Exciting Times(15)

Then he said he’d head to the airport. He had meetings in Bangkok. I asked how anyone could expect him to go, and he said if restaurant staff worked Christmas Eve then surely he could do Boxing Day. ‘St Stephen’s Day,’ I said, and he said, no, Boxing Day. I said he was wrong. He said I was wrong. I nearly asked him to stay, but could feel the demand grow in me to never leave this bed and I won’t either, which was not a programme he seemed apt to endorse, so I didn’t.





12

January 2017

The next week Julian took a cab from the airport to meet me at Admiralty Station. He wore a suit. I had a black dress on, so we looked like a particularly drab pair of twins. We walked to the LockCha Tea House, passing fountains and manicured hedges in Hong Kong Park. I asked how things were in Thailand. My voice made me sound like someone who often had occasion to wonder.

‘Trundling along,’ he said. ‘A lot of people are still in mourning for the king.’

We stood outside the door while he finished his cigarette. I said I wanted to quit my job.

‘Good,’ he said. ‘They aren’t paying you enough.’

‘It’s not about money.’ I went to crack my knuckles, then remembered that was bad for you. ‘I’ll start paying rent.’

‘Don’t worry about that, but you need a plan.’

He stubbed out the cigarette, like: here’s mine, for instance.

Inside there was a checklist menu where you ticked what you wanted. Julian encharged me with the pencil. I felt this implied it was his by default. We chose huai shan and wolfberry seed soup, yellow cucumber salad, beancurd dumplings and sticky rice wrapped in lotus leaves. Our green tea arrived, then dim sum.

‘I still don’t know what I want to do,’ I said. ‘I mean in the long term.’

‘What about teaching? If you got qualified, it mightn’t be so bad at a real school.’

‘It takes too much out of me,’ I said.

You were supposed to find it endearing that children thought only of themselves. Especially if you were a woman, it was meant to make you want one of your own. It would do parents a world of good if I told them their child actually suffered from a form of self-absorption that some adults outgrew and others didn’t. They could note the risk factors: only child, male only child, privately educated male only child whose parents, at odds with their stated politics, gave that child everything until he was of an age to buy it all himself, fellatio potentially included depending on how I was feeling about my own motives. But none of this seemed quite the rub for term reports.

‘My dream job is proofreading,’ I told Julian. ‘Do banks need proofreaders?’

‘The analysts do it.’

‘Maybe I could be one.’

‘It’s not all they do. They’re flunkies. Half of it is stuff it’s quicker to do myself, but you can’t do grunt work once you’re more senior. It looks out of place.’

‘There’s the famous efficiency of capitalism.’

‘That comment was distinctly Milesian. Eat your soup.’

Julian often reminded me to eat. It made him feel better about liking that I was thin.

We navigated the dim sum. It was meant to be eaten with everything shared in the centre, but some of it wasn’t to Julian’s liking, so we sectioned off dishes for individual consumption. He said he didn’t mind that there was no meat, but they ought to have something with protein in its place. I pointed out the beancurd and he said he meant something that wasn’t made of soy.

When we’d finished eating, Julian said: ‘I remember the first time I saw you. You were walking so carefully in your heels. I was wondering what this shy person was doing having so much hair.’

‘That’s a good line. Did you prepare it in advance?’

‘There were several drafts. I struck out a few commas on the flight back.’

‘I don’t have that much hair,’ I said. ‘Not compared to Victoria. And most people don’t think I’m shy anymore.’

‘That’s true. Seb thinks you’re, quote, vivacious.’

‘I feel like “vivacious” is one of those words where you’re not literally calling someone sexy, but everyone knows you are. Which one is Seb again?’

‘Scruffy hair. Litigation.’

‘Dreamy Seb. I did wonder about that friend request.’

We were happy then. Julian had complimented both my outer sparkle and the interior layer only clever people saw. We knew I was complex when others didn’t. This made us better, or at any rate different, which because of our contempt for them still made us better. The cherry: we were attractive – me because dreamy Seb liked me and Julian because why would someone dreamy Seb liked be with someone less dreamy than dreamy Seb – while Julian’s abetment assured us we were conducting an ultimately shallow emotional transaction in which ‘dreamy’ featured. Throughout Julian spoke to me the way an aloof person would want to be addressed, which told me I’d convinced him, if not myself, that I was one. And I returned the favour.

We didn’t always volley well, but when we did it was magic.

‘By the way,’ I said, ‘Victoria’s into you.’

‘Too much hair.’

As with any backhand game, when pros played pros it looked easy.