Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan

Author:Naoise Dolan [Dolan, Naoise]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474613477
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2020-04-11T18:30:00+00:00

26

I turned twenty-three on 18 May. The other teachers asked me along to the pub, but I said, truthfully, that I had plans. I’d asked Edith out for once and hadn’t told her it was my birthday. I was embarrassed by the idea that she’d think I thought we were closer friends than we were. She texted me a balloon emoticon on the morning, which made me wonder if she’d known all along what day it was or if she’d just got a notification about it.

We met at a whiskey bar on Hollywood Road. Edith’s present to me was a printed scarf by an LA-based eco-feminist collective. I was sceptical of its claimed carbon neutrality when it had been shipped from California to Hong Kong, but it was soft against my neck – and it was wrapped, which suggested she’d known it was my birthday.

We went inside. The place was crowded. The menu asked: would you make a pact with heaven for the finest drink on earth?

Edith found the Irish section and ordered me a Connemara peated single malt. ‘Shipped from the old country,’ I said. ‘Bring a tear to the eye, so it would.’ When it arrived, it was so strong it actually did. She said I was a baby and then shuddered herself when she tried it. Julian had called me that once, a baby, and I felt this proved that words took their meaning from context.

Next we had cider. Mid-gesticulation, I knocked my glass over and spilled some on my lap. She took out pocket tissues. I thought she’d hand me one, but she leaned over and dabbed my thigh. Her hair smelled of smoke from the walk through LKF.

Edith addressed the waiter in English, but he answered in Cantonese.

‘He guessed right,’ she said after he’d gone away, ‘but I could have been from anywhere.’

‘Maybe he doesn’t speak English,’ I said. It was a stupid comment, but I wanted to distract myself from her pout. It was another of my favourite Edith expressions, though I knew there was limited point in recording them when I could not imagine a single expression of Edith’s which did not rank among my favourites. The best wedges of words were the ones my eight-year-olds wrote: I like her face. With her I am happy. I wished I’d never learned more advanced grammar and could only make sentences like that. It would give me an excuse to say them aloud.

‘You’re not noticing because you’re white,’ Edith said. ‘People see me and assume I’m from here.’

‘But you are from here.’

‘Kind of,’ she said. ‘But you miss things when you spend your teens abroad.’

It sounded like something a therapist might have told her, oddly phrased to squeeze developmental insight into not very many words.

She added that many people, her parents included, had a misplaced nostalgia for the British Empire because at least it wasn’t China. ‘Hong Kong is the one place where the late-twentieth-century rebrand has worked,’ she said. We both found it

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