by Naoise Dolan
From his flat halfway up the mountain I saw high-rises like saw-edged computer parts, noxious trees – virescent, not green – and squares levelled for tennis courts. I looked out my window and told myself: it is fair enough to find it stressful that my entire life revolves around someone who does not care very much about me. This is a permissible experience.
* * *
Despite hating my job and complaining about it often, I still hadn’t quit. Julian told me to relax. I told him I’d pay back all the rent I owed and he said not to bother. I’d be better off saving for a deposit on a mortgage. He kept meaning to do that himself.
‘Now this is just my personal take,’ I said, ‘but maybe it would help if you accepted money when people offer it.’
‘If you want to pay me rent, go ahead.’
Between sentences he typed on his laptop. Talking to me demanded so little of him that he’d get bored if he gave it his full attention. I knew I loathed him – not least because I was fully aware that if he told me to jump off a bridge, I’d say: Golden Gate or Sydney Harbour? – but I now wondered if I mightn’t also hate him.
‘Is something wrong, Ava?’
‘Do you want me to depend on you?’ I said. ‘So you can have more power in the relationship.’
‘I don’t know that anyone has power in this relationship. Either of us could leave it very easily, so it can’t be that much of a vice-grip, can it?’
‘But I can’t leave easily. I’d need to find somewhere to stay.’
‘I suppose,’ he said.
I couldn’t tell if he was bluffing about not caring if I left. The fact that he could plausibly bluff was already bad enough. Who would believe me if I said it made no difference whether I lived in his apartment or a dingy Airbnb? Yes, I’d say, I am perfectly apathetic as to whether I spend most of my income renting a tiny room with people who hate me. These things are quite subjective. I could have soft towels and five-star dinners, or I could check my windowsill every morning to see how many cockroaches died there in the night. You see it’s one or the other and there’s no accounting for taste.
I told him he wasn’t always nice to me. He asked for even one example. I said that sort of reaction was exactly what I meant.
‘You’re not St Francis of Assisi yourself,’ he said.
‘Would you look at me when you say things like that.’
‘I don’t want to fight.’
‘It wouldn’t be a fight if you’d look at me.’
‘Forget it, Ava.’
‘You can’t just say that and then expect me not to say anything back.’
‘I said you are not St Francis of Assisi. You manage, somehow, to find that claim controversial.’
‘Why are you so patronising?’
‘Some people lend themselves to it.’
I went to his bookcase and touched the cracks in the spines. They evidenced where he’d lingered, corroborated no doubt by fingerprints. I wondered where in the flat I’d shed DNA. Not on his laptop, because that was important, but onto everything in the kitchen, and his clothes from ironing them and his bedroom carpet from kneeling on it. Men. My cells were on the books, too, but only from tidying. I’d never read the authors he admired. He’d laugh if I tried. Probably he laughed in his head every time I said anything.
‘Would you mind sulking somewhere else?’ Julian said. ‘I have a presentation tomorrow.’
‘It’s my flat, too.’
‘I suppose my credit cards are yours as well. Since your definition of owning something is that you use it and don’t pay me back.’
‘I’ll pay you rent. I want to pay you rent.’
‘I don’t know what you want,’ he said.
We didn’t speak for six days. I stayed in my room to avoid him, which meant I couldn’t eat and had to drink water from my bathroom sink. My paycheque was late. I’d put money away from staying in the flat for free but had thought of it as an emergency fund, which made using it feel scary. Still I wasted it with mechanical rigour, buying coffees back to back and noting to the cent how much they’d cost. This was apparently the future I’d been saving for.
I also went to malls, as if to say: he thinks he’s so clever, buying me things, when in fact I can also buy me things. In Topshop I tried on sickly synthetics and thought: these clothes are both hideous and necessary. It reminded me of shoplifting as a teenager. I’d fill my pockets, go home, lay out the movables on the bed and think: why did I risk a criminal record for purple lipstick? It does nothing for my complexion.
Mam texted asking how I was. I typed: i am very unhappy. Autofill offered three different negative emojis. I tapped one and it replaced the word ‘unhappy’ with a sad face. Then I deleted the draft and sent one saying I was grand.
On the seventh day, I apologised to Julian. He said it was fine.
14
I looked on flatshare sites. In late January I went to viewings. One room, for half my salary, was the lounge. Not a separate one: the room you entered when you opened the front door. The flatmates explained that the rent was so low because they understood how the arrangement might compromise my privacy – though they noted there was a curtain to pull around the bed at night. They demonstrated how to draw it. I felt the mechanics were not the main objection, but gamely tried. Two hours later, they texted saying the previous girl they’d shown around had just taken the room – so sorry, but the market moves fast.
I thought of Emily and Freya, and my stale mouth in the morning when I couldn’t brush my teeth. The smell in my old room, too: the damp laundry, and something portentous from the cracks in the walls. Sometimes in bed, hiding from my flatmates, I’d stared at the fault lines till they started to spread. I saw the walls collapse and heard the screams.
A few days after I apologised, when it was very late and very dark, Julian said he’d been lonely before I came to live with him. He didn’t always feel like drinking, and there wasn’t much else his friends enjoyed. And you couldn’t have proper conversations in groups. He liked having someone at home.
‘Shame it’s you,’ he added. I supposed he had to.
* * *
My eight-year-olds had mastered prepositions and were now on question words. We recited them like bullets: who what when where why. Most English people said ‘what’ as ‘wot’, though authors only spelled it ‘wot’ when the characters were poor. Sometimes I said ‘wot’, but with my parents I pronounced it as they did: ‘hwot’. This had been correct when Churchill said it but was hokey now Cameron did not. Even the Queen had stopped haitching it, at the behest, no doubt, of some mewling PR consultant. Irish English kept things after Brits dropped them. ‘Tings’ was incorrect, you needed to breathe and say ‘things’, but if you breathed for ‘what’ then that was quaint. If the Irish didn’t aspirate and the English did then they were right, but if we did and the English didn’t then they were still right. The English taught us English to teach us they were right.
I was teaching my students the same about white people. If I said things one way and their live-in Filipino nanny said them another, they were meant to defer to me. Francie Suen’s mother thanked me once for my hour a week. I smiled, accepted her praise, and never asked whether she should also credit the helper who spoke English with Francie every day. From job adverts on expat forums I estimated she made a quarter of what I did. One forum post asked what children should call their helpers. The parent knew ‘auntie’ was common but worried that if they called the helper that and later fired them, the kid would think other family members could also be dismissed.
On days off it was illegal for helpers to stay in the house. This was so the government knew they were really getting a holiday. They didn’t have the money to go other places indoors, so they sat on cardboard boxes in parks and on walkways.
The parents took sixteen hours a day from their helpers, then complained if I st
arted lessons three minutes late. When Joan accused me of stealing time, I thought: yes, and so do bosses.
* * *
People on Instagram posted quotes about relationships. They paired them with landscapes and tourist snaps. In white block capitals, next to a mountain goat: CHASE DREAMS, NOT PEOPLE. Over the Kremlin: I WANT A BOY WHO KISSES ME LIKE I’M OXYGEN.
Since the fight, I took stock when Julian did things that made me happy. He laughed at my jokes and I noted: he recognises that I am capable of irony. Irrationally, because I was not special, I felt he was the only person who would ever understand me.
‘You’re so pale,’ he said.
‘Sorry.’
‘It’s a compliment.’
‘Sorry.’
I wondered if anyone had liked me in Dublin. Mam, Tom, arguably Dad. In college people had liked that I could roll cigarettes – despite not smoking – and that I didn’t interrupt them when they talked about Infinite Jest. Admittedly that was because I hadn’t read it, but nor had they. I’d thought about reading it but felt my doing so would upset everyone a great deal. The men there said they liked girls who didn’t wear make-up in the tone in which less enlightened men said they liked girls who did, and when you actually wore none they asked if you’d been ill. They lamented not having ‘permission to write’. You had to nod, like: oh, to be permitted.
At least Julian was honest. He’d never experienced anything but permission. I hated him for it, but all the same I was glad he knew he had it. Most men with permission never realised.
When he was late home I texted: i’m bored can we fuck. He’d ring me to say he was busy. He liked ringing and saying he was busy. ‘I’m busy,’ he said. ‘And you have a low boredom threshold.’
‘That objection doesn’t betray much sexual confidence on your part.’
‘I thought you said sexual confidence in men was repulsive.’
‘No, you said your anarchist ex at Oxford thought that and you suspect I agree.’
‘Charlie. She was hot.’
‘I know. I found her profile.’
‘She went both ways,’ he said. ‘Should that interest you. Anyway, I’m busy.’
‘And I’m bored.’
After he came home and fucked me, I went to my own room and revisited the daydream about dining with his mother, mispronouncing words to gag her from saying them. I’d go around all the sinks and turn on the taps, wait, then watch her inch her feet up.
15
February
‘Anything strange?’ said Mam on the phone. She really said it, ‘antin strange’, but if Brits spelled Glosster as Gloucester then I supposed Mam deserved similar leeway.
She told me George had a new girlfriend. ‘The top of her hair is brown, but the bottom is orange. What do you call it?’
‘Ombre.’
‘Amber,’ she repeated diligently. ‘And what about the fella?’
‘What fella?’
‘Tom was telling me. The banker fella.’
‘He’s well,’ I said. ‘It’s not serious.’
‘And he’d work for a bank now?’
I said that yes, bankers tended to.
‘Good man. They say you become the people you’re surrounded with.’
‘So if a white collar hasn’t physically sprouted out from my neck by this time next year, the relationship will be a failure.’
‘You say such funny things,’ Mam said. This was
different to her saying she thought I was funny. ‘When are we meeting the banker fella?’
‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ I said. ‘Hey, Mam, did I tell you he works in a bank?’
‘I’ll let you go now. Tell the banker I said hi.’
‘Bye, Mam,’ I said. As she said goodbye back, I interrupted: ‘Wait, Mam, I can’t believe I forgot to say: he’s a banker.’
She hung up.
* * *
It was 2 February, Julian’s birthday. He went for drinks with friends. He asked me along but said I would probably not enjoy it, which I decided meant he didn’t really want me there. He smelled of smoke when he got back. I wondered if the cheap Chinese cigarettes were really to encourage him to quit smoking, or me to quit him – and why neither strategy was working. I made him tea and gave him a Ferragamo tie with a tiger cub pattern. It was a suitable choice in that he was a man and men wore ties, and also, I supposed, in that it referenced something he’d said in bed. Still I worried. As with the wallet, he might take it to mean I thought him buying me things was about intimacy.
‘I thought you should have something,’ I said. My wording elided that I was the one giving him it.
‘You shouldn’t spend your money on me,’ he said.
The phrase ‘thank you’ was available to most English speakers, including the toddlers I taught. He’d heard it quite often enough from me to be familiar with its usage.
Later I asked if there were things he aimed to achieve before turning thirty.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve just got Vice-President and the next rung is Managing Director, which they’re not going to make me. And I’m not here for good, so there’s no point in buying an apartment. Couldn’t afford it anyway.’
I asked if there was anything else. He said no. He didn’t see it as a landmark.
That was fine. I did not probe further on whether he e.g. saw us still together then, or e.g. had ever loved anyone. Really it was amusing that we were having sex. He was attractive and confident, whereas I was willing to centre my emotional life around someone who treated me like a favoured armrest – and yet there we were, fucking. Funny, the choices we made. There were people in the world that Julian did not want to have sex with. This meant he valued me above them in at least one capacity, a hilarious miscalculation given that I was in fact the worst human on any conceivable axis. And actually, it was even funnier that we were just fucking than it would have been if he’d had feelings for me. I was pathetic enough to seem emotionally endearing, but you would have to be genuinely depraved to look at me and literally just think: I want to exchange fluids with her. So I didn’t want him to love me. I was having too much fun for that.
* * *
Benny was not taken with my post-Christmas surliness. He liked to remind me that the demand for ‘standard English’ came from the parents themselves. Sometimes when he paid me, I’d comment on the learning materials. The illustrations were of white children braving weather conditions that would never occur near the equator. We branded a mistake any usage that might hint a Hongkonger was from Hong Kong.
As I said things like that, Benny tapped his phone. He hit each letter slowly, considering himself the sort of person who was above pretending to type while someone was talking, but quite happy to stretch out the composition of a real message until they’d finished. Sometimes his baseball cap said Nike, and sometimes Disneyland Paris.
Finally, Benny pronounced. ‘Is it racist,’ he said, ‘when my Connemara company sells seaweed to the Irish?’
The question did not wholly illuminate matters for me.
‘The parents are paying,’ Benny said. He started typing again.
On my lunch break I messaged Julian. Unusually, he sent a long reply. He said Benny possibly meant – big ‘possibly’, but possibly – that it was white-saviourish to think Hongkongers didn’t know their own interests in a world where, like it or not, children got ahead with ‘standard’ English. Parents couldn’t change society, so they aimed for its inequalities to harm someone else’s child rather than their own. Julian’s mother had made that choice when she sent him to public school, and mine had when she’d told me not to say ‘amn’t’.
He often surprised me by coming out with statements like that. Something I admired in him was that he could calmly note where he benefited from unfairness – not self-indulgently like I often did, but factually.
>
I wondered if he’d always been that way. From my social media due diligence, I’d discovered that at Oxford he’d written poetry. There was a picture of him rowing for Balliol, which made me certain he wouldn’t have gone near me aged twenty and had only started liking weird girls as a consequence of his boring job. For a while I luxuriated in thinking they’d all been normal but me, I was the only strange person who’d ever fascinated him so, and I alone stroked every contour of his mind. Then I found his girlfriend from final year, saw her doing spoken word at an open mic with her black cropped turtleneck and taut stomach complete of fucking course with navel piercing, and hated everything.
I deliberated whether he saw renouncing verse and boats as a success or a failure, but knew if I asked, he’d say some Julian thing about how he didn’t waste time having thoughts on his life.
* * *
‘Am I interesting?’ I said one Saturday night. We’d just come back from seeing his friends.
‘Potentially,’ he said. ‘You’re a deadbeat. Some people find that interesting.’
‘Do you?’
‘No.’
‘Then why do you like me?’
‘Who said I liked you?’
Scatty raindrops tapped against the window like bird’s feet. The dark shaded him: he could be someone else and I’d never know, which meant I could be anyone, too. And he always did take my side. Or approved when I took his, which was nearly as good. I wondered if I could kiss him and be sarcastic about it, but felt the humour wouldn’t travel.
‘Has knowing me made things different for you?’ I said.
‘Different how?’
‘Do you feel different on the inside?’
‘I suppose it’s a comfort having you.’
‘How soon did you realise you were into me?’ I said.
‘Aesthetically, right away,’ he said. ‘If that’s what you’re asking.’
‘I couldn’t tell if you liked me for ages.’
