by Naoise Dolan
Sometimes I was good at him, sometimes he was good at me, sometimes we were good at each other, and sometimes neither of us was any good at anything. The whole thing was so confusing that I wished one of us had all the power and I didn’t even care if it was him, though that clearly wasn’t true or I’d just let him win – at which point he’d lose interest and replace me with a model because they’re thinner or a dachshund because they shed less.
‘Are you a dog person?’ I said.
‘What? No.’
‘Me neither. I like a bit more of a challenge.’
We laughed at men who found such statements gratifying.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘I’d better go. I’ve a string of meetings tomorrow. But it was good catching up. Talk soon, babe.’
I liked that – babe. It made me feel accounted for.
* * *
I went with the other teachers to a bar in TST. We ordered drinks and variously reminded people we were seeing someone or advertised that we weren’t. Scott from Arkansas did both. I asked why he was claiming to be single when he’d mentioned his girlfriend three seconds ago, and he said he’d made her up because I intimidated him. I wondered if he would be a better or worse person without narcotics.
In the club down the road, Madison from Texas started dancing with me. We didn’t move much but she touched my hip. I remembered in college when a girl was off her face at Workmans and we shifted and a man in a polo shirt asked could he watch. You already are, I’d thought. Men were rarely true voyeurs. They wanted you to know they were there.
Madison said she envied me because I did the inscrutable thing without trying. Men liked that, she said. Madison always thought it would excite me to learn what men liked.
She stroked my arm when Scott from Arkansas approached. Scott said his flatmate was away. Madison said: ‘That’s interesting, Ava, isn’t it’. There was no limit to what Madison thought would interest me. I asked Scott if he meant his girlfriend was away and whether their arrangement was monogamous, and Madison looked at me like I was a child who’d asked their aunt about her divorce. Narcotics made Scott better, I decided, in that they kept him honest by hampering his ability to lie plausibly.
I wondered what Julian told other women about me.
Madison tried to kiss me. Her tongue tasted cheap, like something from a can.
‘You still haven’t told me if you like girls,’ she said.
I said: ‘There’s lots of things I don’t tell people.’
8
‘Mam thinks there’s a guy,’ said Tom on the phone.
‘Why?’ I said.
‘She says a mother knows and that’s how she knows. Circular, but sure look.’
He told me about his degree. He was studying philosophy without much gusto, but was getting his essays in and going to lectures and everything. A lecturer had told him he was destined for a mid-2.1, and he wasn’t offended like I would have been. Mam kept asking what he’d do after.
‘Listen, I’ve been meaning to tell you,’ I found myself saying. ‘Don’t tell Mam, but there actually is a guy.’
‘Okay.’
‘It’s not serious. But it’s been good so far. He’s posh, though. Not Dublin posh, British posh. He says “shall”.’
‘I’d say you like that,’ Tom said.
‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Ah now, Ava.’
It was true that Julian conformed with my record. My two ex-boyfriends from home had gone to South Dublin private schools and knew all about rugby. (That they had no personal interest in it only made this a clearer mark of status.) It was the sort of theory I could form very easily about someone else: Ava is drawn to wealthy partners as a means of quieting her class anxieties. In practice, having sex with rich people only heightens her awareness that she herself is not rich, and yet she keeps on doing it.
But it felt robotic to conclude something like that about myself. I couldn’t help feeling it had to be more complex than that.
‘What about you?’ I asked Tom.
‘There’s no one right now,’ he said. ‘I’ll tell you if there is.’
‘You always say that. Then three months later, you’re like, oh, there was someone but it’s over now.’
‘I don’t tell you till I know it’s a thing. Then when I do know it’s a thing, we break up.’
‘Do you get a say in it?’
‘Sometimes I’m even the one to do it. But I never see it coming. Self-awareness for you.’
‘You’ve more of it than me,’ I said.
‘No, you’re too self-aware. You can talk yourself into anything. Then there’s no talking you out of it.’
‘Is that why you’ve not said anything about Julian?’
‘Is Julian the Tan?’
‘Don’t call him a Tan.’
‘He’s still a Tan.’
I agreed this was factual.
‘Look,’ Tom said, ‘I can’t tell you what to do.’
I wished he would. My stance amounted to: I am glad Julian does not demand intimacy, and annoyed at him for not offering it. I stay in his apartment for free and complain it’s done strange things to our dynamic. I hate needing him and address this not by taking responsibility for my own happiness but by playing his games, which could equally be my games because I’m unsure who started it.
I wanted to tell someone that and have them say either: Ava, you are being unreasonable, or: Ava, we all bear our crosses but yours has the most nails. Anything but: sounds complicated.
‘I’ll let you go,’ I said.
Tom had more than one person he actually liked seeing.
* * *
At work I imagined nice things that might happen to me if I were a different person. When I realised I’d been daydreaming, I’d start correctively listing things I disliked about myself. The children wrote essay plans and I thought: flat feet, doughy hands, clumsiness, moral cowardice. When Matthew Yim asked a question, I felt rudely interrupted. The poster opposite said PREPOSITIONS OF MOVEMENT. It had frogs in different locations: on the table, under the table. I thought: pale, hostile to people who have shown me nothing but kindness, probably bad at sex.
In the staffroom the others were talking about adoptive versus biological children. I said: ‘I’d adopt. I wouldn’t inflict my gene pool on anyone.’
‘Aw, don’t say that about yourself!’ said Madison from Texas.
To the list I added: sense of humour not for everyone.
* * *
Three weeks into December, the day before Julian’s return, I messaged him.
hey so i want to say sorry for how i’ve been treating you. i’m really unnecessarily mean to you and i justify it as socialist praxis when it literally isn’t. i don’t want to call myself a horrible person bc i know i do that so you can’t say it. but i like having you in my life.
I sent it on the balcony. If I threw my phone over the railings, I’d never see if he replied. The patio in front of the lobby looked like a small mosaic tile from overhead. Ant-people played out their personal histories with the same degree of immersion in which I was experiencing mine.
Julian replied a few hours later.
Thanks for the message. I know it can’t have been easy to write. I’ll see you soon.
It could have meant anything, including what it purported to.
I surprised him at the airport. The arrivals section was huge, but his height made him easy to spot. At passport control he had everything ready so as not to waste time. He met my eye from far away. I ran to meet him.
9
Banking slowed down just before Christmas. I suspected Julian told me that with disapproval. His MD had darkly intimated he’d be pleased with his bonus, which meant top tier or none at all. ‘Hengeveld’s a sadistic American cunt,’ Julian said, ‘so quite possi
bly the latter.’ He made no financial plans that relied on the money, then found himself perplexed what to do with it. I said that must be hard for him.
‘What’s “American” doing in that sentence, by the way?’ I said.
Julian took off his suit jacket and placed first it and then himself on the couch, like: pray, elaborate.
I said: ‘You seem more resentful when your superiors are American.’
Julian explained there was an important difference. When an American MD wanted something on their desk tomorrow morning, they said they wanted it on their desk tomorrow morning. When a British one did, they said it wasn’t urgent; tomorrow morning would do.
That evening I made us try cooking, phrasing it that way – I am making us try cooking – so Julian would see it as a cultural activity, like ceramics classes. He chopped the vegetables and remarked that he’d do it professionally if it paid better than banking. I asked if there was anything he wouldn’t do for more money, and he said no, probably not.
‘I should mention,’ he said, ‘that I’ll have to see my father.’
‘That’s fairly common,’ I said. ‘At Christmas.’
‘It’s just that if I have to spend Christmas with Miles and you want to spend Christmas with me, that means both of us will need to go.’
‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I’d love to meet him.’
‘He’ll like you. He hates “neo-liberalism”, though I’ve never heard him define it.’
I laid out the cutlery and wineglasses. After dinner, he read one of his Victorian doorstoppers and encouraged himself to quit smoking by finishing off a Chinese cigarette pack he termed ‘particularly vile’. I looked at things on my phone and balanced my mental energy between a) speculating as to whether his father’s politics suggested there was a degree of daddy issues bound up in his attraction to me, and b) concealing this normal and healthy thought process from Julian. That was what we did. We were the sum of the routines we’d built around each other.
* * *
Joan told me to teach the kids about Christmas in Ireland. Hearing my description, I began to doubt it was something my family actually did. I said people went to the tree shop and bought a tree, and felt it was probably all lies.
The children weren’t curious. Joan was always saying to throw in my value-added, to tell them things a local teacher couldn’t. But none of the differences mattered. Sometimes it snows at Christmas, I said, but more often it doesn’t. People jump in the sea. It’s very cold. But it’s getting warmer, as it is everywhere, and probably within our lifetimes the oceans will rise and drown us.
In each class that week, the centre of attention was whoever was going away furthest away for the break – Mary Yeung to Bangkok, Hsu Chung Sun to Sydney, Emmeline Fan to New York. Some were visiting family. Others were obeying the ever-robust principle that one could not expect rich people to stay anywhere too long.
As we closed shop that evening, Joan ranted about a mother from Beijing who’d wanted the leaflets about the classes available in simplified Chinese as well as traditional. She chewed fish balls from a bamboo skewer between sentences. Seeing a chance to bond, I told Joan there’d been similar debates over Irish-language orthography. She put down her bowl and asked which we used now. I said we’d simplified, and Joan resumed gnawing. She held many grievances against mainland China. The ones concerning Hong Kong’s political autonomy were compelling, and the ones about tourists less so.
On the last day before term break, she told me to call my mother on Christmas Day.
‘I will,’ I said.
‘It’s important.’
‘You’re right, Joan.’
‘Mothers are important.’
‘They are.’
10
Miles and the waiter chatted in Cantonese. Every now and then, Miles pointed at one of us and Julian refreshed the email on his phone.
It was Christmas Eve. We’d met in the lift lobby on Percival Street. There were thirty floors and at least as many restaurants in the tower. The place we went to had dark wood panelling, paper screens, and round mahogany tables. Miles’s conversation with the waiter had started with coordinating to find vegetarian options for me, though I suspected they’d moved off that topic.
‘He’d never spend that long talking to locals,’ said Julian after the waiter left. ‘He’s showing he’s got a way with gweilos.’
‘Or perhaps he was being friendly,’ Miles said. He was sixty-three, Julian had said. Like his son, he favoured shirts. Unlike Julian’s, they were pinstriped and needed ironing.
On the train over, Julian had told me not to mention our relationship. ‘Just don’t say anything,’ he said. ‘It won’t be the only proboscidean in the room.’ I’d said: ‘Why don’t you tell him? And then that’s one less elephant, if “proboscidean” is some pretentious Latin joke.’ Julian said: ‘I don’t want him knowing. And actually, “proboscidean” is a pretentious taxonomy joke.’ I’d said: ‘But you said he already knows.’ And Julian had replied: ‘Right. I’m okay if he knows. I just don’t want him knowing.’
Clever about Latin, clever about taxonomy, able in his intellect to brook being called pretentious provided you matched his penchant for scathing women. I didn’t take holidays. I also found the phrase ‘his penchant for scathing women’ interesting, grammatically. It did sometimes strike me that one could equally say Julian had e.g. managed things so he could take me to meet his father and still make it about how detached he was, detachment being something he knew I both wanted and didn’t want from him and which he played up to these conflicting levels of desire as, respectively, carrot and stick – but historians could debate all that when we were dead and interesting.
The waiter came back with three glasses of hot water. ‘Tell me, Ava,’ Miles said, ‘what do you make of the election?’
‘In Hong Kong?’ I said.
‘Yes, yes, for the Chief Executive in March.’
‘Stop grilling her,’ Julian said. ‘They’re all mainland puppets anyway.’
I should have been grateful, but wasn’t. Did he think I couldn’t handle Miles? As it happened, I couldn’t name a single candidate, but Julian didn’t know that about me.
‘All right, how about you, Julian?’ said Miles. ‘Lam or Tsang? Since heaven knows you won’t be backing the underdog.’
‘Untrue. I was with Blair till the end.’
‘And against Corbyn from the beginning.’
‘I will readily admit to a prejudice against having dangerous nutters lead parties.’
‘Spare a thought for me, Ava,’ Miles said. ‘The one thing worse than a centrist dad is a centrist son.’
‘How much does your university pay its cleaning staff, Miles?’ Julian said.
‘Shamefully little,’ Miles said. ‘It would almost suggest that capitalism doesn’t fairly remunerate socially important labour.’
‘I wonder which creates more jobs – my directing capital where it will stimulate the most growth, or your writing books about how this makes me a bourgeois parasite.’
‘Certainly the books. Hordes of Guardian writers keep the wolf from the door by pretending to have read them.’
‘Whereas I do it for free,’ said Julian. ‘Maybe I’m the communist.’
Miles turned to me. ‘What brings you to Hong Kong, Ava?’ he said.
I said: ‘I’m here to teach.’ I tried to balance my chopsticks on top of the bowl, then noticed a small wooden rest for them. I never knew what to do when someone had obviously asked me a question to include me in the conversation. How much could I say in response before I was abusing their generosity?
Miles said: ‘Teach what?’
‘English.’
‘Tell her what you think about Ireland,’ Julian said. ‘She’ll like that.’
‘First,’ Miles said, ‘I’d like to hear what
you think I think about Ireland.’
Julian said: ‘Isn’t it that independence was a waste of time because the free state hasn’t yet transitioned to full communism?’
‘I appreciate the “yet”. But I don’t know that that was my precise contention. I do think the republic has betrayed the socialist contingency that fought for it.’
‘When should we have left?’ said Julian. ‘Everywhere the British left later than Ireland, it was too late for you, and yet Ireland was too early.’
‘When did I say Ireland was too early?’
‘You don’t like what happened after we left. The only counterfactual is staying longer.’
Miles blew on his tea. ‘The fact that you consider that the only counterfactual,’ he said, ‘tells me all I need to know about the history faculty at Oxford.’
‘I think I picked up my ideological stubbornness from a slightly earlier influence,’ said Julian.
They stopped talking about politics for a while after that.
* * *
The flat was cold when we got back. I turned on the heater and wrapped up in one of the throws. Julian asked what I’d made of Miles. I said I liked him.
‘I’m not trying to turn you against him,’ said Julian, ‘but I think you should know that my parents divorced because he had an affair.’
He wouldn’t want me to say anything sympathetic, so I didn’t. His shoes looked scuffed. I told him to leave them by the couch so I could polish them tomorrow.
‘Why did he send you to Eton?’ I said.
I considered it a deviant thing for any parent to do to their child, but a Marxist one especially.
‘That was Florence,’ Julian said. ‘A key boiling point. Florence thought Miles wanted to, quote, sacrifice her son’s education on the altar of socialism. Miles felt Florence wished to, quote, seal me in a hermetic bourgeois bubble. It was especially fraught because we were entitled to bursaries and Miles thought it was outrageous that we’d take the money from somebody who actually needed it.’
And now I knew all about his family life, he said. As much as he did, anyway, which he suspected was relatively little of it.
