![]() Someone at Edith’s firm had spare tickets. We queued for a play at the Academy for Performing Arts, a tall concrete building on Gloucester Road. Her manicure was perfect, though I noted with interest that she kept her nails short. 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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