Exciting Times(20)

He often surprised me by coming out with statements like that. Something I admired in him was that he could calmly note where he benefited from unfairness – not self-indulgently like I often did, but factually.

I wondered if he’d always been that way. From my social media due diligence, I’d discovered that at Oxford he’d written poetry. There was a picture of him rowing for Balliol, which made me certain he wouldn’t have gone near me aged twenty and had only started liking weird girls as a consequence of his boring job. For a while I luxuriated in thinking they’d all been normal but me, I was the only strange person who’d ever fascinated him so, and I alone stroked every contour of his mind. Then I found his girlfriend from final year, saw her doing spoken word at an open mic with her black cropped turtleneck and taut stomach complete of fucking course with navel piercing, and hated everything.

I deliberated whether he saw renouncing verse and boats as a success or a failure, but knew if I asked, he’d say some Julian thing about how he didn’t waste time having thoughts on his life.

*

‘Am I interesting?’ I said one Saturday night. We’d just come back from seeing his friends.

‘Potentially,’ he said. ‘You’re a deadbeat. Some people find that interesting.’

‘Do you?’

‘No.’

‘Then why do you like me?’

‘Who said I liked you?’

Scatty raindrops tapped against the window like bird’s feet. The dark shaded him: he could be someone else and I’d never know, which meant I could be anyone, too. And he always did take my side. Or approved when I took his, which was nearly as good. I wondered if I could kiss him and be sarcastic about it, but felt the humour wouldn’t travel.

‘Has knowing me made things different for you?’ I said.

‘Different how?’

‘Do you feel different on the inside?’

‘I suppose it’s a comfort having you.’

‘How soon did you realise you were into me?’ I said.

‘Aesthetically, right away,’ he said. ‘If that’s what you’re asking.’

‘I couldn’t tell if you liked me for ages.’

‘How about you?’

‘When did I realise?’ I said. ‘Right away. Aesthetically.’

I sensed potential here for similar shots to our backhand over dreamy Seb. With a few words we could each come to think that the person beside us had jumped every time their phone buzzed, and that we ourselves had eventually got around to letting them have us. Neither of us lost anything by letting the other have that in their head. We both got a great deal out of having it in ours. It was almost collaboration, which was close enough to partnership. But I was tired.

‘The first time I saw you,’ I said, ‘I thought you’d know where to get everything cheaper.’

‘That’s a terrible impression of me.’

‘I know. This was back when I thought bankers were good with money.’

‘Savage. Fair.’

‘But I didn’t put much thought in. When I met you.’

‘I can’t say it was an epoch in my life, either. I was curious. I realised the curiosity would probably survive the encounter, so then I asked you to lunch.’

I wanted him to say more.

Because I loved him – potentially. That, or I wanted to be him, or liked being someone to whom he assigned tasks. I’d had no livable spaces in Hong Kong until I met him, so possibly I just loved thinking in silence and breathing clean air – if that was a tenable distinction when I did so in his apartment.

‘Julian,’ I said, ‘what are we?’

‘Fucked if I know.’

‘Fucked anyway.’

‘Your zest for life is infectious.’

‘Just as well you’re immune.’

We were doing what he and Miles did – acting out scenes. He did that with everyone: extemporised until he’d decided his dynamic with them, then held onto it for dear life.

‘Do you love me?’ I said.

What he said next didn’t hurt me. It was exactly what I’d been looking for to murder the outgrowth.

‘I like you a great deal,’ he said. ‘Now go to sleep.’





16

I saw now that I had a persistent and stupid fantasy where Julian said he loved me. He wouldn’t expect to hear it back. He’d just need to say it, and would be fully contented once he had. This was unfair to ask of him, did not cohere with what I claimed to want from him, and was not something he was at all likely to do. Anyway, he’d said it had ended with Kat in part because she was pushy about things like ‘I love you’. I, however, was reasonable.

I’d noticed Julian used the passive with an unidentified subject whenever he talked about their break-up – ‘It ended with Kat’ – which was poor form stylistically.

*

The week after Julian’s birthday, one of his Oxford friends threw a soirée at their split-level open-plan eco-friendly flat. The more compound adjectives describing an apartment, the higher the rent. Julian put me on the big leather couch and left to mingle without me. He didn’t consciously plan this series of actions, but I hardly knew anyone, so that was the effect.

His dreamy lawyer friend Seb came and sat with me. Seb’s tie was undone and still on his neck, as though he’d fought to leave a meeting but they’d need him back any minute now. His hair was ruffled, giving the troublingly simultaneous impression that he’d also just had sex. While he talked, I remembered the ‘dreamy Seb’ exchange and had to remind myself Seb wasn’t in on the joke.