Exciting Times(29)
Julian, I thought, can tell when people like him. He and Edith had many skills in common. I wondered if this was one of them.
*
I started drafting a message where I told Julian about Edith.
i’ve made a new friend. i don’t know why i’m only telling you now. i’ve only known her a few weeks but i’m thinking about her more and more. incidentally, the search term ‘how to flirt with women’ returns very different results to ‘how to tell a woman is flirting with you’. in both cases the researcher is assumed to be male. i’m guessing you don’t mind when things assume you’re male, which might explain your love of literature.
i’ve never had sex with a woman anyway. i kissed a few in college. their lips are softer, if you didn’t know.
i think about sleeping with other people and then i feel guilty, which is weird bc i think if anything you’d be amused if i didn’t have sex with someone for your sake. like oh you shouldn’t have it’s too much. i was scared when you left but i don’t think anything has changed. you still put more time and energy into showing you don’t love me than anyone has ever put into showing me they do.
sometimes i love you and sometimes i think it would be best if a plane flew into your office and you were on the plane or in the building.
I decided, on balance, that this message would not have the propitiatory effect intended.
22
My Primary Four kids were writing haikus: five syllables, then seven, then five. The previous term they’d done four-line poems, and Ming Chuen Lai expressed a certain suspicion that this meant the curriculum was becoming easier, not harder. We argued over certain words. They held, for instance, that ‘film’ had two syllables: ‘fill-um’. I wanted to say most of Dublin agreed, but their parents weren’t paying for Dublin English.
Katie Cheung, nine, disliked the haiku format. Together we brainstormed for her to write a poem about a cat. For the first line, she said: ‘The big hairy cat liked to drink lots and lots of milk.’
I offered five-syllable versions: ‘My cat likes its milk’, ‘The cat likes drinking’, ‘Milk’s my cat’s favourite’. (Whether ‘favourite’ had two syllables or three was a box Pandora herself would have left well enough alone at that particular juncture.)
Katie Cheung wasn’t assuaged. Katie Cheung wanted it all in the first line. I asked what she’d put in the second if she’d said everything in the first, and she said she’d think of more.
I told her she could write a story, but to at least use paragraphs. She acceded to this with great reluctance. There still wouldn’t be room, she said.
I’d been a pliable child and I wondered if it was obvious, even then, that I would never be an artist. If a teacher had told me to put in linebreaks, I’d have sliced up my words like ham in order to please them.
*
Mam told me Dublin was hot for April. ‘Next the Arctic will melt,’ she said. ‘And we’ll be living in bunkers.’ I said I hoped there’d be intermediary stages.
She said Dad said hi. I said she meant Dad told her to say hi. ‘Dad says hi’ implied he was saying it himself. Mam told me there was no need to be difficult, and that George said hi, too. Then she had news. My cousin Tadhg’s landlady had evicted him, purportedly to move in a family member, but the room had gone on Daft a week later with a 100-euro hike in the rent. I’d forgotten about Tadhg. Another cousin had had a baby. I told Mam I didn’t recognise the name, and she repeated: Sinéad, as though this alone would acquaint me with her. ‘You’re far away,’ she said, which felt unfair inasmuch as I hadn’t known Sinéad before I’d left either.
‘Mam,’ I said, ‘did you think about giving us Irish names?’
She said no, that people who did that sent their kids to tin whistle classes.
‘And Rachel Mulvey’s back,’ she said. I didn’t know Rachel Mulvey either. Mam specified: the Mulveys down the road, in a tone conveying: it is now obvious to me that my daughter knows nothing. ‘Back from New York,’ Mam said. ‘They all come back sooner or later.’ She added that the house felt empty without me and Tom. ‘It’s a waste giving money to a landlord. Tom said eight hundred’s a good deal. Eight hundred a month. For one room, Ava.’
‘It’s wrong,’ I said, ‘when people earn money for owning houses they don’t use. I think we should take their houses off them.’
‘Daydreaming again,’ Mam said.
Ringing home made me miss discussing politics openly. I couldn’t at work, not least because Joan and Benny were both landlords on the side, but more fundamentally because bosses did not like to employ people who thought they should not exist. Julian listened but was incapable of going: that’s an interesting thought. He’d swipe at anything dangled before him. With Edith and Miles I could be as left-wing as I wanted, but I worried about how to sound clever.
I said: ‘The state should seize all the hotels in Dublin and turn them into social housing.’
‘Ah now, Ava.’
‘And there should be a one hundred per cent inheritance tax. And universal basic income.’
‘Ah now.’
‘And eventually communism.’
‘Ah now.’
I enjoyed conversations where I wasn’t attempting to persuade anyone, where I just said precisely what I thought. I got tired of making myself acceptable.