Exciting Times(59)

‘No,’ I said. ‘But thanks.’

*

Edith hadn’t opened my Instagram stories since our break-up a month ago. I knew that didn’t necessarily mean she wasn’t thinking about me, because I wasn’t watching hers and I thought about her constantly, but she was busy and well liked and I wasn’t. I discovered a trick where I could tap the story next to Edith’s, then swipe halfway to the right and see some of what she’d posted without Instagram registering that I’d viewed it. Once I accidentally flicked all the way over. I nearly dropped my phone. The content itself did not warrant this anxiety: it was a picture of one of her chai lattes in Sheung Wan. I screenshotted it anyway because if Edith was going to see I’d been stalking her then I wanted something to keep from the experience.

I wished someone would hurt me and Edith in a way that connected us, like robbing both our life savings or posting the pictures we’d sent each other online. Then we’d hate the person who’d defrauded or revenge porned us or whatever and we’d like each other again without my having to be brave. I didn’t really want that to happen, obviously. I just felt anything would be easier than apologising. I’d been terrified of Edith when she threatened to end it. I couldn’t say sorry now or I’d feel that fear again.

i broke up with you because you threatened to break up with me. i felt your power and wanted to feel my own. i did. it worked. i hate it.





45

I’d survived my first Hong Kong winter without Edith. The second was proving challenging. Julian’s bankerish perception of what counted as a trek had rubbed off on me so much that I now spent my life in four places: the apartment, the TEFL school, Starbucks, 7-Eleven – all on the Island line. In the morning I melded with the commuting rank-file, walk-elevator-walk-train-walk, and looked for facts on my phone. I discovered Colombia also had outdoor escalators, that 7-Eleven was in seventeen countries, and that Starbucks had dipped into Hong Kong’s shark-fin trade.

Teaching kept me busy. Sometimes I made it until lunch before starting another draft for Edith.

i liked women first. men came later. when i learned what love meant, it was liking girls. but when i learned what liking girls meant, it was an accusation. i think that’s why it’s hard for me to love. my first memories of love are bound up with my first memories of being hated. i know you’ve been through it too & it’s not an excuse. but i wish i could talk to you about it.

In the staffroom I said I’d given out to Jessica Leung for bullying. The teachers told me ‘give out’ wasn’t standard English. Steve from Vancouver said it sounded like a euphemism. I said Irish English was many things, but a bowdlerising force it was not. ‘Riding’ was about the most literal way one could describe sex, for boring straight people anyway. In actual Irish, I said, you’d be ag bualadh craiceann: beating skin. In Dublin the shift was just the shift, but elsewhere it could mean considerably more than that. Madison from Texas made to say something. I interrupted her. I felt Edith had taught me much about stoppering morons, and that the morons were lucky we’d broken up before I’d honed this skill to the point of never letting them say anything.

I’d never used to talk about Ireland with my co-workers, or about sex, or anything interesting. I hadn’t tried at all. I knew I was mediating my new efforts through Edith’s imagined approval, though in fact she hated me and was right to.

i act blasé about my family but i have no idea how they’d take it. i thought moving to hong kong would help, but it’s given me more to hide. tom is fine, and i think george & my parents voted yes for same-sex marriage, but so did the girls in 6th year who made up i’d shagged my best friend and she wouldn’t speak to me bc they’d said that. do you know how much it hurt seeing their ‘YES EQUALITY 2015’ profilers? the worst bit is they don’t remember. they call themselves allies now. and maybe they are. but fuck.

My twelve-year-olds were on quantifier nouns: a tube of, a stack of, a stick of. Some words only went with some nouns, and there was, I gaily informed them, no logic to it whatsoever. They nodded. They didn’t expect any. This was, after all, English.

They did their exercises. As they worked, I thought about Edith. She had once explained that Cantonese counted nearly everything with a unit word. She reminded me that this sometimes happened in English: you could have a piece of news, but not a loaf of news or a bottle of news, and you said ‘two pairs of pants’ rather than ‘two pants’. Then she told me to imagine most nouns were subject to such constrictions. ‘That’s Cantonese,’ she’d said. ‘That’s how it works in Cantonese.’

She’d had me repeat phrases after her. Yat daahp bouji: a pile of newspapers. Go bat chin: a sum of money. Li peht laih: this patch of soil. I asked when she anticipated I would need to discuss this or any other patch of soil in the near future, and she said I never did anything practical with my life anyway, so there was no need to focus on quote-unquote handy phrases.

Another draft:

that thing you said about julian letting me think i’m detached is true. that’s us. but there’s a friction too. you said it’s normal to feel something when there’s history, but i don’t think it’s me still fancying him. there’s a level of that, but nothing major. it’s more that we can’t talk to most people but can to each other. i’m 99% not sending you these bc i’m afraid to, but the other 1% feels like you want me to cut him out & i don’t think i need to. ‘friction’ is too sexy for what i mean. i’ll choose a better word in the next draft. it’s more . . . we’re similar people.