Exciting Times(57)

‘You can’t drag that up.’

‘I’m sorry if my feelings on being lied to are spilling over where you don’t want them,’ said Edith, ‘but like my opinions on monogamy and patriarchy, they are many.’ She had given up enumerating the agenda with her hands now.

‘You said you’d forgiven me,’ I said.

Edith swept the table again with another napkin, though there was now nothing for it to catch. She considered it, crumpled and empty, and then placed it with care in her empty coffee cup.

I looked around the shop. It was crowded with people who did not share my emotional state. The books were menacing. I hated them – the chalky smell, the blackboard feel.

Eventually Edith said: ‘When on earth did I say I’d forgiven you for lying?’

I said: ‘You said you wanted to meet him, and now you’ve met.’

‘Apologies if I’m being legalistic, but I don’t think that means I forgive you.’

‘So you’re going to hold it against me forever.’

‘No, Ava,’ she said, ‘I’m going to hold it against you until you do anything to show I’m one-tenth as important to you as you are to me.’

‘You have so much,’ I said. ‘You’ve got a big family and most of them are here. They all love you. Even Mrs Zhang loves you. You earn twice, three times what I do at your job, and as far as I know they let you piss. You’ve got friends.’

‘We can return, if you want, to the fact that you push away anyone who wants to be friends with you.’

‘I didn’t push you away.’

‘Didn’t you?’ said Edith. ‘I was always the one asking to hang out. I’d think: this is pathetic, and I’d wait to see if you’d ask me, and then – still thinking, mind you, that it was pathetic – I’d give up and ask. And you know so much more about me than I do about you. The truth is, you like Julian because he enables this perception you have of yourself as a detached person. Plenty of people are willing to offer you intimacy. That terrifies you. You prefer feeling like no one will ever love you.’

‘My friendship with Julian is none of your business.’

‘You make me feel like I’m not good enough for you.’

‘Edith,’ I said, ‘all you ever do is make me feel like I’m not good enough for you.’

She picked up her small tidy bag with the book zipped inside, stacked plate on plate, and then put both our cups on the top one.

‘Come and stay with my family,’ she said. ‘Come tonight.’

‘What?’

‘There’s a free bedroom. Mrs Zhang likes you. We need a fourth person for mah-jong. Pack your things and come.’

‘Is that a threat?’

‘No,’ Edith said. ‘I’m breaking up with you if you don’t, but for that to count as a threat, it would have to be something you’re afraid of.’

I said: ‘I’m breaking up with you anyway.’

Edith laughed, took the plates to the counter, then walked out.





44

November

At the Caine Road Starbucks I typed sluggish fake apologies. I did it straight into the message app, at first because I thought this would force me to send it since Edith had seen me typing anyway. This didn’t work, but I carried on because – with my signature mental clarity – I thought switching to notes would be bad luck. The first draft said: i’m sorry. Later versions elaborated. My ‘breaking up with you’ had come out procedurally, I said. But Edith thought procedural memory only decreed how you said the thing, not its contents, so that wouldn’t help.

The green-and-brown coffee-shop decor made me think of dying trees. I never saved what I’d written, but kept the template in my head for the next version. The basic format lodged itself so firmly in my mind through repetition that I almost began to feel my behaviour made sense. Then I looked at the discarded blueberry muffin I shared my table with and remembered how things actually stood.

The earlier drafts were all versions of:

i don’t know why i said that. i don’t want to break up with you. but can you understand why i’m scared to move out? julian’s apartment is my home. so i panicked & said something stupid i didn’t mean. i couldn’t move when you left. i sat there and breathed in the dead books. breathed is two syllables when i say it and only one when you do. that could be important but maybe it isn’t.

I spent weeks doing this. October turned to November, and still I had no girlfriend. I wondered if I could get a poem out of that.

Because I’d typed the first draft apology in the Caine Road Starbucks, I felt it would be bad luck to switch. The baristas came to recognise me, bringing the total number of Hong Kong coffee shops that knew me to three. I didn’t care. If they wanted to look at my greasy hair and pen-stained jumpers and decide that this person was me, they were welcome to. I stopped wearing lipstick and put on whichever clothes I found on the floor each morning, which in practise probably meant I wore the same outfit every day.

when we were together i felt too much sometimes and i’d go and talk to him to calm down. he doesn’t make me as happy or as sad as you do. that means i care less about him, but it also makes it hard to leave him entirely. he’s like the gulf stream. did you learn about the gulf stream? it keeps ireland temperate.