“If you eat a snail accidentally in a restaurant, do you think you can sue for negligence?”
Katy blinked, her eyes moving from side to side like shifting curtains. She arrived at the restaurant before me and was already seated at the table I booked.
“It’s not important,” I said, aware it was taking her a while to reply. “Just a famous case.” I picked up the menu, but put it down. I couldn’t read it without glasses. “Or infamous case, rather.”
“Umm… I don’t know that one.” Her umm was long and singsong, like she was meditating.
“It’s OK.” I wasn’t testing her. I was not. I was making small talk that didn’t involve the weather, which could only be described as British. A bit grey and drizzly for a September day.
I rummaged in my handbag for my Prada glasses case. Was I too harsh on her? She was a teenager that I invited out to lunch, and her mum, Jenny, is a very close friend I went to school with when we were growing up in Malaysia.
Jenny’s daughter had decided to “rebel” and “do law”.
“Doing law is not rebelling,” I told Jenny when she called me. She wanted me to be a kind of mentor, since I had gone into law and was in London, to give her an idea of the profession and to give the girl some confidence by convincing her that it was a good degree.
When I suggested that I’d take Katy out to lunch at St Paul’s in the City of London where I worked so that she could get a sense of the city buzz and the legal environment, Jenny was thrilled. I booked Côte Brasserie at Paternoster Square.
Katy had arrived at London Heathrow the day before, ready to start life as an overseas student. I drove there in my Audi to meet her and give her a lift. I parked in the Terminal 3 Short Stay parking. It was a duty of care thing. I took Katy to her halls of residence in Southwark. It would have been quicker by tube, but she had tons of luggage, which, of course, was overweight. Jenny, bless her, had done the Asian mum thing of packing the mobile kitchen (ikan bilis, oyster sauce, laksa paste, salted fish, fried onions, dried shrimp, sambal belacan, Milo etc.) into 23 kg of luggage.
This was a different generation to mine. I saw the Rimowa suitcases, the iPhone (15? 18? I couldn’t even tell), the Nike Air trainers, the Moncler backpack with the fluorescent trims, matching her freshly done LED gelish nails.
Jenny was an oncologist and her husband Chee Seong, an orthopaedic surgeon. They’d done the middle-class Chinese thing and gone into medicine. They’d both qualified in Edinburgh and met there. It was a big deal that Katy was notgoing to be a doctor.
“Why didn’t you choose medicine? I saw you had the grades.”
“No way, Aunty Lucy,” Katy said.
“Wait. Can you not call me Aunty? We’re in London now.”
“But… what shall I call you?”
“My name.”
“OK. Aunty,” she repeated, ignoring my request. “Bro. I don’t like blood, and medicine takes too long.” At least, I got her respect. I got “Bro”.
“Fair enough. What was your favourite subject?”
“Music.”
“Music?”
Music, my mind repeated, as if I had never heard that word in my life.
“Bro,” she said. “I wanted to study music.”
The past tense, already. Why are you doing law, then? I should also have been an artist. I was top at Art in school. This generation was going through what I went through. Why did they have to, when in Jenny’s and my time there were no choices, and we didn’t know any better. It was either get married, or be in a top profession, or be in a top profession and get married. I had even narrower choices than Jenny, who was brilliant at Science. I did not want to teach. I was shit at Science; if I did any of the Arts, I’d have to teach.
By the process of elimination (and I can’t believe now that I came to this conclusion) law was the only choice. This was in 1983. It was a boom economy in Asia caused by the Four Asian Tigers (South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Hong Kong). Law seemed cool.
“I play drums,” she said. “I won some prizes for songwriting and DJing. But you know what? I’m just not into classical music. This means it can only be music production and percussion for me. My parents said that’s not a degree. You can do it in a college. You can also do it as a hobby when you are a lawyer.”
“They said that?”
“Yes.”
As Bank of Mummy and Daddy was paying, the music would have to be second fiddle.
“Therefore,” she concluded, “I’m doing law to keep my options open,” breaking into a grin, one that was genuinely happy because she was genuinely happy, as a baby is. “I don’t know if I even want to be a lawyer.”
“Ah, yes,” I cautiously replied. “The legal profession gives you, umm, freedom, because of the analytical mindset of drawing both facts and conclusions based on the information.”
“Freedom,” she chuckled. “That’s all I heard.”
I did not have the heart to tell her that keeping her options open was the last thing she should do.
I kept my options open, and I was now twice divorced with no children. I did not want to be ‘tied down ’, and my ex-husbands did. I was 53 now and still keeping my options open.
I looked around for a waiter.
“Now, Katy, have you decided? Two or three courses?”
“Uhhh… whatever you’re having.”
If I had said I was not having lunch, she would agree and also not eat a thing.
“I am having two courses, only because I am watching the middle-age spread, but feel free to have whatever you want. I’ll have the baby spinach salad and the breaded chicken,” I said, holding my glasses and peering at the menu.
“With the Provençal sauce, rocket and lemon, Madame?”
“Yes. Thank you,” I flapped the menu shut with such gusto that the wind from the impact blew away a paper napkin onto the floor. “What about you, Katy?”
“Same for me.” She said, not even looking at the menu.
The waiter took both the menu cards away. “I am just going to pop to the loo,” I said. “You don’t mind me leaving my bag with you? It’s quite heavy as it has my laptop in it.”
She shook her head and smiled.
“Your mother and I were part of that generation in the late 1970s,” I said when I came back and sat down. “School was everything. It was a time of spectacular economic growth. Before rigid ideologies and continual dumb conflicts. Whether or not you made it beyond school was entirely hypothetical, because it was luck. Your mother and I were from that lucky generation. It was not so competitive. Even the very average made it to university. The above-average won scholarships and went to Oxford and Cambridge.”
“I’m pretty average,” she said, looking down at her hands. Again, it was the Asian mind refuting a compliment. You always assumed humility, fake or real.
“You’re not,” I said.
“And in your grandparents’ generation, it was a time of hard slog, zero unemployment. You and I both don’t know what it’s like to go hungry.”
The salads appeared. I put my glasses down and picked up my fork. My generation had to slog differently. Depression. Medication. Debt. My first husband had endured all three but not very well. With my second husband, it was too late. Round after round of IVF and disappointment. He suggested moving out of London, where the air is cleaner, the wombs more fertile and the living quieter, and giving up the City firm’s grim, filthy and stressful environment. But I wouldn’t. I did not want to be in some village with only white people. I didn’t grow up in Kuala Lumpur in order to live in a sleepy mock-Tudor village in Sussex and not be able to eat the international food that I liked. Also, it would be boring, though I did not say that to him at the time, and he earned less than me, which would have meant he didn’t mind me stepping down my career a notch to be on par with him and the future offspring, which never came to be.
The waiter brought our pan-fried breaded chicken. Katy, again, waited until I took the first bite before she picked up her cutlery. She was a FOP (fresh off the plane) since no one got off the boat anymore, unless you came in from Calais. Seeing her deference to me as her senior brought a quick memory of life back home, as sharp as a slice of lime.
Katy was tall and fair like her mother, and had a sallow blank expression that these FOP Chinese girls had. Occasionally she adjusted her glasses, which made her look much older. Her long hair was in a loose, messy bun so favoured by young girls. It had been coloured recently; her scalp was stained like beetroot.
I should have taken her for a sandwich and a walk, rather than a sit-down lunch. There was a Wren church I could show her; there was St Paul’s, of course, to climb to the Whispering Gallery, the figure of Justice on top of Old Bailey, with a sword in her right hand and the scales in the left. But I felt a few tidbits and legal cases to discuss over lunch was what Jenny wanted.
“Coming back to the snail,” I said. “Do you know what negligence is?”
“It’s… ah… it’s the failure… ah… to exercise appropriate and ethical care?”
“OK. Not bad. But if there was no contract, is there still a need to exercise that care?”
“A contract…”
“Do you know what a contract is?”
“An agreement.”
“Correct.”
“Would you like something else, Madame?” asked the waiter.
“Katy?” I tilted my chin.
“No, thank you,” she said, without looking at the waiter or me. He cleared away the dishes, and they made clattering sounds which were drowned out by the lunchtime crowd noises. Occasional guffaws and loud sneezes cut through the din. Percussive bangs of crockery and cutlery, phones ringing in different ring tones, foreign languages being shouted into the phones, a single crying baby.
“Can I have the bill, please?” I said to the waiter.
“I think so,” she said suddenly.
“You think so what?” I said.
“I think there is a duty of care when there is no contract.”
“Why?”
“There’s always an agreement,” she replied flatly. “If it was talked about and agreed upon, there’s already an agreement. Yes,” she said, not committing to an answer. Yes, she thought it was correct, or yes, she thought it was wrong. She looked glum, pouting and petulant as only a teenager could. She changed the subject. “Aunty. Where do you work?”
“I’m one of the partners in a Magic Circle firm. Do you know what that means?”
“I know it’s not magic, right?” She screwed up her eyes, searching me for some clues.
“No, it’s not.” So many things I wanted to tell her but could not, such as the fact that I joined at the time my first husband became very ill with depression and alcoholism, ending up in hospital several times. It was my chance to get a top job. I lost him, and he lost his job because of his illness, and we both lost the house. I heard that he was with someone now, living in Scotland.
My second husband was also married now. A semi in Sussex, two children, a Pilates class down the road and a tennis-playing wife. Divorce is expensive, I wanted to tell Katy, and save her from being me in 35 years. But chances were, if she stuck to being lucky with men, it would not happen to her, just as it had not happened to her parents. Find a husband in the same profession, I thought I should tell her. Then he’d know what he was in for. The hours and the dedication. Law was not a profession you could do “for fun”.
“The Magic Circle is slang for the top 5 law firms of the world.”
“Wow! That’s insane.”
“Not really,” I said, deflecting the compliment, of course. Some habits never left. I changed the subject. “Can you cook?”
“Not really, but I am going to try since my mum has packed all those ingredients I can experiment with,” came the sharp reply. “But my mum says that next term she’ll send the maid.”
“To stay in the dorm with you?” I said, with a perplexed frown.
“I doubt it, haha,” she said. “I’ll be moving out to my own place!” She replied with a flourish.
“Your own place?”
“For sure. In Bloomsbury. My parents have bought an apartment, but we don’t own it yet. In a few months, we will. It will be ready for renovation, and then I’ll be able to move in.”
“You’re very fortunate,” I said. She was. I’d managed to buy a brand-new penthouse suite in Pimlico after losing my suburban homes twice. They were renovated beautifully, even a pond of reflection in each.
“Yes, so the maid can come for 90 days at a time to clean and cook.”
“Amazing,” was all I could say, shaking my head at being bereft of any better adjective.
“I’m so hyped, bro. I’m copping a drum kit as soon as I move in.” Suddenly she became animated, as if she had just woken up. Her dull eyes pinged into action.
“A real kit?” I asked. She knew that I knew that real was the wrong word. I meant acoustic.
“No. Electronic! You can’t play an acoustic kit in a flat in London.” She let out a huge, dirty laugh like a toddler.
I laughed too. I had not laughed for a while. I felt my makeup crack open.
“Thank you for lunch, Aunty Lucy.”
“You are welcome. Don’t call me Aunty.”
“Oh. Aiyah, sorry.”
“OK. All the best, Katy. Make sure you let me know how you get on, hah?”
“Can. All the best to you too.” She reached out for a fist bump, but I was distracted by my phone, which buzzed with WhatsApp messages. I ignored them. She got up, and I noticed that she did not have the Nike backpack with her, but rather a tiny Michael Kors bag and chunky platform boots.
“Are you going to the Tube?” I asked.
“Yup.”
I watched her wriggle to put on her jacket. There was a tattoo of a diamond on her inner left arm. We left the restaurant together. That synthetic bubblegummy waft of teenage girls. Lip gloss. Clean hair and skin. It lingered in the air for a few seconds before it evaporated like rain.
In the suddenness of leaving, I didn’t get to discuss the outcome of that snail case. Or that I was being made redundant in six months. They were discussing the packages now. Many reasons. Brexit, Trump, dented egos, financial crisis and most importantly, don’t even worry about AI, because I’d stepped on someone’s toes. The first thing they told you in law school was: a) shut the fuck up, b) do not fuck up.
She went in the opposite direction to where the Tube was. I stared at her a while longer to make sure she knew where she was going. Did she know where she was going? She didn’t see me looking because of the crowd of working people in black, with black umbrellas. I followed her from a distance after she checked that I was not looking. She slipped like a flap of wind into Indelibly, in St Paul’s Churchyard, a boutique that carried premium stationery, elegant notebooks, artisan greeting cards, and thoughtful “gifts”. What was she looking for?
“Madame! Madame!” A male voice came from behind me. I heard running footsteps.
I spun around.
Did the card decline? With thirty-five years in the City and a partner’s equity draw, the Chinese fear of public shame still appeared like a burn. Pai-seh.
“You left this on the table, Madame.”
He held out my black Prada glasses case.
“Thank you,” I said, my voice shaking with too much gratitude, as though he had saved my life. “Thank you so much.”
I unzipped my bag to put the case away. My fingers jabbed the structured interior. I felt my Charlotte Tilbury pressed powder compact, the house keys, the leather cardholder and then brushed across the narrow satin pen loop stitched into the calfskin lining.
I patted my coat pockets, feeling the stiff silk lining.
My hand clutched my belly, and I sagged, like an old shirt.
The missing fountain pen was not an expensive Montblanc, but it was glittery and metallic purple, a gift from my dad when I graduated. It was his nod to my artistic nature. The only nod I was ever going to get from my dad. I had carried it around with me since.
It was when I “popped to the loo”. Drum roll. Cymbal. I wish she’d taken my laptop instead. Won’t need it very soon, when I lose this job. Also, all laptops were the same. What could she possibly need? She had everything in the world.
The pen brought me joy every day. I filled it with ink. I doodled on receipts. I sketched birds.
When I re-zipped my bag and looked through the windows of Indelibly, Katy had flown.