Exciting Times(22)

‘What subject?’

‘The subject of girls from small houses.’

Silence.

Ralph said: ‘What do they say?’

Seb said: ‘About girls from small houses?’

‘Yeah.’

Seb paused for timing.

Then: ‘Small house, cavernous throat.’

Ralph laughed. The sax stewed magisterially. Julian said nothing.

Then Seb inclined his head as if moving things along. ‘I do see the appeal,’ he said, ‘– given you’re not actually with her.’

Glasses clinked downstairs. The drums banged like gavels.

Julian said nothing.

Julian changed the subject.





17

In the middle of February, Julian said he’d be in London for a few months. I wanted to ask what ‘a few’ meant, but decided not to give him the satisfaction.

We were at Central Pier. I wore a trench coat with the belt tied in a bow. He debriefed me on logistics with his hand on my waist, and I thought: gift-wrapped.

Then I looked out on the water, thinking: stocks float, but I wonder if bankers do. It was the first time I’d explicitly imagined his death and I wondered if he’d envisaged mine or if he was as withholding on this point as he was about I love you. I didn’t want him to fantasise about killing me – unless I did – but him finding me in a lake could be really quite affecting. Not all women idly contemplated whether their partners wanted to murder them and whether the prospect appealed, and if they did it was society that was sick, not them.

‘Shall we head?’ he said.

I smiled and thanked him for letting me stay in his absence. When we got home, I went to my room and cried.

The next day at work, I taught my eleven-year-olds how to write letters of complaint. No contractions, I said. They were excited to start airing grievances.

‘We’ll stay in touch, of course,’ he’d said.

Letters of complaint said what you wanted done and the deadline for doing it. Eleven-year-olds would never write them. They were nice people. But they had to in exams. We didn’t test whether they could ask their boss for enough money to survive – but if the barista forgot their macchiato, they needed top-notch English ready to fire.

At home that evening, I told Julian about this. I asked why we taught kids to see themselves as customers when in fact they would spend a greater share of their living hours producing things than buying them.

‘Ask Miles,’ he said. ‘You guys can touch base while I’m away.’

Real people, I said, did not ‘touch base’. They talked.

‘Do that, then,’ he said. ‘Talk.’

My banker friend Julian said more things then. I thought of the water.





      PART II

   Edith





18

March

Edith Zhang Mei Ling – English name Edith, Chinese name Mei Ling, family name Zhang – was a Hong Kong local, but she’d gone to boarding school in England, then to Cambridge. She was twenty-two like me, and now worked at Victoria’s law firm. Her accent was churchy, high-up, with all the cathedral drops of English intonation. Button, water, Tuesday – anything with two syllables zipped up then down like a Gothic steeple. Three-syllable words spread out like the spokes on an umbrella: ‘attaches’ became a-tach-iss. She said ‘completely’ a lot and usually dropped the ‘t’ in the middle. Besides school and uni, she hadn’t seen much of the UK.

‘You should see Dublin,’ I said.

I saw her begin to say Dublin wasn’t in the UK, remember I knew too, and wonder why I’d said that. I wondered, too. She’d be a sight walking down my road: perfect posture, knee-high slouched boots, glossy tong-curled hair, small black handbag on a silver chain. Dad and George would regard her like a viscountess’s cougar they’d been paid to petsit without knowing whether it had teeth.

Her manicure was perfect, though I noted with interest that she kept her nails short.

It was the beginning of March. We queued for a play at the Academy for Performing Arts, a tall concrete building on Gloucester Road. Someone at Edith’s firm had spare tickets. Edith asked Victoria, who couldn’t make it and so passed the invite on to me. It took bullet-biting to accept it, but I googled Edith, and her profile picture – drinking coffee in Ubud, hair Gallically bunned – convinced me to go. Her Instagram had highlights pinned from European trips. From this I speculated that she’d picked up her hair knots and her morning cappuccino abroad, though this was probably too crass to be something she’d really do. She was too sophisticated for me to reverse-engineer how she’d got there.

Besides, Julian had been gone two weeks now, and I wanted to feel like a person again.

‘How are you liking Hong Kong?’ Edith said, as though I’d moved last week.

‘It’s great,’ I said.

‘You don’t seem like most TEFL teachers.’

That shouldn’t have made me happy, but it did.

She was a few inches shorter than me, but side by side our waists were level, which meant she had proportionally longer legs. It felt relaxing to compare our bodies. It wasn’t the fretful ranked surveyal of my teens, so much as a hazy curiosity.

She had fun-sized cartons of soya milk in her bag and offered me one while she talked on the phone. ‘Hou ah, hou ah, mou man tai,’ she said. ‘M goi sai.’