Exciting Times(58)

The first time Julian asked what was wrong, I told him I was on my period. He was so medically illiterate on the female body that I stretched this alibi to cover the initial two weeks of the break-up. Then I said things were difficult at home.

‘In Ireland?’ he said.

I said: ‘Where else would I mean?’

There was no one I could talk to. Tom wouldn’t get it. Tony or Cyril might, but I couldn’t reach out to them when I only knew them through Edith. We’d only hung out a few times and they’d tried to like me for Edith’s sake. And she’d have told them by now. They hated me. I was a bad person who did not know how to love.

For the first time in ages, I went to LKF for drinks with the teachers at my centre. From the rooftop, the lines of the city spread like sheet music. George Sand had loved Chopin and he died on her – ‘Careless,’ Edith had huffed. We’d listened to his mazurkas on my laptop with the lights off. The blue screen was a lighthouse standing sentry. Later, Edith said there was an app to make the colours warm at night. It helped you sleep. I tried it but disliked the orange tint.

The teachers made me act happy. ‘Come dance,’ said Madison from Texas.

I came/danced. A man asked my name. ‘Kitty,’ I said. He said it was a stripper name. I said: ‘Why did you say that?’ He said it was a joke. I asked where the humour lay and he explained it was funny because I was not really a stripper. I claimed to feel sick, went to the toilets, and sat in a cubicle typing: i’m sorry, deleting it, typing, deleting.

*

‘Who drew Mona Lisa?’ asked one of the girls.

‘Leonardo da Vinci,’ I said. No matter how dire everything else was, I could get immersed enough in their world that I was pleased with myself for knowing things like that. It wasn’t just famous people, either. I’d provide the verb for what you did with a knife (‘cut’) and I’d feel I’d been handed one of the good brains. This was why people became teachers, I thought. It wasn’t to help people. It was to be the cleverest person in the room, always, or at least to have people sufficiently confident you’d be that they’d call it your job and pay you for doing it. Really, it was more impressive that my eight-year-olds knew Mona Lisa existed than it was that I knew who’d created her.

They told me they’d read on the news that Leonardo da Vinci belonged to a – ‘cult’, I supplied – and had left – ‘symbols’, I said – in the picture. I asked whether they meant he was in the Illuminati, tracing a triangle in the air with my index finger. They said maybe. Mona Lisa had small numbers and letters painted into her eyes. They were invisible from far away, but you could see them if you used a – ‘magnifying glass’.

‘Miss, did you go to Paris?’ said one of the boys. He meant ‘Have you been?’, but I only misunderstood for a beat. I told him I ‘had’ and hoped he’d deduce from this that he should have used the perfective aspect. The kids drew the Eiffel Tower on the whiteboard.

‘Finish,’ Phillip Goh said. I reminded him to say a ‘t’ at the end: ‘Finisht’, or better yet, ‘I’m finisht.’ I ticked his answers mechanically. If all students were as good as Phillip, I thought, then I could soon be made redundant by AI. In a way, it helped my job security to ensure they kept making a certain number of mistakes. I wrote ‘Super! :)’ at the bottom of the page, conscious that a computer could do this also.

Someone else said: ‘Miss, do you have a husband?’

*

The Edith drafts progressed from straightforward grovelling to something wiry and confessional.

i can’t believe you think i’m detached. i have more feelings than literally the central nervous system. but that’s not what you said, is it? you said i want to think i’m detached. look, that’s true. people hated me in school. at college i didn’t give them the opportunity. i felt like all of me was a secret. i know now it was just that i liked girls, but i thought i had to hide everything. i thought if i let anyone in, they’d find out what was broken about me. and then not only would they know, i’d know too.

I still didn’t send the messages.

*

In mid-November Julian and I went to St John’s Cathedral with Miles. We walked up Garden Road towards the bells. The outside was plain as churches went. ‘RV’, Victoria Regina, was carved on the tower. Inside it reminded me of the Catholic one in Dublin: cream walls, dark wood. Miles said one of the pews still bore the Royal Family crest. It had been reserved for their visits before the handover. I tried to imagine a life so constricted that everywhere you visited, it was pre-ordained where you would park your arse. While it did the constitution a world of good to get one’s weekly fill of the blessed poor, one couldn’t risk sitting next to one. The latterly inheriting meek were well and good, but best kept at a distance where one couldn’t smell them.

Later, Julian took me for lunch at Sorabol on Percival Street. He told me how to pronounce ‘jaengban guksu’ and that the Korean writing system was a cross between an alphabet and a syllabary. I wanted him to come out faster and more fervently with his facts, was aware that this was tantamount to wishing he were someone else entirely, and knew exactly who that person was.

He lit a cigarette on the way out. ‘I take it you don’t want to talk’, he said, ‘about whatever it is.’