by Jo Hamya
It’s a two-hour commute.
Sharp breath down the end of the line. It’s an hour and a half, your father does it every weekday, only he does it north. Somehow it hasn’t killed him. I don’t see how it would kill you, it’s the same amount of time you told me you spend walking to work.
I regretted telling her anything about my life, let alone the time it took me to walk to work. These walks were usually the time of day I called her, but now, it was a rainy weekend in mid-October. My flatmate was out to drinks with her friends. I had a lamp on and the sofa swaddled with sheets. The state of the pavements in London is less of a disgrace than the National Rail service, I said sullenly. I don’t want to spend four hours a day on cramped, dirty rush-hour trains that probably don’t even run on schedule. I have other things to do.
You’ve told me you don’t have any friends, my mother pointed out with alacrity. What else do you have to do? This was true, and it hurt. I want to be independent, I burst out. I want to have a life. I don’t want to sit in my childhood bedroom and go to work like a zombie, and then do nothing.
Is that why you’ve been ignoring your father and me?
I kept quiet. I could hear her shrugging over the phone. I stayed with your grandparents until I was ready to get married, she said placidly. It didn’t turn out so badly for me.
It was impossible to let her finish. I had heard this all before. I did not want to get married. I’m not getting married, I told her. I don’t see how I could start an independent life for myself by getting married.
I don’t see how you’re able to save for a mortgage when you’re sitting in cinemas every evening.
Don’t be ridiculous, I snapped. My generation can’t afford mortgages. Anyway, I have to go, I don’t feel well.
She was quick with her concern; asked—What’s wrong? I told her it was possible I was developing anxiety. She withdrew her concern: You don’t have anxiety. I hung up the phone. I resolved, for the umpteenth time that week, not to call her again but it was too late. Not satisfied at the abruptness of the conversation’s end, and now used to being in touch, she rang me. I ignored the call and opened a browser; I took my unhappiness into my own hands. Not my mother dispensing it, but the news instead, the Home Secretary standing at a lectern and declaring an Australian-style, points-based immigration system: This daughter of immigrants needs no lectures from the north London, metropolitan, liberal elite.
I heard the key turning in the door and knocked the switch on the lamp to its off position; hid beneath the sheets. But my phone still issued the Home Secretary’s speech. My flatmate paused incrementally over the sofa on her way to her room to listen. From the corridor:—Wrong news flow. You’re behind. Parliament’s called back again and the Benn Act’s been passed. Before she reached her room, I switched the lamp back on. What else have I missed?
Her voice advanced. The PM sent two letters to Europe today. She came into the room and sat down on the sofa with me. One was an unsigned request for a Brexit extension, and the other was a signed letter arguing against it. She passed her phone to me and let me read an article on the matter myself. I squinted at the brightness of her screen.
Oh, I said. That’s a bit like what happened at work.
She gave me an odd look; asked how so. I reminded her of the article about landed climate change protesters and went on: the picture editor and art director had given the editor of the magazine two final proofs to pick. The first featured photos of one of the protests done by the organizers of the movement—red robes evangelizing on the pavements and road that made up Westminster Bridge. The effect was striking. The organizers had painted their faces white, and even though it could not have been so, in the photos they looked utterly silent: palms extended, red fabric bleeding into red fabric, now swaying gently to lean upon each other, now raising flags above their ranks. It looked more like a fashion shoot than the actual fashion shoot, which had been sent out on the second version of the proof, shot in shades of greige. The landed protesters had refused to wear couture, deeming that it was at odds with their beliefs on the distribution of wealth. My flatmate snorted. Surely agreeing to be photographed for a society magazine was already at odds with a view to distributing wealth? I nodded. Quite. Anyway, they’d hired models instead, with skin airbrushed to the color and texture of apricots. They wore denim and knitwear, were arranged into a human pyramid, looked off into the middle distance. The art director had put her face in her hands when the photo shoot came back. Oh, fucking Christ, she moaned. What the fuck? At which point the picture editor, clearly having anticipated such a result, unearthed the protest photos she had pulled and suggested sending two versions. When the art director kept her head in her hands, the picture editor had printed them out and shoved them between her elbows. Look, she said, we’ll put our signature on the one with the protest photos and send it along with the photo shoot one, and see which one he signs off on.
And? my flatmate asked.
He sent both back, the one with the real photos untouched, the photo shoot one signed.
She looked at the article on her phone again. That’s a bit ridiculous, don’t you think? I didn’t bother to ask which bit she meant and said nothing. I don’t want to put you out, she said finally, but you’re finishing your job at the end of this month anyway and you can’t live on my sofa forever. I’m not exactly happy at the tension it’s been creating over the past couple of weeks.
I nodded. She sighed again.
I’m sorry for being a bit uptight. But I need you to apologize for infringing my personal boundaries too, okay?
I apologized. She patted me on the knee. Don’t worry about bills for this month. Just find somewhere for November onwards, okay?
It was a relief, almost. I let my head loll on the armrest and listened to her tell me about her night: how she’d arrived late because customers wouldn’t leave the bookshop after its closing; how the guy she liked had bought her three pints of Guinness. At some point I fell asleep.
* * *
After my last day at work, I took my sheets off the sofa. There had been no fanfare at the office; I had barely needed to say goodbye. Leaving was complicated only by the detritus on my desk. I had accrued mugs, books, boxes of tea, spare shoes in my drawer, umbrellas, hairbands, hand creams, lip balms, and various other beauty freebies that got delivered to the office for magazine staff. Also, energy bars, Band-Aids, wooden chopsticks wrapped in thin, translucent paper, a coin purse with 80p in it, a few reusable plastic bags. It was like moving out of a house in miniature. Emptying my flatmate’s living room of my things was less so.
In the end, I could not say goodbye to her. The election had been announced and she went straight from work to canvassing doorsteps. She left a note: Good luck, please leave the fob and house keys on the dining room table. I texted before I left to ask how it was going and what time she’d be back. Not till late, don’t wait up, was the reply. Canvassing was hard. No one wanted you on their front door. No one wanted a reminder of the state of the nation anywhere near their house unless it was insubstantial, on a screen. Please could I be gone early tomorrow morning, as we’d agreed? She wanted to use her living room as a base for Labour members in her area to strategize. I wrote back, Of course, and began googling the election. I watched a clip from the previous day’s PMQs and struggled to keep up. I read an op-ed in the Times on the leader of the opposition and the fractiousness of his party. I read the prime minister’s Twitter feed. I felt shock at how laborious it was, to be fully up-to-date with the news. I was ostensibly unemployed, but an afternoon of research felt like its own full-time job.
How possible was it to stay willfully attuned without living in permanent fear or guilt? The very phone one kept up-to-speed with existed only by the unheard suffering of others. I read an article which pointed out the fact that any egalitarianism of digital culture rested on the exploitation of Navajo women in early electronic manufacture. I drank a liter of water and read another article on the exploi
tation of Facebook moderators who watched thousands of hours of traumatizing material to make sure others didn’t. I turned my phone off and put it on the other side of the room. I went into my flatmate’s room and watered her cacti; I thought of all the names for rose breeds I knew, floribunda, grandiflora, rambling, centifolia. I wondered if, to keep on good terms with her in case I ever needed something in the future, there was a hardy enough rose plant I could offer that would survive in the kitchen’s window box. I turned my phone back on in the interest of googling—but the season was all wrong: even the gardening community on Twitter had the election on their mind. A kindly man from Northumberland finally told me the roses weren’t likely to thrive in the cold. I tried to separate the disappointment I felt about this news from the impulse to hate him and logged off. I wanted to think it was exhausting, but on account of the abused workers I had just read about, couldn’t. I called my mother instead. I’m coming back, I said.
Part III
I, who am driven mad
By my ideas, who go nowhere
III.N
London, framed by rising white columns. The last of October; the gray. The traffic on Millbank, and the Thames, seeping. It had turned autumn. Beyond the portico under which I stood, there was rain. I could envisage it farther out beyond where I was, pouring plashless over Big Ben, over statues, over Westminster—slick and patterning the city’s corsets, the pipe iron casings around clock and Parliament, holding them in and lacing them up. And here, from the steps of Tate Britain, from its square of pillars for anyone to observe: the 87 bus on its rounds. The rushing red body; the black leather whirling round the pavement. Some streaks of rain-dashed color shone on the road below it: rainbows hovering on black tar, itself brushed and covered by the leaves which had departed their boughs—wizened past season, adding orange to the mix. Those bursts of color in covert gleams, here and there between the city’s uniformity, its color of chalky stone, of colleges, of embassies; towards the Thames, the color of glass, silver high-rises over silver water. I shook my umbrella out to it all, heaved my suitcase onto the museum’s virgin floor. I made the first wet tracks. 10 a.m.: opening hour. A woman wearing a lanyard offered me a cloakroom. I could not say yes. I gripped the long metal hook trundling my case, but she, firm—You really can’t take it in there.
I felt argumentative. Well, why not? Because it obstructed the floor space in the galleries for other visitors. I looked around: it was 10 a.m. on a Thursday, there were no other visitors. Yes, but there would be. Ah, I said, well, what if I left before it got crowded? It was like Wimbledon, but out of season and for petty admin. Her backhand was impeccable. If I did not leave my items in the cloakroom, I would have to leave. We smiled at each other. I submitted to her. I expected her eyes to follow me: heading left, past the paintings from the 1930s and towards the Clore Gallery, but beyond the matter of my luggage she did not care about me. I passed through unwatched.
The clatter-click of my shoes went acoustic on the Clore Gallery floor; started low, wood paneling emitting the odd squeak, then opened out, embraced the curved white ceiling and bounced off burgundy walls. I stood at the foot of its main corridor. The casings to each room had no doors, were twice the size and fit of regular doors, and devoid of any sense of entry or exit. The point was just to create a break in the walls, which themselves existed only for the paintings: to group them by subject and give them their place; to hold them aloft for each museum-goer’s staring face. People began to drift through. I could spy on them at an angle through the gaps in the walls. They were pensioners and groups of schoolchildren in neon jackets. They were artists setting up easels in front of their chosen paintings.
I knew I did not have long before some man’s maddening phone was pushed in front of every canvas I wanted to see. I took the first room on the left. The walls there were the shade of a pigeon’s underbelly: three paintings affixed to each, and a fat little bench with short legs and a puff of quilted red leather split into six seats in the center of everything. A graying man with a waxed hooded jacket listening to his wireless through earphones was already on it: the wireless was turned up to maximum sound. From the seat’s left side you could hear, in digest, a Bronze Age monument discovered in the Forest of Dean; the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 1 Report; a reminder of the upcoming general election; placations from Number 10 about the Brexit delay. I took the middle of the bench. The Tate was refuge, procrastination; I had however long the museum’s Turner collection lasted me before I ran out of reasons to catch a train out of London. I closed my eyes. The backs of my lids lit up with little rainbow squares: they were like the pavement—the colors dived and fluttered. The little tin sound of public radio came through like an earworm. It was the chart-topping song I couldn’t get away from. The country, going to shit: played over and over on everyone’s electronic devices. I squeezed my eyes tighter.
When I opened them again, there was Devonshire in a heavy bronze frame, and two black-coated men in their twenties in front of it. I took them in. Cloth tote bags, wool beanies, exposed ankles, and old socks in their clean white shoes. One of them rolled a cigarette while the other proselytized.
Of course, that’s the grand irony of referring to Turner as a British artist. He paused to allow his companion time to lick along the length of the cigarette’s Rizla; the fag was sealed with a flourish, and then, when he was sure of his friend’s undivided attention, the proselytizing continued. All of this stuff is essentially Italianate. And his best work, as far as this museum is concerned, is in the other room: the studies of light in France and Belgium. Of the ports. Those paintings have a sense of motion. He grew animated. They are the product of advancing technologies—steam power; the increasing availability of travel. See the magnificence such availability brought.
To me it seemed his companion was bored because it sounded as though his friend was quoting from a catalogue—in any event, he shrugged. He had a German accent in contrast to his friend’s Queen’s English, but like his companion, his clothes were pure London. I do not know, he said. These paintings will be on your country’s banknotes soon, no? Clearly they still have some nationalist value. Then seeing the frown on his friend’s face, added, Shall we see the ones you like again before I go and smoke this?
They went on strolling the perimeter of the room until they found the gap in the wall.
Unseeing their words took time. It was labor to regain the canvas, to extract the hipster-beanie-art-school-craft-beer pallor overlaid on the image. As an extra precaution, I took my phone out intending to listen to white noise through my earphones: instead I found an iCloud notification; two missed calls from my mother. I ignored the calls and swiped the notification instead. My phone’s photo gallery appeared, rearranged with a line of white sans-serif text over it that read, One year ago. The room I’d rented in Bradmore Road with ten cardboard boxes and a suitcase yet unpacked; various close-ups of carpet stains, cracks in the walls, and the scuffs on the wooden armrests of an easy chair to be noted in inventory. To which my phone: Would you like to share this memory? Over a year ago, flattened out into pixels on my screen and being callously replayed. I remembered the unpacking, the wasps on the windows. How late last year’s summer had stayed. I had reached the point where my days at Bradmore began to lay themselves under new ones; had acquired the perfectly poignant distance of 365 days. I was not ready to feel it, it was too painful. I stuffed my phone back in my pocket.
Devonshire on a wall. If I had closed my eyes again, I would have been able to place myself in it, but to do so would mean not looking at the painting again. I looked. For the first ten minutes all I could think of was cigarette smoke: Turner’s clouds traveling to the left of the canvas in rising spirals. At the bottom of the painting was a brook, and two figures in it. There was another at its edge. I did not want the implication of another person’s thought. I ignored them. I wanted something else—to see the painting as it truly was; to have a landscape in my mind’s eye, alone.
First the brook: it had no breadth; it ran umber in foreshortened depth. The bed of water bled into the bank and out of it. Two tree trunks slashed into the foreground’s left; on the right, a set of shrubs laced the beginnings of a forest. Then, between the curtain of rising bough-bends, the foliage thickening upwards, another body of water in the background, center-left, streaming out towards more green. There was a viaduct loping from one wall of trees to the next, and at its end, a stucco house with yellow walls and peeling white stains, with frail, blown-out draperies: a lemon-sherbet treat of a thing in its wrinkling paper bag. Half hidden beyond it, encased in English countryside, I could see a glimpse of abstract buildings; a town. But this did not stir in me the same feeling that the landscape did. I was done with towns, with cities. Farther back, before the sky broke the land, after yet more green stippled into the distance before it—I did not know why I thought it was, only that it must be—the Channel. Only after having looked at the land did the clouds become something else: idyllic, hung in blemishless English sky.