Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

  ‘How about you?’

  ‘When did I realise?’ I said. ‘Right away. Aesthetically.’

  I sensed potential here for similar shots to our backhand over dreamy Seb. With a few words we could each come to think that the person beside us had jumped every time their phone buzzed, and that we ourselves had eventually got around to letting them have us. Neither of us lost anything by letting the other have that in their head. We both got a great deal out of having it in ours. It was almost collaboration, which was close enough to partnership. But I was tired.

  ‘The first time I saw you,’ I said, ‘I thought you’d know where to get everything cheaper.’

  ‘That’s a terrible impression of me.’

  ‘I know. This was back when I thought bankers were good with money.’

  ‘Savage. Fair.’

  ‘But I didn’t put much thought in. When I met you.’

  ‘I can’t say it was an epoch in my life, either. I was curious. I realised the curiosity would probably survive the encounter, so then I asked you to lunch.’

  I wanted him to say more.

  Because I loved him – potentially. That, or I wanted to be him, or liked being someone to whom he assigned tasks. I’d had no livable spaces in Hong Kong until I met him, so possibly I just loved thinking in silence and breathing clean air – if that was a tenable distinction when I did so in his apartment.

  ‘Julian,’ I said, ‘what are we?’

  ‘Fucked if I know.’

  ‘Fucked anyway.’

  ‘Your zest for life is infectious.’

  ‘Just as well you’re immune.’

  We were doing what he and Miles did – acting out scenes. He did that with everyone: extemporised until he’d decided his dynamic with them, then held onto it for dear life.

  ‘Do you love me?’ I said.

  What he said next didn’t hurt me. It was exactly what I’d been looking for to murder the outgrowth.

  ‘I like you a great deal,’ he said. ‘Now go to sleep.’

  16

  I saw now that I had a persistent and stupid fantasy where Julian said he loved me. He wouldn’t expect to hear it back. He’d just need to say it, and would be fully contented once he had. This was unfair to ask of him, did not cohere with what I claimed to want from him, and was not something he was at all likely to do. Anyway, he’d said it had ended with Kat in part because she was pushy about things like ‘I love you’. I, however, was reasonable.

  I’d noticed Julian used the passive with an unidentified subject whenever he talked about their break-up – ‘It ended with Kat’ – which was poor form stylistically.

  * * *

  The week after Julian’s birthday, one of his Oxford friends threw a soirée at their split-level open-plan eco-friendly flat. The more compound adjectives describing an apartment, the higher the rent. Julian put me on the big leather couch and left to mingle without me. He didn’t consciously plan this series of actions, but I hardly knew anyone, so that was the effect.

  His dreamy lawyer friend Seb came and sat with me. Seb’s tie was undone and still on his neck, as though he’d fought to leave a meeting but they’d need him back any minute now. His hair was ruffled, giving the troublingly simultaneous impression that he’d also just had sex. While he talked, I remembered the ‘dreamy Seb’ exchange and had to remind myself Seb wasn’t in on the joke.

  I asked about work. ‘Busy,’ Seb said. Then I asked how he’d joined his firm. He said he’d finished uni not knowing what to do and thought law would keep him happy and solvent.

  ‘Has it?’ I said.

  ‘It’s kept me solvent.’

  Seb’s composure and Julian’s were quite different. Julian’s came from an equanimous trust that most things were quite beneath his notice. Seb had a more active bearing. Every sentence seemed a decision.

  As he talked, I started planning what it would be like to have sex with him. That was what I called it, ‘planning’, when I pondered how I’d fuck someone I had no current intention of fucking. One had to be prepared, I felt. For Seb, I’d spend a great deal of time with my hand near his belt buckle and see if he nudged me down to touch him or up to undo it. Julian sometimes did one and sometimes the other, so never let anyone tell you men are not complex.

  Seb kept topping up my glass. I said I was fine, really.

  ‘Afraid you’ll end up with a red face?’ he said. ‘It’s hereditary. Happens to all the Irish anyway. One more.’

  Julian’s chinless wonders often started attractive, then lapsed the more they said.

  A man in an idiotic shirt asked Seb to come and tell them about the time he’d scaled the wall at Magdalen when the porters locked the doors. Julian came back over to me when he’d left, which made me smile. He must have been watching us. I hoped he’d kiss me, or at least take my arm, but I knew him better than that. He didn’t ‘mark his turf’, would sooner die than use that phrase without scare-quotes, would explain his non-turf-demarcation with reference to feminism, and felt in addition but less vocally that he was above such Neanderthal theatrics.

  So he took my glass off me, gave me a tissue – to intimate I’d smudged my lipstick – and glanced in Seb’s direction. ‘Jane wouldn’t like it,’ he said. And that was that.

  ‘How together are they?’ I said.

  ‘Very,’ Julian said.

  ‘What about you?’ I said. ‘Would you mind?’

  He looked at me with a mix of concern and derision, like I’d just asked what country we were in.

  ‘Don’t take coke off him,’ he said.

  Numbers dwindled. I went upstairs to the bathroom and topped up my make-up, staring at my face until it seemed like someone else’s. Jane ‘wouldn’t like it’, and that made me happy. I’d only met Jane once, but she seemed like another Victoria: it was as if someone else ironed everything for her – her whole life – and her role was to make new creases.

  When I came out, a dozen guests were left on the open floor downstairs. I was about to join them when I heard deep voices from the balcony in front: Julian, Seb, Ralph.

  ‘Where’s Galway Girl?’ Seb said.

  Julian said he didn’t know.

  They stood facing away from me at the railing ahead, looking down on the rest of the party. I tiptoed back and stood flat against the wall.

  The playlist downstairs shuffled to Duke Ellington – ‘Blood Count’.

  ‘The accent,’ Seb said. ‘Like a gypo with elocution lessons.’

  Ralph laughed. Julian didn’t. From the atrium the trumpets dithered like jurors. When the silence became obvious, Ralph looked between the others, who stood still.

  Finally, Julian said: ‘I think you’ve had enough, mate, if you’re slurring the wrong ethnicity.’

  Seb nudged Ralph. ‘If you’d seen her when I said the Irish have red faces.’

  Julian reached into his pocket, then seemed to remember he couldn’t smoke indoors. Seb surveyed the party. Ralph took an interest in his watch.

  Then Julian said: ‘Would you like a crack at the Polish while we’re here?’

  ‘My mum’s Polish,’ Seb said.

  ‘Really?’ Julian said.

  ‘And she voted Leave.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Plenty of Poles did.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And Irish,’ Seb said.

  ‘Your mum’s Irish, too?’

  ‘The Irish voted Leave. My mum’s Polish.’

  ‘How on earth did the Irish vote Leave?’

  Ralph coughed. ‘Seb’s mum can’t be Polish,’ he said, ‘or Julian would have got to her by now.’

  No doubt in Ralph’s head he had shrewdly split his fealties by alleging that Julian had sex with people who weren’t British, and that Seb’s mother had sex with anyone. His compatriots appeared not
to see it that way.

  ‘Look,’ Seb said, ‘leave Agnieszka out of this.’

  ‘Words cannot express how happy I am to leave Agnieszka out of this,’ Julian said.

  ‘I just think it’s specious.’

  ‘What’s specious?’

  ‘Fucking an Irish girl and then saying I can’t hold my drink.’

  Julian nodded, then said with some gravity: ‘I do see the hypocrisies.’

  ‘Beggin yer pardon for any offence,’ Seb said, ‘but you can tell she grew up in a small house.’

  Julian straightened up. So did Seb.

  ‘How can you tell?’ Ralph said.

  ‘I reckon Julian’s more of an authority,’ Seb said. ‘On the subject.’

  ‘What subject?’

  ‘The subject of girls from small houses.’

  Silence.

  Ralph said: ‘What do they say?’

  Seb said: ‘About girls from small houses?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Seb paused for timing.

  Then: ‘Small house, cavernous throat.’

  Ralph laughed. The sax stewed magisterially. Julian said nothing.

  Then Seb inclined his head as if moving things along. ‘I do see the appeal,’ he said, ‘– given you’re not actually with her.’

  Glasses clinked downstairs. The drums banged like gavels.

  Julian said nothing.

  Julian changed the subject.

  17

  In the middle of February, Julian said he’d be in London for a few months. I wanted to ask what ‘a few’ meant, but decided not to give him the satisfaction.

  We were at Central Pier. I wore a trench coat with the belt tied in a bow. He debriefed me on logistics with his hand on my waist, and I thought: gift-wrapped.

  Then I looked out on the water, thinking: stocks float, but I wonder if bankers do. It was the first time I’d explicitly imagined his death and I wondered if he’d envisaged mine or if he was as withholding on this point as he was about I love you. I didn’t want him to fantasise about killing me – unless I did – but him finding me in a lake could be really quite affecting. Not all women idly contemplated whether their partners wanted to murder them and whether the prospect appealed, and if they did it was society that was sick, not them.

  ‘Shall we head?’ he said.

  I smiled and thanked him for letting me stay in his absence. When we got home, I went to my room and cried.

  The next day at work, I taught my eleven-year-olds how to write letters of complaint. No contractions, I said. They were excited to start airing grievances.

  ‘We’ll stay in touch, of course,’ he’d said.

  Letters of complaint said what you wanted done and the deadline for doing it. Eleven-year-olds would never write them. They were nice people. But they had to in exams. We didn’t test whether they could ask their boss for enough money to survive – but if the barista forgot their macchiato, they needed top-notch English ready to fire.

  At home that evening, I told Julian about this. I asked why we taught kids to see themselves as customers when in fact they would spend a greater share of their living hours producing things than buying them.

  ‘Ask Miles,’ he said. ‘You guys can touch base while I’m away.’

  Real people, I said, did not ‘touch base’. They talked.

  ‘Do that, then,’ he said. ‘Talk.’

  My banker friend Julian said more things then. I thought of the water.

  PART II

  Edith

  18

  March

  Edith Zhang Mei Ling – English name Edith, Chinese name Mei Ling, family name Zhang – was a Hong Kong local, but she’d gone to boarding school in England, then to Cambridge. She was twenty-two like me, and now worked at Victoria’s law firm. Her accent was churchy, high-up, with all the cathedral drops of English intonation. Button, water, Tuesday – anything with two syllables zipped up then down like a Gothic steeple. Three-syllable words spread out like the spokes on an umbrella: ‘attaches’ became a-tach-iss. She said ‘completely’ a lot and usually dropped the ‘t’ in the middle. Besides school and uni, she hadn’t seen much of the UK.

  ‘You should see Dublin,’ I said.

  I saw her begin to say Dublin wasn’t in the UK, remember I knew too, and wonder why I’d said that. I wondered, too. She’d be a sight walking down my road: perfect posture, knee-high slouched boots, glossy tong-curled hair, small black handbag on a silver chain. Dad and George would regard her like a viscountess’s cougar they’d been paid to petsit without knowing whether it had teeth.

  Her manicure was perfect, though I noted with interest that she kept her nails short.

  It was the beginning of March. We queued for a play at the Academy for Performing Arts, a tall concrete building on Gloucester Road. Someone at Edith’s firm had spare tickets. Edith asked Victoria, who couldn’t make it and so passed the invite on to me. It took bullet-biting to accept it, but I googled Edith, and her profile picture – drinking coffee in Ubud, hair Gallically bunned – convinced me to go. Her Instagram had highlights pinned from European trips. From this I speculated that she’d picked up her hair knots and her morning cappuccino abroad, though this was probably too crass to be something she’d really do. She was too sophisticated for me to reverse-engineer how she’d got there.

  Besides, Julian had been gone two weeks now, and I wanted to feel like a person again.

  ‘How are you liking Hong Kong?’ Edith said, as though I’d moved last week.

  ‘It’s great,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t seem like most TEFL teachers.’

  That shouldn’t have made me happy, but it did.

  She was a few inches shorter than me, but side by side our waists were level, which meant she had proportionally longer legs. It felt relaxing to compare our bodies. It wasn’t the fretful ranked surveyal of my teens, so much as a hazy curiosity.

  She had fun-sized cartons of soya milk in her bag and offered me one while she talked on the phone. ‘Hou ah, hou ah, mou man tai,’ she said. ‘M goi sai.’

  The play was a Chekhov number in Russian, with Chinese and English surtitles. We were too near the front to see both the words and the actors’ faces at once, so we had to choose which to follow. Throughout, Edith tended to her work inbox. She managed this by holding her bag like a lapdog and thumbing away inside it. I wondered if the actors noticed.

  One man wore a monocle. Another carried perfume and intermittently doused himself. You knew the women by their dresses: white for ingenue, navy for spinster, black for wife. There was vodka and, presumably, adultery. I decided to read the surtitles so I could fill Edith in later, but it was all a tangle of Olgas and Mashas and catalysed interpersonal tension.

  A man lost a duel. Edith started at the gunshot. Curtain call.

  ‘Did you like it?’ she said as we left.

  ‘As much as I could follow,’ I said.

  ‘Well, I thought it was exceptional. Shall we do it again some time?’

  I tried to hide my excitement.

  * * *

  Edith had come into my life just when there was a vacancy.

  Julian had been in London a few weeks now. He sent messages. I never read them right away. First, like a stress test, I’d list the worst things he could say. Things like: I’m back with Kat and we’re getting married. Our relationship was an elaborate social experiment which has now exhausted my interest. I’m subletting the apartment and you need to leave. I’m not subletting but you still need to leave.

  Once I’d modelled out every possible way the message could hurt me, I went somewhere quiet and opened it. Then it didn’t say anything I’d worried about and I felt I’d got away with something, but that I’d be found out next time.

  In person, if I missed a shaking hand or a falter i
n his smile, then that was that and I couldn’t revisit it. But in written form he was under a bell jar and would stay there until my analyses were complete. Of course he had me under one as well, but I chose my phrasing carefully and knew it would stand up to scrutiny. Really it was a shame we had bodies. I wrote: i miss having sex with you but only because i have a body, & if i didn’t then everything would be easier. He replied that on the contrary, he suspected sex without bodies might pose challenges.

  Sunday mornings were Saturday for him. His papers came as usual. I laid them on the coffee table, read the headlines, and fidgeted with my watch. He’d left some shirts behind that I still hadn’t ironed. The creases seemed like his, though I knew they were the washing machine’s. I watched movies in his bed. This was in theory no different to doing so in my own, but I found it more immersive.

  Sometimes he rang on the weekend, but more often he messaged. Like me, he seemed to find it easier to express himself behind a screen. The Saturday after my theatre date with Edith, he wrote:

  Feel we may have parted on bad terms. Suboptimal terms certainly. Hope you’re keeping up with Miles, Victoria, Ralph-pronounced-Rafe, etc. It’s mental here. The garçon absolut still too principled to want to win elections, which is splendid now Tories have called one. & Bank of England says we’re not doing enough to prepare for no deal – so between May grabbing Damocles by the sword & the rest of us stocking up on canned beans, London is, as ever, a haven of quietude. Interesting how pitch has changed from ‘Take back control’ to ‘We think there will still be food’. Anyway. Say if you need anything. Sorry for uncertainty re: when back. J.

  An editor could have fun, I thought, going through his messages and changing the full stops to exclamation marks.

  I didn’t tell him about my evening with Edith. I couldn’t be bothering him with every tiny detail.

  * * *

  A fortnight after we met, Edith had theatre tickets again. This time she asked me first, and then the next week, too. I didn’t tell Victoria. I hoped the longer I left it, the more dudgeon it would cause her. I liked dudgeoning Victoria. And it was private, all of it – listening to the pinnacles and spires of her accent, sizing our proportions, feeling with each play like I was more and more someone Edith would be friends with.