Exciting Times(39)

Ollie from Melbourne came in to borrow a whiteboard marker. We talked while the children wrote. In his most pedagogical voice, Ollie told me conjunctions were tricky buggers. There was a knack to them, he said, hooking his hand as though the knack was floating and he’d undertaken to catch it for me.

Julian hadn’t replied to my ‘i miss you’. I wondered if I really did, or if I’d wanted to feel powerful by claiming something about myself that wasn’t true and which would trick him into thinking he had the upper hand. I didn’t do things like that with Edith. It wasn’t that I was more authentically myself around her. Manipulation was a part of my character or I wouldn’t do it. But Edith didn’t bring it out, and Julian did. I didn’t like who I was around him, but I felt I had to be that person sometimes because they were bad and I was bad.

‘You keep yourself to yourself, Ava,’ Ollie said. It was apropos of something, but I’d tuned out. I said I had a lot on my mind.

*

Finally Julian replied to the message about missing him. He’d taken so long I’d nearly forgotten I’d sent it.

Sorry – busy at work. Miss you too.

I felt disloyal to Edith when it made me smile, then to Julian because it was the kind of text Edith sent every day and I still appreciated it more from her than from him. This contravened all economics. Assuming my demand for nice messages was elastic, when they were scarcer it should surely drive up their value. But coming from Edith, they commanded a premium.

*

Edith and I talked a lot during sex. Julian had never been verbal in bed, which had made it embarrassing when I was, like I’d misunderstood what we were trying to do. With Edith, speech was part of it – slipping, getting words out till we couldn’t. She said: keep going, we’ve got ages. When we finished I said that was weird, and also a little depressing, like: let’s not hold back sexually since we’re still relatively far from our anticipated time of death. Edith said: a) she’d meant the last train wasn’t for a few hours, and b) if we were going to start calling each other out on bizarre coital utterances then let’s not even.

We continued to hold Judy Garland in the esteem which was her due. ‘I found a picture of her in her fifties,’ Edith said. ‘We were right about the strigine brow. She looks unflappable. Not in a placid way, in like a tough-old-broad way.’

‘That chimes with her personal history.’

‘We should visit her grave,’ Edith said.

‘You’re always so morbid after we have sex,’ I said. ‘I can’t help drawing inferences.’

My ‘always’ had no business describing something we’d only been doing a few weeks. I saw Edith register and approve of its reifying effect.

Sometimes I’d imagine her at Cambridge. I didn’t know why I did that. My dinner-with-Florence reveries were probably not the sort of thing happy people thought about, but at least served an obvious purpose. The Cambridge thing didn’t. But I liked seeing Edith’s dark hair against the snow, or the stairs she’d climb in stone towers to get to tutorials. I thought about her life in Hong Kong, too. The Zhangs ate big dinners on national holidays, and the law firm I could reconstruct from its similarities to Julian’s bank. I’d never seen the bank either, but had asked him to describe it.

Maybe I was living through Edith. When I planted her in high-flying venues, it was because I couldn’t sow myself there and she was the next best thing. Vicarious aspiration couldn’t quite explain why I was hooked on her life, but I didn’t know myself well enough to get any closer.

‘I found it scary in Ireland,’ I told her in my bed, ‘having sex with men.’

I was really telling her that ‘I miss you’ meant more from her than from Julian. It was not a link she could humanly be expected to make, which was why I could say it.





30

The last Sunday of June, we bought salads in Marks & Spencer and took the bus to Tai Pak Beach at Discovery Bay.

I liked getting the minibus with Edith. It was green and white, and jostled us violently. Even Edith dropped her sunglasses when it turned a corner. One evening there was no button and we had to shout at the driver to stop. Edith practised the Cantonese with me – bus-ee jau m’goi – then made me call it out and laughed when I got the tones wrong.

It was hot on the beach. Three old ladies sat near us in fold-out deckchairs with a parasol propped in the middle. I asked Edith what they were talking about, and she said they were speaking Hakka so she couldn’t make much out. Edith’s Singaporean grandmother was a native Hakka speaker and maintained you didn’t need any other language in Hong Kong. There were some unfortunates who didn’t speak it – indeed, a great many and perhaps more of them than one would like – but Mrs Tan doubted it would improve their lot one whit if she dragged herself down to their level.

‘Basically,’ Edith said, ‘my gran is the Hakka version of a British expat.’

I knew I’d later repackage that comment as my own and send it to Julian. Keeping up with both of them took work, but their similarities lent the enterprise a certain economy of scale. Not only could I regift my own observations to both of them, they enjoyed each other’s without realising who I’d stolen them from.

Edith asked me to teach her Irish. When she repeated the phrases, she didn’t say them with her usual accent but with a Sinophone intonation. She said maybe it didn’t matter how many languages you learned. You always brought the flavour of your first.