Exciting Times(54)
Edith found a vantage point and told Julian to use his height to make space for us. ‘This is fantastic, isn’t it,’ he said without raising his intonation. ‘A nice day out with my best girls.’ Edith shushed him and he laughed. ‘What,’ he said, ‘are you worried you won’t hear the fireworks over me?’
I stood in the middle. Every time a firework burst, I squeezed Edith’s hand. Julian craned his head forward like he wanted to appear more attentive than he was. He was conscious, I knew, that this wasn’t a public holiday in London and that clients would expect responses within an hour. That was Edith’s situation as well, but she’d done more on her phone on the way over, so her hourly window ended later. I wondered at first which thoughts they expelled to make room for such considerations. But this was unscientific. Actually, the brain grew new cells the more information you fed it. I didn’t like that and was sorry I’d thought of it, because it meant they were getting smarter than me every day.
The billboards above us cracked out red, white and gold. Kids shouted.
Afterwards I walked Edith to Sai Ying Pun station. There was a mural inside of people disenchanted with urban life. She said she’d had a nice time and liked Julian. Then she asked if there’d been any developments with finding a flat.
‘I’m thinking mid-October,’ I said.
‘You were thinking the end of September the last time I asked.’
‘His dad’s had a heart attack.’
‘I know you want to be a good friend,’ said Edith, ‘but I don’t think he’d ask this of any of his other friends.’
‘That’s because his other friends are actual sociopaths.’
‘Still.’
‘Just a few more weeks.’
‘If you’re sure,’ she said. We hugged and she went through the turnstile. I stayed until she was out of sight to see if she’d look back, but she didn’t.
*
Proper school had started again for my students, though they’d continued coming to my classes all summer. The seven-year-olds were halfway through their module on sentence-level grammar now. A few days after the fireworks, I gave them a lesson on category nouns versus exact nouns. I hadn’t heard of this distinction prior to opening the textbook. It transpired that a category noun was something like ‘vegetables’, whereas exact nouns were ‘beetroot’, ‘carrots’, ‘broccoli’. It was better to use exact nouns because this made your writing more precise and interesting.
The chapter gave a short explanation followed by an exercise: an A4 page divided into columns. On the left were various category nouns. On the right, you had to fill in at least three corresponding exact nouns. I told the kids they could use their Cantonese-to-English dictionaries.
Cynthia Mak asked what to say for ‘people’. Did it mean ‘sister’, ‘brother’, ‘father’, or ‘teacher’, ‘doctor’, ‘artist’, or – ‘They’re all okay,’ I said.
‘But if I put “sister”, “father”, “brother” in “people”, then what about here?’ She pointed to the box marked ‘family’.
‘Okay, don’t do those. Do “teacher” or something.’
‘But what about here?’ – signalling the ‘professions’ row.
‘Okay, something else for “people”.’
‘Happy people, sad people?’
‘“Happy people” isn’t an exact noun – it’s an adjective plus a category noun.’
‘So what should I write?’
We looked at each other. It was indeed a challenge to describe people in a way not immediately related to how they earned money or their position in the family unit. I said: ‘How about friend, boyfriend, colleague?’
‘I don’t want to write “boyfriend”.’
I couldn’t blame her for questioning the exercise. ‘Friend’, ‘enemy’ and ‘colleague’ didn’t seem like ways of narrowing down ‘person’ in the way ‘apple’ did for ‘fruit’. An apple would still be a fruit if it didn’t have any others in its vicinity, but you couldn’t be someone’s nemesis without their hanging around to complete the definition. The same issue cropped up with my earlier suggestions. ‘Family’ was relational, and ‘profession’ was created and given meaning by external structures. Admittedly ‘adult’, ‘child’ and ‘teenager’ could stand on their own. But I still found it depressing that the way we specified ourselves – the way we made ourselves precise and interesting – was by pinpointing our developmental stage and likely distance from mortality. Fruit didn’t have that problem.
*
Even a British man so very British and so very male as Julian surely had limits as to what he could pretend not to notice – on grounds auditory if not emotional – so Edith and I had been meeting in love hotels since his return a few weeks ago. The first one was on Lockhart Road in Wan Chai. She told me it was an hourly rental, which augured something tawdry, but it was upholstered and managed like any other budget joint. You just had to check out sooner. The sheets smelled clean, probably because they’d been sprayed to. We booked the whole evening so we could watch TV afterwards.