by Naoise Dolan
‘You need to read the news,’ she said over coffee. ‘We can’t even choose our own candidates, and I read the news.’
I wanted to tell her I’d known that about Hong Kong’s government, then remembered I only knew it because Julian had mentioned it the first time we met Miles.
I tried to see myself as she did when I dressed myself or bought things. The day before a cinema trip, I spent 400 Hong Kong dollars on a Jo Malone candle because I could imagine lighting it with her in the flat. For her, I’d burn a candle worth four hours’ pay to me, i.e. one-sixth of a day, thinking: the other five-sixths are there, too, if you want them. It would glow purple against her face and her cheekbones would ridge like sand ripples. She’d say I had good taste, and I’d say: no, you. We’d both be right because no one with discernment could spend that much time with another who lacked it. We both had it or neither did. And I didn’t care which.
This made me realise I didn’t actually care about refinement and just wanted Edith to like me. At first that made me happy, since earning her approval seemed more attainable than developing style. Then I remembered that Edith was not like most people.
I noticed more and more how much attention she paid to details. We went back again for lattes in Sheung Wan and she flinched when I sipped mine before she had taken a photo. Then she reconsidered the still-life before her, and said: ‘Actually, the lipstick stain is perfect.’ I hadn’t noticed I’d left one. Another day we got croissants and she said something in Cantonese, then translated – ‘Camera eats first’ – as I made to pick mine up. That made me smile. I liked when she was unapologetically earnest about things, even if it was the angle of a pastry. She said Instagram made her look at everything more closely. Whenever she felt sad, she had a wall of happy memories to look back on.
‘I know it’s all very silly,’ she said, ‘but it’s fun.’
I tried to imagine Julian admitting he enjoyed something frivolous, and couldn’t.
Besides, she wouldn’t have said that the first month we met. I felt I was making progress, though I wasn’t sure what towards. I wished I could watch her be friends with other women. If I knew how she normally went about it, it would be easier to know if we were different.
We laughed a lot in the cinema, especially at the films about sad straight boys who needed fixing. Women in movies taught men how to feel things. They took men who felt nothing and made them feel something. You could never tell what those women felt themselves, besides: I want to help this man. I’d never met anyone like that in real life.
I’d never met anyone like Edith either, and was grateful not to have many other people competing with her for my time. My Hong Kong existence was neat. It had space for her.
Besides, there was room in me. I felt superior to people like Scott and Madison, but really the three of us were hollow. They filled themselves with a little bit of everyone’s approval, whereas I was more discerning. When I met someone I liked, I wanted all of them, and fast.
* * *
I started going to supermarkets a lot, mostly Wellcome and 7-Eleven trips. The walls were papered in adverts. The greying tiles bore boot-marks and hairs set in mud. When I went at rush hour the cashier queues stretched down the aisles, and I’d take my place at the end and take things off shelves as I advanced. If you shuffled past your noodles or cereal or whatever, you couldn’t go back or you’d lose your place in the line. I liked pretending this was the highest-risk transaction I participated in and that my life was well rooted aside from this one thing about the supermarket.
When Julian was around I’d committed to nutritionally sound shopping baskets. Now it was his second month away, I bought Pocky sticks and matcha KitKats. The packets listed ingredients I couldn’t pronounce. I puzzled them out by breaking down the syllables like I made students do with names of dinosaurs.
On the weekends that I didn’t see Edith or Miles, the convenience-store staff were the only people I spoke to. I made myself nice for them. I put on lipstick. At the counter an old lady with cropped hair turned to a colleague and said: gweimui ah. In Cantonese, white people were ghosts. In Hokkien, Edith had told me over coffee, we were redheads, and in Mandarin ‘old friends’.
‘The latter,’ she’d said, ‘is certainly one reading of Sino-Western relations.’
In Russia, Edith had said, you could get Putin’s face on anything. Vodka, bread, you name it. In Hong Kong, the same was true of Hello Kitty. This was, Edith speculated, in part because Hello Kitty came from Japan and so betokened resistance to mainland China. A vending machine in her apartment lobby stocked Hello Kitty toy pianos and candy dispensers. There were also Hello Kitty tampons, though she was less certain what they stood for. I’d noticed she’d started talking more often about periods, also exfoliation and core-tightening exercises. I knew these were normal things for friends to discuss, but the thought came to me unbidden: maybe Edith wants me to notice her body.
One Sunday in mid-April, Victoria bumped into me leaving 7-Eleven and asked how I stayed thin if that was what I ate. ‘I strive for balance,’ I said, which meant I sometimes had a Hello Kitty doughnut for breakfast and then felt so sick I ate nothing else all day. ‘Balance,’ Victoria said, ‘is key.’ I agreed.
The following week she saw me there again. I recalled she lived nearby. We were both drunk. She asked what was wrong with me. I said nothing was wrong with me, that something was wrong with her, and also, while I was here and with reference to her previous query, that I was thin because I had money. The next time we saw each other, we pretended this exchange had not occurred.
I could say whatever I wanted now.
* * *
Edith was still always the one who suggested meeting up. I didn’t dare. Her time, like Julian’s, was important. I’d pretend I couldn’t do the first day she proposed, but she’d say it was her only one free. If she posted no evidence of her hectic life, I thought: she said she was busy. When she did post I thought: not too busy for Instagram.
The other teachers invited me to TST. First we went to a speakeasy bar that was authentically local. Scott from Arkansas said he knew because another American had told him. There was no website or contact number, but Scott got us there by finding the 7-Eleven on Kimberley Road and looking for the back door with a pig’s head peeking out.
I went to the toilet. The girl in the next cubicle was crying or coming – I wasn’t sure. Edith always posted stories on Friday nights. Sure enough, from 9 p.m. there was a pile of folders in the office captioned ‘My life is fun and interesting’, followed an hour later by an overhead of cocktails with: ‘Liquor cures all workloads’. I considered the possibility that the girl was both crying and coming, and felt her night was going better than mine regardless.
Too late I remembered that I’d have to post something now or Edith would see I’d viewed her story and think I was at home on my phone. I went back out and roped Briony from Leeds into a selfie. She’d taken too much MDMA to question this behaviour. Twenty minutes later, I checked the list and saw Edith had seen it.
Soon enough, the rainbow circle appeared around Edith’s name to show she’d put another picture up. I didn’t check it. This felt like a minor victory.
* * *
The following Monday, we got coffee in Sheung Wan and Edith said she was working on an IPO – initial public offering, she clarified. I knew that from Julian but appreciated the thought. The partner helming it, William Brent, had been in Hong Kong since before the handover. He said men were scared of women now.
‘I’m not sure,’ Edith said, ‘if he’s scared he’ll grope us or scared we’ll tell HR.’
She felt it had been easy at Cambridge to claim we should take unfeminist spaces and reform them. Harder in real life, she found. You couldn’t quite announce to William Brent that the ‘space’ of his law firm was presently unfeminist, not least because the first step to changing it would be expunging
William Brent.
Edith was calm about things she couldn’t change. Her firm was full of horrible men and she had to be nice to them. You did in every job, and at least hers paid well.
I was sure there were William Brents at Julian’s bank, and that he took about as much action as he had when Seb commented on the dimensions of my throat. Undoubtedly he told himself he’d do something once he had the power – and when he got there, he’d wonder where all the women had gone.
I still hadn’t told Edith about Julian. Probably I was putting it off because I knew she wouldn’t like the sound of him. I wanted to say she didn’t know him like I did. That was a textbook claim women made about men we’d regret – the men or the claim, depending on how you parsed it – but it was undeniably true when Edith and Julian had never met.
‘You really don’t like men,’ I said.
‘You’re right. I don’t.’
This, too, was ripe for parsing.
I told Edith about a summer in college when a few of us had gone to someone’s holiday home in West Cork. I slept on the couch, two of the lads took a mattress on the floor, and in the dark one of them came and lay on top of me – calmly, as if instructed to. I whispered I wasn’t sure, which meant get off but I’m scared what you’ll do if I say that, and he ignored me. His breath tanged of alcohol. I thought it was Colm but it might have been Ferdia. I couldn’t see. Probably I could have deduced Ferdia or Colm, but I didn’t, because then I’d know, and then for all subsequent interactions with either Colm and Ferdia, which I’d have to keep having because no one would believe me or they’d say yeah but he’s his own problems, I’d remember what he did, know his own memory of events was that we’d got drunk and hooked up, and be certain, too, that our friends would ‘not take sides’, i.e. treat me like someone who might be lying about rape. I told myself what they’d say – grey area, I just don’t think he’d do that – and soon became convinced I was actually making it up, then felt like a sick amoral person for falsely accusing someone of something that I hadn’t accused him of and that he had in fact done.
‘Fuck,’ said Edith.
‘Yeah.’
You could tell who’d been through it and who hadn’t because when you told someone who hadn’t, they were hungry for details. They’d say it was so they could experience their moral outrage with a loftier precision. They were liars and we hated them. Edith and I said as much as we wanted to. When we were done, we changed the subject.
One day I realised we’d stopped seeing plays. I asked why, and Edith said she didn’t really like theatre. ‘I wanted you to think I did,’ she said, and then went back to her phone. This surprised me on a few levels. I hadn’t known she cared about making me think she was cultured. I hadn’t realised I came across as someone who set store by that kind of thing. And I hadn’t noticed our relationship changing such that she could now be honest with me – if this latest confession was what she really felt, and not some new illusion of candour.
Julian, I thought, can tell when people like him. He and Edith had many skills in common. I wondered if this was one of them.
* * *
I started drafting a message where I told Julian about Edith.
i’ve made a new friend. i don’t know why i’m only telling you now. i’ve only known her a few weeks but i’m thinking about her more and more. incidentally, the search term ‘how to flirt with women’ returns very different results to ‘how to tell a woman is flirting with you’. in both cases the researcher is assumed to be male. i’m guessing you don’t mind when things assume you’re male, which might explain your love of literature.
i’ve never had sex with a woman anyway. i kissed a few in college. their lips are softer, if you didn’t know.
i think about sleeping with other people and then i feel guilty, which is weird bc i think if anything you’d be amused if i didn’t have sex with someone for your sake. like oh you shouldn’t have it’s too much. i was scared when you left but i don’t think anything has changed. you still put more time and energy into showing you don’t love me than anyone has ever put into showing me they do.
sometimes i love you and sometimes i think it would be best if a plane flew into your office and you were on the plane or in the building.
I decided, on balance, that this message would not have the propitiatory effect intended.
22
My Primary Four kids were writing haikus: five syllables, then seven, then five. The previous term they’d done four-line poems, and Ming Chuen Lai expressed a certain suspicion that this meant the curriculum was becoming easier, not harder. We argued over certain words. They held, for instance, that ‘film’ had two syllables: ‘fill-um’. I wanted to say most of Dublin agreed, but their parents weren’t paying for Dublin English.
Katie Cheung, nine, disliked the haiku format. Together we brainstormed for her to write a poem about a cat. For the first line, she said: ‘The big hairy cat liked to drink lots and lots of milk.’
I offered five-syllable versions: ‘My cat likes its milk’, ‘The cat likes drinking’, ‘Milk’s my cat’s favourite’. (Whether ‘favourite’ had two syllables or three was a box Pandora herself would have left well enough alone at that particular juncture.)
Katie Cheung wasn’t assuaged. Katie Cheung wanted it all in the first line. I asked what she’d put in the second if she’d said everything in the first, and she said she’d think of more.
I told her she could write a story, but to at least use paragraphs. She acceded to this with great reluctance. There still wouldn’t be room, she said.
I’d been a pliable child and I wondered if it was obvious, even then, that I would never be an artist. If a teacher had told me to put in linebreaks, I’d have sliced up my words like ham in order to please them.
* * *
Mam told me Dublin was hot for April. ‘Next the Arctic will melt,’ she said. ‘And we’ll be living in bunkers.’ I said I hoped there’d be intermediary stages.
She said Dad said hi. I said she meant Dad told her to say hi. ‘Dad says hi’ implied he was saying it himself. Mam told me there was no need to be difficult, and that George said hi, too. Then she had news. My cousin Tadhg’s landlady had evicted him, purportedly to move in a family member, but the room had gone on Daft a week later with a 100-euro hike in the rent. I’d forgotten about Tadhg. Another cousin had had a baby. I told Mam I didn’t recognise the name, and she repeated: Sinéad, as though this alone would acquaint me with her. ‘You’re far away,’ she said, which felt unfair inasmuch as I hadn’t known Sinéad before I’d left either.
‘Mam,’ I said, ‘did you think about giving us Irish names?’
She said no, that people who did that sent their kids to tin whistle classes.
‘And Rachel Mulvey’s back,’ she said. I didn’t know Rachel Mulvey either. Mam specified: the Mulveys down the road, in a tone conveying: it is now obvious to me that my daughter knows nothing. ‘Back from New York,’ Mam said. ‘They all come back sooner or later.’ She added that the house felt empty without me and Tom. ‘It’s a waste giving money to a landlord. Tom said eight hundred’s a good deal. Eight hundred a month. For one room, Ava.’
‘It’s wrong,’ I said, ‘when people earn money for owning houses they don’t use. I think we should take their houses off them.’
‘Daydreaming again,’ Mam said.
Ringing home made me miss discussing politics openly. I couldn’t at work, not least because Joan and Benny were both landlords on the side, but more fundamentally because bosses did not like to employ people who thought they should not exist. Julian listened but was incapable of going: that’s an interesting thought. He’d swipe at anything dangled before him. With Edith and Miles I could be as left-wing as I wanted, but I worried about how to sound clever.
I said: ‘The state should seize all the hotels in Dublin and turn them into social hou
sing.’
‘Ah now, Ava.’
‘And there should be a one hundred per cent inheritance tax. And universal basic income.’
‘Ah now.’
‘And eventually communism.’
‘Ah now.’
I enjoyed conversations where I wasn’t attempting to persuade anyone, where I just said precisely what I thought. I got tired of making myself acceptable.
Mam started asking a lot of questions. She did that when she could tell I was holding something back. But there was nothing worth telling her about Edith. If I said I’d been getting coffee with a woman, Mam would just wonder what I was really hiding.
23
Later in April, Edith and I went to an art exhibition in Sheung Wan. She greeted me with a hug. I was afraid I’d get something on her clothes – a piece of fluff or a stray hair.
‘Nice dress,’ she said. ‘You look like Audrey Hepburn.’
‘It’s old,’ I said.
‘It’s lovely.’
She seemed to think I couldn’t take compliments. I preferred to believe I disliked profuse displays of emotion, and would accept any amount of praise if people tempered themselves in how they expressed it.
On the walk over, I wondered if Edith was pretty or if I just found her so. I was aware, with my college head on me, that beauty was subjective – but I wanted to know if we were aesthetically matched. I nearly asked if she knew Holly Golightly was bisexual. Having formulated the remark and decided how I’d orchestrate my body language while making it, I blushed nearly as much as I would if I’d actually said it.
