Exciting Times(40)

‘Anyway, in fifty years we’ll be speaking Mandarin,’ I said. ‘If you believe Julian. He says most of the clients are mainlanders now.’

‘Why have they kept him on?’

‘He’s very tall.’

Edith said he sounded like a guy from her firm she went running with. He was an overpronating arsehole, she said. Overpronating was when your foot moved too far inward as it landed on the ground. Arsehole was when you had a personality like his.

‘So why do you run with him?’ I said.

‘He’s on my team at work, so it’s that or drink beer with him.’

Edith could make most words sound cutting, and ‘beer’ was one such word.

‘Do you think he has a crush on you?’ I said.

‘Men never fancy me,’ she said complacently.

‘I think Julian might when he gets back. I’ll have to warn him you’re a lesbian. Have I shown you his ex?’

We looked at pictures of Kat. The screen glared in the sun. Edith said Kat was gorgeous and questioned how on earth Julian had convinced her to go out with him. ‘But I don’t know him, so I shouldn’t be uncharitable,’ she added, not necessarily in a tone of regret.

Then Edith asked if I thought I’d ever leave Hong Kong.

The Hakka ladies were watching, so I just stroked her hand. ‘We could leave together,’ I said. ‘London has law firms.’

‘I’ve heard there’s a hiring freeze coming. Brexit and all that. And why London?’

‘I don’t know. It seems livable.’

‘Because it’s away from your family?’

‘Probably.’

‘I think you like your space,’ Edith said.

I couldn’t say: everyone in Dublin hated me, such that I came to hate myself, too, and I came out here trying to change that and it’s kind of worked but not fully. I didn’t think Edith would get it. I also wasn’t sure if it was even true about everyone hating me. It had felt that way, but maybe it did for everyone at that age.

She went back to a document on her iPad, and I considered what I’d said about us leaving together. It had just come out. I’d never really given it much thought. I could barely think about what might happen whenever Julian came back, let alone afterwards. But I could see us living somewhere very tidy, and neither of our families ever finding out. The worst thing would be being out to hers but not to mine. It would give her more power: she’d be able to talk to them about me. Then I felt like a horrible person for wanting her relationship with her parents to be as secretive as mine just because it would keep us even. I wondered if other people had to consciously expel thoughts like that, or if they just never had them in the first place. But it was presumptuous to think about any of that. Probably I was jinxing the whole thing.

That night in Julian’s apartment, I said: ‘Is it true there are loads of lesbians at boarding school?’

‘If there are, they don’t come out,’ said Edith. ‘The teachers were worried there wasn’t enough compulsory heterosexuality, so they made us do socials with Eton.’

I was about to say she might have bumped into Julian, then remembered he’d have started at Oxford by the time she came to the UK.

‘No one was out in my year either,’ I said. ‘You’d have got a door slammed on you.’

She looked at me like she didn’t know if I was joking. I wasn’t sure either. There were reasons besides men I’d been unhappy in Dublin.

Next morning, we walked in Sun Yat Sen Park. Edith asked how she could become my girlfriend. She said: ‘Is there a process involved?’

*

Julian messaged from London about Hong Kong politics. He knew more than I did. He asked if I’d heard that the High Court had upheld a gay civil servant’s spousal benefits. It might go to the Court of Appeal, but was watershed stuff all the same. An Aussie at his bank was out, but no locals he knew. Maybe things would change now. During this conversation I was especially grateful not to have to keep my face arranged.

I asked how he found it back in England. He wrote:

Mum’s happy I’m here. Happier if I quit my job but she’s accepted I won’t. Some people married now, which should be illegal. Don’t know why anyone’s proud of having found someone. Statistically likelier than not that they will, particularly if they lower their standards. And someone from Balliol is having a baby. I suppose the world needs people to have babies.

We chose what to share. Through composition I reduced my life, burned fat, filed edges. The editing process let me veto post-hoc the painful, boring or irrelevant moments I lived through. Necessarily Julian curated what he told me, and that, too, made me happy. Together we were making something small and precise.

There was one area of my life I didn’t tell him about that was neither painful nor boring nor irrelevant, but I saw other grounds for excluding it.





31

Edith had me over to meet her family on the second-to-last day of June. ‘Will it not be weird?’ I said. ‘I presume they still don’t know.’ Edith said it was fine. They’d be much more suspicious if they thought she was hiding me from them.

‘Besides,’ she said, ‘it’s been over a month. You can’t not meet them.’

The fact that ‘over a month’ brought Edith and me into meeting-the-family territory, whereas I had known Julian for months before he’d even mentioned Miles, told me all I needed to know about dating gay women versus straight men.