Exciting Times Read online

  Dedication

  For my grandmother

  Naoise Dolan

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  PART I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  PART II

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  PART III

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Acknowledgements

  About The Author

  Copyright

  PART I

  Julian

  1

  July 2016

  My banker friend Julian first took me for lunch in July, the month I arrived in Hong Kong. I’d forgotten which exit of the station we were meeting at, but he called saying he saw me outside Kee Wah Bakery and to wait there. It was humid. Briefcase-bearers clopped out of turnstiles like breeding jennets. The tannoy blared out first Cantonese, then Mandarin, and finally a British woman saying please mind the gap.

  Through the concourse and up the escalators, we talked about how crowded Hong Kong was. Julian said London was calmer, and I said Dublin was, too. At the restaurant he put his phone face-down on the table, so I did the same, as if for me, too, this represented a professional sacrifice. Mindful he’d be paying, I asked if he’d like water – but while I was asking, he took the jug and poured.

  ‘Work’s busy,’ he said. ‘I barely know what the hell I’m doing.’

  Bankers often said that. The less knowledge they professed, the more they knew and the higher their salary.

  I asked where he’d lived before Hong Kong, and he said he’d read history at Oxford. People who’d gone to Oxford would tell you so even when it wasn’t the question. Then, like ‘everyone’, he’d gone to the City. ‘Which city?’ I said. Julian assessed whether women made jokes, decided we did, and laughed. I said I didn’t know where I’d end up. He asked how old I was, I said I’d just turned twenty-two, and he told me I was a baby and I’d figure it out.

  We ate our salads and he asked if I’d dated in Hong Kong yet. I said not really, feeling ‘yet’ did contradictory things as an adverb and there were more judicious choices he could have made. In Ireland, I said, you didn’t ‘date’. You hooked up, and after a while you came to an understanding.

  Julian said: ‘So you’re saying it’s like London.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’ve never been.’

  ‘You’ve “never been” to London.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ever?’

  ‘Never,’ I said, pausing long enough to satisfy him that I’d tried to change this fact about my personal history upon his second query and was very sorry I’d failed.

  ‘Ava,’ he said, ‘that’s incredible.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s such a short flight from Dublin.’

  I was disappointed in me, too. He’d never been to Ireland, but it would have been redundant to tell him it was also a short flight that way.

  We discussed headlines. He’d read in the FT that the offshore renminbi was down against the dollar. The one piece of news I could offer was that a tropical storm was coming. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Mirinae. And a typhoon the week after.’ We agreed it was an exciting time to be alive.

  Both storms came. Unrelatedly, we kept getting lunch. ‘I’m glad we’re friends,’ he’d say, and far be it from me to correct a Balliol man. I felt spending time with him would make me smarter, or would at least prepare me to talk about currencies and indices with the serious people I would encounter in the course of adult life. We got on well. I enjoyed his money and he enjoyed how easily impressed I was by it.

  2

  I’d been sad in Dublin, decided it was Dublin’s fault, and thought Hong Kong would help.

  My TEFL school was in a pastel-towered commercial district. They only hired white people but made sure not to put that in writing. Like sharks’ teeth, teachers dropped out and were replaced. Most were backpackers who left once they’d saved enough to find themselves in Thailand. I had no idea who I was, but doubted the Thais would know either. Because I lacked warmth, I was mainly assigned grammar classes, where children not liking you was a positive performance indicator. I found this an invigorating respite from how people usually assessed women.

  Students came for weekly lessons. We taught back to back, besides lunch. I became known as the resident Lady Muck for stealing away between lessons to urinate.

  ‘Ava, where were you?’ said Joan, my manager – one, holy, and apostolic, which there was money in being, though not Catholic since there wasn’t – when I returned from a toilet break. She was one of the first Hongkongers I’d met.

  ‘It was five minutes,’ I said.

  ‘Where are the minutes coming from?’ said Joan. ‘Parents pay for sixty per week.’

  ‘What if I end the class slightly early?’ I said. ‘Then start the next one slightly late. Two minutes from one, two from the other.’

  ‘But that’s two from the start and two from the end of the middle class.’ Joan tried to gesticulate, but found it difficult to mime a three-class sandwich as a two-hand person. She abandoned the endeavour with a tart sigh like this was my fault.

  I needed to take it to a higher power.

  Our director, Benny, was forty and wore a baseball cap on backwards, either to look like he loved working with kids or to stress that he was his own boss and dressed to please no one, not even himself. Hong Kong-born, Canadian-educated, repatriated and thriving, he owned a dozen other schools and – evocatively, I felt – an Irish seaweed company. He spoke of this last as ‘back’ in Connemara, a place neither of us had been, though I supposed that enhanced the poetry of it. The buck stopped with him, a reflection of his general distaste for parting with currency.

  When Benny came at the end of July to pay me, I said I was thinking of leaving.

  ‘Why?’ he said. ‘You’ve been here a month.’

  ‘I need to go to the toilet between classes. I’ll get a UTI if I don’t.’

  ‘You’re not quitting over that.’

  He was right. Aside from anything else, I hadn’t quit over their racist recruitment policy, so it would have been weird to leave just because I couldn’t piss whenever I wanted.

  I knew I’d do anything for money. Throughout college back in Ireland, I’d kep
t a savings account that I charmingly termed ‘abortion fund’. It had €1,500 in it by the end. I knew some women who saved with their friends, and they all helped whoever was unlucky. But I didn’t trust anyone. I got the money together by waitressing, then kept adding to it after I had enough for a procedure in England. I liked watching the balance go up. The richer I got, the harder it would be for anyone to force me to do anything.

  Just before leaving for Hong Kong, I sat my final exams. While they were handing out the papers, I counted how many hours I’d waited tables. Weeks of my life were in that savings account. For as long as I lived in Ireland, and for as long as abortion was illegal there, I’d have to keep my dead time locked up.

  That evening I used most of the money to book a flight to Hong Kong and a room for the first month, and started applying for teaching jobs. I left Dublin three weeks later.

  The week I started, they told me the common features of Hong Kong English and said to correct the children when they used them. ‘I go already’ to mean ‘I went’, that was wrong, though I understood it fine after the first few days. ‘Lah’ for emphasis – no lah, sorry lah – wasn’t English. I saw no difference between that and Irish people putting ‘sure’ in random places, it served a similar function sure, but that wasn’t English either. English was British.

  3

  August

  Julian wasn’t bothered coming out to meet me after work, so I started going straight to his apartment in Mid-Levels at about 9 p.m. I told him I found this awkward and degrading. Actually I liked taking the outdoor escalator up. I got on the covered walkway at Queen’s Road and went uphill over hawker stalls on Stanley Street, then signs – Game & Fun, Happy Massage, King Tailor – and high-rises and enormous windows on Wellington Street. Then came fishy air wafting up from Central Street Market and the old police station stacked with thick white bricks like pencil erasers. When I reached Julian’s building, I got a visitor card from the lobby and went up to the fiftieth floor.

  Inside, his apartment looked like a showroom, the sort that had been unconvincingly scattered with items anyone could have owned. His most obviously personal possession was a large grey MacBook Pro.

  We got takeaway, I did the washing up, and then he’d pour us wine and we’d talk in the sitting room. The mantelpiece was bare besides an empty silver picture frame and cream candles that had never been lit. By the window was a long brown corner sofa. I’d take my shoes off and lie on it with my feet on the armrest, crossing one leg over the other and alternating them during gaps in the conversation.

  He smoked cheap cigarettes – to encourage himself to quit, he said.

  We’d first met in the smoking area of a bar in Lan Kwai Fong, where he’d either noticed me looking at him, or started looking at me first until I looked back. He was good at engineering ambiguities. I was bad at avoiding them. He’d said everything very slowly that night, so I’d assumed he was drunk – but he still did it sober, so I gathered he was rich.

  A month into our acquaintance, he asked: ‘Do you meet all your friends in bars?’

  ‘I don’t have any friends,’ I said. He laughed.

  In some moods he told me about markets. In others he’d fire questions at me, only attending to my answers to the extent that they helped him think of follow-up enquiries. I’d said it before, but he wanted to hear it all again – the two brothers, the brown terraced house in one of Dublin’s drearier suburbs, that I’d taken a year out after school to save up for college. That after 2008 I shared a room with my brother Tom so we could rent the other one out to a student. That none of this made us poor and was in fact pretty much what had happened to Ireland as a whole, due in no small part to the actions of banks like his.

  Julian had gone to Eton and was an only child. These were the two least surprising facts anyone had ever told me about themselves.

  He wanted to know if my accent was posh where I came from. I’d never met an English person who didn’t wonder that. Most wouldn’t ask outright – and he didn’t, he just asked what ‘kind’ of Dublin accent I had – but they found some way to convey their curiosity. I told him it was a normal Dublin accent. He asked what that meant. I didn’t know enough about British accents to make a comparison.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘how does a posh Dublin accent sound?’

  I tried to do one and he said it sounded American.

  He’d ask what I proposed to do with myself when the time came to get a real job. He was almost paternally adamant that I shouldn’t waste my degree on lowly employers, and even paid convincing lip service to not thinking less of me for not having gone to Oxford. But when it came to which jobs he did consider good enough for me, he was vague. Law was glorified clerking. Consulting was flying to the middle of nowhere to piss around with PowerPoint. Accountancy was boring and didn’t pay well. And banking, in some nebulous way, wouldn’t suit me.

  I liked when he rolled up his shirtsleeves. He had big square wrists and jutting elbows. Sometimes I worried he could tell how often I thought about his arms. He was always calling me a freak for other, much less strange things, so I couldn’t own up to it.

  The first time I stayed in the guest room was in mid-August when the tropical storm Dianmu hit. After that, Julian always offered to put me up when midnight approached. Depending on my energy, I accepted or got the green minibus home – the covered escalator only went one direction at a time: down for morning rush hour or up for the rest of the day.

  That was the shape of it, but it didn’t have a name, apart from hanging out, catching up, or popping in for a chat, which was, to be fair, the content of what we were doing. He was so stretched for time that I found it semi-plausible he just preferred to meet in his apartment for convenience.

  I asked whether bankers had time for relationships.

  ‘Usually not at the junior levels,’ he said. ‘A lot of them just pay for it.’

  The way he said ‘it’ made me uneasy, but there wasn’t any point in taking things up with Banker Julian. He was too self-assured to notice when I criticised him. He registered that I’d said something, then continued a parallel conversation.

  When he paid for my takeaway, or when he took me to a restaurant, and when in return I spent time with him, I wondered if he saw himself as paying for a milder ‘it’. I liked the idea – my company being worth money. No one else accorded it that value. We sat in high-ceilinged rooms and he said the Hang Seng was down and the Shenzhen Composite was up and the Shanghai Composite was flat. It wasn’t like normal friendships where I worried if the other person still liked me. He liked hearing himself think aloud and I reasoned that I was profiting from it, that you never knew when you’d need facts so it was best to collect as many as you could.

  One night in his living room, a few glasses into the bottle, I told him he was attractive. I said it exactly like that – ‘I find you attractive’ – to avoid seeming earnest.

  ‘You’re quite attractive, too,’ he said.

  ‘I guess that’s why we get along.’

  ‘Could be.’

  We’d known each other about two months, and in total I’d spent perhaps thirty hours in his company – little more than a day. But I was in the habit of thinking he was a habit.

  ‘Thanks for your time,’ he’d say as I left. I wasn’t sure if he put it formally to give himself an ironic get-out clause like I did, or if he was just unaware how stiff he sounded. He’d add: ‘I’ll text you.’ He seemed to think only a man could initiate a conversation. Worse still, it meant I couldn’t send him one first. It would look like I’d despaired of his getting in contact and was only doing it myself as a last resort.

  * * *

  I explained to my nine-year-olds that there were two ways to say the ‘th’ sound. The one at the start of ‘think’ and the end of ‘tooth’ was the voiceless dental fricative, and the one at the start of ‘that’, ‘these’ and ‘those�
� was the voiced dental fricative. As a Dubliner, I had gone twenty-two years without knowingly pronouncing either phoneme. If anyone had thought there was something wrong with my English, they’d kept it to themselves. Now I had to practise fricatives, voiced and un-, so the kids could copy me.

  Calvin Jong – a show-off, but a useful one – volunteered to try, and couldn’t do it.

  ‘Hold your tongue still and breathe,’ I said. That was what the teacher’s guide told me to say, but I tried it myself and produced a sound unlike anything I had ever heard from an English speaker, or indeed from any other vertebrate in the animal kingdom. I decided I’d ask Julian to show me how to do it later.

  * * *

  Even before I met Julian, I didn’t often see my flatmates. We exchanged little more than hellos and goodnights.

  There were three of us. I’d booked the room on Airbnb, planning to be there until I could save up a deposit for something more permanent, but the others lived there long-term. Emily was the oldest and the most proactive. At twenty-nine, she’d been in Hong Kong a few years. Freya was around my age and her chief hobby was complaining about her job. She changed into her pyjamas the minute she got in the door and had four sets of house slippers: bedroom, bathroom, kitchen, other.

  Emily always had comments when I came in. ‘Could you close the fridge more quietly?’ was this particular evening’s criticism.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said. I failed to see how you could make noise shutting a refrigerator, but Emily had an aesthetic sensibility.

  Them getting ready woke me up – spoons clanging on bowls, taps protesting on being asked to produce water – but I couldn’t brush my teeth until the bathroom was free. I lay there and ran my tongue over the night’s accumulated plaque. We often got cockroaches. I swore I heard them in the dark, though I knew scientifically this couldn’t be true. I went without eating rather than face talking to them in the kitchen. They weren’t that bad. I just never knew what to say to them.

  So staying over with Julian became ever more appealing.

  4

  September