by Naoise Dolan
28
June
At the start of June my nine-year-olds finished irregular plural and compound nouns, and moved on to collectives: a flock of sheep, a clutch of eggs, a shower of wankers. The latter I kept to myself, but I did wonder what the English said, because it couldn’t be a ‘shower of’, but as a fundamentally onanistic nation they surely had some way to cluster it. I thought about how to ask Edith and make it funny as opposed to weird, and then Kendrick Yang asked what you said for grapes and I lost my train of thought. ‘Bunch,’ I said, ‘– no, cluster,’ and then I doubted myself again. He’d already written ‘cluster’, so I left it there.
Sometimes I wondered if I was actually a native English speaker. As a kid I’d daydreamed about having been secretly adopted from a foreign country. Russia was the leading candidate since I’d read a historical novel about a family fleeing the October Revolution, though I knew if I revisited the book now I would think it had terrible politics. Books about people who lost their money, or had none and got some, appealed more to my childhood imagination than ones where everyone stayed put – though that was far more common in real life. And characters who didn’t consider class at all were boring. I couldn’t believe those people existed. Everyone in school knew who had the biggest houses and whose parents were barristers.
I’d once explained ‘on the scratcher’ and ‘in the scratcher’ to Julian and asked if he thought there was something about the Irish character discernible from the near indistinguishability of drawing the dole and going to bed with someone. He’d been sleepy and hadn’t said much. I wondered if I could nab this observation and see what Edith made of it, but knew I’d feel wrong. I wasn’t sure, though, if the guilt would be for repeating something Julian thought I’d only say to him, or for tendering Edith old rope.
It was Julian’s fourth month away now. I felt on some level like he’d never come back.
* * *
Edith and I kept having sex. There was only one feeling better than being chosen by someone so perfect, and that was having her utter the sentence: ‘I want you to finger me.’
Most people had crevices of soft skin – behind ears, wrists under sleeves – but all of Edith’s felt like that. She was so small it felt comically unnecessary to hold her close. We’d wrap around each other and laugh at how much bed we had left. I saw myself telling people: we always make room for each other, for you see we are compact. Then I remembered that I’d just spent half a year having quite a lot of sex with a vertically bothersome man. It was all very interesting.
When Edith wasn’t busy working, we’d lie in my bed sharing secrets. After three weeks of this, she said she’d always been exclusively into girls, but it took her until Cambridge to realise not all women were and that this made her gay.
I asked if she’d ever tell her family.
‘No,’ she said instantly.
I claimed I’d tell mine if I ended up with a woman. Until then, there was no need to apprise them of my sex life. ‘Not that it’s all about sex,’ I said. ‘But that’s what they’d boil it down to.’
Edith agreed. Ninety per cent of why she couldn’t tell her parents was the sex thing.
I’d never slept with a woman before, though I’d spent most of my teens and college years obsessed with one or another. They’d all had boyfriends, or girlfriends, or else they were just patently not someone who would ever fancy me. When I told Edith this, she asked if I thought I’d gone for unavailable people because I knew I’d never have to face the reality that being with them would not solve all my problems. I told her she had no business saying something that perceptive.
‘Everyone does that, Ava,’ she said. ‘You keep describing yourself as this uniquely damaged person, when a lot of it is completely normal. I think you want to feel special – which is fair, who doesn’t – but you won’t allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you’re especially bad.’
I asked her again to stop reading me so well, and she laughed and said: ‘Fine, I tried.’ But really I liked when she psychoanalysed me. Her air of knowledgeable objectivity reassured me that someone had the situation – me – in hand.
She’d had sex before with her ex at Cambridge – Sam, she said. It was easier then. Their whole circle was LGBT. She’d edged back into the closet since returning to Hong Kong.
‘Sam,’ I repeated, to show it was new information.
We were too self-conscious to kiss in public. The first time had been permissible because it was spontaneous, but once it became a pattern, we worried people would notice. Small gestures took on significance. I’d nudge her on the arm to look at something on my phone. We went back to Central Pier and took a selfie, and I sent her it with the caption: just gals being pals. I put a picture of Edith on my Instagram story, and when I saw that Julian had seen it, I felt a twinge that I thought at first was fear, but which I realised was more like excitement. Neither of them had all my secrets.
* * *
At work I pretended I was her, or that she was watching me. When the children whispered or watched videos on their phones, instead of ignoring it like I usually did, I coughed the way I knew Edith would. It worked. They stopped. When Clarice Xu asked me for help, I told her she was doing great. I didn’t usually think of myself as someone who could dispense compliments freely. They wouldn’t interest anyone. But you didn’t need to be that great for a ten-year-old to want your approval, and it helped that I had the blackboard markers and they didn’t.
Sometimes Edith came to meet me after work at the train station nearby. I was allowed to touch her then. We could stand on an escalator and I could reach out and do it. It was a normal thing for friends to do. I wanted people to know we were together, but only the ones who wouldn’t hurt us for it. I’d have felt afraid to in Dublin, and I did in Hong Kong, too.
I wanted to explain that to Edith: that holding Julian’s hand was like holding a museum pass, and holding hers was like holding a grenade. But that didn’t make sense even in my head, so I knew it wouldn’t if I tried to say it aloud. And she didn’t want to hold hands either, so it never came up.
* * *
I saw Miles again in June. He told me about the future communist leader Zhou Enlai hiding from machine-gun fire and bayonets at the Western Astor House hotel in Guangzhou. To blend in, Zhou and his wife wore (respectively) a three-piece suit and a silk qipao dress. The anti-communist General Chiang knew they were there but most likely let them go to repay the time Zhou had saved him from violent leftists. I felt it would have been a better story if I’d known more about the figures involved.
Miles also told me about Julian’s birth, then about when he’d met Florence. She’d had a smart pencil skirt on and said she worked at the Bank of England. He’d asked if she was a secretary, and she’d said no, that she was a policy advisor and was saving up to do a PhD. ‘You must forgive me,’ said Miles. ‘Those were different times. She forgave me, at any rate.’ He looked like he wanted to add that she did hold plenty of other grudges.
Since I’d started visiting when Julian left, Miles seemed to be dropping in more snippets of their family life. It felt unfair that this was happening only now that my top priority was not finding out more about Julian.
We listened to one of Nina Simone’s 1976 Montreux recordings, ‘I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to Be Free’. Miles said it had been a Sixties civil rights anthem in the US. Nina sang: I wish I could say all the things I can say when I’m relaxed.
It was no good trying to finish writing his book at the moment, Miles said. Instead, he was trying to devote more attention to his undergrads. There’d been a lot of students in the Umbrella protests a few years ago, and that kind of thing was needed more and more.
‘So you want to brainwash your class?’ I said.
‘Yes. While I still can.’
‘My eight-year-olds are mad into conspiracy theo
ries. Do you want a go with them?’
Nina sang: Jonathan Livingston Seagull ain’t got nothing on me.
I looked at my watch and counted fifteen minutes without thinking about Edith, a personal record. Obviously, though, this set me off again. Miles had asked what I’d been up to, and I hadn’t known what to say because I’d been spending all my time with Edith. I didn’t mind Miles knowing, but if I told him about Edith then Julian might find out. If he found out about Edith, maybe Edith would find out about him. Then she’d want to know why I’d been lying. ‘I lie to everyone about everything’ would probably not satisfy her as an answer.
29
In mid-June, Edith said we’d get boring – ‘as people’, she said, a qualification I later analysed stringently – if we just had sex all the time. I said I disagreed, but that we could go on dates if it made her happy. ‘It does,’ Edith said. I was still so unused to her candour that it threw me into admitting I liked dating, too. ‘A lot of people do,’ she said. I said I pitied anyone who didn’t.
We got street food and bet on horses at Happy Valley. She took me for bubble tea on a long hilly street packed with convenience stores, and made fun of how long I took choosing, and then of my choice. (‘If you hadn’t rushed me, I might have chosen better.’ ‘Anyone who picks “Matcha Love Potion”, in any allotted time period, is a threat to public safety.’) We tried – and failed, but, importantly, tried – to get me over my fear of heights on the Hong Kong Observation Wheel, and the Lantau Island cable car up over the mountains. On both I screamed and grabbed Edith’s hand, realised it was a coupley thing to do, and wondered if other people did coupley things and then questioned their own sincerity. But even if everyone else did the same things Edith and I did on dates, I decided it was still special for us.
One day we went to Man Mo Temple to make a wish. Incense smoked from ceiling coils. We stood at the urn, round and gold like a chalice, and I asked Edith what I wanted. ‘You tell me,’ she said. I laughed and kissed her cheek.
The last week of June, Edith asked when Julian would return.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘He’s vague.’
We’d just been shopping. Julian had told me I could get more throws after I said I liked the one in my room. I’d bought four with Edith, two in herringbone and two in windowpane, and was arranging them in the sitting room. Edith hadn’t said much about my choices, causing me to suspect that she hated them, and that Julian would, too, when he got back. It was unfair that they both had better taste than me.
I added: ‘Do you think the throws are boring?’
‘Vague how?’ Edith said. ‘The throws are fine.’
It was all on stolen time and I’d pay later. I knew that. My temple wish had been for Julian to come back and for it all to be fine. But I couldn’t imagine it with any precision. I’d close my eyes and see him greet her, and that was as far as I could get.
Whenever Edith was busy, I went out and walked my circuits of convenience stores and shopping malls, or I stayed in bed doing nothing. I wasn’t lonely. My job was non-stop human contact, so I appreciated the time alone. But I couldn’t quite relax.
That night I messaged Julian: i miss you. This was a strange thing to do.
* * *
I wanted to improve my handwriting so I could set a better example for my students. I found a French cursive font online, then wrote out sentences containing every letter of the alphabet: the quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs, amazingly few discotheques provide jukeboxes. This seemed like a punishment, though I wasn’t sure what for. After exhausting my supply of pangrams, I copied out Shakespeare sonnets.
While we were watching a movie in bed, Edith saw one of my transcriptions in a notebook on my bedside table. She said I had lovely handwriting. I felt bad for accepting the compliment, like the letters on the page weren’t really mine.
That week my ten-year-olds did ‘if’ and ‘whether’. I’d known that in French you needed to use similar words when you turned a question into a noun clause, but Dubliners didn’t always bother. We often said, ‘I don’t know will he come back,’ which was bad English. You were meant to say: I don’t know whether he’ll come back, or: I don’t know if he will.
I underlined the conjunctions in the example sentences, then set the kids to work. A few finished early and chatted in Cantonese. I pretended not to notice.
Ollie from Melbourne came in to borrow a whiteboard marker. We talked while the children wrote. In his most pedagogical voice, Ollie told me conjunctions were tricky buggers. There was a knack to them, he said, hooking his hand as though the knack was floating and he’d undertaken to catch it for me.
Julian hadn’t replied to my ‘i miss you’. I wondered if I really did, or if I’d wanted to feel powerful by claiming something about myself that wasn’t true and which would trick him into thinking he had the upper hand. I didn’t do things like that with Edith. It wasn’t that I was more authentically myself around her. Manipulation was a part of my character or I wouldn’t do it. But Edith didn’t bring it out, and Julian did. I didn’t like who I was around him, but I felt I had to be that person sometimes because they were bad and I was bad.
‘You keep yourself to yourself, Ava,’ Ollie said. It was apropos of something, but I’d tuned out. I said I had a lot on my mind.
* * *
Finally Julian replied to the message about missing him. He’d taken so long I’d nearly forgotten I’d sent it.
Sorry – busy at work. Miss you too.
I felt disloyal to Edith when it made me smile, then to Julian because it was the kind of text Edith sent every day and I still appreciated it more from her than from him. This contravened all economics. Assuming my demand for nice messages was elastic, when they were scarcer it should surely drive up their value. But coming from Edith, they commanded a premium.
* * *
Edith and I talked a lot during sex. Julian had never been verbal in bed, which had made it embarrassing when I was, like I’d misunderstood what we were trying to do. With Edith, speech was part of it – slipping, getting words out till we couldn’t. She said: keep going, we’ve got ages. When we finished I said that was weird, and also a little depressing, like: let’s not hold back sexually since we’re still relatively far from our anticipated time of death. Edith said: a) she’d meant the last train wasn’t for a few hours, and b) if we were going to start calling each other out on bizarre coital utterances then let’s not even.
We continued to hold Judy Garland in the esteem which was her due. ‘I found a picture of her in her fifties,’ Edith said. ‘We were right about the strigine brow. She looks unflappable. Not in a placid way, in like a tough-old-broad way.’
‘That chimes with her personal history.’
‘We should visit her grave,’ Edith said.
‘You’re always so morbid after we have sex,’ I said. ‘I can’t help drawing inferences.’
My ‘always’ had no business describing something we’d only been doing a few weeks. I saw Edith register and approve of its reifying effect.
Sometimes I’d imagine her at Cambridge. I didn’t know why I did that. My dinner-with-Florence reveries were probably not the sort of thing happy people thought about, but at least served an obvious purpose. The Cambridge thing didn’t. But I liked seeing Edith’s dark hair against the snow, or the stairs she’d climb in stone towers to get to tutorials. I thought about her life in Hong Kong, too. The Zhangs ate big dinners on national holidays, and the law firm I could reconstruct from its similarities to Julian’s bank. I’d never seen the bank either, but had asked him to describe it.
Maybe I was living through Edith. When I planted her in high-flying venues, it was because I couldn’t sow myself there and she was the next best thing. Vicarious aspiration couldn’t quite explain why I was hooked on her life, but I didn’t know myself we
ll enough to get any closer.
‘I found it scary in Ireland,’ I told her in my bed, ‘having sex with men.’
I was really telling her that ‘I miss you’ meant more from her than from Julian. It was not a link she could humanly be expected to make, which was why I could say it.
30
The last Sunday of June, we bought salads in Marks & Spencer and took the bus to Tai Pak Beach at Discovery Bay.
I liked getting the minibus with Edith. It was green and white, and jostled us violently. Even Edith dropped her sunglasses when it turned a corner. One evening there was no button and we had to shout at the driver to stop. Edith practised the Cantonese with me – bus-ee jau m’goi – then made me call it out and laughed when I got the tones wrong.
It was hot on the beach. Three old ladies sat near us in fold-out deckchairs with a parasol propped in the middle. I asked Edith what they were talking about, and she said they were speaking Hakka so she couldn’t make much out. Edith’s Singaporean grandmother was a native Hakka speaker and maintained you didn’t need any other language in Hong Kong. There were some unfortunates who didn’t speak it – indeed, a great many and perhaps more of them than one would like – but Mrs Tan doubted it would improve their lot one whit if she dragged herself down to their level.
‘Basically,’ Edith said, ‘my gran is the Hakka version of a British expat.’
I knew I’d later repackage that comment as my own and send it to Julian. Keeping up with both of them took work, but their similarities lent the enterprise a certain economy of scale. Not only could I regift my own observations to both of them, they enjoyed each other’s without realising who I’d stolen them from.
Edith asked me to teach her Irish. When she repeated the phrases, she didn’t say them with her usual accent but with a Sinophone intonation. She said maybe it didn’t matter how many languages you learned. You always brought the flavour of your first.
