Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

  I went to the window so he wouldn’t have to look at me, and said: ‘Do you want me to stay until Miles is better?’

  ‘The doctor said he’ll be fine in a few weeks,’ Julian said.

  With my fingers I brushed stray soil from a potted plant off the windowsill, then went to the bin and dusted it off my hands. The plant was a gift from Edith. She’d said I couldn’t really feel safe living where nothing grew.

  ‘I can stay,’ I said. ‘If it would help.’

  I expected him to say, ‘If you like,’ and that I’d need a good half-hour to determine whether he could do without me. Women took care of men and let them pretend we didn’t. I knew it was unfair to compare Julian to someone whose entire schooling hadn’t told them crying was for women and poors, but I remembered Edith thanking me for how I’d handled Mrs Zhang.

  ‘Why are we drinking tea?’ Julian said. ‘Let’s have Pinot Noir.’

  ‘The Chambertin or the Clos de Vougeot?’

  ‘That’s not my accent.’

  ‘Okay, but which.’

  ‘Wait, fuck, we still have the Clos de Vougeot?’ I saw him think: and she had us drinking tea.

  My hand slipped when I poured so I filled his glass nearly to the top. I started saying sorry and Julian said there was nothing in the world less worthy of apology. I said he looked good, and he said that was surprising because the air pollution app I’d shown him had been as negative about London as it was about Hong Kong. I’d deleted it myself long ago. He said that was classic us. He had a point, though I couldn’t decide what it was.

  ‘Don’t feel obliged,’ Julian said, ‘but I would appreciate it if you stayed.’

  ‘I will,’ I said. ‘I’m happy to.’

  ‘As friends. Till I know he’s all right.’

  Friends could mean anything.

  41

  October

  It was October 1, National Day. Julian and I offered to spend it with Miles, but he laughed and said he had other plans already. Edith suggested we see the fireworks at Victoria Harbour. I wasn’t sure what she was up to asking Julian along, too, but didn’t probe her on it. He agreed to come.

  Walking through the crowd, I thought of the conclusions people could draw from seeing us. A tall, fair man and two small, dark-haired women. Two whites, one Asian. We couldn’t be related, but we were too different to be an obvious friend circle. Edith’s clothes looked the most expensive, so perhaps we were her harried personal assistants. But why were we spending National Day together? Possibly Julian and I were Edith’s friends from uni and had flown over from London for the week. We’d all gone to the same Oxford college, and Julian and I were married and visiting Edith following her return to Hong Kong so she could help us dip into the culture. Could you spot a gay woman on sight? It was meant to be one of the superpowers attendant on liking women, but clearly I’d never had it.

  Edith found a vantage point and told Julian to use his height to make space for us. ‘This is fantastic, isn’t it,’ he said without raising his intonation. ‘A nice day out with my best girls.’ Edith shushed him and he laughed. ‘What,’ he said, ‘are you worried you won’t hear the fireworks over me?’

  I stood in the middle. Every time a firework burst, I squeezed Edith’s hand. Julian craned his head forward like he wanted to appear more attentive than he was. He was conscious, I knew, that this wasn’t a public holiday in London and that clients would expect responses within an hour. That was Edith’s situation as well, but she’d done more on her phone on the way over, so her hourly window ended later. I wondered at first which thoughts they expelled to make room for such considerations. But this was unscientific. Actually, the brain grew new cells the more information you fed it. I didn’t like that and was sorry I’d thought of it, because it meant they were getting smarter than me every day.

  The billboards above us cracked out red, white and gold. Kids shouted.

  Afterwards I walked Edith to Sai Ying Pun station. There was a mural inside of people disenchanted with urban life. She said she’d had a nice time and liked Julian. Then she asked if there’d been any developments with finding a flat.

  ‘I’m thinking mid-October,’ I said.

  ‘You were thinking the end of September the last time I asked.’

  ‘His dad’s had a heart attack.’

  ‘I know you want to be a good friend,’ said Edith, ‘but I don’t think he’d ask this of any of his other friends.’

  ‘That’s because his other friends are actual sociopaths.’

  ‘Still.’

  ‘Just a few more weeks.’

  ‘If you’re sure,’ she said. We hugged and she went through the turnstile. I stayed until she was out of sight to see if she’d look back, but she didn’t.

  * * *

  Proper school had started again for my students, though they’d continued coming to my classes all summer. The seven-year-olds were halfway through their module on sentence-level grammar now. A few days after the fireworks, I gave them a lesson on category nouns versus exact nouns. I hadn’t heard of this distinction prior to opening the textbook. It transpired that a category noun was something like ‘vegetables’, whereas exact nouns were ‘beetroot’, ‘carrots’, ‘broccoli’. It was better to use exact nouns because this made your writing more precise and interesting.

  The chapter gave a short explanation followed by an exercise: an A4 page divided into columns. On the left were various category nouns. On the right, you had to fill in at least three corresponding exact nouns. I told the kids they could use their Cantonese-to-English dictionaries.

  Cynthia Mak asked what to say for ‘people’. Did it mean ‘sister’, ‘brother’, ‘father’, or ‘teacher’, ‘doctor’, ‘artist’, or –

  ‘They’re all okay,’ I said.

  ‘But if I put “sister”, “father”, “brother” in “people”, then what about here?’ She pointed to the box marked ‘family’.

  ‘Okay, don’t do those. Do “teacher” or something.’

  ‘But what about here?’ – signalling the ‘professions’ row.

  ‘Okay, something else for “people”.’

  ‘Happy people, sad people?’

  ‘“Happy people” isn’t an exact noun – it’s an adjective plus a category noun.’

  ‘So what should I write?’

  We looked at each other. It was indeed a challenge to describe people in a way not immediately related to how they earned money or their position in the family unit. I said: ‘How about friend, boyfriend, colleague?’

  ‘I don’t want to write “boyfriend”.’

  I couldn’t blame her for questioning the exercise. ‘Friend’, ‘enemy’ and ‘colleague’ didn’t seem like ways of narrowing down ‘person’ in the way ‘apple’ did for ‘fruit’. An apple would still be a fruit if it didn’t have any others in its vicinity, but you couldn’t be someone’s nemesis without their hanging around to complete the definition. The same issue cropped up with my earlier suggestions. ‘Family’ was relational, and ‘profession’ was created and given meaning by external structures. Admittedly ‘adult’, ‘child’ and ‘teenager’ could stand on their own. But I still found it depressing that the way we specified ourselves – the way we made ourselves precise and interesting – was by pinpointing our developmental stage and likely distance from mortality. Fruit didn’t have that problem.

  * * *

  Even a British man so very British and so very male as Julian surely had limits as to what he could pretend not to notice – on grounds auditory if not emotional – so Edith and I had been meeting in love hotels since his return a few weeks ago. The first one was on Lockhart Road in Wan Chai. She told me it was an hourly rental, which augured something tawdry, but it was upholstered and managed like any other budget joint. You just had to check out sooner. The sheets smelled clean, probably because th
ey’d been sprayed to. We booked the whole evening so we could watch TV afterwards.

  ‘I wish we could tell people,’ I said in an ad break.

  ‘I like having a secret,’ Edith said.

  ‘Would you like me if it wasn’t a secret?’

  ‘I don’t know. We could try telling people and see if I’m still interested.’

  ‘Who should we tell?’

  ‘My family aren’t ready,’ she said. ‘I told Cyril and Tony about us. People from Cambridge know I’m a lesbian, but I don’t think anyone else does. I suspect I’d be rumbled if I introduced them to my girlfriend.’

  She said things in that formal way when she was trying to be droll. It irked me sometimes, but I knew it was her way of coping with things. ‘So who else is there?’ I said.

  ‘Julian, I guess.’

  ‘But he already knows.’

  ‘It’s a pity,’ said Edith. ‘It would have been so good if we’d told him together. He’d have been all, I’m so happy for you guys, I’m touched you’re being open with me, isn’t it great that we’re sharing our feelings.’

  ‘That’s a perfect Julian impression. I thought you actually were him for a second there.’ She didn’t get that I was joking – or at any rate didn’t laugh – so I added: ‘But I mean, you can tell him. Just maybe don’t expect much of a reaction.’

  She wasn’t looking at me. I couldn’t tell if this was deliberate, but I didn’t want to check her face because if I did and she didn’t look back then I’d know she was doing it on purpose.

  She said: ‘Do you think we’ll ever tell people?’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind,’ I said.

  ‘Telling people or not?’

  ‘Either. It’s up to you.’

  ‘But I want it to be up to you,’ Edith said. Then she laughed slightly. I felt this had a more credible softening effect when people did it by text.

  ‘We don’t need to talk about it right now,’ I said.

  ‘That’s such a Julian thing to say.’

  ‘What’s he got to do with us?’ I said.

  ‘“We’ll talk about it later,” and then you never do.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve ever told you that.’

  ‘What,’ said Edith, ‘do you think I’ve bugged your apartment?’

  ‘I genuinely don’t remember telling you that.’

  ‘Well, you did. You can believe me or not. And not to pester you, but –’

  ‘I’m working on it.’

  ‘You’d better be.’

  42

  The third week of October, Edith said we should do something socially productive. Julian brought the plastic bags. We walked along the beach and picked up rubbish. Julian complained that there was no point because if we came back tomorrow, people would have dumped more packaging on the shore. Edith asked if he’d heard the parable about the man flinging starfish into the sea. Julian said yes, and that he thought it was nonsense because the man should have tried to get to the root of the starfish crisis instead of sticking plasters on it. She asked if he meant by seizing the means of production, and his face said: why is it that everyone I know is a white-collar drone, a deranged Bolshevik or in this case both.

  We kept going till the shore was litter-free, then tied the bags and disposed of them. Julian said the recycling bins were just for show and it would all go to landfill, where it would probably do more damage than if we’d left it on the sand. Edith replied that if he had a better idea for how to spend the next socially productive Saturday, then he was welcome to plan our next tripartite field trip. He asked if she was quite sure there had to be a next one.

  I left them to it. I had other things to think about.

  They squabbled again about where to eat. Edith suggested a pizza place. Julian said London was cheaper and better for that sort of thing. Edith said we weren’t in London, so she didn’t see the relevance of that point. We wound up going for seafood at the Boathouse on Stanley Main Street, which neither of them had wanted, but which gave each the satisfaction of knowing that the other hadn’t got their choice. The terrace overlooked the bay. Edith and Julian ordered a platter of crayfish, clams and scallops. They struggled to fit it beside the fake peonies on the table. I got mushroom soup and didn’t eat it.

  The Boathouse waitress brought our bill. I asked Edith if there was a Cantonese phrase meaning ‘lie of omission’. She said she couldn’t think of a direct translation off the top of her head, but that there used to be a TV thriller series called Lives of Omission about the Hong Kong Police Force. It starred Michael Tse. They cancelled it after thirty episodes.

  Julian said: ‘Where do you find the time to watch so much shit TV?’

  ‘I did most of my watching as a student,’ Edith said. ‘And it’s actually quite good. It got loads of TVB nominations.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  They seemed cordial, but they always did. I wondered what they were really thinking, and knew that in Edith’s case, at least, those thoughts were probably hostile. I wished she could understand that Julian wasn’t pulling me back into our old dynamic. Him needing me was strange and new. Also, his father had been ill. It seemed farcical that I even needed to explain to Edith why I couldn’t abandon him now. On another level I knew I’d abused her trust and had broken it again since my first apology by staying with Julian past the initial deadline. Under this reading of events, which I did appreciate was probably the sane one, it was not much to ask that I stop living with the man I’d lied to her about fucking. But what sort of person packed their bags when their friend’s dad was just out of hospital? This, I thought, was the trouble with being emotionally invested in two articulate people who both made their case well. (Julian hadn’t exactly, but I made it to myself with the sort of analysis he would use.)

  ‘What about you, Ava?’ said Julian.

  ‘He’s asking what you think of Martin Schulz,’ Edith said. ‘The leader of the German Social Democrats? Julian likes him. I don’t.’

  ‘Then I don’t, either,’ I said, and Julian congratulated Edith on having such a loyal stooge.

  It had been sunny when we entered the restaurant, but when we left the hail shot down as though from a volley gun. We had one cheap umbrella, which looked wholly unequal to the task before it. They said I should hold it. Being the modal height, I’d keep it at the fairest altitude for the three of us.

  43

  Edith and I went to a bookstore café on Park Road in late October, the week after the beach trip. It had a red door and wicker ceiling lampshades. I brought over coffee and muffins, and Edith read aloud from an article in the Scientific American.

  ‘A recent study suggests that our ability to construct sentences may arise from procedural memory,’ she quoted. ‘The same simple memory system that lets our dogs learn to sit on command.’

  Procedural memory stored skills like swimming and riding a bicycle, while declarative memory was for facts and memories. You formed phrases by mirroring patterns from sentences you’d heard in the past. That was why Edith said, ‘Do you have it?’ where I might say, ‘Have you it on you?’ We’d grown up hearing different versions of English. Consciously or otherwise, we reproduced them.

  ‘But I don’t say, “Have you it on you?” ’ I said. ‘I say what you say. And you didn’t grow up hearing British English. You said your accent was American until you went to boarding school.’

  ‘It’s an example, Ava.’

  I was picking holes to keep Edith talking, but really I found the whole thing comforting. I was less responsible for what I said if I’d soaked it up from other people. If someone said something to hurt me, it wasn’t because they meant to, but because they’d surrounded themselves with unkind people in the past. And if I wanted to be someone who dashed off barbed retorts and didn’t betray investment in those around them
, I just had to listen to the people I wanted to imitate. My brain would rattle off their sentences.

  ‘But it’s depressing,’ I said – again, mostly to hear Edith’s response. ‘Our words don’t mean anything.’

  ‘I don’t think the selection of the content is procedural, just how we use grammar to express it.’

  Then she went to buy a book. She put it in the middle section of her bag when she got back. Her manner made it clear that she expected me to raise what we’d been avoiding.

  ‘I’m worried about him,’ I said. ‘We drink wine and he tells me things. I don’t think he has anyone else to talk to.’

  ‘What sort of things does he tell you?’

  ‘He believes in God.’

  ‘Is it quite necessary for you to live with him so you can have theological debates?’

  ‘We don’t debate it,’ I said. Her face was impassive, so I kept mine that way, too. ‘I don’t really care.’

  ‘I don’t feel that’s quite as compelling a counterpoint as you think it is.’ Calmly.

  ‘Edith, you’re being such a lawyer.’ I’d intended this to sound playful. It did not.

  ‘Ava, you’re being indecisive.’

  She was still calm, and I hated her for being able to keep it up longer than I could. Probably Edith did not feel things as strongly as I did. She was at an unfair advantage. Or she experienced the same intensity of emotion as I did, but her feelings were normal and appropriate, whereas mine were sick and misdirected.

  ‘I’m not being indecisive,’ I said. ‘I love you.’ Which I did, or I wouldn’t hate her. ‘But I’m not going to turn my back on everyone else. This is so like you. I’m here in this country where I have literally no one but you – I haven’t seen my family in over a year – but that’s not enough for you.’