by Jo Hamya
When things were mostly packed, Maria brought the Hoover up the stairs. I stacked cardboard boxes up above the floor, anywhere they would go. The bed, the desk, the chairs, the shelves. There were too many of them. In the end, I could only pick up and move one at a time around patches of carpet so that she could get to what was below. A notification had gone off on my phone and a livestream from the BBC came in and out of the room between the bursts of sound from the suck and gush of the Hoover. It was like anticlimax musical chairs; it went like this: Life depends on compromise—I lifted, I moved, she hoovered, pointed at the next box—We have completed the work that David Cameron and George Osborne started—I lifted, I moved, she hoovered, pointed at the next box—housing ladder so that young people can enjoy the opportunities their parents did—I lifted, I moved, she hoovered, pointed at the next box—Grenfell Tower, to search for—I lifted, I moved, she hoovered—country I love.
When it was done, Maria looked around pityingly. Need help?
Please, I said.
She produced one of her colorful rags. We cleaned the room together.
You have lots of things, she noted. I said, I’m giving most of them away. It accumulated, I don’t know where from. She looked at me in a way that made me feel stupid; shook her head, took the nectarines from the windowsill, and held them out, asking what she should do.
Help yourself, I said. She slipped one into the front pocket of her apron with a nod and set the other between her teeth. Then she opened the window to clean the glass. She lifted herself. Her foot sought out the desk in a practiced move and found its hook, deft in its white trainer. She remained steady as she leaned out. She seemed utterly stable. Every so often, she reached for the window’s casing, gripping it through the cloth and biting down as she brought the fruit away from her mouth with the other hand to chew. It was quick work. She spat the pit out into the garden below and addressed herself to me. Ready to go?
Almost, I said. What will you do? What’s the plan after cleaning? She did not shift her gaze from the glass she was polishing. I’ll still be here, she said. Mortification rooted me to the spot. I said nothing. She continued softly, with good humor. English houses are very messy. They always need cleaning. English people are very lazy. When I’m treated badly by someone with a messy house, I can’t feel it seriously. Why should I listen to people who can’t take care of where they live, and ask me instead to fix their mess?
She sprang lightly from the ledge and came back into the room. I’m the manager of the company your school uses to clean, she said. I see a lot of people your age. They don’t think they’ll be cleaning for very long. I tell them, I was the same. But some English people will pay very well for a good, clean house. It is their reputation. Your school should think like this. It wouldn’t be so grand if no one picked up the coffee cups and cans of drink you and your friends leave out. I take care of it, my staff does that work. But your school does not want to take care of us if we are sick and need to stay in bed. They do not pay us pensions after we have done work that means you can think all day, and newspapers can take pictures and say how beautiful everything looks.
I watched Maria begin to put her things together. The sun set low on the room, now dotted with uniform boxes. The sudden absence of my things made it sparse and gleaming. The houses on this road, she said after a pause, I do. I’m a manager, but I don’t mind cleaning. Sometimes my staff tell me: our work is a lot of shame. I tell them they’re wrong. They will not be noticed by ignorant people, but the room is a very important work they are doing.
Of course, I said. She smiled thinly. You ignored me, she said. But it’s not personal. I know how much of your payments on this room end up with me.
I stood, at a loss. I felt there was nothing I could say, except, Thank you, Maria.
She nodded, having taken a cigarette out of her apron and put it in her mouth. The Hoover dangled off her arm. Have those, she said, gesturing at a couple of rags and a spray bottle of disinfectant. Before you leave you can wipe everything down. And here, wait—she left the room briefly and returned with a cardboard folder full of paper. I must have looked confused because she said, Don’t forget those. Deposit form, insurance claim, inventory from beginning, inventory to do now. There are two copies—take one, leave one. Okay? Good luck.
Part II
On my bad days
(and I’m being broken at this very moment)
I speak of my ambitions
II.III
Pay attention to this next page, the former copy editor said, because it’s by the Editor’s best friend. When you see this name, you’ll know it needs to be perfect.
We were in an office. London, height of summer. Up on the third floor of a six-story building, the wall-sized windows were thrown open, and the heat and the noise and the dirt of the city rose to meet the white-furnished room. The whole thing was open-plan, loped out in the shape of a serif capital “I”—at one end, a soundproofed glass box for the Editor; at the other, a cluster of twenty desks for marketing; and in between, four white wooden islands with twelve 27-inch high-resolution Retina display screens, back-to-back in rows of three. There was an employee for each one. I had blagged my way into the country’s last society magazine, which, I had been informed at interview, was undergoing an unexpected renaissance with a new Editor at its helm. This, from Oxford, I had not known, but in the windows of newsagents there were, indeed, blown-up posters of the magazine’s cover, each issue selling at least as well as other glossies.
You need to be careful with her pages. He will personally check everything by her, my predecessor continued. Always make sure they go straight to the top of the pile. She retrieved an A3 sheet from the printer beside her and slid it towards me; I took a Post-it, wrote, Lady P. Always Urgent. I stuck it on the side of my own giant screen, obscuring the calendar’s date shining out from it: 8 July. Someone a few desks over from mine was having sushi in front of their screen. I wanted the spicy salmon roll they were eating; I wanted to be able to google Lady P.’s name and find out how she fit into the complicated web of marriages, rivalries, and tax havens I had been studying all morning; I wanted to put her name through Twitter and find as much gossip about her as possible. Constantly, I found my mind turning on what was happening outside of the office instead of in it. I looked at the page. Lady P. had sent in a list of items and a 300-word brief on creating modern opulence in the process of interior design. I took in the £20,000 iron chandelier, £3,000 lamp, price-on-request Nureyev trolley. In the top-right corner was a photo of Lady P. in question: draped in Alice Temperley, her arms thrown out. The art director, a woman with coin eyes wrinkled at the edges and a Jane Birkin haircut neither blond nor gray, craned her neck to look at the page. She had a soft, anxious voice.
This is a good moment to point out, she said, before you start work on it, all the things that make the architecture of the page work. You see? Those sofas are facing each other on either side, diagonally, which offsets the head and sell for the article, makes it appealing. And then you have furniture arranged on the page in a way which encourages the reader to visualize buying it all—the lamp on top of the fireplace, and the mirror above the chair, and the wallpaper behind the sofa, and so on. It’s important that they can visualize putting these things in their home. The architecture of the page—she looked up to make sure I was listening—is as much about the commercial as it is about the aesthetic. What you’re looking at isn’t just leisure or taste, it’s product. We make a lot of revenue off these pages.
My predecessor smiled. That’s right, she said. And the page furniture—the prices and headlines you’ll be writing in—play a big part in that, too. She pulled out another page, this time covered in a collage of well-groomed people holding drinks, posing. She began to explain: The party pages are what we’re known for; names are everything here. Names are money, and a lot of readers will buy each issue to see who’s inside . . .
I let her go on. If you looked outside the windows
and dropped your eyes, you would see the square. Periodically, outside the huge revolving doors to the building, a young woman in heels carrying an impractically sized bag would stand with her back to them and her front to a photographer, and then leave. This kind of woman who never went in was punctuated by women who did—women in long, floral dresses always paired with Birkenstocks, an iced coffee, a green juice. The square itself contained three distinct zones: a patch of green in which office workers took their lunch under its canopy of trees; a throughfare for buses and taxis; an advancing length of torn-up pavement around which men in neon jackets drilled. From the blemishless white office on the height of the third floor, the square functioned like its own complete ecosystem.
The Editor will always want a witty, snappy, glamorous head for every page, my predecessor was saying. Those are your key words and you have to operate in that kind of universe. So, for example, this page on the Serpentine Party, he approved Top of the Lake.
I felt my brow contract. But that’s a crime show, I said. She nodded. There was something flat about her face in spite of its dark features. Really witty, repurposing it for a glamorous social party, right? she said, and I wondered whether she was joking, or if the association between the murdered women on the show and pouting, stiff-boned women on the page really was lost on her. She looked at her phone. She was dressed more sensibly than anyone in the office.
We’ve got just enough time, she said, to grab a quick coffee, and I’ll finish telling you what everyone does in here. Then you can go to lunch.
* * *
I had left Oxford by bus in the last week of May. Hours on it blurred. London appeared along the A40 in leisurely orbit—first fields and asphalt, then shopping center, then that tower block, a Hilton hotel. It was non-time spent in transit. To sit and be carried somewhere with no effort, at a specified rate. To be safe in the knowledge of a destination. In the bus, I had felt cocooned: I fell asleep and woke up with my breath on the windowpane. I had checked Twitter and watched a politician’s gaffe as he pretended to hold his phone in a video someone else had made for him: online, viewers said it was endearing. Things happened, but I could suspend them if I liked. When the view got boring, I drew the curtains on it. When the snoring of my fellow passengers reached my ears, I had headphones ready to counter it.
Eventually the bus had stopped just past Shepherd’s Bush and I’d walked to Barons Court where a friend of a friend had agreed to sublet her sofa for £80 a month. Past the Georgian stucco and white brickwork of West Kensington, trundling a suitcase over uneven slabs of stone in one hand and a small bouquet of crocuses my neighbor had sent me off with in the other. They must have been the last of the spring. He had presented them with a sheepish flourish and said, I will miss you, even though you are ridiculous. Sometimes it was like you were acting out how you thought we’d all like you to be.
I said, What do you mean? and his expression grew more sheepish. He said, Shit, that was terrible, I didn’t mean to offend you—but I waved my hand impatiently, and he went on—You never went out. You never talked to anyone. You seemed to live on fairy meals, like boiled eggs and tangerines and honey. I could have read you in a novel. When I had to carry you out of that party I took you to last year, my friends asked where I had got to the next day. I told them about you and no one remembered your being there. They wanted me to bring you to another party, but you seemed happy enough in your room. I had to narrate you to them—sometimes they asked how you were.
I had cupped the crocuses in my palm and watched him muster himself. He said, I expect you’ll be glad to be gone—off to do literature in the real world and whatnot, and on my part, I felt all the righteousness drain out of me. I suppose, my neighbor had said at the door, we probably won’t speak all that much after this. People always say, let’s keep in touch, but it’s never the case, is it? Might be best to see how it goes. I agreed with him out loud, but in the days before I left I had already been envisioning what it would be like to visit after some period of absence: more beautiful and alive than I had ever been while actually living there, radiant with success.
Towards Barons Court, my suitcase had kept getting stuck on bits of raised pavement, stopping and starting the walk over. I hated it. I had been lied to by every woman who had ever written in a glossy book or magazine about packing a suitcase. There was no leotard and Basis soap; chicly minimized capsule wardrobe and wildcard party dress with a Celine fragrance to match. I could not pack to an itinerary; the contents of my suitcase had no coherent brand. I knew this did not make me a nonperson, and still I resented the assortment of stray mints, chargers, loosely filed papers. My suitcase was a water bottle, a p60 tax form, my clothes without a wardrobe and brutalized with creases—but, I thought, I should not be complaining, there was always someone who had it worse than me. Whenever I forgot, I looked at my phone or self-flagellated with the Guardian. There was a proliferation of opinions on Twitter about what it took to be a good, inclusive, progressive person, but I read such lists and threads on the cusp of going to Waitrose or preparing for sleep, whereupon they were quickly replaced with other lists: sliced bread to be bought, teeth to be brushed. When I remembered I had forgotten them, I felt like a terrible person anew. I wanted to discuss this with someone, but there was never any time. Quickly, I realized the absurd wealth of the places I had been in over the past year: rooms in which such discussions could be played with in theory, without urgency, at any time, and then set aside to be taken up at a later date. The internet was one such room: a constant, useless distress in my pocket. I had resolved to stop looking at my phone if I could help it; to turn off my notifications and live less theoretically.
The girl whose sofa I was to be sleeping on lived in what must have once been an art deco hotel: a long, dilapidated semicircle of a building with five stories, elaborate stonework mossed over, and construction railings going up against each balcony and its flat. Cosseting the building was a rusted fire escape out on which various tenants now stuck their dustbins. The driveway arched round a patch of green and some drooping palm trees. The whole thing was gated, intercommed, needed a key fob for access, but when I went to buzz at my arrival, the set of main gates swung open to let a car out, and I slipped past it.
The lifts on the ground floor still had grates; there were porters’ desks, but they were empty. The stairs leading to each floor were yellowed, linoleum-lined things, with the lights bouncing off them in pearlescent spots. I was on the first floor. When the door swung open, a girl younger than I had expected stood in its frame and waited impatiently. I held out four twenty-pound notes and said, I’m here about the sofa?
She looked confused; asked, How did you get in? I told her, how I had arrived at the moment a car was leaving, how I had gone through the gates before they closed.
Don’t do that again, she said. You can cut yourself keys and clone a fob later today. She let me into a short, narrow corridor quite agitated, saying, Don’t sneak in the gates again.
The corridor opened up to a living room. Immediately I could see there was no way to get in or out of the flat without passing through it, and by extension, the sofa. There was a narrow table which seated four in theory and more probably three in practice: its wood was the same color as the linoleum stairs. There was a dirtied gray carpet my new flatmate walked over shoeless regardless; a small cluster of cabinets with mail on top of them addressed to several different names, none of which, from the quick glance I was able to give, belonged to her. The sofa, she said, like the rest of the furniture in the flat, had been left by the landlord. It opened up into a bed, although she didn’t advise it. It had been there when the previous tenant had lived here, too. She herself was not like the flat. She wore a black, carefully untailored piece of linen and statement earrings; she guided me through a kitchen with grease-stained walls and jewelry tools on the counter; a bathroom with decomposing tiles. That was the price of semi-reasonable rent, she said. In this area, there were a handful of magnificent, cru
mbling buildings with landlords who would lease them to you for cheap and then invoice you for damage you didn’t notice when you moved in. But if you walked twenty minutes up the road, you would see maisonettes with interiors and owners beautiful enough to be featured in House & Garden, as though opposite each of them, on every road, there was not a council estate. That was worse, my new flatmate said, then caught herself and narrowed her eyes at me. Are you a Tory? I shook my head. Good, she intoned. As she had been saying, she would never want to live at such extremes. These days, everyone with a salary who wasn’t an oligarch left London for the suburbs in the end anyway—and even the oligarchs left their flats unoccupied. She suspected she would leave too, but for now, she worked in a bookshop and sold rings online, so this would do.
I stood clutching my suitcase while she spoke. You’re a bit sad, aren’t you? she said, an eyebrow raised. I offered her a weak smile and she deepened in her disgust. It’s not a personality trait, you know, she said. You want my advice, stop moping and go make something. Do something. She threw a set of keys at me with a deft hand.
My rings, she said, get carried around. They live beyond me, tangibly. It’s transcendent, you understand? They’re not just material things: they’re a way I become something meaningful in other people’s lives. It’s something beyond my everyday self. And it’s a nice wad of extra cash each month. Anyway, she nodded at the keys, you’ll need sheets. I haven’t got any to spare. You’ll need to cut yourself keys. Those ones are mine and I’ll need them back today. And you’ll need to do your own shopping. Will you find your way around?