by Naoise Dolan
After about two months, I was spending a few nights a week at his flat. The spare room – mine now, I supposed – had a soft twill houndstooth throw and pictures of London on the wall. One day at work I printed out an image of Dublin and asked if I could put it in the empty frame in the living room. ‘If you like,’ he said. He told me I was welcome to stay over while he was travelling for work, but I didn’t. The temptation to go poking around his bedroom would have been overwhelming. The inside was still a mystery to me, but I imagined everything folded and stored in optimised locations for speedy access.
One evening when he was abroad, I came home to the Airbnb and Emily ambushed me before I could get to my room.
‘We haven’t seen much of you lately,’ she said.
‘We can’t all be here at once,’ I said. ‘It’s claustrophobic.’
‘Let’s go for drinks, then.’
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘When?’
‘Tomorrow?’
Julian was back from Singapore then. ‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m having dinner with a friend.’
‘Is this the friend you stay over with?’
‘I don’t have that many friends.’
Emily began to tidy the ugly couch cushions, as if hoping I’d notice how good she was for not asking me to help. The fabric had a talent for gathering hairs: hers and Freya’s mostly, since I was never there, but they blamed me anyway.
‘You can’t drop everything for a guy,’ she said.
‘I’m not with him.’
‘Why are you always at his place?’
I’d stopped listening. If she wanted to complain about me never being there, but offer extensive notes whenever I did make an appearance, then no wonder I preferred Julian.
* * *
The next evening, I narrated the argument to Julian. Between drags of his cigarette, he nodded and of-coursed in all the right places.
‘Have you ever had flatmates?’ I said.
‘Yes, of course, at Oxford, and when I was starting out in London. Most of them were fine. One guy was a complete nutter. This was my final year of uni. He was doing his dissertation on some existential quandary. You’d hear him pacing around all night muttering about it. And he never ate solid food – he put everything in this big fucking blender. Lived on smoothies. I think he got the top first in his year.’
‘So having your own place is better?’
‘Substantially better.’
Neither of us pointed out that he didn’t really live alone anymore. We finished the wine and he went to get another bottle. My jeans had a hole on the inseam near the top of my thigh. I picked at it, then jerked my hand away when I heard him returning.
I said: ‘What was your last girlfriend like?’
He twirled his glass. ‘She was fine. She got sent back to London.’
‘How long ago was that?’
‘A few months.’
‘Any regrets?’
‘No, none at all. I don’t tend to look back.’
We drank our wine and enjoyed each other’s silence. His cushions, I noticed, were beautiful: pebble corduroy, gold and ivory sateen. I picked one up and hugged it to my chest.
‘That thing you said before about wanting to be a history teacher,’ I said, ‘were you really just bullshitting me?’
‘Completely. I’m glad other people do it, but for my part I’d rather hang on to the dim prospect of owning a house.’
He’d said that thing about teaching history the first time we met, and I hadn’t been sure if he was joking. I still wasn’t. I said: ‘What if you could own a house no matter what you did?’
‘I’ve never thought about that because it’s certainly not happening in our lifetimes. Possibly I’d have stayed at Oxford and done more history. But there’s no point dwelling on it. I have every respect for people who follow their passions, but I prefer stability.’
I wondered if he meant his comment to have point.
‘It could be worse,’ I said. ‘You could have no passions and also no stability.’
‘To be clear, Ava: we’re both dead behind the eyes, but at least I can pay rent?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘We really are the new belle époque.’
‘Arsehole bankers and deadbeats.’
‘Not all bankers are arseholes.’
‘Yeah, just you.’
‘Just me.’
‘I like talking to you,’ I said – quite stupidly, I realised. ‘It makes me feel solid, like someone can confirm I’m real.’
‘Good.’
‘Do you like having me here?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’re good company. And if I’ve got this space and I like sharing it with you, there’s no reason not to.’
‘You mean it suits you.’
‘Not “suits”. You’re making me sound calculating. I’m saying it makes sense.’
He seemed closer to me on the couch than he had a moment ago, although he hadn’t moved.
‘If it stopped making sense, would you stop asking me over?’ I said.
‘You mean would I do something that didn’t make sense to me?’
I leaned over to refill my glass. Our legs touched.
‘Here, let me get it,’ he said, and he hovered close as he poured it.
I waited.
In his room he ran the errands – pulled the blinds, dimmed the lights, shoved things off the bed – while I took off my necklace, dropping it slowly on the nightstand so the steel wouldn’t rattle against the wood. Aware that he was watching me, I tried not to appear curious about his possessions.
My hair got in the way. He caught some of it in his mouth and then it jammed in my zip at the back and he said: ‘I hope this doesn’t end in A&E.’ ‘Really,’ I said, ‘because I hope it does.’ ‘You say the weirdest fucking things,’ he said.
5
October
I couldn’t bear living in an Airbnb forever, but I still didn’t have a two-month deposit saved. At the start of October, I moved my things to Julian’s. I told him I didn’t have time to go around viewing places. He said I could stay until I did.
‘Take the guest room,’ he said. ‘I get calls at night.’
We kept having sex.
In mid-October Typhoon Haima came, the last of the season. We were trapped indoors until the Hong Kong observatory gave the all-clear. Julian wore an unavoidably air-quoted ‘casual jumper’. He called many things casual and kept them in air quotes.
I asked why we’d taken so long to hook up.
‘I didn’t want to impose,’ he said.
The answer I’d been hoping for was that I made him nervous. I hadn’t thought he’d had the power to ‘impose’, and was startled that he’d felt he had.
His sheets were very white. I once left a blot he called a wine stain, either euphemistically or because he could more readily picture me sipping Merlot than menstruating. His interest in making me come felt sinister at first, which revealed to me my assumption that if he wanted something it would probably harm me. He liked when I bit him but you had to pick your moment and I sometimes thought: there are many things I will never become expert in and I chose this – which did not suggest to me that mine was an internal monologue one would select if one could.
I researched the science of biting, learned it would still hurt him later, and knew exactly how I felt about that information.
He enjoyed when I lampooned men who went for sexual flattery. It confirmed his view that he was not one of them, while ensuring their pet phrases still left my mouth. I’d be picky about menus and he’d say I lacked appetite. ‘Untrue,’ I’d say, plus facetious gesture. I felt I’d cracked someone too patrician for the you’re-so-good-at-sex spiel, he felt privy to my disdain for men susceptible to the you’re-so-good-at-sex spiel, and empirically I
sat across the table, ran my foot up his leg, and said he was good at sex. Then I asked for water and watched his hands as he poured.
I wasn’t good at most things but I was good at men, and Julian was the richest man I’d ever been good at.
* * *
Joan often made me stay behind to ‘help her’ write vocabulary lists. In Hong Kong English, ‘helping someone do something’ could mean you did it and they did not assist. Joan was fond of this usage.
That week the twelve-year-olds’ list included the word ‘mind’. The dictionary gave four meanings: to be in charge of or deal with; to be offended or bothered by; the seat of the faculty of reason (Iris Huang looked between the chairs); an important intellectual (Iris Huang fixed on a chair).
The dictionary would not equip these children for Dublin. ‘Mind yourself’ upon leaving a house was different to ‘Mind yourself’ when using a serrated knife. ‘Don’t mind him’ meant he’d been teasing you, and ‘Mind him’ meant either to take care of him or to take care of yourself around him. And all your minding happened in one mind, hopefully your own.
I was forever minding things in Hong Kong, but I couldn’t always construe in what sense.
* * *
Julian liked being busy. He was so busy, I would say. Just one day I would like to be busier than him. I would like for him to suggest a plan and for me to not be free.
‘I’m not that busy,’ he said. ‘Why do you want to be busy?’
‘It’s a status symbol. It’s like, “I’m so in-demand in the skilled economy.”’
‘That’s not the rich, though. That’s people like me.’
‘But you’re rich.’
‘I’m not.’
‘You have to stop pretending you don’t know you’re rich,’ I said. ‘It’s unbecoming.’
Our wealth disparity was too wide to make me uncomfortable. It was a clownish level of difference that I could regard only with amusement. I also felt it absolved me of any need to probe the gendered implications of letting him pay for everything, which was just as well when I couldn’t afford for it to be otherwise. If something cost 1 per cent of his income or 10 per cent of mine, why shouldn’t he take care of it?
I googled the salary range for junior vice-presidents at his bank: €137,000 to €217,000 a year, plus bonus and housing allowance. I tried to take heart from this. That he could have that many zeroes and not consider himself wealthy surely showed that material lucre would not make me happy, ergo that I needn’t find a real job. But if money wouldn’t improve my life, I couldn’t think of anything likelier to.
Staying in his flat was possibly a rupture from the capitalist notion that I was only worth something if I paid my own way economically. Or maybe it made me a bad feminist. I could puzzle it out once the experience had passed. There wasn’t much point in dwelling on it until then. What if I decided I didn’t like staying with him? I’d have to do something else, and I mightn’t like any of the alternatives any better.
* * *
Mam always said: ‘That’s plenty.’ If you tweaked the heating above seventeen – that’s plenty, Ava. Grocery shopping, if you made to pick up a second punnet of cherries – that’s plenty. I hadn’t told Mam I was living with Julian. She’d regard him as more than plenty, which meant too much.
I rang her one weekend when Julian was abroad.
‘Any news?’ she said, clearing her tone of accusation that I’d only call if there were something to disclose. Mam’s genius was that when she avoided implying something, you could hear her doing it.
‘Not much,’ I said.
‘How’s your one?’
Your one, unless otherwise specified, meant Joan.
‘Grand,’ I said.
‘Your man?’
‘Grand.’
Benny. The first time I’d told Mam about my employers, she’d said: ‘They’ll keep you out of divilment.’ In subsequent phone calls she tried to judge how they were doing, and whether they needed help.
‘Any fellas?’ Mam said.
‘Afraid not,’ I said.
I tried to make it sound like I was looking. Mam had the vague impression that girls in search of boyfriends went to nightclubs, something she liked to picture me, a young one, doing. I could have told her I didn’t go because my boyfriend was twenty-eight, but he wasn’t my boyfriend and I’d always hated clubbing.
‘We’ve a hard time keeping up with you,’ Mam said. This comment rarely bore particular relation to whatever I’d just said, but she found it instructive to drop it in.
‘How’s Tom?’ I said.
‘He’s grand. Did I tell you he’s after moving out?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Good lad. Hardworking. Most boys his age you’d need to push out.’
She didn’t want me to agree that it was good her younger son no longer needed her. Equally, she didn’t want me confirming that she should feel defunct because he was leaving before he’d finished college. Mam dealt in conversational quicksands where moving would only trap you more.
(I’d told Julian this and he’d said he never would have guessed that I came from a line of enigmatic women. I’d said: ‘Why enigmatic women? Why do you think I’m a female-pattern enigma? Maybe the men in my family are enigmatic, too.’ He’d said: ‘But you do acknowledge that you’re enigmatic.’ And I’d said: ‘Maybe, or maybe I was just being enigmatic.’)
‘George is well,’ she added. Her listening comprehension deferred to maternal optimism: she assumed that since I’d asked about Tom, I wanted to hear about both brothers. ‘He’s happy with his bonus, did he tell you?’
‘He didn’t,’ I said.
He did. George was a corporate restructuring consultant. This mostly entailed helping companies make people redundant without having to give them severance pay. He did a robust sideline in finding ways to avoid granting women maternity leave.
‘And they think someone on his team will make senior consultant,’ Mam was saying. ‘He’s a hard worker – him and Tom. A pair of workhorses.’
The phrase ‘workhorses’ made me think of ‘workhouses’, then of how commodiously situated George would be running one in a Victorian novel. With my college brain on, I knew many more people lost their jobs when banks like Julian’s played subprime roulette – but the college brain came with a dial. I turned it up for people I hated, and down for people I liked.
‘What about me?’ I said. ‘Am I a workhorse?’
I was trying to be funny, which was an error. You couldn’t joke with Mam on a long-distance call.
‘You’re not getting enough sleep,’ she said.
* * *
I liked imagining Julian had a wife back in England. I am a jezebel, I’d think. This wine rack was a wedding gift and I am using it to store Jack Daniel’s because I have terrible taste in everything. She is Catholic – in the English recusant aristocrat sense, not the Irish poverty sense – and will never grant him a divorce, and I cannot in any case usurp her as the woman who loved him before life and investment banking strangled him, creatively.
I asked about the wine rack and he said it came with the flat.
I wished Julian were married. It would make me a powerful person who could ruin his life. It would also provide an acceptable reason he did not want us to get too close. The more plausible reading was that he was single and that while I could on occasion discharge the rocket science of making him want to fuck me, he did not want to be my boyfriend. That hurt my ego. I wanted other people to care more about me than I did about them.
As things really stood, I performed petty tasks in exchange for access to him. He jokingly asked me to organise his bookshelf, and when I actually did, he said I was brilliant. From the conditions of the spines I judged that he liked Tennyson, also Nabokov, though they might have been second-hand copies or ones someone else had borrowed. One w
eekend I made the mistake of pointing out that he should pack for Seoul, and thereafter he expected me to remind him whenever he went on a business trip.
‘You’re so lazy,’ I said. ‘It’d be easier to do it myself than make you do it.’
‘Knock yourself out,’ Julian said, which wasn’t the response I’d been trying to elicit, but I thought it could be fun, like kitting out a Barbie doll for an improbable profession. His clothes all looked the same and he kept a toothbrush and shaving things in a travel bag. I didn’t include condoms, not because I minded his seeing other people but because I was afraid it would seem passive-aggressive.
I wondered when he spoke to his parents. He alluded to conversations with his mum, but I never heard them talking. Eventually I asked.
‘There’s a routine,’ he said. ‘Every few days, she calls on my lunch break.’
‘What time is that in England?’
‘Six a.m., but she’s up. She gardens.’
‘What about your dad?’
‘Hadn’t I told you? He’s here.’
‘In Hong Kong?’
‘He’s a history lecturer at HKU. They divorced when I was ten.’
This had only emerged four months into our acquaintance. I wondered what other information he’d been squirrelling away, and – God loves a trier – if some of it mightn’t be spousal.
‘How often do you see your dad?’ I said.
‘A few times a year. When we manage.’
‘Where does he live?’
‘Three MTR stops away.’
‘And you see him a few times a year.’
‘Yes, when we manage.’
The English were strange.
Possibly to make fun of me in some obscure way, Julian remembered my parents’ names and used them often. ‘Have you spoken to Peggy recently?’ he’d say, or: ‘How’s Joe?’ His were called Miles and Florence. I found the comparison illuminating, but he didn’t. For Brits, class was like humility: you only had it as long as you denied it.
On the escalator down the next morning I pictured his childhood home in Cambridgeshire. Tall, I thought, and empty: houses were like their owners. (I felt cruel, then decided he’d laugh. This reminded me that nothing I said could hurt him.) Although I was not someone Julian would bring to meet Florence, I imagined her having me for dinner, just the two of us. I’d mispronounce ‘gnocchi’ and she’d avoid saying it all evening so as not to embarrass me. I would meet her eye and think: in this way I could strip you of every word you know. I’d take them like truffles and you’d say, ‘Help yourself,’ and then I’d take those too and you’d be speechless.
