by Jo Hamya
I looked for long enough to understand the initial impulse to climb inside. There was a clearing in the forest, carved and deepening beyond the suggestion of paint; there was shading down the inside of the viaduct’s farthermost parapet, it hinted at pavement that could be walked on. There was a set of boulders by the brook’s edge on which to sit—numerous places within the painting to reside. I felt, unexpectedly and in my chest, a kind of swelling, a sense of pleasure, or fantasy enjoyment. For a moment, in my head, it was summer, and I could have been on some green with a picnic basket for luggage and the sound of wrens over babbling water. I could have been biting into a Braeburn or reclining in a gentle breeze. Then a woman walked in front of my frame. I scowled, but she wasn’t facing me; she was leaning back to get my landscape into her phone. When she had finished, she leaned over the museum label to the left of the frame. I could have killed her.
I did not. At some point, the man with the wireless radio had left. There was a whole new turnover of people in the room. I checked my phone. I had been there for half an hour, it seemed reasonable to look at something else. A palate cleanser. On my phone’s screen, Twitter had sent me an “in case you missed it” notification: I opened it. There was my corner of the internet, ironic, cackling with glee, Happy Brexit Day. I allowed myself a moment of smugness, too, at the failure of the venture. Further down, there was more on the implications of a second referendum; which party was for a people’s vote and which one against, which party opposed the prospect of no deal, but the joy I had felt began to leak out of me. I tried to regain it in front of another canvas and realized with horror that what I had felt earlier was patriotism. I could more clearly identify it now: the canvas was all ochre and verdant lea with rushed scruffs of paint for trees—there was no sun, but there was a lightening in the blue sky, a patch of yellowish white, orb shaped. Somewhere in the center of that was a turreted gray mass, the suggestion of a crumbling manor. The whole thing was abstract enough in style to take on whatever you gave it; and so, though it was unmistakably English, it could have been Yorkshire, it could have been Sussex, it could have been the view of the fields off the M25 around Hertfordshire. Whatever bit of English countryside you could connect it to in your head took hold, and because the painting was a beautiful thing, with its warm tint, its heavy golden frame, and its place in the airy, magnificent gallery, the country became beautiful, too.
After this realization, I could not enjoy the pleasure I felt looking at a room full of Turners. But nor could I quash it. When I looked at the tangled fields, a chorus of associations independent of my own wishes struck up in my head: Heathcliff, looking out across the moor for his love; Lizzie Bennet against the backdrop of Netherfield, in stubborn refusal of hers. All of it was compounded by the lushness of period dramas from which the original materials had sprung. The BBC had a lot to answer for. I was newly uncomfortable in the gallery, but I did not want to leave. For the first time since I had had my own room in Oxford, walking through the gallery conferred a mode of solitude in which I could figure out what I thought, what that made me, and how I had arrived at the things I did. Because the room I was in did not belong to me, I could not do this infinitely. But for the moment I was in it at least, I had the dignity and freedom of a sense of self which belonged entirely to me. I wanted to keep it. I reflected. I could not be like Ghislane, who did not care about the permanence or strength or stability of such things; who had no bodily self and was happy to flit and transmit herself through photos, or a song, or on a page. I could not be like the intern, who compromised to a fault; managed on only espressos for lunch and the hope they would sell a coat to make up for poor wages—all that to cling to a place to which they only tenuously belonged. Where I was going, I would still have to share the bathroom; be conscious of the length of my showers; suffer interruptions of thought if I had to make breakfast in the kitchen, or explain where I had been after leaving the house. Despite my discomfort, I wanted to stay in the Clore Gallery a moment longer.
To resolve this, I thought it best to try to notice what was false in each painting, and by extension, in my own feelings. I began to feel restless; forced myself to move to the next one. This time, I did not marvel at the suggestion of vetiver on the banks of a stream, the willows bending over it, and the clear azure sweep near the top of the frame. I looked up.
The Clore Gallery lit its rooms with strips of rectangular light lined flat into the ceiling, and though this would have been ugly under any circumstance, after the general majesty of what was below, it seemed an affront. Now that the light was ugly, I followed it down. The piece I was standing in front of had a heavy, ornate frame with the painting’s catalogue number, title, and year carved into it. Parts of it shone more brightly than others: certain groves were deliberately blackened to give an even greater impression of depth.
A woman in a face mask came next to me. I switched my attention to her: she too was a part of the painting now; made up the experience of looking at it. She ignored me; looked briefly at the label, took a picture; then, clearly uncomfortable with being looked at, left. I went back to my original view. I could see the weft of the fabric. It bobbled the pastoral landscape; divided it up into little patches and squares. There was a rip in the canvas that bulged beyond the paint.
It was impossible to look at anything like this for long. It required constant vigilance. With its joylessness, its state of compulsory paranoia, I became less of a person. And then there was the fact of my attention: overripe with two hours spent in the gallery and in need of rest. I might have taken myself to lunch, except I could not justify spending what it would cost to sit in one of the museum’s restaurants or cafés. There were more missed calls from my mother on my phone. And at some point or another, I would have to collect my suitcase from the cloakroom. I resigned myself to leaving.
* * *
Squeezing my case between the aisle and seats on the 9 and 87 bus had been awkward enough in the morning, on the way in. I did not want to do it again. I also did not want to lug the thing to Pimlico; to hoist it gracelessly down the Underground, past the barriers, the escalators; to grip it constantly, and keep it from sliding around the Tube. Despite my reservations about lunch, or perhaps because of them, and my increasingly insistent hunger, I wanted comfort. I got an Uber.
The car that arrived was clean enough to eradicate any suggestion of a personality. Before I got in it I could hear the driver’s playlist coming through over the speakers and towards the back seat, but once he had put my suitcase in the boot and we were settled in, he turned it off and lowered the volume on the navigation app displayed on his phone, too. The silence was stultifying. I did not want to force inane conversation, and yet I felt it reflected badly to seem indifferent towards the person who was performing a service for me. The car was a small one. The proximity of space, coupled with the aspect of antisocialness my sitting in the back had induced, was made all the more terrible by lack of sound. I asked how his day was.
Not bad, he said. The silence went on, difficult, as it had been before. I didn’t want to, but I tried again. Busy day?
Not really, he said. It had been a slow, boring morning, though he had been intrigued by the idea of a pickup from the Tate. Was I an artist? I told him no. Oh, that’s a shame, he said. He was keen to talk artists as of late. His girlfriend was one: they had been having an ongoing disagreement over something she had read. The very gallery I had been in was advertising a job in one of their coffee shops for 5K more than its curators made. I leaned forward. Where had she found that?
Twitter, he said. He might have been able to discuss this with his girlfriend’s friends, but apart from one day off yesterday, work had kept him away. He would not be able to do so for a few more days. I nodded; plugged his keywords into my phone. On Twitter, a well-known progressive artist had retweeted a photo of a column from the Times, which read, The daily grind is better rewarded at the Tate galleries if you’re in hospitality rather than something as trivial as art
. The Tate is seeking a “head of coffee,” for which it is offering salary of £39,500. That is £5,000 more than it pays its current exhibition curators. The advert says it is seeking someone with “extensive experience of cupping.” Presumably they don’t require customers to cough while they do it. Above it, the artist himself had written, I give up, they’ve won. I read this all to the driver while he turned off the Victoria Embankment and towards the Strand. We hit traffic near Kingsway.
No, I don’t know who that is, he said once I had given him the artist’s name. But the conversation he’d been having with his girlfriend was about perceived value in the traditional sense. I asked him what he meant. His girlfriend had not liked the disparity in salary between restaurant staff, whom she saw as unskilled workers, and curators, who, by her implication, were skilled. The Times column I had just read had done the same thing by implying the coffee job was “trivial,” or, at least, more trivial than working in the arts. This, he disagreed with. Despite the silliness of the ad, the strange HR-ification of the job title designed to make essentially boring work sound fun, what was being advertised was a high-pressure, front-of-house managerial job, which required time-management skills, efficiency, a way with people, and a detailed knowledge of a particular beverage industry. He had told his girlfriend there was more pride and practical use to be found in a job like this than in any of the posturing and simpering and affectation he saw in the art world.
He shrugged. Understandably, she had taken offense. But he stood by it. The whole argument was stupidly middle-class in tone. Yet, in his ends, people who did service work were often underpaid and badly treated. He would take his stance on the difference in pay between gallery and food service staff to his grave. On the other hand, he regretted the irony of the fact that the gig work he was doing now meant he could not resolve the rift this stance had created in his relationship. Having heard one thing, his girlfriend was now finding it difficult to believe that he had not been belittling her job. He had just been standing up for ones like his.
I nodded. That was understandable. Where were his ends? Where was he from?
Notting Dale. His eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror, searching for any sign of recognition, and then back to the road. I shook my head. He went on: close by the Grenfell Tower. And catching my eyes again, added that he was not there anymore.
By now we were at Holborn. My stomach dropped, churned. Had he read the inquiry report? He had. Had I? I had not.
It had taken him all day yesterday. He’d felt duty-bound to do it. The report was more than eight hundred pages long, and truthfully, a lot of it blurred in his mind. He’d skipped around a bit. Some parts were very technical, showed spandrel locations and sloping angles; noted the burning rate of combustible synthetics found in the cladding. There were graphs and photos of the estate from the year it had been built: construction frames climbing half-assembled rooms and window frames with computer-generated arrows drawn on them. It was beyond his reach to picture what was once someone’s home as foam insulation and beams, or as “fig.1,” with JPEG arrows overlaid. But the report also contained photos from inside the tower after the fire. At this point, he had stopped for a moment and wept. There had been a diagram of the kitchen where it had started, and over the impersonal, bureaucratic floor plan, its occupant had made some additions in blocky, elegant biro: labeled the number of cupboards, the location of the smoke alarm; the extent of the smoke when he had first seen it, light and white in color.
When the Uber driver had resumed reading, a lot of the survivor testimony had induced secondhand fear in him—descriptions of occupants fighting for breath; running back for their family; telling the operators on 999 they were scared. But other parts of the report, for reasons he could not unpack, had felt devastating. One survivor had described the heat in her living room as similar to the heat you feel when you take a cake out of the oven. In the testimony of firefighters and 999 calls going through the control room, there were repeated variations on the advice given to occupants that they wet blankets, bedding, and towels as defense strategy against the smoke: the image of all the repurposed, sodden cloth had set him off crying again. There was the fact that the witness testimony included repeated descriptions of the ventilation fans throughout the building humming in response to the fire; quiet, haunting groaning. The report described the failure of various domestic structures within each home in the building. The intensity of the heat from the fire was such that the windows failed, allowing the flames to penetrate the flats. The extractor fan units in the kitchens had nearly all deformed and dislodged, providing the flames another point of entry. The fire doors did not hold back smoke, or lacked effective self-closing devices.
He turned into the taxi ramp at Euston. I made no move to get out. Finally, he exhaled. More than anything, he had cried at the number of preventable deaths lost to the instruction given on the night, that residents would be safest if they stayed put inside their homes. Some people did not understand that in this country, you had to be a particular type of person to always be safe at home. At the end of the report, when it was done, he had gone out; driven up and down the A40 near the tower block multiple times. Two years on. He was tired. He had seen Grenfell, now covered with some kind of gray sheet; a banner on top: Forever in Our Hearts. He wished whoever it was who’d put it there—the estate, the borough council, the government—had had the courage to leave the building exposed: incised into people’s eyes and buckling the expression on their faces, where it could not be ignored. What good was it to store something like that away in a place as private and messy and ineffectual as the heart? The human cost, the class snobbery, the neglect of the thing. The gray sheet showed that the most important thing to the inhabitants of this city was its veneer: that things should look okay, even if they weren’t. He wanted that tower to mean something else. He wanted that burnt-out, blackened husk to disturb the gentile, white buildings in Kensington and Whitehall. It did not. It stood tastefully covered up.
The cabs behind us began to sound their horns. The Uber driver swung himself out of the car and retrieved my suitcase from the boot. When I followed, he was taller than I expected, in turned-up jeans and a black fleece; with a swollen face and bags under his eyes. He looked apologetic—perhaps the conversation had been a bit much for two strangers on a short drive. On my part, the impulse to be polite crashed into the admiration and honesty I wanted to show him. We shook hands. While he held mine, he made a joke about giving me a five-star rating via the app on account of our therapy session.
* * *
Euston, not as large as it should have been. Euston, squat and hulking. There was the square outside the station: it had statues and pigeons looking for their lunch. It was all shades of gray and the curling fug of cigarette smoke, the strawberry-scented issue from vapes. People kept appearing suddenly and slowing my progress, tangling their suitcase with my suitcase, or else stopping entirely to stand in one place. I wanted to say, am I invisible to you? To the lady who had stepped directly in front of me to take a phone call. Out of all proportion, I wanted to tear off her face. In my stomach, there was the familiar, anxious poison of fear and bitterness.
Inside the station, I took a left. The automated machines. £13.25 for a yellow-and-orange ticket with font on it that belonged to an eighties computer game. After I’d shoved it into the back of my phone case, my neck craned up at the screen showing train times. Delayed. Well, of course. I had a book with me, but it was thin and I was already more than halfway through it: I had wanted to pass the time on the train by reading. With nothing else to do, I sat on my case. Out of unthinking habit, I checked my emails. The previous day, the managing editor had sent me a list of questions asking where on the shared hard drive fact-checks and versions of proofs were, and I’d replied courteously, elated despite myself that I might still be needed, and things might fail without me. She had not emailed back. Not even in thanks. Leaving work was like being broken up with within a semi-abusive relationshi
p. Today my inbox was empty. I sat on my case and pulled down refresh thirty-seven times until I lost count.
When the platform number was announced for the train, the main body of the station and the ramps towards the platform began hemorrhaging. Things fell apart. It was midafternoon, and the station was crowded, but not particularly full. Yet traveling salesmen in leather shoes flew past voluptuously grouped families, past teenage girls with Primark shopping bags; jammed their tickets into the barrier gate; stabbed the open/close button on carriage doors like animals in pain. I noted all this with distaste. Then I noted my distaste. This was my main fear in leaving London. That a parochial habit of watching what other people did and a running commentary on their failings would lodge itself in my brain. That such commentary would become my main form of anecdote. I wanted, always, to maintain the metropolitan affect of never being fazed. I walked at normal pace to the very front of the train, and got into passenger car A. Two other commuters followed. And once we had settled into the carriage space, chosen discrete corners in which to pass the journey, I took my coat off. I hoisted my luggage into the overhead compartment and saw a girl curled into a window seat with her shoes off and her feet on the furred green seats. She was propping her phone up against the bulk of a WH Smith bag on the grim plastic table in front of her, watching Netflix as though she were in bed with her earphones in. I saw another slightly older woman near the end of the carriage, unwrapping an M&S sandwich and leaving it on the little table that folded down from the seat in front of her. She set aside her flapjack and bottle of water, put on her reading glasses, and began to look over a bundle of printed documents. She bit into the sandwich and started up her laptop on the seat next to her.