by Jo Hamya
Sure, but how? The part of Brexit you’ll feel will only benefit you. The market might crash, but you won’t notice it—you’ve been living in austerity without knowing it for years. You’re not an immigrant, you have no trouble finding a place to live. When the housing crisis hits, all you’ll see is your rent go down. You’re middle class—your freedom of movement doesn’t end, it just becomes inconvenienced. The only thing you might really find is nutjobs having an easier time making life hard for you because you’re not white, but then again, you’ve been at the same school they have, you work at the magazine they read. You even dress like you vote their way when you come in to work here.
I became indignant. You’re not really saying, I shot back, I should just sit down and let “nutjobs” find it easier to give me a hard time? Anyway, I’m not just thinking about myself. I traversed my brain for what I’d read, and triumphantly pulled out, What about the reformation of basic rights that will be in the hands of a government I don’t trust after we leave the EU? What about rights of workers already being exploited in a zero-hour contract job, or the bodily rights of women already suffering through period poverty? The art editor cocked her head at that.
Don’t shout. And stop regurgitating headlines in abstract, that’s precisely what I mean. You need to start being a bit more honest with yourself when you read your daily news intake. A lot of us don’t care about the decline of humanitarianism and the worsening state of the world when we watch election live streams or Prime Minister’s Questions. We watch it to feel good about ourselves when we tweet our dismay, or at least you lot do. All these people on here—she threw her chin towards her screen—that’s what they’re doing now.
That’s terrible, I said flatly.
You’re not listening to me, the art director said, finally losing her patience. The soft, quavering quality of her voice went short. I’m saying, stop staring at the large screen in order to pick out what you can caterwaul at on the small one in your pocket. The reason to care is not to know what happens in the abstract realm of somebody else’s tweets, or to talk and talk and talk about how it affects people you’ve never met, and actually don’t know anything about. The reason to care is to know the why of what’s happening to the cost of your bread, or the electricity bill in your house. Because when you know that, you’ll know how to make the system work for you. That’s what matters to you.
I care about other people. And I don’t think I’d presume to know what matters to you, I told her. Brexit costs me opportunities in my life.
All right, she said. Fair enough. So, when you voted for your MEP in the European Parliament elections a couple of months back, tell me, who did you vote for, and why?
I bit my lip and knew the reply. I had not voted; I had been picking through my belongings at Bradmore Road, deciding what would go into a suitcase and what would not. It would not turn out favorably for me. The art director, seeming to sense this too, relented, sighed. I know you’ve got good intentions at heart, she said. But you want my opinion? Either read the papers with a bit more self-interest in mind, or find some charities you can donate a few pennies to, and try not to tweet about it when you’ve done that. Do both, if you can.
I shook my head, downcast. Then on impulse: I’ve been staying on a friend’s sofa lately. It’s just been hard to keep up.
She softened. That’s the way it is, she said. I did a few sofa hops in my time. Look, you’re young. Just keep a cool head and keep at it with your work, we can all see you’re trying your best here.
Okay, I said, drawing myself up and starting to organize my desk. What should I do now?
Whatever you were doing before, she said. But all afternoon, I felt guilty, I fidgeted, tried to find something else I could do, except turn the notifications back on, on my phone.
II.II
That Friday, the final Friday of the month, I did not get paid. It’s pretty common, the managing editor said, for there to be a lag in payroll if the employee joins after the cut-off date.
But, I said desperately, I thought I had joined before then. She gazed at me. She had an uncommonly pretty face, framed by thick, blond hair she twirled around both hands. From behind it, the rings on her fingers waxed and waned: a gold signet engraved with her initials flashed, was obscured, then resurfaced alongside a large oval stone nestled above a gold band. You will get paid in arrears, she said at last. You don’t need to worry about that.
I tried not to cry. Yes, but—I took a breath—my bank account is in double digits now.
The managing editor paused. Well, it would be a shame if you had to leave, she said, and I, with requisite terror at the message received, began calculating, as quickly as I could, the cost of a bag of rice and the portion count a tin of beans and a tin of tomatoes would stretch, the size of my flatmate’s freezer, and how much bread I could reasonably store. If I could beg her to pay my contribution to council tax and bills for the next month late, if I could borrow more from my parents, then perhaps . . . I took a deep breath. Just below my temples, I could hear a loud, insistent thrum. I counted the objects on the desk in front of me in an attempt to calm down: the Smythson diary, the wireless mouse, Chanel Huile de Jasmin, the almond butter, the two-ring binder with proofs I had assembled the previous day. I took another breath and let it out.
No, of course, I understand, I said. I really value my position here. I took a breath, and then tentatively, If there’s a possibility of a small advance to help me manage until pay for next month is put through, I’d really appreciate it. I’d be very grateful. The managing editor smiled. I’ll talk to HR, she said, and see what they say.
I went back to my desk; fiddled with my phone. I waited.
* * *
But I had turned the notifications back on, on my phone. The push alerts came, blooming kiss upon kiss, in oblong waves onto my home screen. The way apps moved had a lightness, an aerodynamics to them: they hovered, hung, bobbed in and out of view. I experienced a fog. I experienced slips in time. I looked down at my phone: on-screen it was always now; I looked back up, now was an hour later. I looked, more and more, idly fed whatever nerve filled at my swiping, at the anticipation of viewing whatever was delivered. I revived, then dulled at my thumb and its pull-down, release, and refresh of mailbox, timeline, feed, waiting to see who was there, what was there to claim my attention. Algorithms were alive and well: the first notification I got was a post on Twitter, suggested because it had been liked by several users I followed. It contained a screenshot of a Facebook page called “Memory Lane” and above it, the caption, “Can someone please explain?!” The screenshot was a box of text; it had an Instagram filter no one used any more from years back when the platform had first started. Insistently artificial, it dirtied and framed whatever it overlaid to make it look as though the digitally generated contents were, in fact, analogue and aged. Briefly, I marveled at the coalescence of all these social media forms, then read: If you watched Baywatch followed by Gladiators then Blind Date on a Saturday evening, had 4 TV channels, started school with singing in the main hall, played in the woods, always rode your bike, a game was Kiss Chase or Bulldog with not a computer in sight, had to be in before dark, got grounded if you were late, not even the home phone was mobile . . . vandalism was scratching the school desk with a compass, you recorded the top 40 off radio on tape, got 10 sweets in a 10p mix, and you turned out ok, then repost:, THIS IS WHEN BRITAIN WAS GREAT BRITAIN!!!! I saved the tweet on its own app, then opened up Facebook and found the Memory Lane page. On Twitter, the post had engendered its own meme format. Users had begun to create their own captions—@yootywrites: “If you circle jerked a room of people singing God Save the Queen before it got dark without a computer in sight . . . a game was running after a bus for 350 million quid, got a full English in your local caff for £15, and you turned out okay then repost: THIS IS WHEN BRITAIN WAS GREAT BRITAIN!!!!” But on Facebook, a coterie of older users gave responses antiquated in their syntax, which was unstyled and sincere
. In comments by the post, avatars displayed next to first and last names hung above sentences that read “Hear hear,” or “Jemma Lane—LOL remember all this? Where have the years gone?”
At lunch, I walked to the gardens by St. James’s Church, sat amid the hollyhocks and bramble planted there, and scrolled through the Memory Lane Facebook page for half an hour more. Some of the posts were photos or text, but more often they were illustrations—beautiful images that could have come from a children’s book. In one of them, two watercolor figures of men in bottle-green uniforms deposited the clean, virtually empty contents of large aluminum cans into the open back of a truck: the illustration was titled “WHO REMEMBERS proper bin men.” I tried my best to recognize that the cultural identification I felt with these posts stemmed only from the fact that the touch points, gestures, images they referenced were things I had been handed through a screen: reruns of nineties shows and period dramas on Netflix; Instagram accounts dedicated to sixties fashion in London. When I looked up, the hollyhocks, the bramble, carefully preened, induced nostalgia for Oxford and its carefully tended-to green; for the University Parks by Bradmore Road. I swallowed hard, the impulse to miss what now felt like home, and in reality, never had been. Another notification did the work of distracting me instead: a couple of days previously, there had been a Cabinet cull. Now, a listicle did the work of synthesizing who was in and who was out. I read the names of the new home secretary, chancellor, foreign secretary. I read a list of names I did not recognize, or barely recognized: these names had resigned, been sacked, quit. The gardens churned. The smell of street food, the sound of ice cream doled out; the office workers in rotas on each bench; the mothers wiping their children’s chins, the pigeons plucking discarded crusts. An email came through: HR could give me two weeks’ worth of advance. I looked up from my phone at the summer recess.
II.I
The mystery of the intern’s Wolseley lunches got solved one month in. On 8 August, I passed under Piccadilly’s white arches and saw them at one of the restaurant’s marble bars. Two in the afternoon. The stone tomb of a room. The slabs of rock and slabs of brick, all burnished. And the intern, their amber beret; their narrow legs tangling the rails of a gold metal stool. I watched them order an espresso and waited to see whether they would have anything else. They did not.
After my conversation with the managing editor, I had doubled down on my efforts to arrive early at the office and leave late. I gave pointed waves to my colleagues whenever they left at 5 or 6 p.m., emailed updates to the team at eight at night on work finished and work to be done. The more I tried, the more coolly my efforts were received. The managing editor thanked me diligently at each emailed list, but the sign-off was always “Kind regards”—never the initial, the treacly x that punctuated the missives she sent the office at large. I wondered whether the intern, in their direct correspondence with her, was a beneficiary of such x’s. Each morning, I watched them high-five the building’s receptionist on the way into the office, hug the managing editor and wish her a happy whatever day of the week it was. I decided it was very probable she did sign off her emails to them with an x, but no matter how closely I watched them in the office, I could not decipher what it was they knew to pass through it with such ease; to be so universally accepted. In any case, it was impossible to ask. They had avoided me, carefully, since I had failed to reply to their invitation to the pub. On the way back from seeing them in the Wolseley, in an alcove in the Burlington Arcade, I called my mother to complain. The response was not what I wanted.
You can’t start crying every time something goes wrong.
I’m not crying.
You have to learn to take things on the chin better.
I do, that’s why I’m calling you. I need a place to vent that’s not the office.
My mother sighed. I’d feel a lot better if I knew all these ridiculous decisions you’ve been making with your life were at least making you happy.
The next day I watched the intern leave a Post-it note on their screen. It said, Off to raid the fashion cupboard for gems xxx. They returned an hour later, wearing sunglasses and a baby-blue silk coat with a ruffled white bib; holding another, red fur one. The beauty editor shrugged on this last piece, and the picture editor grinned delightedly through her phone at the two of them as they posed for photos. Obviously I’m not keeping this one, the intern said when they had finished laughing. But I talked the lovely bunch downstairs into letting me sell it. I do think the red one is hot, though. Especially on you, darling.
Keep it, said the beauty editor, nodding sagely and stroking her sleeve. From my desk, I could see the managing editor smiling and shaking her head in front of her computer screen: indulgent, amused.
* * *
Come to dinner, my flatmate said. I had been watching Netflix on the sofa since Friday night. I looked up at her and she beckoned me to sit up with her right hand. The rings on it jangled lightly. It’s pathetic for me, watching you here when I’ve got to slave away in a shop on a Sunday. My parents are a little farther north. I have to go see them for a thing. They invite friends and family round for dinner once a week but they all work together and end up talking shop, it’s boring. You can keep me company. Also, say you have to be home before eleven so that I can leave with you. Here—a buzz in my back pocket—I’ve texted you the postcode. I’ll meet you on the street outside when my shift is done. Don’t be late.
I had been moping; I did not necessarily want to leave. It was impossible to walk around London now. I felt in no way safe. But up sprung the great new motto of my life: never mind. I stuck some deodorant on, stole roses from the front garden of the building. I tried to be bodiless as I walked; tried to make it so that I could ignore the fact that I was moving myself through the streets. The city happened to me. There approached first a long stretch of terraced housing. It swelled, came upon me, then passed. There came pubs and ill-fitting shirts laughing in the direction of dresses that could not have given any warmth: clouds of tobacco and nicotine; a clutch of beer. Corner shops and grocery stores gave out bottles of wine, packets of crisps. Restaurants flickered—burger joints spat out their orders in four-digit code. Then the pavement pulsed where a flight of stairs sloped down and gave out neon light, and the flash of phones lined up outside it documented a prologue of sorts—a bouncer letting each bumbag and pair of platformed trainers in one by one. After that, things thinned, became uniform. Hedges sprang from the ground and wooden gates appeared. On one side, lambent windows kept crumbling brickwork beautiful: the sensibility of another age; the comfort of tenderly rolled out Persian rugs and midcentury lamps as twenty-first-century triumph. On the other, across from them, great squares of twentieth-century concrete block: flat roofs and plastic window frames, with cars parked outside and a miniature playground stuffed into the front gardens. In front of one of them, I was forced back to myself: my flatmate stood, phone in hand, head bent, scrolling. I tapped her shoulder.
Oh good, she said, and took me to the other side of the road, inside one of the houses done in Queen Anne Revival style.
There was a coatrack by the door. A corridor perforated at three distinct points: it opened up to a staircase at its end and mixed the sounds of a small lavatory, a kitchen, and a living room at its center. I left my shoes by the door and my flatmate guided me into the kitchen, where the entire back wall was taken up by glass doors. Through them, I could see a conservatory, radiant with string lights and holding a circle of people spread over cushions, garden furniture, a velvet sofa. Its woodwork was splintered white and wholly faded; inside, the ash-wood floors took on the same insubstantial quality as the glass. Even the furniture looked like it lacked weight. I hung by the kitchen door, staring at it, until a dark-haired woman looked up from her chopping board and said, Pri! My flatmate hugged her mother, who set down her knife and over her daughter’s shoulder said, Call me Jane. She accepted the stolen roses and took me into her arms: when she drew back, she looked carefully at my face. I
hear you’ve been on my daughter’s sofa, she said. But I also hear you’re making do. I nodded. Well, at any rate, she returned briskly to the chopping board, we’ll feed you properly. Did she tell you who’s here? It’s work friends, mostly. Do go and say hello.
My flatmate led me to the glass house and easily found her place where the circle of guests naturally broke for her. She planted a kiss on the cheek of a graying man who smiled and said, Ray, before turning to his daughter.
You, he informed her, have arrived at just the right moment. I’m trying to defend social media in the arts. These two here—he gestured to his left at a man in a leather jacket and a woman with platinum-blond eyebrows—think an iPhone has no place in the work of today.
Good luck, she said, accepting a wineglass. I hate it. Give me 35mm any day. They’re all gallerists, she threw at me. But obviously with loaded families. To this, the circle scowled a little, and widened to accommodate me. I had to turn my body slightly to slot in. Christian makes beautiful films, my flatmate’s father said, though whether for my benefit or in attempt to countermand his daughter’s remark, I wasn’t sure. I’ll be exhibiting them towards the end of the month. And Liza does portraits, exposing multiple rolls of film: all her subjects have more than one face. You might have seen her work before. They both think Instagram is the devil’s scourge. What do you think, dear?
Oh don’t, my flatmate groaned. Leave her alone. I brought her here because all she ever does is sulk on her own. You’ll put her off ever talking to anyone ever again if you start to go on.
My flatmate’s father wore an immaculately ironed shirt. I smoothed the front of my blouse. No, please, I said. I’d love to hear about everyone’s work. I only used Instagram to look at other people, mostly.