by Naoise Dolan
First we went walking. Edith held a parasol. There was a lot of greenery, scrunches of shops, and seafood restaurants with white plastic tables. Anteprandial fish swam their last in tight-packed tanks. I said: ‘Can we save one?’ Julian seemed to decide I was addressing him and said: ‘No.’ Edith looked like she was speculating if this was a long-running joke between us. I wanted to tell her we’d never be that rude to her, but I really had no precedent to go by. We passed balconied houses spread out up the hill.
He’d arrived two weeks ago at the start of September. The night before he’d returned, I’d thrown out Edith’s edits – the flowers, the framed paper samples. I went to meet him at the airport and when we got back, he took his shoes off in the hall and put them beside the heels I’d left earlier. I added the sandals I’d had on and saw that this combination, one pair of his and two of mine, looked a lot like something else. I made tea. ‘I’ve coffee either,’ I said. ‘We’ve coffee.’ Tea was fine, he said. The kettle clicked and hummed. I asked if I could stay until I found somewhere.
For our Lamma lunch, Julian had made a booking at a raw vegan café. Even when he wasn’t enthused by something – be it uncooked plant-based cuisine or Edith’s company – he wanted to be in charge of it. She told him the restaurant was nice, and he looked at her pityingly like she thought he’d built it by hand and he didn’t want to disillusion her. I wondered if he’d thought Edith was vegan – it was the sort of thing he assumed about women. We ordered zucchini noodles and hot turmeric milk. The tables were tiny. We arranged our elbows carefully around the plates.
‘Ava told me we’re not allowed to talk about work,’ Julian said to Edith, ‘so I won’t ask if you’ve advised my bank.’
‘I never said that,’ I told her. ‘Don’t believe a word this one says about me.’
Edith said: ‘Julian, Ava mentioned you went to Oxford?’
‘For my sins, yes.’
‘I’m afraid I’m a tab.’
‘She told me,’ said Julian. ‘Don’t worry, everyone makes bad choices.’
I said: ‘Like the one Oxford made when they let you in.’
‘Does she do this to you, Edith?’ said Julian.
‘He loves when I roast him about Oxford,’ I told her. ‘It reminds him he went there.’
After our raw lunch, we went walking again. Edith led. Her dress reminded me of hotel bedsheets: creased cotton, limb-indented. Physically, I found it confusing to be around both of them: my face kept wanting to make expressions, something I now realised I censored it from doing when I was with Julian. I thought they’d had the same sense of humour, but now they were together, I couldn’t think of a single joke they’d both like.
Julian’s phone rang when we were halfway back to the pier. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he said. I went ahead to walk with Edith. The Chinese banyans cast weeping shade. They grew figs – Edith had told me that before. I kept watching her but couldn’t do too much of it at once.
‘When are you moving out?’ she said.
‘Two weeks,’ I improvised.
‘You can stay with us. My mum could improve you. Everyone she meets, she sees room for improvement.’
We’d reached the shops. In Central the signs blocked the skyline like pop-ups, ten per lamppost, one per storey of a twenty-floor building, but on Lamma there were gaps between them. Awnings shaded the walk. A shop with sliding doors and no English name stocked postcards and dried meat.
The morning before this outing, the sun had woken me early. I got water and paced while drinking it in the lounge. I cut up an apple and did not eat it, and observed red-lined heels beside Julian’s shoes in the hall but did not care. Throughout inspecting the shoes I continued not caring, and on seeing they were a seven formed no dubiously feminist mental image of her big ugly feet. Then I went to my room and cried, which was sometimes something people did, and as I was crying I heard Victoria say she’d best be off.
‘It’s hard moving out,’ I told Edith.
‘Practically, you mean?’ she said.
I said: ‘I love you.’
I loved her that moment, yes, but also because the morning I heard Victoria leave, I’d put on a cardigan Edith had thrown on the floor. Like Edith, it smelled of soap. I remembered how she listened whenever I told her about Irish, and then I thought about the places where things lived in her bag. I was one such thing now, I was safe there, and no one but Edith could hurt me. So that when Julian asked later that day if we were still on for Lamma tomorrow, I’d said: all good, and meant it.
Edith stopped to take a picture of the two of us. I asked if it was for Instagram and she said no, it was just to have. I could see her browsing filters. As usual, I felt excited to feature on her feed, but anxious that I would look mismatched with everything else there. I knew her caption would remind the people she was out to that I was her girlfriend, but wouldn’t give it away to anyone else. That was more than I ever did to advertise our relationship.
The pier was just ahead of us now. We saw the next ferry was due in ten minutes. Having finished his phone call, Julian caught up. Edith asked if either of us wanted chewing gum or water, and when we said no, she went to get some for herself.
‘That was fun,’ I said to Julian once she’d left. ‘I thought you guys got on well.’
He’d started on a cigarette and gestured at the packet to offer me one.
‘I don’t smoke,’ I said, ‘remember?’
‘Sorry,’ he said.
We could see the ferry coming in now, chugging and ripple-making. The sky bled yellow into blue. It was early for a sunset. I told Julian this and he nodded. Then he cleared his throat.
‘I’d better tell you before she gets back,’ he said. I followed his gaze and saw Edith leaving the shop.
‘Tell me what?’ I said.
‘They rang just now. Sorry, just let me –’ He stubbed out his cigarette and lit another.
‘What’s happened, Julian?’
He exhaled. ‘My dad’s had a heart attack.’
40
Julian said they were properly referred to as acute myocardial infarctions. At first, he’d thought the textbook had misspelled ‘infractions’, but it was a different word – infarctions. The first hour after it happened, ‘it’ meaning ‘an acute myocardial infarction’, was crucial in determining the outcome. The ‘outcome’ Julian referred to was binary in nature.
‘He has coronary artery disease,’ Julian said. ‘Sixty-three is young for it. The doctors say it’s the booze and fags. That or genetic predisposition.’
Julian lit a cigarette, then appeared to remember what he’d said about the factors that had compromised Miles’s arteries. It didn’t stop him smoking, but he was quiet.
When he’d finished, we went back into the hospital. I gestured towards the lift, but he wanted us to take the stairs.
‘You’re both making a tremendous fuss,’ Miles said. ‘I lived through Thatcher.’
Julian buttoned and unbuttoned his shirtsleeves. ‘I phoned Mum,’ he said. ‘She’s getting the next flight.’
‘It’s kind of her to come and support you,’ said Miles.
‘Dad.’
‘Aren’t you needed at work?’
‘They can live without me for a day.’
‘Goodness, you really must think I’m nearing expiry.’
That night in the sitting room I saw Julian watch a video on his laptop. It showed a heart like a rubbery boxing glove. A black patch spread from one of the arteries. Then came the plaque build-up, artistically realised as yellow bumps. Julian learned that Miles should have chewed an aspirin. It would have lowered the risk of a blood clot.
I said, ‘Maybe you can tell him now.’
‘Thanks for the input,’ said Julian, ‘but I’m not sure I want to give my father advice for the next time his heart stops working. Not ex
actly blue-sky thinking, is it.’
A few days later, the last of Miles’s tests came back. Julian found them reassuring enough to go back to work, but his habits got weirder and more erratic. When he was hungry enough to remember about food, he’d have whatever required the fewest steps: dry cereal, bagel not even cut in two. Small things irked him.
‘Why did you put my phone on the couch?’ he said.
I said: ‘I thought it was mine until the screen came on.’
‘You should have put it back. I might have got a call.’
‘You would have heard it ringing.’
‘No, I wouldn’t. It’s in silent mode from the hospital. Why can’t you leave things where you found them?’
Later he apologised. I told him he could be as cross with me as he wanted, and he replied: ‘Don’t say that. I need you to be normal.’
‘I don’t want to upset you,’ I said.
He said: ‘If I ever say the words “It upsets me”, please have me shot.’
Florence arrived three days after Miles was hospitalised. She stayed four nights. She knew Julian had a two-bedroom flat and didn’t know I was living there, but he got her a hotel room on the pretext that he worked late and wouldn’t want to wake her.
Miles could only have two visitors at a time, so I never met Florence. Julian said this was for the best. She didn’t take to other women. I asked if he meant their being in his life or their existence full stop. He didn’t respond.
After a few weeks, they released Miles with a full complement of medicine and a list of substances that could and couldn’t enter his body. We visited him at his home. I asked Julian if he’d prefer to go alone, and he said absolutely not.
‘I don’t even say anything,’ I said. ‘I sit there and watch you guys talk.’
‘You keep us civil. He hasn’t held me personally responsible for the global financial crisis even once since you came into our lives. And I’ve stopped comparing him to Stalin.’
I acknowledged this was a benefit not to be discounted.
* * *
Mam said Granaunt Maggie needed a hip replacement. Again, Mam said. Maggie had a turbulent relationship with prosthetics. The first fake hip had damaged some of the remaining portion of Maggie’s actual pelvis, so now she was getting another, and probably suing. You never knew with the solicitors.
I said my friend Edith did law, albeit in another jurisdiction, and offered to ask her about it. Mam said she sounded like a nice girl.
‘This other friend of mine is having a hard time,’ I said. ‘His dad’s just out of hospital.’
It felt indiscreet to say the friend was the banker.
‘The poor lad,’ said Mam. This was likely the first time anyone had ever referred to Julian as a ‘lad’. ‘Would it be serious?’
‘He’s grand now. He had a heart attack, but he’s in remission.’
‘God love him.’
‘Both of them,’ I said.
‘Sure look.’
Mam’s dad died when I was six. Like any number of men in our family, he’d been an alcoholic. You had to be careful of that, Mam said. I couldn’t tell if she meant men should be careful of drink or we should be careful of them. The funeral was in the big white turf-smelling house in Roscommon. I’d gone back twice a year since to see Nana, who lasted eight years more. George and Tom watched telly with her and I’d go to the sink to wash up. ‘You’re as good,’ Nana said. ‘Bit of initiative.’ At college I had tentatively described this as an example of patriarchal conditioning, but in fact I’d felt superior doing jobs while the boys sat there like spuds.
I asked Mam what to do about Julian.
‘You’re as well not prying,’ Mam said. ‘Just be there for him.’
She put me on to Dad. He said: ‘Grand stretch in the evenings now?’, and I said there was. He said it was well for some.
‘It is,’ I said.
I felt important because now I was the one who couldn’t see Edith. She messaged asking to hang out, and I said I was busy. I meant that I wanted to be there for Julian when he got home, but I obviously couldn’t tell her that. So she probably thought I was dynamic and sought-after in ways I was too busy to even explain to her. That, or she thought I needed to manage my time better.
* * *
After Miles had been in hospital for a week, Julian took me to the Marriott in Admiralty. It was the first time we’d been out together properly since his return earlier in September. In the elevator a mink-coated woman scanned his height as though unsure he needed so much of it, then my hemline in certainty that a great deal more was required.
He let me order for both of us and said, distractedly, that my hair looked quite nice. We discussed whether the word ‘quite’ magnified or diminished a compliment. I sketched a cline on a napkin and put ‘quite’ between ‘a little’ and ‘very’. It was nice being someone else’s Edith. Julian drew his own and put it between ‘very’ and ‘extremely’ – in this context, he said. In others, I was quite right. I asked which ‘quite’ he’d used just there and he said he wondered how he’d managed to miss me in London.
‘I missed you, too,’ I said.
He said I’d been a good friend to him.
‘I want to be now,’ I said.
The seats were upholstered in a range of fabrics, overlooked by paintings of cliffs. The women in the restaurant wore bright dresses as though to atone for the glum-suited men – we had to have him along, you see. Julian and I started inventing stories for the ones nearby. He took as married a couple I regarded as quite obviously having a secret liaison.
‘At the Marriott?’ Julian said.
I said: ‘Sorry, I forgot everyone occupies a social realm where they’re bound to see someone they know at a five-star hotel.’
I felt calm in a way I never had before he’d left. I had Edith to go on real dates with now, so I didn’t need to worry about whether Julian and I were on one. We could just eat.
He told me London had changed: not for everyone, of course, but for him. Nothing but the Shard was tall anymore. The Tube was shabbier than before. At least in both countries the woman in the announcements was equally anxious that he please make way for alighting passengers. He wondered if she minded hearing her voice in stations. There was no amount of money he would accept to have his own broadcast to him when he was trying not to spill coffee on himself. He’d thought he didn’t notice the Chinese characters everywhere in Hong Kong, but found in London that the signs looked bare without them, though his Chinese reading comprehension was still, he said, below that of literally a toddler. And he took the opposite view to Middle England’s, re: London: he was freaked out by how many white people there were.
‘Keep a wide berth of Oxford, so,’ I said.
Afterwards, we took the tram from Admiralty to Pottinger Street, then the outdoor escalator. Signs, as always: Sunny Palms Sauna, Paris Hair Salon, Open Late SEX TOY SHOP (emphasis theirs). It seemed humorous that Julian could be standing to the right, looking like the rest of us, when we had stayed while he was gone.
I realised I walked ahead of him now. The first time he took me to lunch, he’d reached the MTR station escalator first, then let me go ahead so – I soon saw – the height difference wouldn’t be magnified on the steps. It had made me nervous. If he thought of things like that, I’d wondered what other observations he’d make. Now twenty-three was shaping up to be the first year of my life where the idea of someone noticing me didn’t fill me with abject horror. I supposed later was better than never.
Inside the flat I made chamomile tea. I said: ‘I know you probably don’t want to talk about Miles, but I’m there if you do.’
‘Thanks, Ava,’ Julian said.
We sat on the couch and watched the news on his laptop. He said he was thinking of getting a real physical TV. I said: ‘Christ, you really are pushing thirty
.’ Hong Kong’s government had jailed three prominent pro-democracy student leaders. British McDonald’s workers were striking over zero-hour contracts. (‘How can you agree with me so much and not like Corbyn?’ ‘I think really the difference stems from our feelings on whether it would be in the national interest to turn Britain into a gulag.’)
Julian fiddled with his shirtsleeves and said: ‘Do we have a date for moving out?’
‘Maybe in a couple of weeks.’
‘Right.’
I drank some of my tea so I could go and top up the water.
‘If that’s okay,’ I said.
‘Well,’ Julian said, ‘that’s not much time to find somewhere.’
‘Places move quick here,’ I said. ‘And I could get an Airbnb if I had to.’
‘True. Well, just know there’s no rush at my end if you need longer.’
Then he got up and looked for his MacBook charger. He should really just buy another, he said. Buy one for each socket in the flat, still probably manage to lose them all.
‘I’m sorry about the message,’ I said. I directed this comment to the cushion I was holding. ‘It was an accident.’
‘These things happen,’ he said, as though people routinely sent him rambling declarations of who they were fucking. This was not outside possibility. His friends were pretty weird.
‘So, Victoria,’ I said. I didn’t know if she’d been back since, but I hadn’t noticed if she had.
‘How did you –’
‘I’m a very intelligent person.’
‘You don’t mind?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I did, but if I’ve got someone –’
He laughed. ‘I hope no one holds me to my mistakes as much as all that.’
It had never made sense to me that men thought women they’d had sex with would like to hear them be unkind about other women they’d had sex with. You would have to be a raging egomaniac, I thought, to think those men didn’t also speak about you that way. The worst thing Julian had ever said about Kat was that she was ‘fine’, and that was one of the reasons I trusted him. It wasn’t my business to mind that he was now doing and saying things he wouldn’t have previously, but it worried me.