, ‘I’m not fucking you when you’re back.’
‘You really have been working on yourself,’ he said.
If Edith were there, I would have struggled to explain why we were laughing. I’d say: it’s amusing when I tell Julian I might stop having sex with him, because then I’d have to live somewhere else and he knows I can’t – and it’s hysterical when he implies that me fucking him is a form of self-harm, because he’s right. There would in any case be more pressing issues if I ever had to explain me and Julian to Edith.
The following night, he messaged about Kat.
Saw her at a party. Mostly fine. We talked about May’s EU citizenship guarantee. She has this friend Izzy, and she (Izzy) said something about me ‘showing my face’ here. Don’t know if Kat agrees. Talk soon. J.
I read it in the queue at the Caine Road Starbucks. Experimentally, I typed:
i feel like you take me for granted, and particularly take that i’ll still be here when you get back for granted, which is not unamusing when a) i’m still not entirely sure you’re not the guy in american psycho, b) my girlfriend is i. a literal goddess and ii. almost certainly not that guy, and c) i admittedly can’t quite stop talking to you but i’m pretty sure it’s just i’m so fucked up that i need a break from having feelings.
When it came to my turn to order coffee, I deleted the draft with an air of now having real business to attend to.
* * *
I told Miles about Julian’s take on the Li Hongzhang anecdote and he said it was the same reception Julian had given the tale when Miles had first told him it. Clearly Julian had feigned the same interest a parent would when their kid told them something they already knew – or had forgotten the story since Miles last told it, in which case his reactions were entirely predictable since he’d had the same one twice.
We sat on the roof terrace above Miles’s apartment. He shared it with the building’s other occupants, but today it was empty.
‘I do appreciate your coming to see me,’ said Miles. ‘Have more wine. I’ve had a bit of a head start on you.’
I wondered if most people’s relationships with their father more closely resembled mine with my dad, or mine with Miles. My entire verbal contact with Dad since moving to Hong Kong had been strings of ‘How are you getting on?’ – ‘Very good, very good, and how’s work?’ – ‘Very good, very good, and is it hot?’ and then back over to Mam. We couldn’t discuss politics because he’d say something awful about travellers or trans people and Mam would look at me like: don’t be hassling him. The only thing we had in common was DNA, which gave us limited mileage conversationally.
‘I wanted to ask you about Julian,’ he said. ‘How do you think he’s getting on in London?’
‘Fine, I think. He likes his job.’
‘I’ll never understand him.’
‘Me neither,’ I said. ‘He was asking after you.’
Julian had probably asked Miles about me, too. I wondered what Miles might have told him. There surely wasn’t much he could say except that I was doing fine, and it would, I reflected, be unreasonable of Julian to extrapolate from this that I now had a girlfriend called Edith. Lots of people were doing fine and had no such girlfriend.
Miles said they planned to go to church
some Sunday when Julian returned and I was welcome to join. They were Anglican, Miles said. My childhood impression was that Protestants sang a lot and were either more or less literal about wafers, depending how you saw it. Julian and Miles both had thick necks and voices whose timbre suggested a certain vim of throat. They’d be an asset come hymn-time.
I told Miles about mass in Ireland. My parents didn’t believe in God and were Catholic to boot (I explained this wasn’t contradictory, and was in fact the case for most Irish people), but Mam had made me go to the important services because if you didn’t you’d never be Mary in the nativity play. I was never Mary anyway. I fidgeted too much, and the mother of God surely kept her hands still or gainfully occupied, not twiddling her ponytail.
Clearly I had some potential as an actress, or I couldn’t simultaneously be Edith’s girlfriend and Julian’s whatever-the-hell-I-was. Edith’s girlfriend was honest about her feelings. Julian’s whatever-the-hell-she-was did whatever the hell she did. It was like the riddle with two doors and two guards, one who told the truth and the other who lied. And I had a privilege rarely afforded to stage professionals: I could choose which was a character, and which the real me. Could choose, as in no one else would choose for me – and couldn’t choose, as in couldn’t.
36
‘We need to do something about the apartment,’ Edith said in late July.
She began by leaving freesias and tulips in the hall with a note: put them in water or they’ll die. I’d given her what I thought of as the spare key, though it was really Julian’s. I wondered if Edith had taken this as a hint that I wanted her to reverse-burgle me with van der Bloom’s summer selection. I had no idea how real couples worked.
I put the bouquet in a vase I’d found in the cupboard, coated in dust so thick it felt like silt. Later I rang Edith. ‘I put them in water,’ I said. ‘They’re still dying.’