Exciting Times(27)

I wanted to tell her I’d known that about Hong Kong’s government, then remembered I only knew it because Julian had mentioned it the first time we met Miles.

I tried to see myself as she did when I dressed myself or bought things. The day before a cinema trip, I spent 400 Hong Kong dollars on a Jo Malone candle because I could imagine lighting it with her in the flat. For her, I’d burn a candle worth four hours’ pay to me, i.e. one-sixth of a day, thinking: the other five—sixths are there, too, if you want them. It would glow purple against her face and her cheekbones would ridge like sand ripples. She’d say I had good taste, and I’d say: no, you. We’d both be right because no one with discernment could spend that much time with another who lacked it. We both had it or neither did. And I didn’t care which.

This made me realise I didn’t actually care about refinement and just wanted Edith to like me. At first that made me happy, since earning her approval seemed more attainable than developing style. Then I remembered that Edith was not like most people.

I noticed more and more how much attention she paid to details. We went back again for lattes in Sheung Wan and she flinched when I sipped mine before she had taken a photo. Then she reconsidered the still-life before her, and said: ‘Actually, the lipstick stain is perfect.’ I hadn’t noticed I’d left one. Another day we got croissants and she said something in Cantonese, then translated – ‘Camera eats first’ – as I made to pick mine up. That made me smile. I liked when she was unapologetically earnest about things, even if it was the angle of a pastry. She said Instagram made her look at everything more closely. Whenever she felt sad, she had a wall of happy memories to look back on.

‘I know it’s all very silly,’ she said, ‘but it’s fun.’

I tried to imagine Julian admitting he enjoyed something frivolous, and couldn’t.

Besides, she wouldn’t have said that the first month we met. I felt I was making progress, though I wasn’t sure what towards. I wished I could watch her be friends with other women. If I knew how she normally went about it, it would be easier to know if we were different.

We laughed a lot in the cinema, especially at the films about sad straight boys who needed fixing. Women in movies taught men how to feel things. They took men who felt nothing and made them feel something. You could never tell what those women felt themselves, besides: I want to help this man. I’d never met anyone like that in real life.

I’d never met anyone like Edith either, and was grateful not to have many other people competing with her for my time. My Hong Kong existence was neat. It had space for her.

Besides, there was room in me. I felt superior to people like Scott and Madison, but really the three of us were hollow. They filled themselves with a little bit of everyone’s approval, whereas I was more discerning. When I met someone I liked, I wanted all of them, and fast.

*

I started going to supermarkets a lot, mostly Wellcome and 7-Eleven trips. The walls were papered in adverts. The greying tiles bore boot-marks and hairs set in mud. When I went at rush hour the cashier queues stretched down the aisles, and I’d take my place at the end and take things off shelves as I advanced. If you shuffled past your noodles or cereal or whatever, you couldn’t go back or you’d lose your place in the line. I liked pretending this was the highest-risk transaction I participated in and that my life was well rooted aside from this one thing about the supermarket.

When Julian was around I’d committed to nutritionally sound shopping baskets. Now it was his second month away, I bought Pocky sticks and matcha KitKats. The packets listed ingredients I couldn’t pronounce. I puzzled them out by breaking down the syllables like I made students do with names of dinosaurs.

On the weekends that I didn’t see Edith or Miles, the convenience-store staff were the only people I spoke to. I made myself nice for them. I put on lipstick. At the counter an old lady with cropped hair turned to a colleague and said: gweimui ah. In Cantonese, white people were ghosts. In Hokkien, Edith had told me over coffee, we were redheads, and in Mandarin ‘old friends’.

‘The latter,’ she’d said, ‘is certainly one reading of Sino-Western relations.’

In Russia, Edith had said, you could get Putin’s face on anything. Vodka, bread, you name it. In Hong Kong, the same was true of Hello Kitty. This was, Edith speculated, in part because Hello Kitty came from Japan and so betokened resistance to mainland China. A vending machine in her apartment lobby stocked Hello Kitty toy pianos and candy dispensers. There were also Hello Kitty tampons, though she was less certain what they stood for. I’d noticed she’d started talking more often about periods, also exfoliation and core-tightening exercises. I knew these were normal things for friends to discuss, but the thought came to me unbidden: maybe Edith wants me to notice her body.

One Sunday in mid-April, Victoria bumped into me leaving 7-Eleven and asked how I stayed thin if that was what I ate. ‘I strive for balance,’ I said, which meant I sometimes had a Hello Kitty doughnut for breakfast and then felt so sick I ate nothing else all day. ‘Balance,’ Victoria said, ‘is key.’ I agreed.

The following week she saw me there again. I recalled she lived nearby. We were both drunk. She asked what was wrong with me. I said nothing was wrong with me, that something was wrong with her, and also, while I was here and with reference to her previous query, that I was thin because I had money. The next time we saw each other, we pretended this exchange had not occurred.