Exciting Times(2)

When Benny came at the end of July to pay me, I said I was thinking of leaving.

‘Why?’ he said. ‘You’ve been here a month.’

‘I need to go to the toilet between classes. I’ll get a UTI if I don’t.’

‘You’re not quitting over that.’

He was right. Aside from anything else, I hadn’t quit over their racist recruitment policy, so it would have been weird to leave just because I couldn’t piss whenever I wanted.

I knew I’d do anything for money. Throughout college back in Ireland, I’d kept a savings account that I charmingly termed ‘abortion fund’. It had €1,500 in it by the end. I knew some women who saved with their friends, and they all helped whoever was unlucky. But I didn’t trust anyone. I got the money together by waitressing, then kept adding to it after I had enough for a procedure in England. I liked watching the balance go up. The richer I got, the harder it would be for anyone to force me to do anything.

Just before leaving for Hong Kong, I sat my final exams. While they were handing out the papers, I counted how many hours I’d waited tables. Weeks of my life were in that savings account. For as long as I lived in Ireland, and for as long as abortion was illegal there, I’d have to keep my dead time locked up.

That evening I used most of the money to book a flight to Hong Kong and a room for the first month, and started applying for teaching jobs. I left Dublin three weeks later.

The week I started, they told me the common features of Hong Kong English and said to correct the children when they used them. ‘I go already’ to mean ‘I went’, that was wrong, though I understood it fine after the first few days. ‘Lah’ for emphasis – no lah, sorry lah – wasn’t English. I saw no difference between that and Irish people putting ‘sure’ in random places, it served a similar function sure, but that wasn’t English either. English was British.





3

August

Julian wasn’t bothered coming out to meet me after work, so I started going straight to his apartment in Mid-Levels at about 9 p.m. I told him I found this awkward and degrading. Actually I liked taking the outdoor escalator up. I got on the covered walkway at Queen’s Road and went uphill over hawker stalls on Stanley Street, then signs – Game & Fun, Happy Massage, King Tailor – and high-rises and enormous windows on Wellington Street. Then came fishy air wafting up from Central Street Market and the old police station stacked with thick white bricks like pencil erasers. When I reached Julian’s building, I got a visitor card from the lobby and went up to the fiftieth floor.

Inside, his apartment looked like a showroom, the sort that had been unconvincingly scattered with items anyone could have owned. His most obviously personal possession was a large grey MacBook Pro.

We got takeaway, I did the washing up, and then he’d pour us wine and we’d talk in the sitting room. The mantelpiece was bare besides an empty silver picture frame and cream candles that had never been lit. By the window was a long brown corner sofa. I’d take my shoes off and lie on it with my feet on the armrest, crossing one leg over the other and alternating them during gaps in the conversation.

He smoked cheap cigarettes – to encourage himself to quit, he said.

We’d first met in the smoking area of a bar in Lan Kwai Fong, where he’d either noticed me looking at him, or started looking at me first until I looked back. He was good at engineering ambiguities. I was bad at avoiding them. He’d said everything very slowly that night, so I’d assumed he was drunk – but he still did it sober, so I gathered he was rich.

A month into our acquaintance, he asked: ‘Do you meet all your friends in bars?’

‘I don’t have any friends,’ I said. He laughed.

In some moods he told me about markets. In others he’d fire questions at me, only attending to my answers to the extent that they helped him think of follow-up enquiries. I’d said it before, but he wanted to hear it all again – the two brothers, the brown terraced house in one of Dublin’s drearier suburbs, that I’d taken a year out after school to save up for college. That after 2008 I shared a room with my brother Tom so we could rent the other one out to a student. That none of this made us poor and was in fact pretty much what had happened to Ireland as a whole, due in no small part to the actions of banks like his.

Julian had gone to Eton and was an only child. These were the two least surprising facts anyone had ever told me about themselves.

He wanted to know if my accent was posh where I came from. I’d never met an English person who didn’t wonder that. Most wouldn’t ask outright – and he didn’t, he just asked what ‘kind’ of Dublin accent I had – but they found some way to convey their curiosity. I told him it was a normal Dublin accent. He asked what that meant. I didn’t know enough about British accents to make a comparison.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘how does a posh Dublin accent sound?’

I tried to do one and he said it sounded American.

He’d ask what I proposed to do with myself when the time came to get a real job. He was almost paternally adamant that I shouldn’t waste my degree on lowly employers, and even paid convincing lip service to not thinking less of me for not having gone to Oxford. But when it came to which jobs he did consider good enough for me, he was vague. Law was glorified clerking. Consulting was flying to the middle of nowhere to piss around with PowerPoint. Accountancy was boring and didn’t pay well. And banking, in some nebulous way, wouldn’t suit me.