by Jo Hamya
I kept my eyes on my phone screen and grunted. The protest on Cornmarket had finally begun to stream through. Online, the mess of bodies I’d witnessed acquired logic; voices I hadn’t been able to decipher became witty poster boards accruing likes. Pulling out doesn’t stop people from coming, and IKEA has better cabinets.
If you’re that interested in it, go back and join, said my neighbor irritably, upset at having been ignored.
* * *
Towards the end of May, I was required to hold a feedback group for taught graduate students who wanted to express their opinion on the texts they’d been set over the past year. There was also an option to submit opinion electronically (On a scale of one to ten, how satisfied are you with your course? Do you feel the teaching you have received has enhanced the quality of your course? Please elaborate in the box below). Perhaps because of this, only five bored faces with reusable coffee cups adjacent looked towards me from tables pushed into an angular horseshoe. With a little effort, I recognized the girl with SAD, the environmentalist, the nonbinary student who, alone, seemed poised with a notebook and pen to take notes. And, to the left of the room’s windows—Ghislane.
We should start, I said.
Everything I saw was a confirmation. So, she was wearing a bright orange handkerchief dress and gold rings I had seen on her Instagram page. Just as I’d seen on my feed, she’d dyed her long, dark hair dirty blond and was wearing less makeup than the night we met. She seemed unaccompanied in the horseshoe: stretching her legs out in a straight, sloping line under the table and leaning her body at a right angle into her seat. Both of her hands were placed in the pockets of her jacket, which remained on. She was as still in her chair as she was on my phone. The only surprise was to find her in the soft, changing light of the spring; to see what difference it made when the sun went behind the clouds and new shadows appeared on her face in real time, then dissolved as clouds parted. I smiled in recognition. She gave a vacant nod back. I couldn’t be disappointed. Only one of us had been periodically checking the other’s socials for almost a year.
Ideals wrought by the twentieth century were dead, one of the graduates in a Hawaiian shirt was saying to the room. And he hadn’t really seen that reflected in the course reading. In fact, they had been taught as though language hadn’t developed past modernism. Frankly, he said, gathering speed, the whole premise of the catalogue they had received was lazy. They had been given Heart of Darkness so that they couldn’t say the course hadn’t covered questions of imperialism and race. They had been given Mrs. Dalloway so that they couldn’t say the course hadn’t addressed feminism. But he did not want a preestablished discussion on the difference between the savage and the civilized, or on angels in the house. The question of a functioning social identity in the twenty-first century was slipperier than that. It was time to start questioning the inherent virtue assumed by minority politics. No disrespect—he raised his palms in apology, he knew his place as a cis white male in the new order—but just because a character was a woman, or brown, did not make them infallible to basic human cruelty. Social politics now functioned at the level of the “I.” At the very least, if the texts could not be changed, he wanted to know how the logic behind them had led to the strains of metamodernism and autofiction being produced now. Could I communicate that back, please? He appraised me conspiratorially, but I had been told to remain neutral; to create a safe space for student opinions so that they could be relayed authentically.
I looked at Ghislane. Her face was unresponsive. I was disappointed.
I agree and I don’t, said the student next to him after an uncertain pause in which I failed to respond. The past was prologue. There was as much wisdom about our current situation to be found in texts written a century ago as anything being produced today.
Such as? he shot back.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity, they cited.
He slumped back into his chair. Everyone always quotes fucking Yeats, he murmured.
* * *
When they milled out, the girl with SAD hung back. How are things? I asked her. She gave a pained sigh. There was more end-of-term work to be done. She was waiting for the weather to go on the up. Seasons came so much later than she anticipated, these days. The kale juice had been a good shout. Now she was going through a mango phase, a vitamin C kick. She bought it cubed, daily, ate it first thing. The routine of waking up in the morning and having an immediate destination in Magdalen Street for a box of it helped. She had tried using the time to be a good citizen and stay informed, but it robbed any pleasure she might have gained from the process. The last time she had tried, she read that May had announced her intention to resign, and the rest of her mango slid like cement down her throat at the thought of what was to come. Lately, she had found a way to compromise by listening to a podcast on current cultural affairs presented by two slightly punch-drunk blonds whose upturned sentences made any calamity into a question. With that, she could digest better. When the mango and the podcast were finished, she felt she had achieved some small thing, and could get on with the rest of her day.
Aha, I said, bored yet wanting to appear simpatico. She did not look convinced; cast the horseshoe a pitying glance.
For the record, she said, she had not agreed with anyone in the feedback group. There was no literature to rival the disintegration of language social media and digital technology had provoked. For example, last weekend, after a long absence, she had visited her parents. In the month she had been away, they had installed an Amazon Echo Dot in the house, a gadget she had always been resistant to. The turning on and off of lights now relied upon the word “Alexa”—but something in the voice recognition of the technology had gone wrong and sometimes the AI system would perform another task entirely, make strange noises of its own accord, or simply not respond. Sometimes its coding would not account for the long, compound sentences in which her father spoke, and he would frustrate himself for hours trying to make it understand instead of simply accomplishing the task he was asking it to do himself: going out to check the weather, say, or looking up a foreign word. She hated that the thing had a human name and passably human voice, which made it seem as though it were a sentient being with the capacity to empathize with need and respond, rather than a thing which recognized command in a sequence of variously pitched sounds. It did all sorts of funny, relatably human stuff, like sing Ed Sheeran out of tune when you asked it to. On that account, she could not convince her parents to exchange the thing—in their minds, its technical error was tantamount to human error: they did not seem to realize it worked unto an algorithm that could not fix itself, rather than a sense of goodwill which would eventually compromise with them. And so when her father, having failed to get his meaning across cried, No, Alexa! I meant this—over and over—she felt her heart break. It was like watching Lear on the heath. More than this, she hated the thing simply for claiming the attention of the room. Her parents had taken to asking it to play lo-fi sounds, and it would blare ugly, discordant, so loud she had to shout to be heard. It made the house feel less like a home, which it didn’t anyway because they lived in a fashionable district of London lined with pastel doors. Whenever she opened her own, it was probable someone who did not live anywhere near them would be on the front step, wearing something oversized that cost £19.99. They would drag stage lights and a friend with an equally oversized trashy Nikon camera along and splay themselves over the steps she carried groceries up, or stormed down after a fight with her mum.
Her lip twitched. One time, she had asked one of these girls to please stop influencing outside her home. And the girl had retorted that since this was London and she lived in such a privileged neighborhood, she really couldn’t complain. The influencer herself lived in a cramped house share with one bathroom and four other people that cost her half her paycheck a month. If she had owned a house like this, she would have gladly shared her good luck with other people trying to make
it in the world. Moreover, the influencer said, if she lived in a house that could be located behind Hugh Grant in a popular nineties film, she would be aware that her front door was a public zone. And then she had tucked away the label on her faux Louis Vuitton and gone back to her photo shoot.
It was a shit-show, the girl with SAD finished. She had left it. There was no way to win the privilege Olympics. And she could not blame someone like the influencer, however ridiculous they had been, for living so much of their life online. There was all the space you wanted there, you paid no money for it, and you could do with it whatever you chose. She remembered the earliest stages of Twitter, when she was fourteen: how furnishing her profile with the exact html shade of lilac text, the perfect banner, and assorted heart symbols had been as crucial to her as decorating her room.
* * *
I did not feel like cooking. At college, I loaded up my dinner card and on my way to hall found my neighbor in the common, picking out the chords to “Ghislane” on his guitar.
Please stop, I begged as I passed. He frowned. You’ve developed a really bad habit of snapping your fingers at me when you talk, he said, but leaned into the instrument, began to strum lightly, and instead: I loved you since I knew ya—I wouldn’t talk down to ya, I have to tell you just how I feel . . .
Even at the very front of the hall, it was impossible not to hear him. He had a strong, clear voice. It magnified over discs of porcelain and on the prongs of forks. It commanded everyone to pause over their food at intervals to listen. I lurched out of my chair and down St. Giles.
The weather had broken at last. White dresses toured Magdalen Street. Various trees’ spring refuse matted each pavement’s edge. I stopped and took in the sight of a girl in an orange dress. She had draped her jacket against the high black fence of a derelict graveyard, leaning against it with a bag of pistachios under her arm. She was peeling a satsuma. Because of how she was holding the nuts, there was some awkwardness to the process. I walked towards her.
To see Ghislane from across the road was not the same as being on the same side of it, next to her. When I was beside her, it turned out that my view had been better than hers. I stood and tried to find something to admire in the Tesco that now faced us both.
They’re on offer if you go in, she said, dropping peel everywhere so that she could shake the pistachios at me with one hand and insert half the satsuma into her mouth with the other. She swallowed it whole, popped the other half in, and spoke through a thick layer of fruit. Shell some for me? I don’t have any nails. You can help me eat them, too.
I broke open a few of the nuts and passed her the small handful. You didn’t say much in the feedback session, I told her.
No, she agreed as she chewed. The sun was in her eyes. The light turned her face quizzical, wrinkled her features into a squint.
So?
She made a face at the kernels when I offered them again and shook her head. These aren’t doing it for me. She frowned and motioned that I should follow her.
The air inside Tesco was clinically cool. Unassuming beige floor shone under fluorescent light. A few steps down to the right, a row of baked goods lined the wall. Without looking, Ghislane plucked a folded paper bag of standard value double chocolate cookies, wriggling her fingers for a basket. I held one out. We went on like this.
So? I pressed again. And she: I found it irritating. I think they all got most of their opinions from Twitter. Do you think it’s possible to generate opinion at the rate the internet requires? I don’t. We passed through fruit and veg. Rows of plums and peaches glazed in their packaging offered themselves in fours at half price. She threw a box of apricots towards me, an aubergine, some parsley.
No, I conceded. But the point was to elaborate your position on the past year, irrespective of anyone else’s take. Ghislane looked at me with unconcealed disgust. Then, Your man in the Hawaiian shirt was showing off. So was everyone else. Who quotes Yeats in an argument? Reaction culture makes everything a moral and philosophical position. You asked them for their opinion of our reading list and they arrived with preprepared statements on the nature of the twenty-first century. And catching my expression, she passed me some tomatoes on the vine; amended: Exceptional circumstances, maybe. Maybe all you can expect to encounter in a room full of English graduate students is high-grade bullshit. But sometimes I want not to speak. I don’t use Twitter anymore, she said, because it became impossible to know what I thought on it. I read one thing I agreed with, and ten seconds later, a wholly convincing argument contravened what I’d only just established. Imagine being told you’re wrong all the time. Imagine it being fashionable to prove people wrong. I can’t thrive in that much negative energy.
I sympathized. I told her I was only half on Twitter, too: I watched everything, but only ever retweeted posts and never wrote my own. She took the basket from me and studied it. I want an egg mayonnaise sandwich, she said finally, and dumped the lot. I sent what I hoped was a pacifying shrug at the aggrieved customer assistant who had watched her do so.
Do you find it comfortable? Ghislane asked, now surrounded by industrial fridges and occupied with picking out a meal deal. Can you really say you have cogent thoughts about everything, all the time?
Between her fingers I could count a Twix, some Lucozade, water, and the sandwich, before she turned the corner and dumped her second haul into a nearby freezer, fishing out ice cream instead. Pistachio. I became ever more acutely aware of the pained expressions on the faces of the store staff, but I could not bring myself to point them out to her. Ghislane brought the ice cream to her chin, tilting her face upwards in expectation of reply. I said, Of course not, and she nodded, satisfied. Here, she said, scooping the Lucozade and water out of the freezer once more and tossing them to me. The guy outside with his dog might want them. She marched us to self-checkout.
By now, I was beginning to feel lost. Have you enjoyed being here? I asked while she paid. Have you enjoyed your degree?
Of course, she said neutrally. Or, I will in a few months, when I feel nostalgic over it.
* * *
Ghislane stole cutlery from Pret, then took us down Ship Street. She ate the ice cream on the grass outside the Radcliffe Camera, and I watched. I wanted to feel there was a genuine warmth being established between us.
Do you remember meeting at the department party? I asked.
Kind of, she said.
Remember the day you met me outside 2 Bradmore Road?
No, she said simply, licking her spoon.
Walter Pater’s house, I prompted.
Kind of, she said.
Oh. I deflated. You were taking pictures of it.
Ghislane nodded. I take pictures of everything.
Have you enjoyed your time here? she asked when she had finished eating and sprawled herself on the grass. Select your answer on a scale of one to ten below, where one is not at all, and ten is very much, she added, smirking with her eyes closed. I prickled; picked at the rest of her ice cream, set spoonfuls of it clinging to a blade in front of me, and watched it moodily, as it dripped towards the earth.
I’ll tell you something, she said at last, shielding her eyes from the sun, paying me the final bit of attention she had to muster. You look like them, even if you think you don’t. And seeing the confused expression on my face, she said impatiently, You look right at home.
* * *
I thought about Ghislane’s remark when my contract was up.
Packing took time. I had kept the cardboard boxes under my bed. I reflected. The longing. Always present during my stay at Bradmore Road, the wish to drop into a place, like a penny. I had wanted to be able to recognize the smell of the room as mine, and so had stretched freshly laundered bedding over the radiator and draped it over the backs of chairs; kept Darjeeling out. I left books open everywhere: the soft, aged musk of secondhand paperbacks and the sharp tang of new hardbacks. I burrowed down for long periods and forgot to open the window until the room smelt o
f my body, slow, unmoving—and when I had had enough, opened it so that the trees outside could waft the season in on branches: brittle air, pollen, sap, wind. These now seemed obscenely romantic ways in which to belong to a place where the downward slide of the pane and any absence longer than two days returned it to its original odor: fetid carpet, repainted walls. Not that it mattered, I was wiping it all down with disinfectant anyway to get my deposit back.