Exciting Times(64)

‘Jesus, you must have been a miserable fucker then.’

He laughed. I could always make him laugh by saying something cynical in a thicker Dublin accent than I actually had.

Then I said a number of things. I said no one made me laugh as much as he did – which was nearly true enough to actually be true – and that I’d miss him. ‘And you say it’s no big deal buying me things,’ I said, ‘but you think about money so much I assume it’s not worthless to you. So it’s nice of you to spend it on me. You’ve never been available to me, and I’ve spent a lot of time resenting that, but it’s not like I’ve spliced myself open for you either. And you introduced me to Miles. You took me to see him in hospital. You’ve told me more about Kat than I’ve told you about my exes. And you were my first friend here.’

‘Thanks,’ he said, ‘– I think. Most of that was quite complimentary.’

He added that he’d thought of something he liked about me. ‘You’re donnish,’ he said, ‘you’re careful with language, you strain everything for its meaning, and you’re not easily pleased with how other people put sentences together. Which is an interesting trait in someone who can’t orally distinguish between “three” and “tree”. But when it comes to money, you’ve got no taste. And no squeamishness – about asking for it, discussing it, hoarding it. It’s not often I meet someone who can handle it without flinching. Everyone is embarrassed. They feel compromised by even mentioning it. You’re like that about other things, but not about money. When it comes to money, you’re a little animal.’

He added: ‘I was afraid to ask this earlier, but – come with me to Frankfurt.’

I heard myself say yes.





48

December

On my lunch break the next day, I started a new message to Edith. Within the logic of our imaginary correspondence, she deserved a phantom explanation.

there’s nothing for me here. you, tony and cyril were the only people i belonged with. a little with miles, a little with the other teachers, but never completely. hong kong didn’t make me happy, so i guess i’ll try frankfurt with a banker who’d sell his mother to diversify his portfolio. that’s not fair to say about julian. but none of this is fair. and that is okay for me to say, because when i say it’s not fair i mean it’s my fault.

I stopped typing. None of it concerned her now.

She’d once asked me how I made decisions. I said: poorly, what about you. She said she did pros–cons lists. ‘Usually weighted ones,’ she’d said, ‘because some pros will be more pro than other pros and some cons will be more con. And you need a column for implications.’

‘Implications?’

‘Potentially important knock-on effects. Not a proper pro or con because you don’t know for sure that it will happen – but likely enough to be worth considering. I favour the PMI table.’

‘What?’

‘Pluses, minuses, implications.’

On a napkin she’d sketched a mock PMI table for me. She was always drawing me things on napkins.

I’d asked how she’d decided on law. Edith said it was that or medicine, and with law you qualified sooner. ‘What about Cambridge?’ I said, and she said her favourite teacher had gone there. The hardest decision she’d ever made was coming out at uni. Hong Kong international students talked. If anyone had wanted to ruin her life, they could have done so very easily by telling the Zhangs. But as Edith saw it, she would never be happy if she couldn’t accept herself. She hadn’t needed a PMI table to tell her that, but still recommended the exercise.

In three weeks’ time, we’d be a continent apart.

*

For their second-to-last lesson before Christmas, my twelve-year-olds learned that British English speakers distinguished between ‘bring’ and ‘take’. ‘Bring’ was for things that were going from ‘there’ to ‘here’, e.g. ‘I’ll bring you some biscuits from the other room.’ ‘Take’, however, was for things you were moving from ‘here’ to ‘there’, e.g. ‘Could you take the biscuits back to the other room?’ The textbook said a speaker’s ability to observe this distinction was a sure way to tell if they were native or non.

I had never heard of the bring/take rule. In Dublin you mostly said ‘bring’. The ‘clearly unnatural’, ‘incorrect’ example sentences in the textbook looked fine to me: ‘I’ll bring you to the airport tomorrow’, ‘I’ll bring my camera with me when I go to Spain on holiday’. The textbook always referenced European travel destinations.

I practised in my head to ensure I used the right verb with Julian when he flew off next week. ‘Don’t forget to take your suitcase.’ ‘Will the taxi take you there on time?’

We’d fought about whether to fly business or economy. He said he’d buy my ticket to have someone to talk to in business. I said people would think I’d paid for it myself and I’d never get over the social embarrassment. Imagine, I said, being seen as the sort of person who’d pay that much money for literally a seat. Julian said no one would ever think I’d paid for business. I said why the fuck would he say that, he said he’d meant it by way of reassurance, and then the argument wasn’t about tickets anymore. In the end it didn’t matter, because work needed me to stay an extra week until the new teacher’s visa came through. ‘That’s not your problem,’ Julian said. I’d said no, it wasn’t, but that I didn’t mind.