Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

  ‘First of all,’ Edith said, ‘it’s disingenuous to take “Please don’t live with some guy you used to fuck” as “Please cut off everyone in your life”.’

  Her voice faltered for the first time. I was proud of myself for that.

  ‘That’s the practical outcome of what you’re asking,’ I said.

  ‘Let me finish. That’s the first thing.’ She raised one finger, as though guiding us through an agenda. The twinning of this corporate gesture with her raised voice terrified me. ‘The second thing is, you’re so full of shit about not having anyone.’ A second finger, to show we were on bullet point number two. ‘Your co-workers invite you out all the time and you never go. Weren’t your old flatmates texting asking to catch up? And Victoria said you never reply to her messages.’

  ‘Victoria’s not the best person to bring into this.’

  ‘I – whatever, I don’t want to know.’

  ‘Hey, Edith,’ I said, ‘just by the way, whatever happened to your many opinions on the nexus between monogamy and patriarchy?’

  Edith took a napkin and brushed crumbs into it. ‘I think my opinions on lying are more relevant here,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If you really think there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with fucking multiple people – and you’re right, there isn’t – then why did you lie to me?’

  ‘You can’t drag that up.’

  ‘I’m sorry if my feelings on being lied to are spilling over where you don’t want them,’ said Edith, ‘but like my opinions on monogamy and patriarchy, they are many.’ She had given up enumerating the agenda with her hands now.

  ‘You said you’d forgiven me,’ I said.

  Edith swept the table again with another napkin, though there was now nothing for it to catch. She considered it, crumpled and empty, and then placed it with care in her empty coffee cup.

  I looked around the shop. It was crowded with people who did not share my emotional state. The books were menacing. I hated them – the chalky smell, the blackboard feel.

  Eventually Edith said: ‘When on earth did I say I’d forgiven you for lying?’

  I said: ‘You said you wanted to meet him, and now you’ve met.’

  ‘Apologies if I’m being legalistic, but I don’t think that means I forgive you.’

  ‘So you’re going to hold it against me forever.’

  ‘No, Ava,’ she said, ‘I’m going to hold it against you until you do anything to show I’m one-tenth as important to you as you are to me.’

  ‘You have so much,’ I said. ‘You’ve got a big family and most of them are here. They all love you. Even Mrs Zhang loves you. You earn twice, three times what I do at your job, and as far as I know they let you piss. You’ve got friends.’

  ‘We can return, if you want, to the fact that you push away anyone who wants to be friends with you.’

  ‘I didn’t push you away.’

  ‘Didn’t you?’ said Edith. ‘I was always the one asking to hang out. I’d think: this is pathetic, and I’d wait to see if you’d ask me, and then – still thinking, mind you, that it was pathetic – I’d give up and ask. And you know so much more about me than I do about you. The truth is, you like Julian because he enables this perception you have of yourself as a detached person. Plenty of people are willing to offer you intimacy. That terrifies you. You prefer feeling like no one will ever love you.’

  ‘My friendship with Julian is none of your business.’

  ‘You make me feel like I’m not good enough for you.’

  ‘Edith,’ I said, ‘all you ever do is make me feel like I’m not good enough for you.’

  She picked up her small tidy bag with the book zipped inside, stacked plate on plate, and then put both our cups on the top one.

  ‘Come and stay with my family,’ she said. ‘Come tonight.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘There’s a free bedroom. Mrs Zhang likes you. We need a fourth person for mah-jong. Pack your things and come.’

  ‘Is that a threat?’

  ‘No,’ Edith said. ‘I’m breaking up with you if you don’t, but for that to count as a threat, it would have to be something you’re afraid of.’

  I said: ‘I’m breaking up with you anyway.’

  Edith laughed, took the plates to the counter, then walked out.

  44

  November

  At the Caine Road Starbucks I typed sluggish fake apologies. I did it straight into the message app, at first because I thought this would force me to send it since Edith had seen me typing anyway. This didn’t work, but I carried on because – with my signature mental clarity – I thought switching to notes would be bad luck. The first draft said: i’m sorry. Later versions elaborated. My ‘breaking up with you’ had come out procedurally, I said. But Edith thought procedural memory only decreed how you said the thing, not its contents, so that wouldn’t help.

  The green-and-brown coffee-shop decor made me think of dying trees. I never saved what I’d written, but kept the template in my head for the next version. The basic format lodged itself so firmly in my mind through repetition that I almost began to feel my behaviour made sense. Then I looked at the discarded blueberry muffin I shared my table with and remembered how things actually stood.

  The earlier drafts were all versions of:

  i don’t know why i said that. i don’t want to break up with you. but can you understand why i’m scared to move out? julian’s apartment is my home. so i panicked & said something stupid i didn’t mean. i couldn’t move when you left. i sat there and breathed in the dead books. breathed is two syllables when i say it and only one when you do. that could be important but maybe it isn’t.

  I spent weeks doing this. October turned to November, and still I had no girlfriend. I wondered if I could get a poem out of that.

  Because I’d typed the first draft apology in the Caine Road Starbucks, I felt it would be bad luck to switch. The baristas came to recognise me, bringing the total number of Hong Kong coffee shops that knew me to three. I didn’t care. If they wanted to look at my greasy hair and pen-stained jumpers and decide that this person was me, they were welcome to. I stopped wearing lipstick and put on whichever clothes I found on the floor each morning, which in practise probably meant I wore the same outfit every day.

  when we were together i felt too much sometimes and i’d go and talk to him to calm down. he doesn’t make me as happy or as sad as you do. that means i care less about him, but it also makes it hard to leave him entirely. he’s like the gulf stream. did you learn about the gulf stream? it keeps ireland temperate.

  The first time Julian asked what was wrong, I told him I was on my period. He was so medically illiterate on the female body that I stretched this alibi to cover the initial two weeks of the break-up. Then I said things were difficult at home.

  ‘In Ireland?’ he said.

  I said: ‘Where else would I mean?’

  There was no one I could talk to. Tom wouldn’t get it. Tony or Cyril might, but I couldn’t reach out to them when I only knew them through Edith. We’d only hung out a few times and they’d tried to like me for Edith’s sake. And she’d have told them by now. They hated me. I was a bad person who did not know how to love.

  For the first time in ages, I went to LKF for drinks with the teachers at my centre. From the rooftop, the lines of the city spread like sheet music. George Sand had loved Chopin and he died on her – ‘Careless,’ Edith had huffed. We’d listened to his mazurkas on my laptop with the lights off. The blue screen was a lighthouse standing sentry. Later, Edith said there was an app to make the colours warm at night. It helped you sleep. I tried it but disliked the orange tint.

  The teachers made me act happy. ‘Come dance,’ said Madison from Texas.

  I came/danced. A man asked my name. ‘Kitty,’ I said. He said
it was a stripper name. I said: ‘Why did you say that?’ He said it was a joke. I asked where the humour lay and he explained it was funny because I was not really a stripper. I claimed to feel sick, went to the toilets, and sat in a cubicle typing: i’m sorry, deleting it, typing, deleting.

  * * *

  ‘Who drew Mona Lisa?’ asked one of the girls.

  ‘Leonardo da Vinci,’ I said. No matter how dire everything else was, I could get immersed enough in their world that I was pleased with myself for knowing things like that. It wasn’t just famous people, either. I’d provide the verb for what you did with a knife (‘cut’) and I’d feel I’d been handed one of the good brains. This was why people became teachers, I thought. It wasn’t to help people. It was to be the cleverest person in the room, always, or at least to have people sufficiently confident you’d be that they’d call it your job and pay you for doing it. Really, it was more impressive that my eight-year-olds knew Mona Lisa existed than it was that I knew who’d created her.

  They told me they’d read on the news that Leonardo da Vinci belonged to a – ‘cult’, I supplied – and had left – ‘symbols’, I said – in the picture. I asked whether they meant he was in the Illuminati, tracing a triangle in the air with my index finger. They said maybe. Mona Lisa had small numbers and letters painted into her eyes. They were invisible from far away, but you could see them if you used a – ‘magnifying glass’.

  ‘Miss, did you go to Paris?’ said one of the boys. He meant ‘Have you been?’, but I only misunderstood for a beat. I told him I ‘had’ and hoped he’d deduce from this that he should have used the perfective aspect. The kids drew the Eiffel Tower on the whiteboard.

  ‘Finish,’ Phillip Goh said. I reminded him to say a ‘t’ at the end: ‘Finisht’, or better yet, ‘I’m finisht.’ I ticked his answers mechanically. If all students were as good as Phillip, I thought, then I could soon be made redundant by AI. In a way, it helped my job security to ensure they kept making a certain number of mistakes. I wrote ‘Super! :)’ at the bottom of the page, conscious that a computer could do this also.

  Someone else said: ‘Miss, do you have a husband?’

  * * *

  The Edith drafts progressed from straightforward grovelling to something wiry and confessional.

  i can’t believe you think i’m detached. i have more feelings than literally the central nervous system. but that’s not what you said, is it? you said i want to *think* i’m detached. look, that’s true. people hated me in school. at college i didn’t give them the opportunity. i felt like all of me was a secret. i know now it was just that i liked girls, but i thought i had to hide everything. i thought if i let anyone in, they’d find out what was broken about me. and then not only would they know, i’d know too.

  I still didn’t send the messages.

  * * *

  In mid-November Julian and I went to St John’s Cathedral with Miles. We walked up Garden Road towards the bells. The outside was plain as churches went. ‘RV’, Victoria Regina, was carved on the tower. Inside it reminded me of the Catholic one in Dublin: cream walls, dark wood. Miles said one of the pews still bore the Royal Family crest. It had been reserved for their visits before the handover. I tried to imagine a life so constricted that everywhere you visited, it was pre-ordained where you would park your arse. While it did the constitution a world of good to get one’s weekly fill of the blessed poor, one couldn’t risk sitting next to one. The latterly inheriting meek were well and good, but best kept at a distance where one couldn’t smell them.

  Later, Julian took me for lunch at Sorabol on Percival Street. He told me how to pronounce ‘jaengban guksu’ and that the Korean writing system was a cross between an alphabet and a syllabary. I wanted him to come out faster and more fervently with his facts, was aware that this was tantamount to wishing he were someone else entirely, and knew exactly who that person was.

  He lit a cigarette on the way out. ‘I take it you don’t want to talk’, he said, ‘about whatever it is.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘But thanks.’

  * * *

  Edith hadn’t opened my Instagram stories since our break-up a month ago. I knew that didn’t necessarily mean she wasn’t thinking about me, because I wasn’t watching hers and I thought about her constantly, but she was busy and well liked and I wasn’t. I discovered a trick where I could tap the story next to Edith’s, then swipe halfway to the right and see some of what she’d posted without Instagram registering that I’d viewed it. Once I accidentally flicked all the way over. I nearly dropped my phone. The content itself did not warrant this anxiety: it was a picture of one of her chai lattes in Sheung Wan. I screenshotted it anyway because if Edith was going to see I’d been stalking her then I wanted something to keep from the experience.

  I wished someone would hurt me and Edith in a way that connected us, like robbing both our life savings or posting the pictures we’d sent each other online. Then we’d hate the person who’d defrauded or revenge porned us or whatever and we’d like each other again without my having to be brave. I didn’t really want that to happen, obviously. I just felt anything would be easier than apologising. I’d been terrified of Edith when she threatened to end it. I couldn’t say sorry now or I’d feel that fear again.

  i broke up with you because you threatened to break up with me. i felt your power and wanted to feel my own. i did. it worked. i hate it.

  45

  I’d survived my first Hong Kong winter without Edith. The second was proving challenging. Julian’s bankerish perception of what counted as a trek had rubbed off on me so much that I now spent my life in four places: the apartment, the TEFL school, Starbucks, 7-Eleven – all on the Island line. In the morning I melded with the commuting rank-file, walk-elevator-walk-train-walk, and looked for facts on my phone. I discovered Colombia also had outdoor escalators, that 7-Eleven was in seventeen countries, and that Starbucks had dipped into Hong Kong’s shark-fin trade.

  Teaching kept me busy. Sometimes I made it until lunch before starting another draft for Edith.

  i liked women first. men came later. when i learned what love meant, it was liking girls. but when i learned what liking girls meant, it was an accusation. i think that’s why it’s hard for me to love. my first memories of love are bound up with my first memories of being hated. i know you’ve been through it too & it’s not an excuse. but i wish i could talk to you about it.

  In the staffroom I said I’d given out to Jessica Leung for bullying. The teachers told me ‘give out’ wasn’t standard English. Steve from Vancouver said it sounded like a euphemism. I said Irish English was many things, but a bowdlerising force it was not. ‘Riding’ was about the most literal way one could describe sex, for boring straight people anyway. In actual Irish, I said, you’d be ag bualadh craiceann: beating skin. In Dublin the shift was just the shift, but elsewhere it could mean considerably more than that. Madison from Texas made to say something. I interrupted her. I felt Edith had taught me much about stoppering morons, and that the morons were lucky we’d broken up before I’d honed this skill to the point of never letting them say anything.

  I’d never used to talk about Ireland with my co-workers, or about sex, or anything interesting. I hadn’t tried at all. I knew I was mediating my new efforts through Edith’s imagined approval, though in fact she hated me and was right to.

  i act blasé about my family but i have no idea how they’d take it. i thought moving to hong kong would help, but it’s given me more to hide. tom is fine, and i think george & my parents voted yes for same-sex marriage, but so did the girls in 6th year who made up i’d shagged my best friend and she wouldn’t speak to me bc they’d said that. do you know how much it hurt seeing their ‘YES EQUALITY 2015’ profilers? the worst bit is they don’t remember. they call themselves ~allies~ now. and maybe they are. but fuck.

  My twelve-year-olds were on quantifier nouns: a tube of
, a stack of, a stick of. Some words only went with some nouns, and there was, I gaily informed them, no logic to it whatsoever. They nodded. They didn’t expect any. This was, after all, English.

  They did their exercises. As they worked, I thought about Edith. She had once explained that Cantonese counted nearly everything with a unit word. She reminded me that this sometimes happened in English: you could have a piece of news, but not a loaf of news or a bottle of news, and you said ‘two pairs of pants’ rather than ‘two pants’. Then she told me to imagine most nouns were subject to such constrictions. ‘That’s Cantonese,’ she’d said. ‘That’s how it works in Cantonese.’

  She’d had me repeat phrases after her. Yat daahp bouji: a pile of newspapers. Go bat chin: a sum of money. Li peht laih: this patch of soil. I asked when she anticipated I would need to discuss this or any other patch of soil in the near future, and she said I never did anything practical with my life anyway, so there was no need to focus on quote-unquote handy phrases.

  Another draft:

  that thing you said about julian letting me think i’m detached is true. that’s us. but there’s a friction too. you said it’s normal to feel something when there’s history, but i don’t think it’s me still fancying him. there’s a level of that, but nothing major. it’s more that we can’t talk to most people but can to each other. i’m 99% not sending you these bc i’m afraid to, but the other 1% feels like you want me to cut him out & i don’t think i need to. ‘friction’ is too sexy for what i mean. i’ll choose a better word in the next draft. it’s more . . . we’re similar people.

  That day back when we were speaking, I’d told Edith we did weird things with enumeration in Irish – that ‘two’ could be ‘dhá’ or ‘dó’ or ‘a dó’ or ‘beirt’ – but that I wasn’t sure if the grammar related to quantity classifiers or something else altogether. They didn’t explain it in school. Edith said no one had ever explained Cantonese quantifiers either, but she understood them intuitively. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well done, Miss Native Speaker. Congrats on not being robbed of your national language.’ She said that if I wanted to play colonial-oppression Olympics then by all means. I said I didn’t want to play colonial-oppression Olympics. ‘That’s wise,’ she said, ‘because white people generally lose.’