Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

She was so beautiful I couldn’t see why she was talking to me. Sometimes her eyes said: I don’t know why, either.

He sounded weak and studiedly impartial on the phone, like a doctor giving you a negative prognosis near the end of a shift where they’d already delivered lots of other bad news.

The whole thing was so confusing that I wished one of us had all the power and I didn’t even care if it was him, though that clearly wasn’t true or I’d just let him win – at which point he’d lose interest and replace me with a model because they’re thinner or a dachshund because they shed less.

it was as if someone else ironed everything for her – her whole life – and her role was to make new creases.

The only thing we had in common was DNA, which gave us limited mileage conversationally.

This was why people became teachers, I thought. It wasn’t to help people. It was to be the cleverest person in the room, always, or at least to have people sufficiently confident you’d be that they’d call it your job and pay you for doing it.

Some people wore not caring about money as a trait. I’d seen online that Julian’s ex Charlie lived in Shoreditch and said without elaboration that she ‘created’. If your work was an intransitive verb then that meant your trust fund subsidised it.