Dad and George would regard her like a viscountess’s cougar they’d been paid to petsit without knowing whether it had teeth. She’d be a sight walking down my road: perfect posture, knee-high slouched boots, glossy tong-curled hair, small black handbag on a silver chain.
I saw her begin to say Dublin wasn’t in the UK, remember I knew, too, and wonder why I’d said that. Besides school and uni, she hadn’t seen much of the UK. Three-syllable words spread out like the spokes on an umbrella: “attaches” became “a-tach-iss.” She said “completely” a lot and usually dropped the “t” in the middle. Button, water, Tuesday-anything with two syllables zipped up then down like a Gothic steeple. Her accent was churchy, high-up, with all the cathedral drops of English intonation. She was twenty-two like me, and now worked at Victoria’s law firm. She studied English literature at Trinity College Dublin and Oxford University.Įdith Zhang Mei Ling-English name Edith, Chinese name Mei Ling, family name Zhang-was a Hong Kong local, but she’d gone to boarding school in England, then to Cambridge. The following is excerpted from Naoise Dolan's debut novel, Exciting Times, an excerpt of which was published in The Stinging Fly by Sally Rooney.
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