Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

She is Catholic—in the English recusant aristocrat sense, not the Irish poverty sense—and

In Ireland you got five years for rape, fourteen for aborting your rapist’s fetus, and a lifetime in the laundries for the fact of being raped,

None of this was directly the fault of the men you fucked but it influenced how you went about fucking them, especially in Dublin where you might need to ask them for money.

No one could start having sex with that calculation in mind and not have it affect them wherever they went, though not all women responded q...

never admitted to remembering things people had told me in passing. But I knew that this trait, which made Edith

look frank and organized, would only make me seem like I didn’t get out enough.

I saw I hadn’t just been holding back from coming out to Edith as part of some game. I also feared that she’d stop being friends with me. I thought that about Julian, too, and about anyone in my life who had ever remotely cared about me, but I’d never had to confront it in Hong Kong because I hadn’t had a crush on a woman till now.

Or maybe I didn’t care about coming out and just didn’t want her to know that I was into

her specif...

We both found it hilarious that Brits thought their international image was one of flaccid tea-loving Hugh Grantish butterfingery. If they’d been a bit more indirect during the Opium Wars, or a bit more self-effacing on Bloody Sunday, then our countries would have been most appreciative. “That’s why they can’t accept that they did colonialism,” Edith said. “They see themselves as people who can’t even get a dog put down.” We agreed also that the British obsession with dogs was creepy, both because of the volume of other animals they ate and in light of their historic and contemporary level of regard for humans.

The three elliptic minutes watching her type had a gravitational field all their own. She did not want to get coffee or something, or anything. The kiss, you see, was done in pastiche. Why was she taking this long to say no? Just say it and leave me for the worms to find.

she asked if I thought I’d gone for unavailable people because I knew I’d never have to face the reality that

being with them would not solve all my problems.

Julian and his friends were “after” things meaning they sought them. They were after bonuses, after clients, always eating the dust of what they wanted. “After” never meant looking back on what they’d done. My sympathies were limited, given who they were, but I thought it might explain why they weren’t happy people.

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 subsidized it. Good for Charlie. Charming for Charlie to be a free spirit. For me, whatever paid rent was the decision. Sometimes there were multiple ways of paying rent, and then I got to pick between them. And sometimes there was no way.

He often said he didn’t meet many people like me. But I didn’t know if that meant there was necessarily a vacancy for them.