Exciting Times(42)

‘True.’

We turned right on Yee Wo Street past cut-price perfumes and medicine shops. Four bovine Australian men trudged abreast in front of us. We silently agreed to weave around the blockade. One of them whistled at Edith. She glided ahead like she was declining him admission to the category of people she was willing to notice.

‘Sometimes I imagine the conversation where I come out to my mum,’ Edith said. ‘When I can’t get to sleep at night, I go through the script.’

Like much of Edith’s phrasing, this sounded slightly rehearsed, and I wondered if I gave her that same feeling of needing to prepare. I wanted to tell her she didn’t need to, but felt this would only make her more self-conscious. On another level I liked that I could embarrass someone as flawless as Edith. I could hurt her. I didn’t want to, but I could.

I didn’t need to know how other women went about being together. I could see it forever, for us: walking through cities, laughing at things that weren’t that funny.

A few metres down from the Shanghai Commercial Bank was a Yun Fat Pawn Shop. It was part of a chain. I’d seen another in Wan Chai. There were no windows, but you could see blurred colours through the frosted glass door. At the top of Pennington Street we crossed the China Congregational Church and a dwarfing Armani billboard. We waited at the lights, then marched forward with the crowd onto Leighton Road. Edith strode with such command that I stayed a step behind to watch her movements. She wore red suede point-toe flats. In a more private setting, I’d have heard them against the cement.





32

July

Dad was visiting his sister’s family in New York. Mam said he sent his love. I found that strange because it wasn’t like his being in the US was suddenly depriving me of his company. New York was probably closer to me than Dublin, if anything. While Mam talked I messaged my girlfriend, Edith, whom I was going out with.

‘Sorry for not calling last night,’ I said. ‘I was having dinner with a friend.’

‘Which friend?’ Mam said.

‘You don’t know her.’

Mam’s assumption that she’d already be acquainted with any friend of mine had started in Junior Infants and, seemingly, endured after I’d moved continent.

‘What’s her name?’ Mam said.

‘Edith.’

‘Would she be from Hong Kong?’

Because Edith was one of the few Hong Kong people I’d mentioned, Mam was disproportionately curious about her. I avoided revealing that Edith was a lawyer for much the same reason I’d regretted mentioning that Julian was a banker. Since I hadn’t told Mam Edith was my friend when we were friends, and had now called her my friend when we were girlfriends, I would probably announce her as my girlfriend only when we got married.

I regretted letting myself think that far.

‘Ava?’

‘Sorry, what?’

Mam told me off for daydreaming and repeated that Tom had started an internship at a bank.

‘Good on him,’ I said.

‘He’s a smart boy, Ava,’ as if that had anything to do with it. ‘Your father’s proud of him. And George misses you’ – this appended as if it flowed naturally from what had come before. ‘He doesn’t say so, but that’d be him. Keeps everything bottled up. Your dad would be the same. It’d mean the world to them if you’d come back to visit.’

Mam didn’t ask for things on her own account.

‘I’ll think about it,’ I said.

I knew I owed them a week back, but I wanted to wait until Julian returned. One of us needed to stay in Hong Kong to anchor our connection. The apartment was nautically high up, closer to the sky’s amassed water than to anywhere roots grew, and it needed steady witnessing. If I left, everything between us would drift. Worse: it would remain, but I wouldn’t see it.

‘The Edith one,’ said Mam, ‘she’s welcome to come and stay with us.’

That would be a spectacle: Edith’s spindly legs dangling off the couch, Edith dressing before anyone was up so we wouldn’t be embarrassed by the sight of her in her pyjamas. The Edith one. But she’d said before that she didn’t do well in cold weather and that her stint at Cambridge had been a spiritual test. A very expensive spiritual test, she’d said.

‘Thanks,’ I told Mam. ‘I’ll pass it on. Listen, I need to go soon.’

‘Tom’s here. Will I put him on?’

When she did, he sounded tired.

‘How’s things?’ he said.

‘Grand. Mam says you’re a banker now.’

‘Fuck off. It’s just Bank of Ireland.’

‘What do you do?’

‘Piss-all, but then I stay late so it looks like I’ve been working.’

‘That’s face time for you,’ I said, in a tone implying I’d come across the term in my natural environment and hadn’t just learned it from Julian. ‘Hope it gets better.’

There was a girl at work, Tom told me, but it wasn’t a thing yet. They were still seeing. I didn’t ask what they were still seeing about. He enquired about Julian with a degree of scepticism I found brazen in a younger sibling. I told him about Edith – not that she was my girlfriend, but that she was an important person in my life and I’d like him to meet her. He said she sounded nicer than Julian.