Fragrant Harbour by John Lanchester Page A

circumstances had stopped Michael from making the return trip. The flurry of work following his exhibition hadn’t subsided, but had gone on so consistently that he was now confident – not that being confident about practical things was much of a Michael trait, but you get the gist – that he could take a couple of weeks off without everybody suddenly deciding that he was a bad photographer. I had been half looking forward to and half dreading his visit. The less optimistic part of me found itself dwelling on a heavy, cross, partly angry, partly guilty, and partly irritated sense that Michael was, to use a word that comes up often when British women talk about British men, useless. Meaning, among other things, that he was in love with his own doubts and difficulties, incompetent in practical matters, vain, clueless. Hong Kong had given me a strong appetite for the feeling that things (and people) were making progress, getting somewhere , going somewhere. This is a view that has consequences for old relationships.
    At first, though, it wasn’t too bad. You might even say it was good. As soon as I set eyes on him, as he came blinking through into the arrivals hall at Kai Tak with his suitcase, bag of duty-free and a ludicrously out-of-place Aran sweater over his shoulders, I felt a rush of pleasure and sexual anticipation that made me realise (a) how horny I’d been and (b) how much I had been burying the feeling of missing him. Sometimes when you’ve spotted someone you’re looking for and they haven’t yet spotted you, you see them fresh, and this is what happened with Michael, as he shoved his floppy hair to one side and shifted his weight from one hip to the other scanning the hallway and looking like he was thirty-five going on fourteen in his jeans and his skinniness.
    ‘Michael!’ I called out. ‘Over here!’
    ‘Baby!’ he said as he came loping towards me, his whole face smiling, perhaps as surprised at his own uncomplicated pleasure as I was. ‘Darling!’
    And I thought, phew, it’s all going to be all right.
     *
    But it turned out to be a little harder than that. The strange thing was the severance between the physical aspect and everything else. I’d never felt so strongly before that my body was going off and doing its own thing, leaving me to fend for myself. With my body it was sex: yes; good; thank you; more please; leave me alone (this last remark addressed to my brain). The first evening and night, for instance – with Michael admittedly desynchronised by jet lag and an eight-hour time difference – we did it four times. I don’t think we’d managed that since we first started going out. It was great. From my body’s point of view it was shaping up to be the best two weeks of all time. But my brain seemed not to want to go along for the ride. After the first thirty-six hours or so, drugged as I was with sex and with the simple pleasure – I admit – of having company, someone around all the time, irritation and impatience started to build like magma underneath an earthquake fault-line.
    I’d been completely unaware of this subterranean build-up until the Sunday after the Friday when Michael arrived. He said he wanted to go for a walk, so I obliged him. We went down the hill, towards one of Hong Kong’s most amazing spectacles, the Sunday gathering of Filipina amahs around Statue Square, spilling out towards Legco, the park, the exchange. You hear it long before you see it, a high fluttering sound, a cross between a roaring and a twittering, like thousands of birds, like no other human sound you’ve ever heard. The noise made by ten thousand Filipinas all talking at the same time isn’t like a crowd event, a march or a rally or a sporting match, since they aren’t concentrating on an external entity but on each other – eating and sharing picnics, exchanging news and reading letters from home, listening to music, shopping at the impromptu market that features carefully targeted