Exciting Times(19)

‘Charlie. She was hot.’

‘I know. I found her profile.’

‘She went both ways,’ he said. ‘Should that interest you. Anyway, I’m busy.’

‘And I’m bored.’

After he came home and fucked me, I went to my own room and revisited the daydream about dining with his mother, mispronouncing words to gag her from saying them. I’d go around all the sinks and turn on the taps, wait, then watch her inch her feet up.





15

February

‘Anything strange?’ said Mam on the phone. She really said it, ‘antin strange’, but if Brits spelled Glosster as Gloucester then I supposed Mam deserved similar leeway.

She told me George had a new girlfriend. ‘The top of her hair is brown, but the bottom is orange. What do you call it?’

‘Ombre.’

‘Amber,’ she repeated diligently. ‘And what about the fella?’

‘What fella?’

‘Tom was telling me. The banker fella.’

‘He’s well,’ I said. ‘It’s not serious.’

‘And he’d work for a bank now?’

I said that yes, bankers tended to.

‘Good man. They say you become the people you’re surrounded with.’

‘So if a white collar hasn’t physically sprouted out from my neck by this time next year, the relationship will be a failure.’

‘You say such funny things,’ Mam said. This was





different to her saying she thought I was funny. ‘When are we meeting the banker fella?’

‘Let’s not get ahead of ourselves,’ I said. ‘Hey, Mam, did I tell you he works in a bank?’

‘I’ll let you go now. Tell the banker I said hi.’

‘Bye, Mam,’ I said. As she said goodbye back, I interrupted: ‘Wait, Mam, I can’t believe I forgot to say: he’s a banker.’

She hung up.

*

It was 2 February, Julian’s birthday. He went for drinks with friends. He asked me along but said I would probably not enjoy it, which I decided meant he didn’t really want me there. He smelled of smoke when he got back. I wondered if the cheap Chinese cigarettes were really to encourage him to quit smoking, or me to quit him – and why neither strategy was working. I made him tea and gave him a Ferragamo tie with a tiger cub pattern. It was a suitable choice in that he was a man and men wore ties, and also, I supposed, in that it referenced something he’d said in bed. Still I worried. As with the wallet, he might take it to mean I thought him buying me things was about intimacy.

‘I thought you should have something,’ I said. My wording elided that I was the one giving him it.

‘You shouldn’t spend your money on me,’ he said.

The phrase ‘thank you’ was available to most English speakers, including the toddlers I taught. He’d heard it quite often enough from me to be familiar with its usage.

Later I asked if there were things he aimed to achieve before turning thirty.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve just got Vice-President and the next rung is Managing Director, which they’re not going to make me. And I’m not here for good, so there’s no point in buying an apartment. Couldn’t afford it anyway.’

I asked if there was anything else. He said no. He didn’t see it as a landmark.

That was fine. I did not probe further on whether he e.g. saw us still together then, or e.g. had ever loved anyone. Really it was amusing that we were having sex. He was attractive and confident, whereas I was willing to centre my emotional life around someone who treated me like a favoured armrest – and yet there we were, fucking. Funny, the choices we made. There were people in the world that Julian did not want to have sex with. This meant he valued me above them in at least one capacity, a hilarious miscalculation given that I was in fact the worst human on any conceivable axis. And actually, it was even funnier that we were just fucking than it would have been if he’d had feelings for me. I was pathetic enough to seem emotionally endearing, but you would have to be genuinely depraved to look at me and literally just think: I want to exchange fluids with her. So I didn’t want him to love me. I was having too much fun for that.

*

Benny was not taken with my post-Christmas surliness. He liked to remind me that the demand for ‘standard English’ came from the parents themselves. Sometimes when he paid me, I’d comment on the learning materials. The illustrations were of white children braving weather conditions that would never occur near the equator. We branded a mistake any usage that might hint a Hongkonger was from Hong Kong.

As I said things like that, Benny tapped his phone. He hit each letter slowly, considering himself the sort of person who was above pretending to type while someone was talking, but quite happy to stretch out the composition of a real message until they’d finished. Sometimes his baseball cap said Nike, and sometimes Disneyland Paris.

Finally, Benny pronounced. ‘Is it racist,’ he said, ‘when my Connemara company sells seaweed to the Irish?’

The question did not wholly illuminate matters for me.

‘The parents are paying,’ Benny said. He started typing again.

On my lunch break I messaged Julian. Unusually, he sent a long reply. He said Benny possibly meant – big ‘possibly’, but possibly – that it was white-saviourish to think Hongkongers didn’t know their own interests in a world where, like it or not, children got ahead with ‘standard’ English. Parents couldn’t change society, so they aimed for its inequalities to harm someone else’s child rather than their own. Julian’s mother had made that choice when she sent him to public school, and mine had when she’d told me not to say ‘amn’t’.