Exciting Times(37)

I’d once explained ‘on the scratcher’ and ‘in the scratcher’ to Julian and asked if he thought there was something about the Irish character discernible from the near indistinguishability of drawing the dole and going to bed with someone. He’d been sleepy and hadn’t said much. I wondered if I could nab this observation and see what Edith made of it, but knew I’d feel wrong. I wasn’t sure, though, if the guilt would be for repeating something Julian thought I’d only say to him, or for tendering Edith old rope.

It was Julian’s fourth month away now. I felt on some level like he’d never come back.

*

Edith and I kept having sex. There was only one feeling better than being chosen by someone so perfect, and that was having her utter the sentence: ‘I want you to finger me.’

Most people had crevices of soft skin – behind ears, wrists under sleeves – but all of Edith’s felt like that. She was so small it felt comically unnecessary to hold her close. We’d wrap around each other and laugh at how much bed we had left. I saw myself telling people: we always make room for each other, for you see we are compact. Then I remembered that I’d just spent half a year having quite a lot of sex with a vertically bothersome man. It was all very interesting.

When Edith wasn’t busy working, we’d lie in my bed sharing secrets. After three weeks of this, she said she’d always been exclusively into girls, but it took her until Cambridge to realise not all women were and that this made her gay.

I asked if she’d ever tell her family.

‘No,’ she said instantly.

I claimed I’d tell mine if I ended up with a woman. Until then, there was no need to apprise them of my sex life. ‘Not that it’s all about sex,’ I said. ‘But that’s what they’d boil it down to.’

Edith agreed. Ninety per cent of why she couldn’t tell her parents was the sex thing.

I’d never slept with a woman before, though I’d spent most of my teens and college years obsessed with one or another. They’d all had boyfriends, or girlfriends, or else they were just patently not someone who would ever fancy me. When I told Edith this, she asked if I thought I’d gone for unavailable people because I knew I’d never have to face the reality that being with them would not solve all my problems. I told her she had no business saying something that perceptive.

‘Everyone does that, Ava,’ she said. ‘You keep describing yourself as this uniquely damaged person, when a lot of it is completely normal. I think you want to feel special – which is fair, who doesn’t – but you won’t allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you’re especially bad.’

I asked her again to stop reading me so well, and she laughed and said: ‘Fine, I tried.’ But really I liked when she psychoanalysed me. Her air of knowledgeable objectivity reassured me that someone had the situation – me – in hand.

She’d had sex before with her ex at Cambridge – Sam, she said. It was easier then. Their whole circle was LGBT. She’d edged back into the closet since returning to Hong Kong.

‘Sam,’ I repeated, to show it was new information.

We were too self-conscious to kiss in public. The first time had been permissible because it was spontaneous, but once it became a pattern, we worried people would notice. Small gestures took on significance. I’d nudge her on the arm to look at something on my phone. We went back to Central Pier and took a selfie, and I sent her it with the caption: just gals being pals. I put a picture of Edith on my Instagram story, and when I saw that Julian had seen it, I felt a twinge that I thought at first was fear, but which I realised was more like excitement. Neither of them had all my secrets.

*

At work I pretended I was her, or that she was watching me. When the children whispered or watched videos on their phones, instead of ignoring it like I usually did, I coughed the way I knew Edith would. It worked. They stopped. When Clarice Xu asked me for help, I told her she was doing great. I didn’t usually think of myself as someone who could dispense compliments freely. They wouldn’t interest anyone. But you didn’t need to be that great for a ten-year-old to want your approval, and it helped that I had the blackboard markers and they didn’t.

Sometimes Edith came to meet me after work at the train station nearby. I was allowed to touch her then. We could stand on an escalator and I could reach out and do it. It was a normal thing for friends to do. I wanted people to know we were together, but only the ones who wouldn’t hurt us for it. I’d have felt afraid to in Dublin, and I did in Hong Kong, too.

I wanted to explain that to Edith: that holding Julian’s hand was like holding a museum pass, and holding hers was like holding a grenade. But that didn’t make sense even in my head, so I knew it wouldn’t if I tried to say it aloud. And she didn’t want to hold hands either, so it never came up.

*

I saw Miles again in June. He told me about the future communist leader Zhou Enlai hiding from machine-gun fire and bayonets at the Western Astor House hotel in Guangzhou. To blend in, Zhou and his wife wore (respectively) a three-piece suit and a silk qipao dress. The anti-communist General Chiang knew they were there but most likely let them go to repay the time Zhou had saved him from violent leftists. I felt it would have been a better story if I’d known more about the figures involved.

Miles also told me about Julian’s birth, then about when he’d met Florence. She’d had a smart pencil skirt on and said she worked at the Bank of England. He’d asked if she was a secretary, and she’d said no, that she was a policy advisor and was saving up to do a PhD. ‘You must forgive me,’ said Miles. ‘Those were different times. She forgave me, at any rate.’ He looked like he wanted to add that she did hold plenty of other grudges.