Exciting Times(17)

*

The skies were thick and bronchial. Joan had said to cover my head when it rained or I’d get acid on my scalp. She claimed the bad chemicals blew in from China, but you smelled them coming out of lorries and idling buses on the street. I downloaded an app to check the air quality each morning. A happy face meant it was safe, a blank one that the health risks were moderate, and an angry one to stay inside. After seven consecutive angry faces, I deleted the app. I did not need that negativity in my life.

Julian asked if I missed home. I told him not all Irish people were parochial.

‘It’s normal to miss your family,’ he said.

I said that was why I didn’t.

The trouble with my body was that I had to carry it around with me. In train stations I picked around other feet like brambles. Rats, too, lived low. Julian said it was good we were on a high floor because cockroaches couldn’t reach it. But you had to go down every day to be a part of things.

From his flat halfway up the mountain I saw high-rises like saw-edged computer parts, noxious trees – virescent, not green – and squares levelled for tennis courts. I looked out my window and told myself: it is fair enough to find it stressful that my entire life revolves around someone who does not care very much about me. This is a permissible experience.

*

Despite hating my job and complaining about it often, I still hadn’t quit. Julian told me to relax. I told him I’d pay back all the rent I owed and he said not to bother. I’d be better off saving for a deposit on a mortgage. He kept meaning to do that himself.

‘Now this is just my personal take,’ I said, ‘but maybe it would help if you accepted money when people offer it.’

‘If you want to pay me rent, go ahead.’

Between sentences he typed on his laptop. Talking to me demanded so little of him that he’d get bored if he gave it his full attention. I knew I loathed him – not least because I was fully aware that if he told me to jump off a bridge, I’d say: Golden Gate or Sydney Harbour? – but I now wondered if I mightn’t also hate him.

‘Is something wrong, Ava?’

‘Do you want me to depend on you?’ I said. ‘So you can have more power in the relationship.’

‘I don’t know that anyone has power in this relationship. Either of us could leave it very easily, so it can’t be that much of a vice-grip, can it?’

‘But I can’t leave easily. I’d need to find somewhere to stay.’

‘I suppose,’ he said.

I couldn’t tell if he was bluffing about not caring if I left. The fact that he could plausibly bluff was already bad enough. Who would believe me if I said it made no difference whether I lived in his apartment or a dingy Airbnb? Yes, I’d say, I am perfectly apathetic as to whether I spend most of my income renting a tiny room with people who hate me. These things are quite subjective. I could have soft towels and five-star dinners, or I could check my windowsill every morning to see how many cockroaches died there in the night. You see it’s one or the other and there’s no accounting for taste.

I told him he wasn’t always nice to me. He asked for even one example. I said that sort of reaction was exactly what I meant.

‘You’re not St Francis of Assisi yourself,’ he said.

‘Would you look at me when you say things like that.’

‘I don’t want to fight.’

‘It wouldn’t be a fight if you’d look at me.’

‘Forget it, Ava.’

‘You can’t just say that and then expect me not to say anything back.’

‘I said you are not St Francis of Assisi. You manage, somehow, to find that claim controversial.’

‘Why are you so patronising?’

‘Some people lend themselves to it.’

I went to his bookcase and touched the cracks in the spines. They evidenced where he’d lingered, corroborated no doubt by fingerprints. I wondered where in the flat I’d shed DNA. Not on his laptop, because that was important, but onto everything in the kitchen, and his clothes from ironing them and his bedroom carpet from kneeling on it. Men. My cells were on the books, too, but only from tidying. I’d never read the authors he admired. He’d laugh if I tried. Probably he laughed in his head every time I said anything.

‘Would you mind sulking somewhere else?’ Julian said. ‘I have a presentation tomorrow.’

‘It’s my flat, too.’

‘I suppose my credit cards are yours as well. Since your definition of owning something is that you use it and don’t pay me back.’

‘I’ll pay you rent. I want to pay you rent.’

‘I don’t know what you want,’ he said.

We didn’t speak for six days. I stayed in my room to avoid him, which meant I couldn’t eat and had to drink water from my bathroom sink. My paycheque was late. I’d put money away from staying in the flat for free but had thought of it as an emergency fund, which made using it feel scary. Still I wasted it with mechanical rigour, buying coffees back to back and noting to the cent how much they’d cost. This was apparently the future I’d been saving for.

I also went to malls, as if to say: he thinks he’s so clever, buying me things, when in fact I can also buy me things. In Topshop I tried on sickly synthetics and thought: these clothes are both hideous and necessary. It reminded me of shoplifting as a teenager. I’d fill my pockets, go home, lay out the movables on the bed and think: why did I risk a criminal record for purple lipstick? It does nothing for my complexion.