Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

He was good at engineering ambiguities.

I flinched, and he asked if I liked girls. I wanted to say: my chief sexual preference is that I don’t like you.

The men around me talked about their schools. As an adult with a job, I did not find the topic altogether piquant – but British men were resourceful, and found school not only interesting, but the most interesting thing they’d ever done.

Julian often reminded me to eat. It made him feel better about liking that I was thin.

‘It’s normal to miss your family,’ he said. I said that was why I didn’t.

Interesting how pitch has changed from ‘Take back control’ to ‘We think there will still be food’.

If you were really sick you couldn’t just harness your self-loathing like that, so I knew I was fine.

If she posted no evidence of her hectic life, I thought: she said she was busy. When she did post I thought: not too busy for Instagram.

‘Imagine wearing Michael Kors on purpose,’ Edith said. I told her that was a bad thing to say. ‘It is true, though,’ she said.

‘Writing’ just meant ‘messaging’, but made them sound in deeper cahoots.

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.

Then she’d want to know why I’d been lying. ‘I lie to everyone about everything’ would probably not satisfy her as an answer.

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.

Sometimes she showed her boyfriend’s wallet in brunch flatlays, but never his face. That way when she switched boyfriend the brand endured.

‘Kat’s a Tory.’ ‘So’s Kate Bush,’ I said. ‘No one should name their daughter Katherine.’

She’d once asked me how I made decisions. I said: poorly, what about you.