Exciting Times(3)

I liked when he rolled up his shirtsleeves. He had big square wrists and jutting elbows. Sometimes I worried he could tell how often I thought about his arms. He was always calling me a freak for other, much less strange things, so I couldn’t own up to it.

The first time I stayed in the guest room was in mid-August when the tropical storm Dianmu hit. After that, Julian always offered to put me up when midnight approached. Depending on my energy, I accepted or got the green minibus home – the covered escalator only went one direction at a time: down for morning rush hour or up for the rest of the day.

That was the shape of it, but it didn’t have a name, apart from hanging out, catching up, or popping in for a chat, which was, to be fair, the content of what we were doing. He was so stretched for time that I found it semi-plausible he just preferred to meet in his apartment for convenience.

I asked whether bankers had time for relationships.

‘Usually not at the junior levels,’ he said. ‘A lot of them just pay for it.’

The way he said ‘it’ made me uneasy, but there wasn’t any point in taking things up with Banker Julian. He was too self-assured to notice when I criticised him. He registered that I’d said something, then continued a parallel conversation.

When he paid for my takeaway, or when he took me to a restaurant, and when in return I spent time with him, I wondered if he saw himself as paying for a milder ‘it’. I liked the idea – my company being worth money. No one else accorded it that value. We sat in high-ceilinged rooms and he said the Hang Seng was down and the Shenzhen Composite was up and the Shanghai Composite was flat. It wasn’t like normal friendships where I worried if the other person still liked me. He liked hearing himself think aloud and I reasoned that I was profiting from it, that you never knew when you’d need facts so it was best to collect as many as you could.

One night in his living room, a few glasses into the bottle, I told him he was attractive. I said it exactly like that – ‘I find you attractive’ – to avoid seeming earnest.

‘You’re quite attractive, too,’ he said.

‘I guess that’s why we get along.’

‘Could be.’

We’d known each other about two months, and in total I’d spent perhaps thirty hours in his company – little more than a day. But I was in the habit of thinking he was a habit.

‘Thanks for your time,’ he’d say as I left. I wasn’t sure if he put it formally to give himself an ironic get-out clause like I did, or if he was just unaware how stiff he sounded. He’d add: ‘I’ll text you.’ He seemed to think only a man could initiate a conversation. Worse still, it meant I couldn’t send him one first. It would look like I’d despaired of his getting in contact and was only doing it myself as a last resort.

*

I explained to my nine-year-olds that there were two ways to say the ‘th’ sound. The one at the start of ‘think’ and the end of ‘tooth’ was the voiceless dental fricative, and the one at the start of ‘that’, ‘these’ and ‘those’ was the voiced dental fricative. As a Dubliner, I had gone twenty-two years without knowingly pronouncing either phoneme. If anyone had thought there was something wrong with my English, they’d kept it to themselves. Now I had to practise fricatives, voiced and un-, so the kids could copy me.

Calvin Jong – a show-off, but a useful one – volunteered to try, and couldn’t do it.

‘Hold your tongue still and breathe,’ I said. That was what the teacher’s guide told me to say, but I tried it myself and produced a sound unlike anything I had ever heard from an English speaker, or indeed from any other vertebrate in the animal kingdom. I decided I’d ask Julian to show me how to do it later.

*

Even before I met Julian, I didn’t often see my flatmates. We exchanged little more than hellos and goodnights.

There were three of us. I’d booked the room on Airbnb, planning to be there until I could save up a deposit for something more permanent, but the others lived there long-term. Emily was the oldest and the most proactive. At twenty-nine, she’d been in Hong Kong a few years. Freya was around my age and her chief hobby was complaining about her job. She changed into her pyjamas the minute she got in the door and had four sets of house slippers: bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, other.

Emily always had comments when I came in. ‘Could you close the fridge more quietly?’ was this particular evening’s criticism.

‘Sorry,’ I said. I failed to see how you could make noise shutting a refrigerator, but Emily had an aesthetic sensibility.

Them getting ready woke me up – spoons clanging on bowls, taps protesting on being asked to produce water – but I couldn’t brush my teeth until the bathroom was free. I lay there and ran my tongue over the night’s accumulated plaque. We often got cockroaches. I swore I heard them in the dark, though I knew scientifically this couldn’t be true. I went without eating rather than face talking to them in the kitchen. They weren’t that bad. I just never knew what to say to them.

So staying over with Julian became ever more appealing.





4

September

After about two months, I was spending a few nights a week at his flat. The spare room – mine now, I supposed – had a soft twill houndstooth throw and pictures of London on the wall. One day at work I printed out an image of Dublin and asked if I could put it in the empty frame in the living room. ‘If you like,’ he said. He told me I was welcome to stay over while he was travelling for work, but I didn’t. The temptation to go poking around his bedroom would have been overwhelming. The inside was still a mystery to me, but I imagined everything folded and stored in optimised locations for speedy access.