Exciting Times(18)

Mam texted asking how I was. I typed: i am very unhappy. Autofill offered three different negative emojis. I tapped one and it replaced the word ‘unhappy’ with a sad face. Then I deleted the draft and sent one saying I was grand.

On the seventh day, I apologised to Julian. He said it was fine.





14

I looked on flatshare sites. In late January I went to viewings. One room, for half my salary, was the lounge. Not a separate one: the room you entered when you opened the front door. The flatmates explained that the rent was so low because they understood how the arrangement might compromise my privacy – though they noted there was a curtain to pull around the bed at night. They demonstrated how to draw it. I felt the mechanics were not the main objection, but gamely tried. Two hours later, they texted saying the previous girl they’d shown around had just taken the room – so sorry, but the market moves fast.

I thought of Emily and Freya, and my stale mouth in the morning when I couldn’t brush my teeth. The smell in my old room, too: the damp laundry, and something portentous from the cracks in the walls. Sometimes in bed, hiding from my flatmates, I’d stared at the fault lines till they started to spread. I saw the walls collapse and heard the screams.

A few days after I apologised, when it was very late and very dark, Julian said he’d been lonely before I came to live with him. He didn’t always feel like drinking, and there wasn’t much else his friends enjoyed. And you couldn’t have proper conversations in groups. He liked having someone at home.

‘Shame it’s you,’ he added. I supposed he had to.

*

My eight-year-olds had mastered prepositions and were now on question words. We recited them like bullets: who what when where why. Most English people said ‘what’ as ‘wot’, though authors only spelled it ‘wot’ when the characters were poor. Sometimes I said ‘wot’, but with my parents I pronounced it as they did: ‘hwot’. This had been correct when Churchill said it but was hokey now Cameron did not. Even the Queen had stopped haitching it, at the behest, no doubt, of some mewling PR consultant. Irish English kept things after Brits dropped them. ‘Tings’ was incorrect, you needed to breathe and say ‘things’, but if you breathed for ‘what’ then that was quaint. If the Irish didn’t aspirate and the English did then they were right, but if we did and the English didn’t then they were still right. The English taught us English to teach us they were right.

I was teaching my students the same about white people. If I said things one way and their live-in Filipino nanny said them another, they were meant to defer to me. Francie Suen’s mother thanked me once for my hour a week. I smiled, accepted her praise, and never asked whether she should also credit the helper who spoke English with Francie every day. From job adverts on expat forums I estimated she made a quarter of what I did. One forum post asked what children should call their helpers. The parent knew ‘auntie’ was common but worried that if they called the helper that and later fired them, the kid would think other family members could also be dismissed.

On days off it was illegal for helpers to stay in the house. This was so the government knew they were really getting a holiday. They didn’t have the money to go other places indoors, so they sat on cardboard boxes in parks and on walkways.

The parents took sixteen hours a day from their helpers, then complained if I started lessons three minutes late. When Joan accused me of stealing time, I thought: yes, and so do bosses.

*

People on Instagram posted quotes about relationships. They paired them with landscapes and tourist snaps. In white block capitals, next to a mountain goat: CHASE DREAMS, NOT PEOPLE. Over the Kremlin: I WANT A BOY WHO KISSES ME LIKE I’M OXYGEN.

Since the fight, I took stock when Julian did things that made me happy. He laughed at my jokes and I noted: he recognises that I am capable of irony. Irrationally, because I was not special, I felt he was the only person who would ever understand me.

‘You’re so pale,’ he said.

‘Sorry.’

‘It’s a compliment.’

‘Sorry.’

I wondered if anyone had liked me in Dublin. Mam, Tom, arguably Dad. In college people had liked that I could roll cigarettes – despite not smoking – and that I didn’t interrupt them when they talked about Infinite Jest. Admittedly that was because I hadn’t read it, but nor had they. I’d thought about reading it but felt my doing so would upset everyone a great deal. The men there said they liked girls who didn’t wear make-up in the tone in which less enlightened men said they liked girls who did, and when you actually wore none they asked if you’d been ill. They lamented not having ‘permission to write’. You had to nod, like: oh, to be permitted.

At least Julian was honest. He’d never experienced anything but permission. I hated him for it, but all the same I was glad he knew he had it. Most men with permission never realised.

When he was late home I texted: i’m bored can we fuck. He’d ring me to say he was busy. He liked ringing and saying he was busy. ‘I’m busy,’ he said. ‘And you have a low boredom threshold.’

‘That objection doesn’t betray much sexual confidence on your part.’

‘I thought you said sexual confidence in men was repulsive.’

‘No, you said your anarchist ex at Oxford thought that and you suspect I agree.’