Exciting Times(28)

I could say whatever I wanted now.

*

Edith was still always the one who suggested meeting up. I didn’t dare. Her time, like Julian’s, was important. I’d pretend I couldn’t do the first day she proposed, but she’d say it was her only one free. If she posted no evidence of her hectic life, I thought: she said she was busy. When she did post I thought: not too busy for Instagram.

The other teachers invited me to TST. First we went to a speakeasy bar that was authentically local. Scott from Arkansas said he knew because another American had told him. There was no website or contact number, but Scott got us there by finding the 7-Eleven on Kimberley Road and looking for the back door with a pig’s head peeking out.

I went to the toilet. The girl in the next cubicle was crying or coming – I wasn’t sure. Edith always posted stories on Friday nights. Sure enough, from 9 p.m. there was a pile of folders in the office captioned ‘My life is fun and interesting’, followed an hour later by an overhead of cocktails with: ‘Liquor cures all workloads’. I considered the possibility that the girl was both crying and coming, and felt her night was going better than mine regardless.

Too late I remembered that I’d have to post something now or Edith would see I’d viewed her story and think I was at home on my phone. I went back out and roped Briony from Leeds into a selfie. She’d taken too much MDMA to question this behaviour. Twenty minutes later, I checked the list and saw Edith had seen it.

Soon enough, the rainbow circle appeared around Edith’s name to show she’d put another picture up. I didn’t check it. This felt like a minor victory.

*

The following Monday, we got coffee in Sheung Wan and Edith said she was working on an IPO – initial public offering, she clarified. I knew that from Julian but appreciated the thought. The partner helming it, William Brent, had been in Hong Kong since before the handover. He said men were scared of women now.

‘I’m not sure,’ Edith said, ‘if he’s scared he’ll grope us or scared we’ll tell HR.’

She felt it had been easy at Cambridge to claim we should take unfeminist spaces and reform them. Harder in real life, she found. You couldn’t quite announce to William Brent that the ‘space’ of his law firm was presently unfeminist, not least because the first step to changing it would be expunging William Brent.

Edith was calm about things she couldn’t change. Her firm was full of horrible men and she had to be nice to them. You did in every job, and at least hers paid well.

I was sure there were William Brents at Julian’s bank, and that he took about as much action as he had when Seb commented on the dimensions of my throat. Undoubtedly he told himself he’d do something once he had the power – and when he got there, he’d wonder where all the women had gone.

I still hadn’t told Edith about Julian. Probably I was putting it off because I knew she wouldn’t like the sound of him. I wanted to say she didn’t know him like I did. That was a textbook claim women made about men we’d regret – the men or the claim, depending on how you parsed it – but it was undeniably true when Edith and Julian had never met.

‘You really don’t like men,’ I said.

‘You’re right. I don’t.’

This, too, was ripe for parsing.

I told Edith about a summer in college when a few of us had gone to someone’s holiday home in West Cork. I slept on the couch, two of the lads took a mattress on the floor, and in the dark one of them came and lay on top of me – calmly, as if instructed to. I whispered I wasn’t sure, which meant get off but I’m scared what you’ll do if I say that, and he ignored me. His breath tanged of alcohol. I thought it was Colm but it might have been Ferdia. I couldn’t see. Probably I could have deduced Ferdia or Colm, but I didn’t, because then I’d know, and then for all subsequent interactions with either Colm and Ferdia, which I’d have to keep having because no one would believe me or they’d say yeah but he’s his own problems, I’d remember what he did, know his own memory of events was that we’d got drunk and hooked up, and be certain, too, that our friends would ‘not take sides’, i.e. treat me like someone who might be lying about rape. I told myself what they’d say – grey area, I just don’t think he’d do that – and soon became convinced I was actually making it up, then felt like a sick amoral person for falsely accusing someone of something that I hadn’t accused him of and that he had in fact done.

‘Fuck,’ said Edith.

‘Yeah.’

You could tell who’d been through it and who hadn’t because when you told someone who hadn’t, they were hungry for details. They’d say it was so they could experience their moral outrage with a loftier precision. They were liars and we hated them. Edith and I said as much as we wanted to. When we were done, we changed the subject.

One day I realised we’d stopped seeing plays. I asked why, and Edith said she didn’t really like theatre. ‘I wanted you to think I did,’ she said, and then went back to her phone. This surprised me on a few levels. I hadn’t known she cared about making me think she was cultured. I hadn’t realised I came across as someone who set store by that kind of thing. And I hadn’t noticed our relationship changing such that she could now be honest with me – if this latest confession was what she really felt, and not some new illusion of candour.