Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

  ‘He Instagrams his friends’ car keys,’ Edith said. ‘They pile their keys on the coffee table, and he posts a picture and tags them.’

  ‘As in, he tags them as their keys?’ I said.

  Edith rolled her eyes, like: no, he tags them as the post-fact malaise.

  It was my turn to top up our drinks. ‘And one for my friend,’ I said to the barman, enunciating sternly to tell him he could take from that just what he wanted.

  Back at the rooftop, Edith was answering emails on her phone. I stood at a distance for some time, as though waiting for something to change. When I came and put the flutes on the table, I said – feeling I could if I was doing something else while saying it – that I wondered if women ever did use Ladies’ Night for dates.

  ‘It’s certainly a strategy,’ she said.

  No one could be good at Edith.

  She hailed a taxi and swapped sentences with the driver in Cantonese. In the cab I slipped my heels off and felt the carpet through my tights.

  ‘Taxis always smell like new car,’ I said.

  ‘They use a spray,’ Edith said.

  ‘You know everything.’

  ‘You’re ar meisce.’

  She stroked a ladder on my tights and said I should be more careful. I wondered if this was a simple extension of her domain over everything, or if I’d somehow indicated she was allowed. I’d said I was hers from how I looked at her – not from how I’d chosen to look at her, but from how I couldn’t help looking at her – but that didn’t mean she could tell. Maybe Edith didn’t notice me at all and touched me as she would a small appliance.

  The taxi dropped us uphill and we passed three checkpoints through to a marble lobby with a twenty-foot fig tree in the centre. There were potted bonsais on all conducive surfaces, including one in the lift. Edith said having children was like growing bonsai. I asked what growing a full-size tree was like. That, Edith said, was a question of temperament.

  Cyril Kwok met us at the door. He wore white from head to toe: sweatshirt, jeans, trainers. ‘Pick a colour,’ he said.

  ‘This is Ava,’ Edith said.

  ‘Hi, Ava. Pick a colour.’

  ‘Pink,’ I said. ‘Hi, Cyril.’

  ‘Rosé it is.’

  The party was loud and dark, with flashing lights. Cyril led us through the atrium and up the mezzanine to what he called ‘the bucket’. I was relieved to see it was an actual bucket. He fished inside and found Edith a bottle of Armand de Brignac. ‘Happy me turning twenty-three,’ he said, kissing cheeks before excusing himself.

  I told Edith he seemed nice and asked why she hated him. She didn’t hear me the first time, so I had to say it into her ear.

  ‘I thought you’d judge me for liking him,’ she said. ‘He went to Eton.’

  ‘Julian went to Eton,’ I said.

  Edith gripped the rosé as though to remind me she held the talking stick. ‘You always bring up Julian,’ she said.

  I hadn’t been sure she was drunk until then.

  ‘You shouldn’t pretend you hate your friends,’ I said. The noise drowned me out again and Edith asked me to repeat myself, which let me redraft it to: ‘Sorry I made you feel like you have to pretend to hate your friends.’

  Edith had to catch up with everyone and I didn’t, so she considered who to leave me with. I was too used to this from Julian to mind. ‘I’ll give you to Tony Ng,’ she decided. ‘He was at Wadham, so he tries not to act rich now.’ Edith looked over at Tony’s red chinos as though to tell me I could judge for myself his success in this.

  ‘Ling Ling, you’re glowing,’ Tony said. ‘How’s Sam?’

  ‘We broke up,’ Edith said.

  ‘Wow,’ Tony said. ‘It’s been aeons.’

  ‘Definite aeons,’ Edith said.

  With a clarity I blamed on alcohol, I knew precisely what I felt: envy. It was partly that Edith’s friends were rich, but mainly that she had them. The Sam thing I would get to later.

  ‘This is Ava,’ Edith told Tony. ‘Ava’s single.’

  ‘Me too,’ Tony said. ‘Let’s see which of us gets a man first.’

  I could reply: or a woman. But I didn’t know if Edith had introduced me to Tony thinking it might prompt my disclosure, or if the possibility had never occurred to her. The girls at school had claimed to want a gay best friend, despite not being someone any gay would want to be friends with. They still called me all sorts of things for not kissing enough boys.

  Edith and Tony had changed the subject now, so I nodded and made engaged expressions. I saw I hadn’t just been holding back from coming out to Edith as part of some game. I also feared that she’d stop being friends with me. I thought that about Julian, too, and about anyone in my life who had ever remotely cared about me, but I’d never had to confront it in Hong Kong because I hadn’t had a crush on a woman till now. Or maybe I didn’t care about coming out and just didn’t want her to know that I was into her specifically. It was impossible to separate these issues. I couldn’t like Edith without liking women, and I also felt – illogically, but with conviction – that I couldn’t like women without liking Edith. And I had that thought mid-laugh, so I had to keep laughing or Edith would see what I’d been thinking.

  * * *

  That night at home I searched Edith’s friend list online. There were six Sams: four male, two female. I clicked ‘see friendship’ between Edith and me, then went to the URL and edited my account name to each of the Sams in turn so it showed their history with her. Three of them – two men, one woman – had nothing but birthday wall posts. One was only tagged with Edith in group pictures from Cambridge. The last pair, he-Sam and she-Sam, each had a single photo with their arm around her.

  26

  I turned twenty-three on 18 May. The other teachers asked me along to the pub, but I said, truthfully, that I had plans. I’d asked Edith out for once and hadn’t told her it was my birthday. I was embarrassed by the idea that she’d think I thought we were closer friends than we were. She texted me a balloon emoticon on the morning, which made me wonder if she’d known all along what day it was or if she’d just got a notification about it.

  We met at a whiskey bar on Hollywood Road. Edith’s present to me was a printed scarf by an LA-based eco-feminist collective. I was sceptical of its claimed carbon neutrality when it had been shipped from California to Hong Kong, but it was soft against my neck – and it was wrapped, which suggested she’d known it was my birthday.

  We went inside. The place was crowded. The menu asked: would you make a pact with heaven for the finest drink on earth?

  Edith found the Irish section and ordered me a Connemara peated single malt. ‘Shipped from the old country,’ I said. ‘Bring a tear to the eye, so it would.’ When it arrived, it was so strong it actually did. She said I was a baby and then shuddered herself when she tried it. Julian had called me that once, a baby, and I felt this proved that words took their meaning from context.

  Next we had cider. Mid-gesticulation, I knocked my glass over and spilled some on my lap. She took out pocket tissues. I thought she’d hand me one, but she leaned over and dabbed my thigh. Her hair smelled of smoke from the walk through LKF.

  Edith addressed the waiter in English, but he answered in Cantonese.

  ‘He guessed right,’ she said after he’d gone away, ‘but I could have been from anywhere.’

  ‘Maybe he doesn’t speak English,’ I said. It was a stupid comment, but I wanted to distract myself from her pout. It was another of my favourite Edith expressions, though I knew there was limited point in recording them when I could not imagine a single expression of Edith’s which did not rank among my favourites. The best wedges of words were the ones my eight-year-olds wrote: I like her face. With her I am happy. I wished I’d never learned more advanced grammar and could only make sentences like that. It would give me an excuse to
say them aloud.

  ‘You’re not noticing because you’re white,’ Edith said. ‘People see me and assume I’m from here.’

  ‘But you are from here.’

  ‘Kind of,’ she said. ‘But you miss things when you spend your teens abroad.’

  It sounded like something a therapist might have told her, oddly phrased to squeeze developmental insight into not very many words.

  She added that many people, her parents included, had a misplaced nostalgia for the British Empire because at least it wasn’t China. ‘Hong Kong is the one place where the late-twentieth-century rebrand has worked,’ she said. We both found it hilarious that Brits thought their international image was one of flaccid tea-loving Hugh Grantish butterfingery. If they’d been a bit more indirect during the Opium Wars, or a bit more self-effacing on Bloody Sunday, then our countries would have been most appreciative. ‘That’s why they can’t accept that they did colonialism,’ Edith said. ‘They see themselves as people who can’t even get a dog put down.’ We agreed also that the British obsession with dogs was creepy, both because of the volume of other animals they ate and in light of their historic and contemporary level of regard for humans.

  We talked fast together. I was always slowing down in Hong Kong, either to help the kids understand me or because Julian said everything at leisure and I felt I should stay in rank. Only with Edith could my mouth get ahead of me. The other mercy was that in the thick of assertion I could pretend not to notice her knee against mine.

  We did shots, then went down Aberdeen Street to the pier. It was too late to get a decent view, but she said she liked watching the boats and imagining their shapes by drawing lines between the lights like a join-the-dots. Our walk started with ignoring everyone around us and ended with no one to ignore.

  ‘You know,’ Edith said, ‘it used to be illegal for locals to live on the Peak. I’m not sure about Mid-Levels, but definitely the Peak.’

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Who lived there?’

  She laughed. ‘The British, of course.’

  I wanted her to give me one of her spiels, with her gestures like bodily extensions of her facts, but she left it there. It was 9 p.m. The office buildings sported a few dark windows like punched-out options on a game show, but plenty still burned bright. I pictured a thousand Ediths and Julians hunched over tables, hitting targets, making waves, spitting out productivity. In front of us, though, the water held still.

  ‘I wonder if there’s a time in Hong Kong when not a single person is working,’ I said.

  Edith turned to me slowly. ‘I hate my job,’ she said. ‘I work hard, it’s good to work hard, but I hate it. I just want my mum to be proud of me. Which is stupid, because the things she values aren’t the things I value, but she’s my mum. I care what she thinks.’

  ‘Just tell yourself you’re doing it ironically,’ I said.

  ‘Do people still say that?’ Edith said.

  I cast for sincerity.

  ‘I like girls,’ I said. Then: ‘I like you.’

  She kissed me.

  27

  We texted throughout the following week. I did it at work, or while walking around shopping malls. I tried to wait fifteen minutes. I’d write in the notepad app to stop her from seeing me type, count the seconds, then cut, paste and send. But I soon found once I’d written something, I needed to show her right away.

  Among these messages: so do you want to get coffee or something.

  The three elliptic minutes watching her type had a gravitational field all their own. She did not want to get coffee or something, or anything. The kiss, you see, was done in pastiche. Why was she taking this long to say no? Just say it and leave me for the worms to find.

  Then: yes, i’d like that.

  We got speciality coffees in Sheung Wan and laughed as we drank them. Mine was charcoal with cashew milk and hers was bright pink dragonfruit. I considered asking if this made me the man, but decided ironic heteronormativity was still heteronormative, and also that it was too early to make that joke.

  I wondered which was better: a first date after three months of knowing someone, or moving into their apartment after three but still being ‘friends’ with them half a year later. Neither seemed wildly successful, but I was too happy about Edith to mind.

  * * *

  I couldn’t focus at work. I would sit correcting papers, then think of her and cross my legs tighter together. In class the children asked me what words meant or whether a spelling was correct. Instead of making them use the dictionary like I was meant to, I just told them the answer. It was fine. They had smartphones. Through the walls I heard the other teachers giving stern instructions, and wondered if my problem was that I didn’t want to teach like they did, or that I didn’t want to be a teacher at all.

  I hated being in charge. I wanted Edith to tell me what we were and how it worked. Whenever Julian did that, I hadn’t liked the answer. It struck me now that maybe I could have – for instance – told him that, with words, instead of pretending to be okay with it. Then I felt glad to have a new chance. I’d lied to Edith, too, but not as consistently, and not about how I felt.

  My favourite students were the girls with neat copybooks. I knew they’d grow up to be like Edith, and was glad Hong Kong had a long-term supply. Connie Qian kept glue and a small pair of scissors in her pencil case. She cut out choice paragraphs from my handouts and stuck them in her notepad. ‘I like your notebooks,’ I told her. Then I wondered if I should have said it more bossily to make it clear that I was not trying – ever – to be anyone’s pal. Connie considered, then accepted my praise. ‘I like them,’ she said – no ‘too’, perhaps to show her judgement was independent of mine. This also seemed like something Edith would do.

  No student had ever reminded me of Julian. Despite my speculations about his background, I’d never been able to picture him as an actual child. He didn’t want me to see him any way other than how he was now. He liked me because I didn’t know him before he was on a six-figure salary.

  * * *

  I asked Edith over to the flat a week after our first date. Unusually, she wore jeans and a cable-knit jumper. She presented me with a diamond-patterned crystal bowl for the coffee table and said to fill it with fruit or flowers. At face value it was obviously a gift for me, but the fact that Edith had hand-picked it for Julian’s apartment made me uncertain what to say. Were we grateful, or just me?

  We ate fruit and watched an old film with Judy Garland. I wondered if other people watched movies when they asked someone around to do that, or if our actually doing it meant things were going horribly wrong.

  ‘I find Judy’s brow intriguing,’ said Edith. ‘It’s owlish.’

  We were less taken with the plot. Judy was a dowdy farmer whose wayfaring actress sister set up camp in her barn to rehearse jaunty musical numbers with her troupe. There was a predictable dalliance with the sister’s dashing fiancé, but we forgave him for being formulaic because he was played by Gene Kelly. Had the technology existed, I was sure Gene would not have got this far into a movie when he asked a woman around to watch one.

  ‘Do you think she’s pretty?’ said Edith.

  ‘Judy?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Edith could have meant ‘of course’ because who else could I possibly find attractive, or ‘of course’ because Judy, as both an LGBT icon and person of a gender I’d broadly said I liked, was a woman I was especially likely to have opinions on.

  ‘I see where you’re coming from about the owlish brow,’ I said. ‘And she’s got a good profile on her. She and Gene have a great pair of noses.’

  There were better things I could have said – I regretted involving Gene, who really had no stake in this – but she kissed me anyway.

  ‘Judy’s great,’ she said. ‘The studio made her wear prosthetics on her nose, you know. But I don’t think
she has them on here. She put her foot down in the end.’

  ‘I wish you wouldn’t kiss me and then go off about Judy Garland’s prosthetic nose.’

  ‘I told you, it’s not prosthetic, it’s her actual one.’

  ‘Look,’ I said. We started kissing again and I forgot what I’d wanted her to consider.

  There was a Pavlovian moment where I started leading her towards Julian’s room, but I stopped and brought her to mine instead. We went down on each other. She grabbed at my hair and said: yes, right there. Afterwards we compared our bodies, and I realised that I had never actually felt calm doing it before. Now I could relax. Our limbs didn’t seem to belong to either of us in particular. Edith had longer arms, we agreed.

  ‘I’m so happy,’ I said.

  ‘Me too,’ she said.

  I asked if the taste was all right. I’d always wanted to ask Julian, but knew what he’d say: ‘Fine’, which would make me worry more, or: ‘Like Pinot Noir, but I’m not sure if that’s because you’ve had some or I have.’ Edith said she couldn’t describe it. I found myself breathing artificially slowly, as though to placate someone else, and realised it wasn’t the answer I was interested in. It was being able to say I felt anxious.

  She had to go. Her parents expected her home. I told myself this had nothing to do with my question potentially being weird, then recollected that if she’d said something odd then I would almost certainly wait a bit and say other things before leaving.

  There was no record of what had happened. I couldn’t fully believe in it when it hadn’t been committed to paper. Maybe that was why Sappho wrote poems – but when she died, they wrapped her papyrus around corpses to keep maggots off.

  It was fortunate Edith had left before I’d started waxing existential. I told myself: this is why you’re single. This is how you can be having sex with two people, tell neither about the other, be living with one of them, and still be single.