Exciting Times(34)

I told Edith he seemed nice and asked why she hated him. She didn’t hear me the first time, so I had to say it into her ear.

‘I thought you’d judge me for liking him,’ she said. ‘He went to Eton.’

‘Julian went to Eton,’ I said.

Edith gripped the rosé as though to remind me she held the talking stick. ‘You always bring up Julian,’ she said.

I hadn’t been sure she was drunk until then.

‘You shouldn’t pretend you hate your friends,’ I said. The noise drowned me out again and Edith asked me to repeat myself, which let me redraft it to: ‘Sorry I made you feel like you have to pretend to hate your friends.’

Edith had to catch up with everyone and I didn’t, so she considered who to leave me with. I was too used to this from Julian to mind. ‘I’ll give you to Tony Ng,’ she decided. ‘He was at Wadham, so he tries not to act rich now.’ Edith looked over at Tony’s red chinos as though to tell me I could judge for myself his success in this.

‘Ling Ling, you’re glowing,’ Tony said. ‘How’s Sam?’

‘We broke up,’ Edith said.

‘Wow,’ Tony said. ‘It’s been aeons.’

‘Definite aeons,’ Edith said.

With a clarity I blamed on alcohol, I knew precisely what I felt: envy. It was partly that Edith’s friends were rich, but mainly that she had them. The Sam thing I would get to later.

‘This is Ava,’ Edith told Tony. ‘Ava’s single.’

‘Me too,’ Tony said. ‘Let’s see which of us gets a man first.’

I could reply: or a woman. But I didn’t know if Edith had introduced me to Tony thinking it might prompt my disclosure, or if the possibility had never occurred to her. The girls at school had claimed to want a gay best friend, despite not being someone any gay would want to be friends with. They still called me all sorts of things for not kissing enough boys.

Edith and Tony had changed the subject now, so I nodded and made engaged expressions. I saw I hadn’t just been holding back from coming out to Edith as part of some game. I also feared that she’d stop being friends with me. I thought that about Julian, too, and about anyone in my life who had ever remotely cared about me, but I’d never had to confront it in Hong Kong because I hadn’t had a crush on a woman till now. Or maybe I didn’t care about coming out and just didn’t want her to know that I was into her specifically. It was impossible to separate these issues. I couldn’t like Edith without liking women, and I also felt – illogically, but with conviction – that I couldn’t like women without liking Edith. And I had that thought mid-laugh, so I had to keep laughing or Edith would see what I’d been thinking.

*

That night at home I searched Edith’s friend list online. There were six Sams: four male, two female. I clicked ‘see friendship’ between Edith and me, then went to the URL and edited my account name to each of the Sams in turn so it showed their history with her. Three of them – two men, one woman – had nothing but birthday wall posts. One was only tagged with Edith in group pictures from Cambridge. The last pair, he-Sam and she-Sam, each had a single photo with their arm around her.





26

I turned twenty-three on 18 May. The other teachers asked me along to the pub, but I said, truthfully, that I had plans. I’d asked Edith out for once and hadn’t told her it was my birthday. I was embarrassed by the idea that she’d think I thought we were closer friends than we were. She texted me a balloon emoticon on the morning, which made me wonder if she’d known all along what day it was or if she’d just got a notification about it.

We met at a whiskey bar on Hollywood Road. Edith’s present to me was a printed scarf by an LA-based eco-feminist collective. I was sceptical of its claimed carbon neutrality when it had been shipped from California to Hong Kong, but it was soft against my neck – and it was wrapped, which suggested she’d known it was my birthday.

We went inside. The place was crowded. The menu asked: would you make a pact with heaven for the finest drink on earth?

Edith found the Irish section and ordered me a Connemara peated single malt. ‘Shipped from the old country,’ I said. ‘Bring a tear to the eye, so it would.’ When it arrived, it was so strong it actually did. She said I was a baby and then shuddered herself when she tried it. Julian had called me that once, a baby, and I felt this proved that words took their meaning from context.

Next we had cider. Mid-gesticulation, I knocked my glass over and spilled some on my lap. She took out pocket tissues. I thought she’d hand me one, but she leaned over and dabbed my thigh. Her hair smelled of smoke from the walk through LKF.

Edith addressed the waiter in English, but he answered in Cantonese.

‘He guessed right,’ she said after he’d gone away, ‘but I could have been from anywhere.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t speak English,’ I said. It was a stupid comment, but I wanted to distract myself from her pout. It was another of my favourite Edith expressions, though I knew there was limited point in recording them when I could not imagine a single expression of Edith’s which did not rank among my favourites. The best wedges of words were the ones my eight-year-olds wrote: I like her face. With her I am happy. I wished I’d never learned more advanced grammar and could only make sentences like that. It would give me an excuse to say them aloud.