by Jo Hamya
I said yes, I had lived in London before.
Good. Off you go, she said, and disappeared into her bedroom.
* * *
On Kingsway, the linden trees were the only thing that calmed me. I knew them well. My flatmate had suggested a locksmith in Chelsea, but I thought it was possible she was right: that what she took to be sadness was, in fact, my anxiety at being back in the city with no discernible plan. Holborn was a familiar place where life had once had reliable form: I wanted sanctuary. I cut a copy of the keys. I cloned the fob. Then, at the very end of the road, I walked across towards Bloomsbury, found Tottenham Court Road, bought sheets, bought tinned cannellini beans, tangerines, almonds, coffee, and, in spite of myself, a secondhand book. I took it all to Russell Square and unsheathed it beneath the cool, intimate shade thrown onto the grass by the yew, the oak, the Scots elm. The idea had been to read for a while.
I checked Instagram. I checked on Ghislane, but she was no longer posting. She remained, still, in gridded squares, in common rooms, in libraries, in three-minute clips of a popular nineties song. I lay on the grass and listened to her namesake.
I texted my mother. She wrote, I suppose there’s no point asking you to take a train home, and my stomach did its little guilt squeeze, answered, I still need to look for a job.
Years ago, I had studied around Bloomsbury. In Oxford, it had held the idealized sheen of a former home, but now, with the knowledge that I would have to pay for any amenity around it that would make me comfortable—a toilet, a drink—to sit there was unbearable. I could not find it in me to think that amenities would have to wait.
* * *
Unfortunately for you, the former copy editor said, sketching out a rough floor plan when we had settled in the café, your main concern is everything and everyone. Don’t lose this—she slashed a rectangle into three desks and above it drew another; carried on, until there were several—and don’t show it to anyone. When she was done, the office we had just come from was laid out, crude in 2D and biro over a stained napkin. The hum of espresso machines and shouted orders dimmed her voice. I strained to hear her.
So, she breathed out, and began tapping her pen over the corresponding desks as she spoke. You’ll want to know that her father is in the House of Lords, she used to sleep with every musician you can think of in the nineties, and her sister does PR at Buckingham Palace. This guy here, his wife is the former editor of the magazine upstairs. What else . . . ? He went to uni with a bunch of royals. Ah, and she’s about to marry into acting royalty. The rest of them are normal, but either they’ve been there longer than you’ve been alive, or they’re working pretty much for free. She pushed the napkin at me and said, It’s horrible describing them all that way, but you can’t be caught off guard. They’re all charming, but you’ll need to watch yourself. I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but you look a bit clueless. I looked you up, nothing showed up about you in terms of connections or fame. I shook my head. She sighed again and asked, half-heartedly, where I was staying.
I’m on a casual contract, I explained, examining the napkin. The managing editor told me to check in with her at the end of each week to see if I’m still needed. I’m on a sofa for now.
I thought as much, she said. Don’t lose that. If you do well here, it’s a good chance they’ll be too lazy to replace you and you’ll become permanent staff. You’ll be the only copy editor on the desk as it is.
I nodded as though it had all made sense, which it hadn’t. The job description had specified a command of English, proficiency in InDesign; none of what I’d just been told. I wanted to ask more questions but could scarcely think of what might be useful to know anymore, and before I had time to think, she waved me off to lunch. So I walked west towards Hyde Park, then doubled back on myself, despondent. On the way back, a man winked at me from the ground and said, You have a good night, girls, keep smiling—but it was midafternoon, and there was only one of me, and I was not smiling. I blurted out, You too, and wondered whether he understood any more of the exchange than I did. When I returned to the office, I saw the former copy editor was already there, the same coffee cup she had been drinking out of in the café now on her desk barely touched. I slid into the desk next to hers. Outside, the construction workers had returned from their lunch and the irregular sound of drilling filtered up from below.
In academia, so much of my work had been tied up in my moral self. I weighed up the value of a particular narrative for a living and attached my name to what, in theory, I would have the world be like. This was nothing like that. To the sound of slabs being taken up from the ground below, I proofed and revised a Cotswolds heiress’s guide to laying a table: she made suggestions like putting flowers in jam jars and sitting on hay bales; her silverware was artfully tarnished. There was no need for the old formalities, she said. She encouraged her guests to turn whichever way they liked and chat away across the table—or even to move away entirely from their assigned seats. I gave it a head: The lady is for turning. There was an at-home interview with a celebrity facialist whose photo shoot was overlaid with yellow boxes: in capital letters the art department had written, MAKE BRIGHT, PUNCHY, OPEN on her purple velvet sofa and her taut, gleaming skin. The interview ran over. Keep the stuff about her being an immigrant, the features editor mused on consultation, and cut the stuff about her house. I was given a page full of chintz cushions and deliberately scuffed tables: country chic was back, and every house was full of it. Rid yourself of stainless steel and loud colors, the copy advised—such things were the height of pretension. I labored over filling in the brand names and prices: a Jo Malone wood sage candle, a Le Creuset dish. There was a couture report with gowns inspired by ancient Rome; I changed a BC to AD in red pen, and then on-screen. A few times the art director stopped me with her winding neck, her breathy vowels cutting short when she said, Don’t move anything on the page. Don’t change the layout, it’s very specifically done. If you can’t make room for it, it doesn’t belong there.
I envy you your job, I said to my flatmate after my first week. Mine is all a sham. No one in my office would be able to report on the life of the one percent if they weren’t either part of it or hustling on the side. The intern sells pills. The features editor gets sent clothes by upcoming brands and they pay her for pictures of her wearing it online. I looked at her glumly. You’re among books. You’ve got the best job in the world.
You really need to wake up, my flatmate said after a pause. I don’t moon around and think and read all day. They’re goods with a price printed on them. I haven’t read most of them, mainly because I don’t have time to. They get delivered in blue plastic crates by guys on minimum wage and I break my back lifting them, getting them onto a trolley, and then arranging them on a shelf so that some fucker can take them down and leave them lying around somewhere under his discarded coffee cup for me to pick up. The owner of my company tells my colleagues and me it’s a noble job and we get paid in honor for doing it, but honor doesn’t pay my bus fare. If I could get more stable commissions for the jewelry I make, I’d leave bookselling in a heartbeat. The staff turnover in my shop has a monthly rate and people leave crying; meanwhile, the owner sits in a town house in Marylebone and cuts himself a million-pound paycheck every year. You do not want my job. She peered at me over the remains of her dinner. Are you sure you’re not a Tory?
I’m not, I said. I’m just adjusting to something new.
Oh. She grimaced. No offense. I suppose that’s a bit weird to assume of a BAME person anyway. I just meant from a class perspective. But maybe Oxford will do that to you, right? I don’t think you should miss it. She paused. Don’t you think it’s weird that you spent a year giving yourself to the place that started the careers of people that openly disdain you, and now you’ve gone to work for a publication that exalts them?
* * *
I had only been gone a year, but the city felt different. A month passed and still I could not root myself in it. I jumped
at every face, every engine, hurling itself forward. The Tube roared out of its tunnel. I became one of those people who feared being pushed under it. In Oxford I had missed the anonymizing height of the buildings in London. Now they bore down on me, and everywhere, a relentless modernity. The lights were never off.
In the first weeks of moving back, before I had started my job, things were defined by what they were not. The screech of foxes in the city at night was not the thrum of crickets in Bradmore Road’s overgrown grass and, however hard I tried, I could not reconcile the prevalence of shop windows to the stained honeycomb of the walls I was used to in my head. Only the private gardens were recognizable in spirit. Then gradually, the appearance of the same chains—the hipsters with backpacks and the rushed businessmen in Pret; the Zara on the high street where the girls were photo-shoot ready. Familiar patterns evolved, so at first, I had tried to get some transposition involved. I made up the sofa with cotton sheets; I woke up to Greenwich pips. But, too soon, it became a drag to fold and snag the thin white layers; to snap and unfurl them, then spread, like cold butter over cheap cardboard toast, the mass onto the sofa’s fraying edge, then spread and hold myself, briefly, with arms and legs splayed, before cramping up to have my limbs fit my new bed. Only to gather it again in the morning: a sofa was a semi-public thing—my flatmate would want to sit on it, too. I gave up making it up: I threw the cushions from its back to its side: a quick displacement that took two seconds to fix the morning after. I stuffed the sheets into one of the cabinets: it was summer, I did not need covering anyway, I repeated nightly to myself, I did not need covering anyway. And when my back gave up its complaints, had acclimatized, I found a new way to get on. In the first weeks of June, I spent each morning embarrassed. My flatmate was an early riser with no compunction: she saw my sleep-swollen face, the slipped T-shirt, uncovered nipple, the furred tongue and unbrushed hair—she looked at all of this having already brushed her teeth. Cheer up, she said. People used to move all the time. You’re in your natural hunter-gatherer state, cheer up, it’s not like you’re homeless.
I learned to get up before her by leaving the curtains open to the living-room windows. I left before she woke; the kitchen was covered in tools and the dust of semiprecious metal, I got my coffee elsewhere.
I tried spending those early mornings taking the Piccadilly line to Leicester Square and switching over for the Northern line to Goodge Street: I had nowhere to go but Bloomsbury, no way to spend my time but minding a cardboard cup slopping cheap filter over its plastic disc on top. I tried street haunting, but could not walk for the blue-plaqued success of the dead. At dentist offices, embassies, car rental agencies, university buildings, and bookstores—statesmen, architects, pioneers of women’s suffrage, prime ministers, authors, artists had all lived here, and because of this, the price of rent in the area meant I never would. Instead of feeling free to ramble, I felt dread. The Tube was too expensive. I gave up street haunting.
Occasionally I got texts from friends who had heard I was back in the city and asked me out for drinks. But I had no cash to spare; nowhere to host them, and so demurred, promising to get back in touch at a later date. I wanted to be able to invite them to a proper flat; to have four bottles of wine resting idly in their rack, and to pull them out in succession between a starter course, a main, dessert. I tried typing out, I’m broke, and found it was too much to have on-screen privately, even after I’d found the requisite emojis to turn it into more of a joke. I left those drafts unsent. Gradually, the texts stopped coming.
I missed being an academic, and so I read. My great comfort was a particular kind of novel which seemed to be gaining traction in the publishing industry and on bestseller lists. I could not afford them as new hardbacks, but I asked my flatmate to bring proofs back from work whenever she found them. In this kind of novel, the protagonist was always a woman and always sad. At some point, she always mentioned losing her appetite and drinking coffee sweetened with cream and too much sugar instead of having breakfast or lunch; then other characters, or she herself, would remark flippantly on how thin she was. This protagonist had oblique, troubled relationships with men and spent a lot of the book’s plot doing only one thing, but doing it well: sleeping, driving, smoking, going on holiday or having conversations at length—all the while making general observations under very specific circumstances as a veiled way of saying something about the nature of womanhood. The protagonist was inevitably compared to the author. This last thing was what made these books popular: it was revolutionary for a woman to spend 250 pages looking at herself in some way. These books were always written in sparse, spiky prose that ebbed my spare hours away. It was their specificity I admired—their descriptions of buttons on coats, macadamia nuts next to beds. Whatever problems these women had were bound up in their material existence: the more beautiful their circumstances were, the more pleasure I took in absorbing their turmoil. A central character in one of the books equated the dishevelment of her inner life with the renovation of her house for 260 pages. Between applying for jobs, I lay on my flatmate’s moldering sofa for the month of June and read ceaselessly.
Also popular during this time were long-form essays published in book form by women who said the way to vote when the time came would be Lib Dem, advocated centrism, and wore Shrimps coats: ten-thousand-word chapters on breaking up with your iPhone, the tyranny of yoga, the tyranny of Amazon, the conversation they had had with their nonbinary-nonwhite friend which had changed their perspective on—not to sound dramatic—everything, why loneliness was a valid form of existence, why they had checked their privilege, why they could be a feminist and still enjoy the unique pleasure of a Net-A-Porter delivery, and a list of all the times their life had gone wrong—those times had made them the strong woman who was writing the book you were holding today. If you liked the book, you could also buy merchandise on their website; buy tickets to live recordings of their podcast at Liberty or Selfridges. My flatmate brought these books back to roll her eyes at: she read paragraphs out loud over dinner and snorted between commas. When she did, I began to feel self-conscious about my perverse enjoyment of them, but they, along with the novels I was reading, began cropping up on my Instagram feed, their attractive covers decorated in sans-serif font posed decoratively at an angle on a wooden table next to coffee and flowers, or arranged in cotton sheets on someone’s bed. Occasionally, I found a crossover between the two genres: nonfiction in which the author found kinship with a writer, usually dead, usually with a legacy of radical politics. Writers who had worked as street hustlers, who had had abusive parents, who had been vagrants, who had died of AIDS, who had had MI5dossiers made in homage to their activism, who had been barred from entire countries, whose legacies now functioned in the machinations of north London suburbia: the particularly feminine plight of taking one’s children to school; the trauma of swilling Moët at the reception of your own wedding; the drudgery of one’s husband managed through gardening as a form of therapy and then recycled into a paying crowd at a Bloomsbury bookshop. I read these books attuned to each page in the same way some people watched police procedurals or medical dramas. My flatmate sent me interviews with each author once I’d finished: tasteful videos or photo shoots in which such women discussed the theoretical impossibility of the home from behind the marble island in her kitchen, or described the eighties prints above her fireplace as “the spirit of the room.” More than I cared to admit, I wanted to know what the contents of each writer’s fridge was; how she arranged the papers on her desk. It was of key interest to me to notice how, by her front door, she and her family stacked their shoes, and to note what brand of perfume was in her bathroom. This was not my flatmate’s concern on the matter. Ffs, read the accompanying commentary to each link. Could these women be at least a little subtler while they monetize the evolving identity politics of the left and turn them into bored Lib Dem housewife interior design strategies?
When in July I finally secured my job, I took up my s
pare hours differently: I went out on foot at 7 a.m. and watched carefully what went on around me. London, the workshop. London, the machine. I walked a straight line of an hour and a half alongside the A315: first Persian cafés, bodegas with wasps pushing into pomegranates and Medjool dates stacked outside, then charity shops and alleyways breaking off into mews flats, until it all became the Kensington High Street—overripe with French patisseries, pizzerias, a Cos, a Uniqlo, Whole Foods. At that time of day there were delivery trucks and bin men going by in the pale light: au pairs waiting outside Waitrose for the glass doors to slide open on cue. I saw it all in passing for a minute at most a day. After Knightsbridge, the series of hotels: past the tinted windows of One Hyde Park, in quick succession, the doormen of the Mandarin Oriental, the Berkeley, the Ritz all tipped their hats at me with white-gloved hands. I carried their salutes up through Piccadilly. The only bend came through the turn into the Burlington Arcade: antique jewelry glittered in its cage and Savile Row announced itself scented with aftershave at the end. Below the suited mannequins, under each shop the sliver of a window in the gutter of the street gave way to the scurrying of tailors. Once I hit the office building, I tapped my key card against the magnetized strip by the door, and I was let in. At the end of the day, I made sure my key card was tucked into the pocket inside my bag and walked the same route back to Barons Court.
It’s a £65 day rate, the managing editor said in my first week. Sorry, I should have mentioned.
I heard myself saying, No, of course, thank you for telling me; I’m just here to do a good job—and almost mean it. I could not do anything to impede my chances of a permanent contract. But later, scrolling through Rightmove, dull panic turned practical. £700 on a room, zone 2 or 3, only to find I would still not be able to afford my life. Then hours lost to dream criteria. If I clung on long enough to secure a proper salary at the magazine, then maybe: a flat to myself, where I could feel unembarrassed about how I looked in the morning, would not have to wait to use the bathroom, or regularly find the washing machine loaded with dirty laundry. But the idea could not form credibly in my mind. Already, the more realistic prospect of a long-term flat share had turned into wishful thinking. To my flatmate, on the same salary as me, How do you afford it? And she, barely audible and throwaway, My parents. If you can, you’ll end up doing it too. There’s no other way to stay.