Exciting Times(65)
‘I still don’t understand,’ Tammy Kwan said after I’d explained bring/take for the fourth time. Tammy Kwan had my sympathies.
*
There wasn’t space for a proper PMI table on Edith’s napkin. I went to MUJI in Hopewell Centre to buy paper. Near the stationery display, a small white aroma diffuser misted out cedarwood oil. I paid thirty Hong Kong dollars for a large recycled notebook with a red spine. The inside was blank. The woman at the till said she liked those ones because you could fill them however you wanted.
In my bedroom I opened the first page and wrote: ‘I’m sorry.’ My pre-teen students had introduced me to erasable pens. They liked them because no one would know you’d made a mistake. I rubbed out ‘I’m sorry’, wrote ‘PMI table’, underlined it with a ruler, also from MUJI, ran over it with a highlighter, also from MUJI, and then started.
*
Julian and I had planned to go to the beach on Sunday in mid-December, but the morning news said the shore had been affected by an oil spill coming from mainland waters. White bubbly clumps lined the sand like styrofoam. Authorities were asking why it had taken China a day to notify Hong Kong of the ship collision which had caused the incident.
We had sex instead. I liked the authoritative clink of his belt when he undid it. Afterwards I curled up like a woodlouse and asked why he wanted me to come with him.
‘I’m not sure,’ he said. ‘I suppose I enjoy your company.’
‘I don’t even enjoy my company.’
‘No,’ he said, ‘you don’t seem to.’
‘So are we friends again or what?’
‘We’re always friends,’ he said. ‘Christ.’
‘Don’t take His name in vain.’
‘You don’t believe in any of it.’
‘I feel Catholic guilt when we’re fucking, but I’m not sure if fucking you is the source of guilt or the penance.’
‘ “Better than Hail Marys”. Can I have that in writing?’
No matter how acerbic I was with Julian, it ultimately supported his view of himself as someone who could take it, and of me as doing it to please him. He enjoyed my sharpness primarily because it was an impressive thing to have on retainer.
‘You blaspheme quite often actually,’ I said. ‘In bed, I mean. Babe.’
‘Get fucked.’
He said ‘Get fucked’ the smiling Irish way. When I first met him I’d consciously dialled back on it, also ‘fuck off’ and ‘you’re a cunt’, because the English for some reason did not find such statements affectionate. I wondered which other phrases he’d plucked. I felt like a bird he kept for quills. I remembered the times I’d lain on my stomach and he’d rubbed my back, and I thought, very sensibly: thief. He liked Irish English because he knew the most interesting words were ones he’d never say. I detested him violently, though I was well aware that the take where I stirred his inner poet was more flattering than likelier one that he’d got used to having me and I didn’t give him much trouble.
Which fairly described how I felt about him.
I started persuading myself that my behaviour was different, then realised I loved the idea that we were calmly exploiting each other and would both go to hell when we died. If he went first, I’d get a bigger advance on my memoir. Those heady days of pickpocketing bankers, I’d write; and then I settled down with one in Richmond. He commuted, telling people it was because I liked green spaces, being Irish. One could hardly plant a Celtic soul in Canary Wharf – or a soul of any kind, he added, ironically of course. He married me, took a mistress, and bought me an AGA. He denied this last was to atone for his indiscretions, because that would mean either of us had feelings. I often dined with his mother.
Since Julian would never be my boyfriend, we’d never marry. The fact that I could imagine a world where we did, but not one where we were happy, was interesting.
I couldn’t tell if he thought I wasn’t good enough for him, if I was ascribing him that opinion so I could hate him, or something else altogether. Maybe the something else was that he liked having money and I liked being good at men. Neither of us liked much else about ourselves. Julian knew he was small fry compared to his clients, and I knew I was terrible at men if my methods made them happy and me miserable. But we backed each other up. Both our egos thrived on him being the richest man I’d ever been good at.
Not even that could be the worst thought. Nothing in words was the worst thought. Something was inside me. Every time it hit my consciousness, I redrafted it to something else.
But I’d go to Frankfurt. We suited. Julian was nicer now than he had been a year ago, a positive trend which I hoped would continue. I had no evidence that he wished to change and probably only thought he did because I’d want to if I were him, which to some minds would militate against our being together – but I didn’t care.
I said: ‘Will we keep having sex in Frankfurt?’
‘I don’t know’ – as much as to say: we might really be brains in jars for all we know.
‘How can you be a theist about God and agnostic about whether we have sex?’
‘Quite easily, Ava. I’d wager many people believe in God and don’t have strong opinions on whether we should have sex.’
‘Some of them are pretty sure Edith and I shouldn’t.’