Exciting Times

by Naoise Dolan

“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.

“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 agreed it was an exciting time to be alive.

“I’m glad we’re friends,” he’d say, and far be it from me to correct a Balliol man.

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 wou...

We got on well. I enjoyed his money and he enjoyed how easily im...

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 re...

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.

Throughout college back in Ireland, I’d kept a savings account that I charmingly termed “abortion fund.” It had €1,500 in it by the end.

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.

More money i maade the freer i wasor was i leess so?

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.

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.

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

“We really are the new belle époque.” “Arsehole bankers and deadbeats.”

“Look, if I could explain my job in a sentence, it wouldn’t pay so well.”

I wanted a power imbalance, and I wanted it to benefit me.

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.

There were other reasons you liked him, some actually quite pure, e.g. his dry humor and his shared assessment that you were both a great deal smarter than anyone else you knew.

There was more to your performative detachment than just the Eighth, but it stayed with you after you left Ireland.

he wouldn’t have gone near me aged twenty and had only started liking weird girls as a consequence of his boring job.

In the now-empty box I wrote: i wish i knew how i felt about everything,

Books about people who lost their money, or had none and got some, appealed more to my childhood imagination than ones where everyone stayed put—though that was far more common in real life.

Through composition I reduced my life, burned fat, filed edges. The editing process let me veto post hoc the painful, boring, or irrelevant moments I lived through.

I could choose which was a character, and which the real me. Could choose, as in no one else would choose for me—and couldn’t choose, as in couldn’t.

I think you’re desperate enough for his validation that you’ll go back to him. I have many opinions about the nexus between monogamy and patriarchy, opinions which are available on request should they interest you,

The truth is, you like Julian because he enables this perception you have of yourself as a detached person. Plenty of people are willing to offer you intimacy. That terrifies you. You prefer feeling like no one will ever love you.”

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,

I felt Edith had taught me much about stoppering morons, and that the morons were lucky we’d broken up before I’d honed this skill to the point of never letting them say anything.

i don’t think it’s me still fancying him. there’s a level of that, but nothing major. it’s more that we can’t talk to most people but can to each other.

In 1841 Victoria wrote: “Albert is so much amused at my having got the island of Hong Kong.”

if you hate me so much then leave. Granted I am not someone anyone with a healthy attitude to intimacy would want to be with, but if I were, you wouldn’t be here.

I’d broken up with someone who told me how they felt, and I’d gone back to someone who either did not tell me, or felt nothing.

when i say it’s not fair i mean it’s my fault.

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

PMI table.” “What?” “Pluses, minuses, implications.”

What would I say? I didn’t know. I’d see her and see. She’d ask what I was doing and I’d say—I didn’t know.