Three Rooms

by Jo Hamya

  The last time I’d worn the dress had been the night of the parties held by the English faculty and my neighbor’s college. It had been tossed into a carrier bag for the charity shop when I was getting rid of my things during the last days of my teaching post. I wanted it back.

  She hit pause on her phone. The sound stopped. When you’ve done all the page furniture and you’ve put in all the details, run it past me. I don’t want her father calling me at all hours, he’s less interesting than he used to be.

  Yes, I said. Are you still living in the Berkeley?

  No, she groused, once more absorbed in her phone. I’m doing Claridge’s now. Make the Thames Water bastards pay.

  * * *

  The strike action outside the office and around the square took a day to resolve itself—or at least, by the following morning, the square was empty. There was no one to hose down the fine layer of dust that spread over the remaining pavement, nearby windows, the grass and blue tents. The square had acquired a ghoulish, chalky calm which regular passersby seemed to revel in: the absence of drills, of shouted Polish or cockney, more room in the thoroughfare for pedestrians to flit between each bus and car. The place was demolished, but more women than ever flocked towards the revolving doors, holding magazines and shopping bags while they posed for photos. The quiet stretched out for a week. Into this, the photos of Ghislane came, with an accompanying list detailing the items she wore, where they came from, and how much they cost.

  Have you read this? the picture editor volleyed over her iMac, holding up a forest-green book with pink lettering. It’s great. It’s like this manifesto for women who want to succeed, but it completely turns the idea on its head. It’s not prescriptive: “this is how you get the good life,” bit by bit. It’s more about life not being linear, self-care, reasonable goals, and feeling accomplished in yourself without external validation. The author says success is innate, it’s always there, in the person you are, not outside you in the arbitrary things you want to achieve. She’s really honest in it, she talks a lot about her personal privilege and all her ups and downs. I think you’d like it.

  I grimaced; looked, instead, at my screen. The opening shot was of Ghislane against an olive background, in a thin leather bralette and an equally thin matching pencil skirt. Someone had slicked her hair into one uniform ponytail: two front pieces of hair curtained her face in an artful curve; her makeup was calculatedly bare, save for a brickish-red smear of lipstick. She had been shot twisting a white banner around her body onto which someone had scrawled in deliberately jagged text YES TO THE REVOLUTION.

  I thought she was going to be shot in context of her dad’s song? I frowned.

  The picture editor walked round to look at the photos. Yeah, she didn’t like the association. It’s a shame, I love that song. But she said she wanted something more in tune with how women want to be portrayed today, and something about existing in her own right.

  It’s a protest photo shoot? I could not stymie my incredulity.

  Yeah. You should have seen the stroke she gave wardrobe, insisting on a last-minute change to the entire concept. Actually, she gave everyone a stroke, we almost didn’t get His Majesty’s approval on it. But I like it, the picture editor said, cocking her head as though a new angle would impart a sense of profundity on Ghislane’s stomach, peeking out from between the white sheet and leather clothes. It’s a laugh after all that calamity we had going on with the builders yesterday. Plus it’s better than the usual high-couture bollocks. She looks very sexy. They made a point of making sure the photographer was a woman, and it was the photographer who came up with the banners, actually, because she wanted her to feel powerful—I think there was a whole conversation about encouraging a sense of play and autonomy with how she was using the props. Empowerment, and all that. Anyway, this book, I finished it last night and—

  I titled the page “Exist to Resist” and moved to the next image. I thought about myself, walking in circles around my room in Bradmore Road, reading bits of Pater in order to make sense of Ghislane’s Instagram. Nothing had changed. Now it was Ghislane on an InDesign document, against an olive background, wearing a silvery, sheer slip dress, waving a white flag, and me inputting text to make sense of her. I typed: Sheer satin slip dress, stylist’s own. Now it was her, in low-slung trousers and a halter neck, ready to be sent to print. I typed: Rage against the machine. Now, she had Chanel Rouge Noir on her nails and two thin braids on either side of her face. I made to stick more nonsense words in and came up short. Do the words even matter? I murmured absently. Does anyone read them?

  Try “The future is female,” the picture editor said. I typed it in. Before I got to the “m” in “female” the script disappeared off the page. Oh, it doesn’t fit, she said, and I could hear she was disappointed. Anyway, she continued, have you read it? The author’s coming for a talk next month and I think I’m going to go. You might be interested, too.

  I stared at the screen.

  I knew her, I said finally. Then corrected myself—That’s not true, I didn’t know her, but she was around when I was a research assistant.

  At Oxford?

  Yes.

  You never talk about your old job. Do you miss it?

  I miss the place. I miss the town. Or belonging to it. I’m not sure what it would be like to go back now. None of my things are there. I reflected. None of my things are here, either.

  Unusually for the magazine, in some of the pictures Ghislane was smiling. In one, she was bent forward with her hands on her knees, mid-laughter. The picture editor tapped the screen. What about her? A few people here know her dad, and they say he’s a real relic. She seems very now, though, doesn’t she? She’s been doing interviews here and there and she makes it look so easy; all these young girls do. I suppose it feels like she’s been around forever because of her dad’s song, though, which must be hard. But she’s got the whole activist, low-key fashion plate, not really fixed in one area, doing loads of stuff at one time thing going on. My daughter’s a few years younger than you both and she says she’s going to have a career like that. Did Ghislane do that sort of stuff when you knew her?

  I don’t know. She was on Instagram a lot, I sighed. Actually, she looked nothing like how she does in these photos. She was someone else to me then. She was a student. I felt superior to her. It wasn’t even that long ago.

  I couldn’t say any more.

  We tried tracking her social media presence, the picture editor said awkwardly, she’s doing this thing where she archives each of her photos before the next one goes up. So we have to get it all from secondhand sources and little fan accounts. It doesn’t make us look great when we have to credit it. Could you reach out to her?

  I shifted uneasily, and the picture editor nodded. It’s really easy to fall out of touch now, isn’t it? Although when I think about it, it’s not any more common than it used to be, there’s just less of an excuse now. Everyone takes offense more readily if you leave them on read.

  Ghislane’s face pouted at me from the screen. The only yellow boxes the art director had put in were on the background, indicating where lighting and tone should be fixed; stray cables taken out. I’ll try emailing her, I said, then looked at the green-and-pink book still on the picture editor’s desk. I read that in June. I don’t know how much it did for me.

  I walked round so that I could look at the inside cover, where a well-lit photo of the author, young, athletic, tawny, adorned the tasteful heavy jacketing. I flicked through it and remembered what it was about the book that had irked me so much. It was easy, I had said to my flatmate in June, to envision the idea of success as innate when nothing in the setup of your life would ever allow you to fall short of a good one. The author had been financially comfortable since birth; now owned London property; was conventionally beautiful, and expensively educated. She suffered the occasional wobble in her mental health, but then, who didn’t? I could not inherently fault her for any of these things. But the idea of h
er profiting from having written a book about how to attain something she had never had to work for upset me, still.

  The picture editor watched me turn the pages in silence, confused. I gave her a good-humored shrug. On my way back to my desk, I caught sight of the intern, eating cashews and squinting at something in front of them. Somehow, perhaps because of the mop of blond curls on their head, the effect was cherubic. When the beauty editor, at the desk across from them, caught their eye, they grinned before resuming their work.

  Actually, I said, I would like to go to that talk.

  You said it didn’t do anything for you, the picture editor laughed. I forced myself to smile.

  I probably read it in too much of a rush the first time. I’ll try it again.

  She looked unconvinced.

  * * *

  After the stainless white of my flatmate’s parents’ house, the building in which she lived yellowed further in my eyes. One working week on from their dinner, on Friday, I walked from the office to Barons Court. The sweat that had accumulated under my arms, that had made the gap between my sandals and my feet slippery and coiled into my hair, made the empty, aged dirtiness of the lobby even more manifest. I had taken ten minutes to lie on a patch of grass in Hyde Park and remained itchy while walking up the stairs; putting the key into the door; turning it; letting myself in. I saw, scribbled and left on the mantelpiece: Back Sunday night. I began to breathe a little more freely, until I went to take a shower. My flatmate had neglected the cleaning rota, and the bathroom floor looked filthier than I was. I rose, on instinct, to tread it on tiptoe, and resigned myself to the dry chalk of rubber gloves and dull bleach headache. By the time I was able to shower my muscles ached and nothing felt right—hot water seemed only to make me sweat more, to make things worse; cold water was uncomfortable, did nothing to shift the layer of grime I felt prickling into my skin. Everything was wrong. I finished washing and went to her bed, dragged myself into it, did not come out until Sunday afternoon. I did nothing, except occasionally use the toilet or eat. My phone illuminated every so often on the pillow next to me—flashed news updates, the date, the time: kept me somewhat in the world. When my flatmate was due back, I took another shower; massaged my face with the Molton Brown clary sage wash.

  Over the weekend, her bedroom had induced odd pity in me. It was furnished with the same cheap wood the landlord had left in the living room and light, ineffectual curtains, but she had gone to great lengths to inject some glamour. Heavy cardboard bags from Selfridges and Liberty were arranged by the mirror, all of them empty. The wardrobe had been wrapped in fairy lights; there was a table covered in MAC cosmetics and scented candles. Like her mother, my flatmate had pushed the bed to the center of the back wall opposite the door so that it dominated the room. Everything else was in orbit around it. There were table mirrors propped up on nearly every available flat space, though with less elegance than I had seen in her mother’s house the previous weekend: Polaroid photos and small potted plants surrounded them. I made the bed and stacked up one frilly cushion on top of the next. My flatmate was in her late twenties, but I could picture what she must have been like as a teenager by her room. I let myself out; crossed the two steps between the corridor and the kitchen, which was littered with its usual jewelry-making tools and sparse, unsentimental array of pasta, store-bought pesto, a cheap plastic kettle. I might have crossed into a different flat. I felt quite tenderly towards her when she returned.

  You look like shit, she informed me. Here, come help.

  The tenderness disappeared. She was dragging a cluster of reusable bags. They bulged by her knees. I took four from her.

  What’s all this?

  Tins.

  Tins?

  I could feel her irritation. Yes, tins. The kitchen was small enough to make the floor an island of Waitrose plastic. I stepped gingerly around the green.

  Tins of what?

  She pulled out chopped tomatoes, chickpeas, soup. Do you know what? she mused, we could actually stack them on the open shelves, they’re so kitsch they’re almost aesthetic. The tins began to go up in pyramids against the kitchen’s dirty blue walls. Grudgingly, I allowed that the combination of precious metals and gems on the countertops against the delicate illustrations of tuna, the syrup and peaches, the white sans-serif Heinz logo on duck-egg blue, was quite evocative.

  You could print a few pictures of Warhol, I mused. Find some really nice frames and prop them up against all this.

  That might be taking the piss, my flatmate said, leaning back from her iPhone and taking a photo of the finished shelf. I mean, these are doomsday measures in the end. She bit the inside of her cheek and tried a square crop.

  I’m sorry, what?

  She began to filter one of the photos. Yellowhammer leak? All over the papers this morning? The idiocy of our government will kill us all? Hello? Do you not read the news? I raised my eyebrows until she noticed. I’m not posting this, she said defensively. It’s just for memories a few years down the line. She looked briefly at the stacked shelf. And I’m not stupid, I’m only half serious. But better safe than sorry. Austerity has been bad enough these past few years anyway. Anyway, if you eat a tin, replace a tin, okay?

  I began snatching up the bags she had left littered on the floor, folding them with exaggerated pointedness. You forgot to clean the bathroom, I said. It’s not a big deal but I ended up having to do it after I got home from work stressed.

  She was unmoved; adjusted a tin of Ambrosia Devon custard so that the blue-and-white house in the middle of the field lined up dead center with the tin below it. Eventually, I heard her blow out a Sorry, and as she passed on her way out a murmured, It’s my bloody bathroom anyway.

  After she had gone into her bedroom, I took the sheets from the drawer they had been stuffed in at the beginning of summer: set them to wash on a warm, gentle cycle with plenty of fabric softener, and then stretched them across a drying rack so that they filled the living room. I gathered my own bundle of possessions out of my suitcase and arranged them in and around the cabinet drawers—a small stack of books, my toiletry bag, my clothes. When the sheets were dry, I ironed them so that they patterned in squares: each crease brought up crisp, uniform tents. I tucked and spread until the slump of the sofa was obscured by cotton, plumped the pillows at one end and smoothed a thin blanket down just below them. I set my bag down and lined up my two pairs of shoes on the floor at the opposite end of the pillows, and in the morning, I did not dismantle my bed. I made it up perfectly, left a couple of books arranged neatly on it, and dared anyone disturb what I had made for myself.

  * * *

  On 26 August, I had to ask whether I still had a job.

  I had been DMing Ghislane. Instagram. I was days into the process and had finally managed as far as Dear Ghi, before an automated email lit up at the top of my phone and informed me that my IT contract was due to expire unless renewed by my line manager. I had been receiving these emails daily: we had started at fourteen days, gone to ten, down to nine, and now the perfectly round number of a week.

  It was one of the rare days that the Editor was in. I saw the managing editor taking him through the coming issue’s flat plan; him, eyeing a croissant she had left untouched on her desk. There are more around the corner, she told him, and he declined. He was working on losing what he called his “relaunch paunch”; a year’s worth of breakfasts at Claridge’s: the hard work of rehabilitating the image of the magazine. I waited until he had retreated into his office and approached.

  Why don’t we regroup? the managing director smiled once I had stuttered my way to the point. I’ll get back to you with availability. We can talk about how you’re getting on. How does that sound?

  It sounded terrible. I smiled back and said thank you.

  After this, the message to Ghislane wrote itself in minutes. It said, you probably don’t remember me; and, the photos are *so* empowering and strong; and really good to see you’ve landed on your feet so quickly; and
was wondering if I could put you in touch with the picture editor here for some usable personal shots; and would love to hear how you’ve been more generally; maybe have lunch? Warm wishes—

  I sent it without reading it back.

  * * *

  Eventually, September stuffed, inflated itself into the air, and when the rain came, it was not with any commitment or delight.

  Because of how consistently it rained, everything stayed green. August was still fresh enough that I could wish it back from the previous week; could ease out a thousand different ways to spend my body no longer possible. I had been waiting for a flat of my own; I had been waiting for my life, as I wanted it. To go wild swimming in the ponds in Hampstead; to shop for fistfuls of cheap vine-ripened tomatoes and cook them in the evenings with a glass of red wine. To wear thin, gauzy white; read, and eat Cornish ice cream. To have hot, hazy evenings in a cinema or a café, and then the last few hours of daylight in garden squares, stretched out in dwindling sun. But it was September now. Days shortened, went cold. When my phone dispensed photos from the House of Commons of an MP lounging across the bench, for an unwitting moment I felt seen, before I remembered to apply context and become morally outraged.

  The true form of things was the office, now oddly luminescent in its whiteness against the gradually graying weather; the sudden appearance of dun-colored coats and jumpers. My contract, extended for two more months. The managing editor, earnest: After that, your probation period will be up and I don’t think we’ll be moving forward, but we’re so proud of how much you’ve grown. I’m sure you’ll have no trouble finding something else.

  I felt nothing. Earlier that day, the senior editor had boomed over his desk: News? And the features team: Twenty-one MPs had the whip removed. To which the senior editor shook his head—We can’t do anything sexy with that.

  It took two weeks for Ghislane to respond. Each time my phone gave out the descending tone that signaled a notification, my heart did a corresponding drop. When, on 9 September, I saw her name beneath the gray banner, I flipped my phone over so violently it dropped to the floor. I left it there for twenty minutes until the art director came back from her lunch break and put it back on my desk.