Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

have every respect for people who follow their passions, but I prefer stability.’

During these outings I felt I had hitherto woefully misdirected my energies in attempting to cultivate a personality. If you didn’t have one then that left more room for everyone else’s.

Madison’s also-ran touched my arm. I flinched, and he asked if I liked girls. I wanted to say: my chief sexual preference is that I don’t like you.

You had to pretend to feel sad if you’d been single too long. I hated doing that because there were other things I was actually sad about.

Periodically she touched her Celine trapeze bag. I thought: it’s still there, Victoria. It’s not going anywhere. The cow’s dead.

‘Brain surgeons can explain what they do in a sentence,’ I said. ‘They fix brains.’ ‘I don’t know how I’ll manage without these observations in Tokyo,’ he said. ‘Keep a diary.’

edifying.

There was something Shakespearean about imperious men going down on you: the mighty have fallen.

piquant

You were supposed to find it endearing that children thought only of themselves. Especially if you were a woman, it was meant to make you want one of your own. It would do parents a world of good if I told them their child actually suffered from a form of self-absorption that some adults outgrew and others didn’t. They could note the risk factors: only child, male only child, privately educated male only child whose parents, at odds with their stated politics, gave that child everything until he was of an age to buy it all himself, fellatio potentially included depending on how I was feeling about my own motives. But none of this seemed quite the rub for term reports.

Julian had complimented both my outer sparkle and the interior layer only clever people saw. We knew I was complex when others didn’t. This made us better, or at any rate different, which because of our contempt for them still made us better. The cherry: we were attractive – me because dreamy Seb liked me and Julian because why would someone dreamy Seb liked be with someone less dreamy than dreamy Seb – while Julian’s abetment assured us we were conducting an ultimately shallow emotional transaction in which ‘dreamy’ featured.

You were afraid when men came in you, though you were unsure if that was all Irish women or just you, and sometimes you’d say do you want to finish in my mouth because after all this you still felt you owed him somewhere.

I was quieter and more openly begrudging now, and it was becoming clearer than ever that the other teachers found me odd. I’d encountered this opinion so many times, in so many places, that I’d come to find it comforting. It doesn’t matter if a fact is good or bad, I thought. You don’t mind once everyone agrees. Their consensus makes it true, and truth feels safe.

trouble with my body was that I had to carry it around with

I luxuriated in thinking they’d all been normal but me, I was the only strange person who’d ever fascinated him so, and I alone stroked every contour of his mind.

Because I loved him – potentially. That, or I wanted to be him, or liked being someone to whom he assigned tasks.

‘Do you love me?’ I said. What he said next didn’t hurt me. It was exactly what I’d been looking for to murder the outgrowth. ‘I like you a great deal,’ he said. ‘Now go to sleep.’

Anyway, he’d said it had ended with Kat in part because she was pushy about things like ‘I love you’. I, however, was reasonable.

Seb’s composure and Julian’s were quite different. Julian’s came from an equanimous trust that most things were quite beneath his notice. Seb had a more active bearing. Every sentence seemed a decision.

Jane ‘wouldn’t like it’, and that made me happy. I’d only met Jane once, but she seemed like another Victoria: it was as if someone else ironed everything for her – her whole life – and her role was to make new creases.

The word ‘friend’ did Herculean work in terms of describing me and Julian.

‘If I’m making my family sound really quite something,’ Edith said, ‘that’s because they’re really quite something.’

English has a subjunctive. I learned that fact the morning I taught it. I knew French had one and suspected Irish did, but hadn’t noticed its moody fingerprints on my native language. It turned out I didn’t know because the English subjunctive required phrasing I would never use. Apparently, you didn’t say: ‘What if I was attracted to her.’ You said: ‘What if I were.’ You deployed the subjunctive for the less-than-factual. If I avoided it, did that mean I only said true things? Or since I didn’t section off the imaginary, perhaps everything I said was just a wish or a feeling. And maybe I sounded stupid for not knowing grammar. I wondered if Edith had been fighting the urge to correct me.

She said Instagram made her look at everything more closely. Whenever she felt sad, she had a wall of happy memories to look back on.

I told Edith about a summer in college when a few of us had gone to someone’s holiday home in West Cork. I slept on the couch, two of the lads took a mattress on the floor, and in the dark one of them came and lay on top of me – calmly, as if instructed to. I whispered I wasn’t sure, which meant get off but I’m scared what you’ll do if I say that, and he ignored me. His breath tanged of alcohol. I thought it was Colm but it might have been Ferdia. I couldn’t see. Probably I could have deduced Ferdia or Colm, but I didn’t, because then I’d know, and then for all subsequent interactions with either Colm and Ferdia, which I’d have to keep having because no one would believe me or they’d say yeah but he’s his own problems, I’d remember what he did, know his own memory of events was that we’d got drunk and hooked up, and be certain, too, that our friends would ‘not take sides’, i.e. treat me like someone who might be lying about rape. I told myself what they’d say – grey area, I just don’t think he’d do that – and soon became convinced I was actually making it up, then felt like a sick amoral person for falsely accusing someone of something that I hadn’t accused him of and that he had in fact done.

you still put more time and energy into showing you don’t love me than anyone has ever put into showing me they do.

I’d been a pliable child and I wondered if it was obvious, even then, that I would never be an artist. If a teacher had told me to put in linebreaks, I’d have sliced up my words like ham in order to please them.

he laughed and said he could always count on me for brutal honesty. That wasn’t true. I often lied to spare others’ feelings or to make them like me. Most of my directness was by accident. But I got more social capital from pretending it was on purpose, not least because it made people assume my compliments had to be sincere.

She stroked a ladder on my tights and said I should be more careful. I wondered if this was a simple extension of her domain over everything, or if I’d somehow indicated she was allowed. I’d said I was hers from how I looked at her – not from how I’d chosen to look at her, but from how I couldn’t help looking at her – but that didn’t mean she could tell. Maybe Edith didn’t notice me at all and touched me as she would a small appliance.

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.

‘Everyone does that, Ava,’ she said. ‘You keep describing yourself as this uniquely damaged person, when a lot of it is completely normal. I think you want to feel special – which is fair, who doesn’t – but you won’t allow yourself to feel special in a good way, so you tell yourself you’re especially bad.’

He was an overpronating arsehole, she said. Overpronating was when your foot moved too far inward as it landed on the ground. Arsehole was when you had a personality like his.

The light from the theatre screen blinked against her profile. Her lips were slightly open and her neck was long and pale like the filament of an orchid. I nearly reached out to touch her face, but she looked so still in that suspended moment that I didn’t want her to flinch. I mouthed: you’re so beautiful. Then: I love you.

On another level I liked that I could embarrass someone as flawless as Edith. I could hurt her. I didn’t want to, but I could.

I don’t think you’re interested in having a nice life. Which is arrogant, really, because you expect other people to help you maintain an existence that you yourself can’t work up any enthusiasm over.

I felt like abandoning everything else I did to try to be happy, and just spending the rest of my life finding things Edith needed to be told, and telling her.

The twelve-year-olds were on the perfect aspect, God love them. They had just got to grips with the past tense, and the continuous would be next – if they survived. Present perfect if it’s continued up until now, e.g. ‘They’ve been together.’ Present perfect continuous if it’s been continuing, e.g. ‘They’ve been fucking.’ Past perfect if it: a) continued up to a time in the past, e.g. ‘They had been living together,’ or: b) was important in the past, e.g. ‘I had thought I loved him until I met her.’ There was more, but my windpipe filibustered it.

I loved Edith so much it seemed only sensible to worry about losing her. You could hardly stake that much in someone and not think every now and then of what you’d do without them. I analysed the contingencies and concluded: nothing. On the couch or in my bed, I measured various scenarios in which Edith left me and decided my ensuing strategy would be: none. Up and down the escalator, pacing my clammy classroom: if she ended it, I would end too. Sometimes this seemed fine and normal, and sometimes it made me grip whatever I was holding until my fingers hurt. When that happened I messaged Julian. Edith did not exist in the space I shared with him, which let me compose myself again. I wrote: everyone has too many feelings. it’s embarrassing. He agreed. Inside my quarantined dynamic with him, I was safe. He’d made me unhappy, but I’d be in a far deeper gradation of misery if Edith ever abandoned me. She gave me concomitant highs. Sometimes felt I was hiding from those, too, when I talked to Julian.

and it’s hysterical when he implies that me fucking him is a form of self-harm, because he’s right.

I wondered if most people’s relationships with their father more closely resembled mine with my dad, or mine with Miles. My entire verbal contact with Dad since moving to Hong Kong had been strings of ‘How are you getting on?’ – ‘Very good, very good, and how’s work?’ – ‘Very good, very good, and is it hot?’ and then back over to Mam. We couldn’t discuss politics because he’d say something awful about travellers or trans people and Mam would look at me like: don’t be hassling him. The only thing we had in common was DNA, which gave us limited mileage conversationally.

‘I’m not nice to Julian,’ I said. ‘He doesn’t love me and I feel like that means there’s something wrong with me, so then I want to believe the problem is actually him. We laugh a lot, but I’m a horrible person when I’m with him. I want to make him feel as bad as I do.’

disingenuous

‘Mam,’ I said, ‘have you ever been afraid to say sorry?’ She said yes. If you weren’t afraid then you probably weren’t sorry.

‘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.