Exciting Times(16)

I knew where we stood. Good people supposedly wound up with money, and I wanted to be good, so Julian’s zeroes felt summative. This was different to thinking he was or we were. I ate my soup.

On the walk back he offered me a cigarette. I said I had enough problems without adopting his just for company. ‘Company for your other problems or company for me in my nicotine dependence?’ he said, and I said: ‘Get fucked,’ smiling to remind him this was Irish for warmth. I felt protective when he smoked. This made no sense when he was jeopardising my lifespan, but I supposed he was endangering his own even more.

Sometimes I thought I’d outlive him by decades. I’d explain him then. Men wore suits at the time, I’d say. They earned more than women. In Ireland you got five years for rape, fourteen for aborting your rapist’s foetus, and a lifetime in the laundries for the fact of being raped, and there was a laundry still open when you were born. None of this was directly the fault of the men you fucked but it influenced how you went about fucking them, especially in Dublin where you might need to ask them for money. No one could start having sex with that calculation in mind and not have it affect them wherever they went, though not all women responded quite so unsubtly as by fucking bankers.

There were other reasons you liked him, some actually quite pure, e.g. his dry humour and his shared assessment that you were both a great deal smarter than anyone else you knew. All couples thought things like that about themselves, but you hoped for their sake that the rest of your relationship was nothing they saw in their own, because you didn’t want to identify with most of it and you were one half of that actual couple. Mathematically if you didn’t want to be ‘most’ of a couple, as in over 50 per cent of an entity of two, then that did not commend your practice of self-love. You were twisted individuals successfully mated, like Noah’s Ark for sociopaths. Alternatively, you were well-meaning albeit imperfect humans with uncommonly scarce emotional resources at their disposal. Spending money and being good at men came easier than real generosity.

There was more to your performative detachment than just the Eighth, but it stayed with you after you left Ireland. You were afraid when men came in you, though you were unsure if that was all Irish women or just you, and sometimes you’d say do you want to finish in my mouth because after all this you still felt you owed him somewhere. When you came yourself, you feared against all biology that it might be what sentenced you. You knew if you told him any of this he’d understand just enough to break his heart, but seeing how little he could comprehend before it broke him would break you, too. You were ironical with him, also with yourself. It was wild.





13

A few days into January, work started again. Madison from Texas greeted me by launching into a description of her new-year new-me fitness regimen. ‘I’m going to be me, but worse,’ I said.

‘I think I’m getting the hang of you,’ she said, then laughed theatrically. But I hadn’t been joking.

I was quieter and more openly begrudging now, and it was becoming clearer than ever that the other teachers found me odd. I’d encountered this opinion so many times, in so many places, that I’d come to find it comforting. It doesn’t matter if a fact is good or bad, I thought. You don’t mind once everyone agrees. Their consensus makes it true, and truth feels safe.

The main thing they considered weird was how I spent my lunch breaks. I’d leave, taking care not to steal minutes, and come back just on time. The staffroom wall was thin. I heard Scott from Arkansas say, where’s she going? I alternated between Starbucks and Pacific Coffee in the hope that the baristas would never come to recognise me. None of this seemed outlandish. But my colleagues’ muttering made me feel that probably they were right and the whole thing did show I was in some way faulty.

Victoria also found me odd. On weekends we cast around for topics of shared interest while the men discussed things like England beating Wales. (Julian described the result as ‘pivotal; cardinal, even’, to a round of nods, and later told me he believed, but wasn’t sure, that the sport had been rugby.) When she was drunk, we went to the bathroom. She liked looking in the mirror. She had a lot of hair. Posh girls had more than I did, but often enough it was from someone else’s head.

‘I’d fuck Julian,’ she said one Saturday night.

I said: ‘Okay.’

I wondered if her scalp got itchy with strangers’ hair glued to it.

‘Do you think he’d fuck me?’ she said.

‘I don’t know. Maybe.’

‘You must have some take on it.’

I held my palms open as though cradling an opinion I couldn’t see but the weight of which I felt. ‘I told you,’ I said, ‘I don’t know.’

‘He’s never tried to fuck me,’ Victoria said. ‘I don’t know if he would.’

‘I’m not the best person to ask.’

‘You’re fucking him. That must give you some indication of who else he’d fuck.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘it really doesn’t.’

She told me it was sad Julian and I weren’t a couple. Kat seemed a difficult person to get over. When he was ready, he’d find someone. I was kind to bridge the gap.

I wondered if I pulled her hair, would the bits that were hers stay in place and would only the extensions from other heads come out, or would it all break off if I tugged hard enough.