Exciting Times(33)

That wasn’t true. I often lied to spare others’ feelings or to make them like me. Most of my directness was by accident. But I got more social capital from pretending it was on purpose, not least because it made people assume my compliments had to be sincere. Julian seemed to trust me. Smart people often did dumb things.

‘Would you like tea?’ Miles said.

I thought it was too hot for that but said yes, then offered to make it myself. Miles declined twice and accepted the third time. The kitchenette had a window and poor soundproofing, so I heard and saw men in hats doing something with drills outside.

Miles said he was coming to prefer my company to Julian’s. I knew that wasn’t true but thanked him for saying it. I wondered if it was obvious how much I craved his son’s approval, or if he thought everyone wanted Julian to like them. For some time, I’d been dying to ask him who’d come to Hong Kong first: father or son? I frequently pictured a conversation where one of them was already installed there, and then the other rang from England to announce they’d be moving over, too. They’d both remain calm on the surface, but the exchange would have far-reaching emotional implications. Julian would say ‘right’ a lot.

I couldn’t think of Julian for too long without cycling back to Edith. Most persons, places and things led me her way, but Julian especially triggered it. I sat there in Miles’s apartment and thought: Edith, and smiled.

*

‘Drink faster, Irish,’ Edith said.

‘You know it’s a serious social problem in Ireland?’

‘Yeah, okay. Sorry. Drink moderately.’

We’d picked up Ladies’ Night champagne at a rooftop bar in LKF on a Friday in mid-May. The premise of the evening was that bars gave us free drinks so we’d stay there for men to sleaze on. Edith said this made girl-on-girl dating quite affordable for the savvy consumer. I couldn’t remember if most women made jokes like Edith’s, or how their faces looked when they did make them.

We were getting mullered before Cyril Kwok’s twenty-third. Edith asked if ‘mullered’ meant what she thought it did. Yes, I said. Irish English made sense. That was how one distinguished it from British English.

‘Anyway,’ I said, ‘why do we need to get mullered?’

‘You’ll see,’ Edith said.

‘Ar meisce is the Irish Irish.’

‘Let’s get ar meisce,’ she said, as if deciding to keep it.

The Ladies’ Night champagne was a shoddy payment for talking to the men. Anything would be. They slapped the tables whenever anyone said anything, which seemed, bizarrely, to encourage them all to say more. You would need to drink a huge amount not to deliberately step on their foot, and the quality of the alcohol did not lend itself to this.

We’d claimed wicker chairs in the corner. Edith drank three flutes of champagne in ten minutes. I asked if she really needed that much sedation for Cyril Kwok’s.

‘He Instagrams his friends’ car keys,’ Edith said. ‘They pile their keys on the coffee table, and he posts a picture and tags them.’

‘As in, he tags them as their keys?’ I said.

Edith rolled her eyes, like: no, he tags them as the post-fact malaise.

It was my turn to top up our drinks. ‘And one for my friend,’ I said to the barman, enunciating sternly to tell him he could take from that just what he wanted.

Back at the rooftop, Edith was answering emails on her phone. I stood at a distance for some time, as though waiting for something to change. When I came and put the flutes on the table, I said – feeling I could if I was doing something else while saying it – that I wondered if women ever did use Ladies’ Night for dates.

‘It’s certainly a strategy,’ she said.

No one could be good at Edith.

She hailed a taxi and swapped sentences with the driver in Cantonese. In the cab I slipped my heels off and felt the carpet through my tights.

‘Taxis always smell like new car,’ I said.

‘They use a spray,’ Edith said.

‘You know everything.’

‘You’re ar meisce.’

She stroked a ladder on my tights and said I should be more careful. I wondered if this was a simple extension of her domain over everything, or if I’d somehow indicated she was allowed. I’d said I was hers from how I looked at her – not from how I’d chosen to look at her, but from how I couldn’t help looking at her – but that didn’t mean she could tell. Maybe Edith didn’t notice me at all and touched me as she would a small appliance.

The taxi dropped us uphill and we passed three checkpoints through to a marble lobby with a twenty-foot fig tree in the centre. There were potted bonsais on all conducive surfaces, including one in the lift. Edith said having children was like growing bonsai. I asked what growing a full-size tree was like. That, Edith said, was a question of temperament.

Cyril Kwok met us at the door. He wore white from head to toe: sweatshirt, jeans, trainers. ‘Pick a colour,’ he said.

‘This is Ava,’ Edith said.

‘Hi, Ava. Pick a colour.’

‘Pink,’ I said. ‘Hi, Cyril.’

‘Rosé it is.’

The party was loud and dark, with flashing lights. Cyril led us through the atrium and up the mezzanine to what he called ‘the bucket’. I was relieved to see it was an actual bucket. He fished inside and found Edith a bottle of Armand de Brignac. ‘Happy me turning twenty-three,’ he said, kissing cheeks before excusing himself.