Exciting Times(32)

Later I started another Potemkin message to Julian.

i think i’m flirting with edith. she seems like someone who flirts with everyone, and so doesn’t really flirt with anyone. i don’t know what’s happening. i’ve known her two months and it feels like she’s the only person in my life who has ever mattered or existed.

I highlighted the text and pressed the back key, then navigated out and back into my drafts three times to make sure the deletion had saved. In the now-empty box I wrote: i wish i knew how i felt about everything, then erased that too.

*

Victoria invited me out for tea again, alluding to things Julian had ‘written to her about’. ‘Writing’ just meant ‘messaging’, but made them sound in deeper cahoots. I replied that I was busy with work. I watched myself type this thing that would obviously make Victoria hate me even more than she already did, then kept watching as I pressed send.

Mam also said it had been a while. When I called, she said I seemed distracted. Julian messaged, then again a few days later saying – cockily, I thought – that it wasn’t like me to take so long to reply. Even Tom asked if things were well. It was so long since we’d last spoken that I forgot to upbraid him for telling Mam about Julian.

Whenever I was waiting for Edith’s replies, I touched my collarbone. Then she’d message.

The first Sunday of May, she and I went to a sushi place in Queensway. We met at the station and walked past money-changers and double-decker trams on Hennessy Road. The Chinese pharmacies smelled of scallops and woody ginseng. Edith saw me looking at the display crates of brown shrivelled remedies, and said Mrs Zhang had detailed thoughts on what worked and what didn’t if I ever needed help.

‘Birds’ nests for coughs,’ she said.

I tried to jaywalk at a crossing, but she pulled me back.

The sushi restaurant had a conveyor belt. I didn’t eat fish, so my options were limited. Edith saw a cucumber roll before I did, jerked forward to grab it, then smiled in triumph at what a good provider she was. She rated me as an intermediate chopstick user. I wasn’t embarrassing myself, but nor would I be winning prizes. When I couldn’t follow her demonstration, she reached over and arranged the sticks in my hand. Afterwards I was scared to put them down in case I couldn’t reposition them at the correct angle.

‘How long do you think you’ll stay in Hong Kong?’ Edith said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Maybe till I want to get a mortgage.’

‘If you don’t mind my saying,’ she said, ‘your flat is quite nice. Maybe you could move somewhere cheaper.’

‘To be honest, Julian pays most of the rent.’

‘Really?’ she said.

There was always surprise in Edith’s voice. That was her charm. But it made it harder to tell when a statement had genuinely nonplussed her. She held her chin at just that angle, and widened her eyes just so, to take in words, any words. This face was one of my favourites of Edith’s, but its ubiquity muddled matters when I’d told her something difficult and didn’t know what to say next.

‘It’s complicated,’ I said.

‘This is none of my business,’ she said, ‘but –’

‘Are you wondering –’

‘Yes.’

‘No. But I don’t mind you asking.’

I wondered if I was being dishonest to avoid hurting my, quote, chances with her, end-quote. But I didn’t think that was it. I was unscrupulous enough to lie so I could have sex with someone, but while I’d do other things just as bad, it wasn’t the sort of bad thing I’d do. Unless, of course, I was telling myself that so I’d feel I was being duly self-critical, while remaining fuzzy on which of my behaviours ever did count as the sort of bad thing I’d do.

Also, I still didn’t know Edith’s sexuality. I thought about inventing an ex-girlfriend to see her reaction, but this felt beyond the pale. There was no limit to what I would trawl through online, and clearly none on the information I would hide from Edith, but I wouldn’t make up a person. That was my moral purlieu. Coincidentally, bringing up a girlfriend would take courage, whereas cyberstalking was easy.

There was the question of Julian, but he’d laughed at me back in February when I asked if he minded me flirting with men. Women, I assumed, were fair game. Even if they weren’t, I knew I’d keep seeing Edith anyway.





25

I tried to keep seeing Miles, not least so I would have some way to account to Julian how I was spending my time. It also distracted me from thinking about Edith, which was nice because then when I remembered her again, it felt better than the last time.

Miles told me about how Mao heeded the failed Taiping rebellion in the mid-nineteenth century. Like him, the Taipings imported a rebellious foreign doctrine. Unlike him, they never made it resonate with locals and so were crushed by the gentry’s grassroots militia.

‘Another reason Marxist academia shouldn’t be a universe unto itself,’ said Miles. It was the fourth time I’d gone to see him since Julian’s departure. ‘And between us,’ he said, ‘it makes me question the purpose of what I do. Who reads academics’ books?’

‘I have to admit I don’t,’ I said – absentmindedly, but he laughed and said he could always count on me for brutal honesty.