Exciting Times(61)

‘Yes.’

‘How attached are you to the Merlot?’

‘More attached than I am to you.’

‘That’s not saying much,’ I said.

He agreed.

‘So,’ I said, ‘can we have sex?’

‘Now?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t rather throw the Merlot?’

Somehow I wanted to have sex with him, and somehow I enjoyed it. It was probably the catharsis of accepting he’d never be my boyfriend. I said nothing satirical and accepted his compliments without caveating that I knew just because he liked my body didn’t mean I could. It was like drinking something I’d been holding till it cooled, finding it still too hot, and gulping anyway because I’d been cold too long.

Since I felt confident now and hadn’t the last time I’d had sex with him, there were theories one could form about who’d really helped me change.

And we still had to make it mean nothing afterwards, for different private reasons.

‘Eight out of ten bad decision,’ I said.

‘Nine, surely.’

‘Eight-point-five. And seven of that is me.’

‘Rob thinks you’re a nine. Which goes to show lawyers can’t add.’

Julian had quietly swapped dreamy Seb for Rob since the party in February. I’d know to avoid Rob if the name changed again.

For a while we said nothing, and then he said he was often nervous around me. A year ago, I would have given the world to hear that. Now I barely noticed. I said what he wanted me to: that I’d never realised. He’d spent years at public school learning to feign confidence, he said, probably too much of it for some people’s liking and certainly for some caustic Irish women presently in his bed’s liking – but there were nerves.

I wanted to ask what made him nervous, but knew I would be doing so in the hope that he’d call me caustic again. He could just as plausibly say: you make me nervous because you often seem to genuinely loathe me. He could add: if you hate me so much then leave. Granted I am not someone anyone with a healthy attitude to intimacy would want to be with, but if I were, you wouldn’t be here. You don’t really want to try coke, and claiming you do is not a good look for a communist. Your interest in colonialism is at times morally serious and at times something you draw on when you’re bored of hating me for being rich and male and you can’t hate me for being white because you’re white, too. When you find someone you can’t hate for those reasons, like the cleaning lady, you pretend they don’t exist. You’re actually very good at getting what you want. You often get it without stating or even privately acknowledging that you want it, which lets you keep seeing yourself as someone who floats. Really you’re more of a salt-water goddess.

(He would surely specify a classical deity, but it wasn’t my fault I hadn’t gone to Oxford.) He could continue: the above is all true – not always, but often enough that it’s part of your character. Beneath it, though, the main reason you hate me, when you do, is that you’re terrified of vulnerability. This is so both because others have been unkind to you in the past, and because you don’t like yourself and are sure anyone who gets close will agree. That’s what makes people afraid to offer you intimacy. They know you’ll reject it. You broke up with the love of your life because you saw how much power they had to hurt you.

This did not all seem to me precisely what Julian would say if I asked why I made him nervous, but I thought it a fair stab.

‘Who’s the salt-water goddess?’ I said.

‘What?’

‘In Greek mythology.’

‘Salacia. Roman, not Greek. Neptune’s consort.’

‘I resent that you won’t give me coke.’

‘Get your own,’ he said. ‘Jesus.’

*

Edna Slattery was after painting the front door puce. She’d paid for the paint, also the house, also the painter, so Mam did concede that legally it was all above board. But it was an unfortunate hue. You couldn’t trust the Slatterys in matters of decor. Jim had partial colour-blindness, which everyone remembered except Edna. She’d ask his opinion and he’d say it was grand because he didn’t want to be forever reminding the missus of his sundry visual impairments. Edna had enough to be contending with. She’d tell you so herself. Where other people had hobbies or interests, Edna Slattery had contentions. And that, Mam said, was how puce doors happened.

‘How’s Dad?’ I said.

‘Doesn’t like the door. He drives past it on the way to work.’

‘Poor Dad.’

‘And Auntie Kathleen’s over next week,’ Mam said. ‘You don’t mind if we put her in your room?’

‘It’s more Tom’s room now.’

‘I’ve already asked him.’

‘Tell Auntie Kathleen I was asking after her.’

‘She tried to send you a birthday card, but it got sent back to her. She rings saying I gave her the wrong address, and then she reads it out to me, and she’s after writing: “Mid-Levels, Hong Kong Island, Hong Kong, Korea.”’

‘Where’d she get Korea from?’

‘The same place she got Uncle Ger,’ Mam said.

We discussed when they’d call the abortion referendum. I hoped they’d give enough notice for me to get my flight cheap. I told Mam my British friend – she didn’t know him – had refused to believe me when I said I had to fly back to vote. ‘That can’t be how a country functions,’ he’d said, and then he’d spent half an hour researching the matter before coming back and explaining that I had to fly back to vote.