Three Rooms

  What was boarding school like?

  The politician shot me a pained glance through a mouthful of bacon. Hell, if you must know, he said. I willed him to say more. He began to look like he rather regretted inviting me into the hall. It was boring, he said finally. It was school.

  It was just a boring school? I sounded incredulous to myself even in my dream, as though the investment of my subconscious time was yielding conspicuously low return.

  Yes, he said. In spite of himself, he stopped chewing momentarily and seemed to catch the end of a stray thought. It occurred to me later this could not have been the case given that all reality as it took place in that hall was constructed entirely out of my own. In any case, the politician swallowed his bacon, more of which had somehow multiplied on the plate before him, and said, I tell you what though, the night parties were fun.

  There came a martyred sigh to indicate he didn’t need prompting anymore. A few more eggs had begun to rock on their sides on the plate in front of him, sloughing their shells. I went to eat my toast, but it had disappeared.

  You got split into houses, where you got given your own room, he explained. Then you got a timetable. Regimented sort of thing: eat then, sleep then, shit then, lessons in between. I imagine it was meant to inspire a sense of discipline but obviously the only thing a curfew could inspire was the urge to break it. We’d sneak bottles of anything we could into each other’s rooms at night and one-up each other.

  What, I asked, “I’ve seen more naked girls than you have?”

  Don’t be crass. Yes. But also, my god is better than your god kind of thing. It was intellectual, too.

  I snorted, and he shot me a dirty look. Don’t laugh, he said. You could really make or break yourself on these things. I remember one night, there was this boy, Felix, who almost ruined me. He began to slice up another piece of toast. The eggs he had been eating, meanwhile, had disappeared from his plate and reappeared on mine. He transferred them back onto his. Then he continued. It was my first night party. I had sherry that I’d stolen from my mother’s pantry because I’d just been home for the weekend, and I invited the whole bloody house into my tiny room.

  And?

  It went great. I was the toast of the town, as it were. He looked at his buttered soldiers and chortled. Anyway, we had a good night, but of course, at some point they all had to go back to their own rooms, otherwise the dame—

  The what?

  Like a matron, he sped on impatiently, she would have had kittens. We all got caught at one point or another, actually, it’s not easy to make it back to your dorm when you’re drunk.

  I opened my mouth to express my condolences but he shot me a warning look and I shut up. I took some toast from the rack; the butter, the jam; began making myself breakfast. He selected another egg with exaggerated solemnity.

  There I am, trying to get them all out of my room, and the last person left is Felix, who pipes up and says, I feel terribly ill. May I sleep here? And because the party had been such a success, and I was feeling magnanimous the way you do when you’re sixteen, I said yes. But only if he slept on the floor, cleared off in the morning, and didn’t tell anyone about it. Instead, I woke up at three in the morning to find him next to me in bed with a cramp in his leg from all the alcohol, making the most awful sort of noise—

  What noise?

  His plate was now a mountain of bacon. He pushed it aside to allow us a good view of each other, then screwed up his nose and closed his eyes. He began to moan in soft vowel sounds. Ai, ai, ai. Awful noise, he said, face relaxed and eyes back open. I hated it. He kept holding his leg really tightly and making it worse. I ought to have hit him. The politician intuited my expression and rearranged his features accordingly. Yes, I know. I didn’t, of course. Gave him some water, told him he’d be all right. He ran off anyway and I went back to bed. I didn’t think any more of it, except he’d gone to the school nurse because he thought he was dying and the whole school found out that he’d stayed in my bed and had taken ill for an entire day after. The next morning I went down to breakfast. We ate in a hall with benches and the food was always cold—rather like this. He gestured vaguely at our surroundings within the college, the mess on his plates. Anyway, I sat down with my soldiers and my friends, and they’re all congratulating me on the night, and then someone yells quite loudly, Apparently Felix got sick from sleeping in your bed.

  He paused. I had to quash all kinds of Chinese whispers after that. It sounds so odd to say, but this was years ago. Calling someone gay was still a credible insult. Catching germs from someone was still a viable notion. The UK and US hadn’t even legalized same-sex marriage at that point.

  We fell silent.

  Actually, he resumed sheepishly, when I say he almost “ruined” me, that might have been too grand a word.

  I could think of nothing to say. He watched my face with ill-concealed anxiety, toying with some of the toast I’d made myself before tearing it, inattentively, into small pieces. At last, he could stand it no longer.

  I’ve got nothing against people being gay, you know.

  All right, I said. The politician paled. He said, I’ve got nothing against people being Black, or brown, or them belonging to any kind of ethnic minority; nothing against them being gay, or bi, or trans; I have disabled friends, I support women’s rights. I just couldn’t let there be any confusion about Felix and my bed.

  Oh. I shrugged. He nodded, satisfied, before springing forward again. I say, he smiled, would you mind making me some toast?

  I stood up to fetch more bread and another plate. The dream morphed into something else.

  When I woke up, what seemed strange to me was the fact that I had had no instinctive understanding of what this figure wanted or meant. Despite its presence in my subconscious, that apparent signal of my desire, if not design of its being there, I had not been able to find any veracity in its words, or feel any kinship with them as they came out. I knew only with certainty that I had been hungry, and that I had observed the ease with which sitting in that hall, piling up a plate, eating one’s fill, and telling a good story came to him. It was an unappealing characteristic, but not one I could truly say I had no sympathy with.

  I.IV

  When the snow came, it was late January and the park smelt of firs—it was reviving. I idled by the University Park gates, only a few minutes away from the house, in the evergreen air. Time to walk through them seemed to stretch into eternity, to be repeated again the following morning. I had taken to walking through the park on weekends, too. In lieu of work as destination, I crossed the high bridge that arched over the Cherwell. Behind it lay a sequence of farms and woodland, which I walked through. I used Tweet of the Day to pick out various birdsong, playing each two-minute segment through earphones at intervals. I got used to the smell of cowpat; knew at which time of day the sun would strike the grass gold. But a thin layer of frost and snow falling that morning in fat, flurrying flakes turned the footpath slipshod. I went back, stripped off in my room save for knickers and a sweater; went downstairs.

  In the kitchen, the bins were overflowing. My neighbor greeted me from the table, but had tucked himself too tightly in with his chair and was unable to move. He rolled his head around on his neck and watched my progress towards the rubbish.

  Oh yeah. He gave a nod. I think Maria is on holiday.

  I thought of Maria scrubbing his daily meal of baked beans and pasta off the kitchen countertops and hob, where it invariably reappeared the next afternoon. It was only the surplus of trash bulging from the bins that announced her absence. I tried not to feel shame, then reflected that perhaps doing so might make me a better person, and had a brief communion with it. When I was done, I looked around the kitchen. It was true, there was more tomato sauce splashed around than usual. I moved away from the countertops and bins and found the assembly of brightly colored microfiber rags she left on the radiator each day to dry after she’d used them.

  Oh, those are Maria’s,
my neighbor ventured uncertainly, having watched me wet one and scrub the counter.

  I’m aware, I said.

  He bit his lip. I’m not sure we’re supposed to touch them.

  I could have hit him, but I didn’t. I picked a dried baked bean off the hob, finished scrubbing, and wiped the whole thing down. When the rag was replaced on the radiator alongside the others, I lifted the top off the bin and began to twist what corners I could grab of the rubbish bag in on themselves, then marched towards the front door in search of the neighborhood wheelie bins. He watched on in anxious silence, breaking it only with the offer of a cup of tea.

  I had already forgotten about the snow. I stuffed my feet into slippers. Outside, each little press of cold reminded me of the fact that I was wearing only a large jumper and a pair of knickers. An industrial waste container peeked visibly over the hedges surrounding the front of the house.

  Not visible over the hedges and standing next to the bins was a boyish-looking man passing the house in a pink scarf and corduroy trousers. I halted before him, looked at the bag in my hand, and the goose-bump trail rising up my thighs. He in turn, with some bemusement, lifted the lid of the waste container up for me and watched as I heaved the bag in with one hand, and pulled the hem of my jumper down with the other. He replaced it leisurely when I was done, took a pocket hanky out of his shirt, and began gently wiping his fingers. He offered a smile.

  I pulled my jumper down still further. He flicked his eyes downward and said, Oh, do stop worrying about that, it’s nothing we haven’t both seen before, which I didn’t know whether to take as an insult or a sign of decency. It seemed easier to go for the latter and more correct to side with the former. I thanked him for his help and watched him walk on unperturbed.

  * * *

  All winter, I had been sitting in pubs and bars, waiting for someone to come over. Now, it was spring, and all I had was a declining rate on my debit card. April. I had ordered negronis. I had ordered Guinness on tap. I had held glasses of house white and whiskey in heavy-bottomed tumblers; downed little shots of coffee liqueur. A veil of red lipstick, gradually chewed off. I kept telling myself: this was not the way to meet people, it wasn’t going to work; but if it was only random chance that should dictate the meeting of two people with harmonious views on birth control, the Game of Thrones finale, and whether or not Labour had an anti-Semitism problem—all this in a city of over 150,000—it did not seem ill-advised to see whether you could strike it lucky on another night. At Bradmore Road, my neighbor laughed at me. That was what algorithms were for. Here, he said, reaching for my phone, tapping for a few minutes; raising his arm at an angle to aim it at me. When he handed it back, I had a dating app installed. I looked back dourly at myself. Take a better picture, he opined. I said no; and what was this, anyway? How was it possible for him to use dating apps but not Twitter? He raised his eyebrows: my expectations were all wrong. Some things could not be avoided. He could ignore Twitter, but if his chance of sex was now dependent on a phone, if it was true that no one thought anymore to look for other people at a bar when the whole world up to a user-established radius was ready for a swipe and a fuck in the convenient grasp of their palm, then of course he would accept dating apps. Besides, who would waste time quizzing successive candidates over drinks when a concrete profile could establish a more select coterie of people by presenting the immediate facts off the bat: height, food preference, life-changing experiences? On what more evidence did I need to drink alone? He said this; I knew all this, and yet, there was always the hope—tomorrow, at the Rose and Crown, eyebrows plucked, legs shaved, nylon sheers newly bought, and a gin and tonic twirling in one nervous hand—there will be someone.

  The app my neighbor had installed depended on women making the first pass. This was meant to be a rectification of heteronormative dating practice: no need for men to play hard. It put the initiative in women’s arms and freed them from passivity—or so the marketing told, but all it really did was reveal that one sex was just as stunted and awkward as the other at saying hello.

  In my dreams, I was spontaneously approached, and the conversation passed easily like in tennis or chess, with preestablished rules.

  Emojis, my neighbor counseled. I told him to shut up.

  The app asked whether or not you were looking for a serious relationship. I thought this was a trick question of sorts and let the request go unanswered on the settings page. It also had less scope than I imagined most of its users would have hoped for—an hour was all it took to happen across the profiles of several students, fellow colleagues, my neighbor. I looked at the photos of themselves they’d deemed attractive enough to show and read their profile summaries attached below (Male, 24, Looking to leave the single market before the UK does). The embarrassment was dull—as though I’d intruded on something I was not meant to see, but each profile was so posed and distanced through the medium of the screen that it almost felt as if I hadn’t.

  At the start, I tried not to base my preferences on looks alone, but profiles weren’t much to go on either. Sometimes the only redeeming feature was looks. In constructing a profile, the app required the user to answer a series of questions, which would then be visible to all. Tell me a joke, was one. In a display of feminist virtue all the men replied, the patriarchy, and then expected sex in return. But the earnest, well-intentioned ones were equally off-putting. My conversations on here aren’t usually this good, said one early match. I had asked him where he was from.

  What do you want? another asked. In the spirit of honesty, I told her: I was no longer sure what I was allowed to want. Everything I had been raised to desire had, at some point, become passé, but no one had told me. There was a chasm between my expectations and the reality I had to exist in which no one else seemed to grasp. When I FaceTimed home and told my parents I found it unlikely that I should ever walk into a room and meet the person with whom I would one day take out a mortgage, have a child, get a dog, make a home, they stared at me blankly. When I told my neighbor I found it unlikely that a swipe could ever incur something good, he laughed. And though I wanted to be a good feminist, be grateful for the advancements of a post-post-feminist age and #MeToo, I did not want to end up alone.

  There was a long pause. The speech bubble swelled, tremored, and receded, then loosed: You’re overthinking it. Happiness is something you create. And homes are just things people make pretty until they can no longer afford them, or afford something better.

  I stared at her response for a long time. Perhaps ours is a lost generation of sorts? I eventually wrote.

  Lol, get over yourself, showed her next message, at which point I deleted the app. It’s just as well, my neighbor reasoned glumly after I recounted this over a customary round of drinks. I wanted to talk about the gamification of dating, but he swayed lightly on his stool and shook his head. No wonder I couldn’t get laid. But then, softening: you got a false impression of what the situation was on dating apps. Matches seldom were what they appeared on one’s phone. The likely event was that we’d all end up alone.

  He brightened momentarily. But he and his sort-of-girlfriend had just agreed to take a break, and since we were both out of luck, already at a pub, and headed home together anyway—

  * * *

  Any discomfort there might have been after I rejected his offer was bypassed by the fact that, up the road, Cornmarket Street had been upturned. In the center of it all, a girl with close-cropped hair on a white van spoke through a megaphone, but her words got lost in the wider chant of the crowd. I nudged my neighbor, who stopped to look on. His eyesight was better than mine. He looked into the scrum while I checked my phone, and like this, we put together a quick sketch of what was going on. The university’s debating society, Oxford Union. It had a penchant for inviting high-profile, and sometimes, controversial guest speakers as a way to extract outrageous membership fees from the student body: the guest that night was a former journalist turned politician who had been president of it h
imself. Now, he was the country’s best example of farcical populism turned politic. He could be found anywhere there was power to be gained through the expression of ideals deemed controversial: through his overlong Etonian turn of phrase and jovial posturing, he had made such things gradually more respectable. Over the course of his first career he had engendered various forms of hate speech in reputable newspapers, most notably against women who chose to wear a hijab. After his tenure as mayor of London, which had cemented his platinum-blond hair and oafish smile as a cultural meme through a series of well-performed stunts—wobbling around the city on a bike two times too small for his backside; hanging off a zip wire—he had sent a bus round the country sowing improbable economics and Euroscepticism in the name of the National Health Service. I had never seen the bus in person—nor had my neighbor when I asked—but it was a widely accepted part of the news cycle online. It was enough to catapult him to Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. It was an achievement on his part that the initial shock of this appointment was now an accepted state of affairs: outrage politics were the thing on which he thrived.

  We turned north. I checked my phone to see whether the protest had hit Twitter but a search on Cornmarket returned only a handful of eyewitness reports. I searched the Union instead. My neighbor glanced at my phone.

  I read an article­—oh, pardon, he said, and broke off. A beer belch rumbled out of him. He tipped his head in apology and resumed. I read an article by a bloke who went to school with him, before anyone knew he’d be mayor or Brexit minister. It was written in a rather elite newspaper. The article claimed that true ambition had silent claws; that entitlement was only fruitful when softened with charm. That was what the school they had gone to had taught. The article described aspects of the boys who had gone on to become Cabinet ministers—the character of their walk, how active they were on the playground—in a way that overstated the significance of these things in relation to the men they had become. It was the institution, not any sort of inner nature, which bred them. Dinner halls taught them how to assume the posture of being served; grounds funded by generations of their families taught them how to walk on any land as though it belonged to them. Really, my neighbor had found the angle from which the article had been written interesting in itself: the author had seen himself as sufficiently apart from the goings-on of the school to comment on them with faint bemusement or distaste. He had qualified this by the fact that he had gone to the school on a scholarship fund. His parents were working class. He did not read the Times or the Sun, preferring the Guardian instead. But my neighbor sometimes sat in on Philosophy, Politics, and Economics seminars, which bred the kind of boys mentioned in this article, and frankly, could not discern much of a difference in tone between this article and what he heard in class. Or perhaps not so much tone as a way of speaking. Passive liberalism was the same as Toryism. And wasn’t it the case, my neighbor pointed out, that this writer had nonetheless been raised enough within the milieu of these boys that he could now comfortably live in one of the most expensive cities on earth, writing remembrances of things past? It grated on him. Didn’t I find that sort of thing aggravating, too? he asked.