by Naoise Dolan
I knew that was the kind of disclosure he’d instantly regret making, so I didn’t ask him to unpack it.
11
On Christmas Day, Julian went to church with Miles. I stayed in bed and phoned my family. When he returned, presents: necklace for me, wallet for him – the things you gave colleagues in gift exchanges when you wanted them to know you’d gone over the spending limit. It was the first time I’d bought him something. I couldn’t help thinking I should have asked permission.
Ralph and Victoria threw a Christmas dinner. Their flat had big white rooms, a long glass table, and, remarkably, enough friends to fill it.
Victoria passed around duck canapés and said it was a shame Seb – Slaughters, was it, or Linklaters – and Jane – JP Morgan or Morgan Stanley – couldn’t make it, but lucky them, having time to fly home. From this we understood that Ralph and Victoria were more important than Morgans who slaughtered and linked later, that we were too or we’d be with our relatives and not in Hong Kong, and that if Seb and Jane were in the country, they’d have come. You could tell the festive spirit had taken Victoria from her encompassment of us, her guests, in her claims about who was busiest. Alternatively, you could be me and not have had money for flights home.
I didn’t take a canapé. ‘Being good, Ava?’ Victoria said. Her implied temporality spoke volumes.
‘I’m a vegetarian,’ I said.
Victoria had large teeth. They made it difficult for her to smile without scaring people, which was why Victoria smiled a lot.
After dinner everyone pretended it was the loud sort of Christmas party you have the week before. It was easier than acting like family. Ralph put on a jazz playlist, and at each new song told all who were curious it was a pity the artist had died young.
Victoria ushered me over to her ‘other’ Irish friend, as though she’d had each of us imported at the other’s request. ‘One of yours, Oisín,’ she said, and he looked at her like she’d handed him adoption papers penned in crayon. He soon mentioned he’d gone to Gonzaga. He was a rich Irish person, preferred having wealth in common with Victoria to Ireland in common with me, and was annoyed at us both for disabusing him that Victoria saw it that way. His mouth said it was great to see another Mick out foreign, and his eyes said: don’t fuck this up for me.
As a buffer I drew in two Englishmen I knew from previous events. Oisín could like me then. The three of them did, and I’d had enough wine to pretend I liked them, too. Someone said Julian had called me ‘very bright’. I felt an impulse to run over, look up at Julian, and go: very bright, saying it like I was drinking Victoria’s wine – relishing not having paid for it. Then I’d stay in his pocket forever. I was able to fill in ‘– considering’, but chose to stay dizzy on the first two words.
Victoria had left us and joined Julian by the window. She was giggling and doing most of the talking, so I gathered she was laughing at her own jokes.
I couldn’t go over. He’d think I missed my owner.
In groups Julian talked quietly and slowly. Really his calm insouciance betrayed as much entitlement as Ralph’s braying – more, since he made you listen harder – but it was soothing. I usually spoke softly, too, and sometimes thought: a little lower and no one can hear us.
‘She was blotto,’ Victoria yelled.
I wondered if Victoria was a real person or three Mitford sisters in a long coat.
‘Was she,’ Julian said.
The men around me talked about their schools. As an adult with a job, I did not find the topic altogether piquant – but British men were resourceful, and found school not only interesting, but the most interesting thing they’d ever done. Andrew had been to Radley, and Giles to Manchester Grammar. Giles joked that they were similar schools, which was how I learned Andrew’s was better. They reminisced about rugby. Oisín contributed so they’d know Gonzaga played, too. Max joined, waited, then unsheathed: Westminster.
I was outside their figurations. No one asked where I’d gone.
‘Will we do some white?’ Oisín said.
An English person would have said ‘shall’, but he was understood.
I declined. Julian wouldn’t like it. He did coke on occasion, but said I had an addictive personality. I was too pleased with ‘very bright’ to hold this against him at the party, so I mentally stored it for the next time I hated him and lacked a sensible reason. Controlling what women do with our bodies, I thought, preparatively. The men started cutting and I went to the toilet. Coming back, I bumped into another man who looked at me, muttered ‘Julian’s’ – as one might say: ‘chair’, or: ‘floral arrangement’ – and stumbled on.
In the red taxi home I described the man. The driver had seven phones of assorted vintage plugged into the dashboard. Julian saw me looking and explained they were for queuing dispatches. I could tell he was drunk because he said my name slowly and when I held his hand he scrunched our fingers tighter. Then he said: ‘Was that Chris Marshall?’ I said I didn’t know. Julian said it had to be Chris Marshall, that every woman had a Chris Marshall story, and that at least mine didn’t feature hands. I asked why Chris was asked to things if he was, best-case-scenario, a contactless creep, and Julian said he’d gone to Habs with Will and Bristol with Ellie, so they couldn’t very well leave him out.
Few of those nouns meant anything to me, but I’d had no invitations of my own.
* * *
We had sex the next morning and for a while I felt safe and warm and understood. I scratched him a lot, he called me a tiger cub, and I pretended to find it infantilising because it made me so happy. Unusually, he stroked my hair. He said everyone had liked me at Victoria’s. I wondered if he was being nice because (usual reason) his friends wanted to fuck me, (holiday special) I was lonely enough to not only spend Christmas with terrible people but be glad they’d tolerated me, or (clever girl) I’d come faster than usual and he believed in positive reinforcement. I wanted to tell him that in a framework where affection was circumspect, its overt forms were necessarily hostile. Look, I’d say, it’s like English grammar. It doesn’t make sense but it’s too late to change it. When you buy me clothes it means you want to stroke my hair, so when you really stroke my hair it means you want me to move to Siberia and die.
Then he said he’d head to the airport. He had meetings in Bangkok. I asked how anyone could expect him to go, and he said if restaurant staff worked Christmas Eve then surely he could do Boxing Day. ‘St Stephen’s Day,’ I said, and he said, no, Boxing Day. I said he was wrong. He said I was wrong. I nearly asked him to stay, but could feel the demand grow in me to never leave this bed and I won’t either, which was not a programme he seemed apt to endorse, so I didn’t.
12
January 2017
The next week Julian took a cab from the airport to meet me at Admiralty Station. He wore a suit. I had a black dress on, so we looked like a particularly drab pair of twins. We walked to the LockCha Tea House, passing fountains and manicured hedges in Hong Kong Park. I asked how things were in Thailand. My voice made me sound like someone who often had occasion to wonder.
‘Trundling along,’ he said. ‘A lot of people are still in mourning for the king.’
We stood outside the door while he finished his cigarette. I said I wanted to quit my job.
‘Good,’ he said. ‘They aren’t paying you enough.’
‘It’s not about money.’ I went to crack my knuckles, then remembered that was bad for you. ‘I’ll start paying rent.’
‘Don’t worry about that, but you need a plan.’
He stubbed out the cigarette, like: here’s mine, for instance.
Inside there was a checklist menu where you ticked what you wanted. Julian encharged me with the pencil. I felt this implied it was his by default. We chose huai shan and wolfberry seed soup, yellow cucumber salad, beancurd dumplings and sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves.
Our green tea arrived, then dim sum.
‘I still don’t know what I want to do,’ I said. ‘I mean in the long term.’
‘What about teaching? If you got qualified, it mightn’t be so bad at a real school.’
‘It takes too much out of me,’ I said.
You were supposed to find it endearing that children thought only of themselves. Especially if you were a woman, it was meant to make you want one of your own. It would do parents a world of good if I told them their child actually suffered from a form of self-absorption that some adults outgrew and others didn’t. They could note the risk factors: only child, male only child, privately educated male only child whose parents, at odds with their stated politics, gave that child everything until he was of an age to buy it all himself, fellatio potentially included depending on how I was feeling about my own motives. But none of this seemed quite the rub for term reports.
‘My dream job is proofreading,’ I told Julian. ‘Do banks need proofreaders?’
‘The analysts do it.’
‘Maybe I could be one.’
‘It’s not all they do. They’re flunkies. Half of it is stuff it’s quicker to do myself, but you can’t do grunt work once you’re more senior. It looks out of place.’
‘There’s the famous efficiency of capitalism.’
‘That comment was distinctly Milesian. Eat your soup.’
Julian often reminded me to eat. It made him feel better about liking that I was thin.
We navigated the dim sum. It was meant to be eaten with everything shared in the centre, but some of it wasn’t to Julian’s liking, so we sectioned off dishes for individual consumption. He said he didn’t mind that there was no meat, but they ought to have something with protein in its place. I pointed out the beancurd and he said he meant something that wasn’t made of soy.
When we’d finished eating, Julian said: ‘I remember the first time I saw you. You were walking so carefully in your heels. I was wondering what this shy person was doing having so much hair.’
‘That’s a good line. Did you prepare it in advance?’
‘There were several drafts. I struck out a few commas on the flight back.’
‘I don’t have that much hair,’ I said. ‘Not compared to Victoria. And most people don’t think I’m shy anymore.’
‘That’s true. Seb thinks you’re, quote, vivacious.’
‘I feel like “vivacious” is one of those words where you’re not literally calling someone sexy, but everyone knows you are. Which one is Seb again?’
‘Scruffy hair. Litigation.’
‘Dreamy Seb. I did wonder about that friend request.’
We were happy then. Julian had complimented both my outer sparkle and the interior layer only clever people saw. We knew I was complex when others didn’t. This made us better, or at any rate different, which because of our contempt for them still made us better. The cherry: we were attractive – me because dreamy Seb liked me and Julian because why would someone dreamy Seb liked be with someone less dreamy than dreamy Seb – while Julian’s abetment assured us we were conducting an ultimately shallow emotional transaction in which ‘dreamy’ featured. Throughout Julian spoke to me the way an aloof person would want to be addressed, which told me I’d convinced him, if not myself, that I was one. And I returned the favour.
We didn’t always volley well, but when we did it was magic.
‘By the way,’ I said, ‘Victoria’s into you.’
‘Too much hair.’
As with any backhand game, when pros played pros it looked easy.
I knew where we stood. Good people supposedly wound up with money, and I wanted to be good, so Julian’s zeroes felt summative. This was different to thinking he was or we were. I ate my soup.
On the walk back he offered me a cigarette. I said I had enough problems without adopting his just for company. ‘Company for your other problems or company for me in my nicotine dependence?’ he said, and I said: ‘Get fucked,’ smiling to remind him this was Irish for warmth. I felt protective when he smoked. This made no sense when he was jeopardising my lifespan, but I supposed he was endangering his own even more.
Sometimes I thought I’d outlive him by decades. I’d explain him then. Men wore suits at the time, I’d say. They earned more than women. In Ireland you got five years for rape, fourteen for aborting your rapist’s foetus, and a lifetime in the laundries for the fact of being raped, and there was a laundry still open when you were born. None of this was directly the fault of the men you fucked but it influenced how you went about fucking them, especially in Dublin where you might need to ask them for money. No one could start having sex with that calculation in mind and not have it affect them wherever they went, though not all women responded quite so unsubtly as by fucking bankers.
There were other reasons you liked him, some actually quite pure, e.g. his dry humour and his shared assessment that you were both a great deal smarter than anyone else you knew. All couples thought things like that about themselves, but you hoped for their sake that the rest of your relationship was nothing they saw in their own, because you didn’t want to identify with most of it and you were one half of that actual couple. Mathematically if you didn’t want to be ‘most’ of a couple, as in over 50 per cent of an entity of two, then that did not commend your practice of self-love. You were twisted individuals successfully mated, like Noah’s Ark for sociopaths. Alternatively, you were well-meaning albeit imperfect humans with uncommonly scarce emotional resources at their disposal. Spending money and being good at men came easier than real generosity.
There was more to your performative detachment than just the Eighth, but it stayed with you after you left Ireland. You were afraid when men came in you, though you were unsure if that was all Irish women or just you, and sometimes you’d say do you want to finish in my mouth because after all this you still felt you owed him somewhere. When you came yourself, you feared against all biology that it might be what sentenced you. You knew if you told him any of this he’d understand just enough to break his heart, but seeing how little he could comprehend before it broke him would break you, too. You were ironical with him, also with yourself. It was wild.
13
A few days into January, work started again. Madison from Texas greeted me by launching into a description of her new-year new-me fitness regimen. ‘I’m going to be me, but worse,’ I said.
‘I think I’m getting the hang of you,’ she said, then laughed theatrically. But I hadn’t been joking.
I was quieter and more openly begrudging now, and it was becoming clearer than ever that the other teachers found me odd. I’d encountered this opinion so many times, in so many places, that I’d come to find it comforting. It doesn’t matter if a fact is good or bad, I thought. You don’t mind once everyone agrees. Their consensus makes it true, and truth feels safe.
The main thing they considered weird was how I spent my lunch breaks. I’d leave, taking care not to steal minutes, and come back just on time. The staffroom wall was thin. I heard Scott from Arkansas say, where’s she going? I alternated between Starbucks and Pacific Coffee in the hope that the baristas would never come to recognise me. None of this seemed outlandish. But my colleagues’ muttering made me feel that probably they were right and the whole thing did show I was in some way faulty.
Victoria also found me odd. On weekends we cast around for topics of shared interest while the men discussed things like England beating Wales. (Julian described the result as ‘pivotal; cardinal, even’, to a round of nods, and later told me he believed, but wasn’t sure, that the sport had been rugby.) When she was drunk, we went to the bathroom. She liked looking in the mirror. She had a lot of hair. Posh girls had more than I did, but often enough it was from someone else’s head.
‘I’d fuck Julian,’ she said one Saturday night.
I said: ‘Okay.’
I wondered if her scalp got itchy with strangers’ hair glued to it.
‘Do you think he’d fuck me?’ she said.
‘I don’t know. Maybe.’
‘You must have some take on it.’
I held my palms open as though cradling an opinion I couldn’t see but the weight of which I felt. ‘I told you,’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’
‘He’s never tried to fuck me,’ Victoria said. ‘I don’t know if he would.’
‘I’m not the best person to ask.’
‘You’re fucking him. That must give you some indication of who else he’d fuck.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it really doesn’t.’
She told me it was sad Julian and I weren’t a couple. Kat seemed a difficult person to get over. When he was ready, he’d find someone. I was kind to bridge the gap.
I wondered if I pulled her hair, would the bits that were hers stay in place and would only the extensions from other heads come out, or would it all break off if I tugged hard enough.
* * *
The skies were thick and bronchial. Joan had said to cover my head when it rained or I’d get acid on my scalp. She claimed the bad chemicals blew in from China, but you smelled them coming out of lorries and idling buses on the street. I downloaded an app to check the air quality each morning. A happy face meant it was safe, a blank one that the health risks were moderate, and an angry one to stay inside. After seven consecutive angry faces, I deleted the app. I did not need that negativity in my life.
Julian asked if I missed home. I told him not all Irish people were parochial.
‘It’s normal to miss your family,’ he said.
I said that was why I didn’t.
The trouble with my body was that I had to carry it around with me. In train stations I picked around other feet like brambles. Rats, too, lived low. Julian said it was good we were on a high floor because cockroaches couldn’t reach it. But you had to go down every day to be a part of things.
