Three Rooms

by Jo Hamya

  I dropped back into my chair. I wished I’d thought to buy a newspaper, or food; that I possessed whatever ability it was which made these women so able to create little nests of space wherever they were. The carriage shuddered, the conductor came on overhead. We began to move. London’s outer boroughs, its rows of suburban housing, washed themselves in faded brown and gray over each window; peeled successively away in diminishing forms. I had my book. I tried to read but the words slid along the page, making no impression on my mind. I hadn’t had lunch, and I was hungry. Each past sentence I read evaporated in my memory as soon as the next one took hold. The futility of the task was oppressive enough that when a call came from my mother, I took it, and prayed that at some point, the train would drive into a tunnel so that the signal would break the conversation off at a natural, early end. It turned out there was not much to do but listen. A new couple had moved in next door, and they were fuming on account of the Brexit delay, it was inadvisable to stop for a chat if I saw them on my way in. She herself had endured a very long, arduous conversation about the general election with them, and they’d assumed she voted their way. Then, my father had turned up, and by the sounds of his accent, it was very clear that she didn’t. There was a palaver about apologizing for the rude things they’d said about Remoaners: of course, by the looks of my father, in his suit, with his iPhone 10 and regional-accent-inflected English, there could be no question he paid his taxes; worked as a valued member of the UK economy. My mother cackled down the phone. The English were too polite for convictions. By the way, there was a new housing development being built on the fields across the road, and so I might like to wear sensible shoes when I arrived, things were a bit muddy.

  I said it was too late, I was already on the train and all I had were heels and fashionable trainers because I had just spent the last four months working at a society magazine in London. Outside, the scenery came to a stop; became Wembley, dispensing passengers and long whistle blows. Don’t you raise your voice at me for it, my mother said, there was enough noise going on her end already. But I was having waking nightmares about being assaulted with mud, the sound of drills, of construction work, again. I thought the whole point of the countryside was that nothing ever happened in it, I said.

  Yes, very droll, she said. There was a lot of construction happening all over, actually. People being priced out of London were moving into the villages and towns. There wasn’t enough housing to keep up with the demand. The newer houses were expensive; full of modern technology built into the walls, but equally, there weren’t enough amenities to keep up with the influx of population. The roads leading to the high street were consistently jammed. The schools were struggling to keep the number of pupils in classrooms down. Yesterday, she had waited half an hour at the checkouts in Morrisons, when a few years ago, she had only used to wait five minutes. I felt my eyes roll into the back of my head. Wembley unclenched from the window. Look, I feel awkward being the only passenger talking on the train, I said. I’ll see you when I’m there. She called me poppet and said she was getting things ready for me before she hung up the phone. I pictured my mother dusting the mantelpiece with its framed family photos; going over the rugs with a vacuum and plumping the cushions so that they stood up against each other on the sofa, like little tents. I could hear her complaining to no one in particular that the dust from the construction was dirtying the windows, and felt tenderly towards her. I sent a warmer, love-laden text. I was not without shame.

  The ticket inspector came into the train car with his ticket machine: the woman eating a meal deal from M&S showed him hers first. She had to pile her papers under her chin and shift her laptop, now balanced on her knees, awkwardly about to look for it. When at last she had pulled it out, the inspector nodded briefly, said, That’s great, thanks, and continued on. It took enough time for the train to move in and out of Watford.

  The girl at the window seat watching Netflix sat straight up, as though she’d been caught cheating on a test; swung her feet immediately off the seats and took her earphones out. She, too, showed him her ticket, and he gave a nod as he passed. Now, it was me. I had no bearings to collect. I flashed him the back of my phone. It took ten seconds: he peered at the card wedged between the device and the protective cover; he said, Nice one, as though my ticket had somehow been better than all the rest. He disappeared into the driver’s compartment of the train. I went back to my book. I turned pages without reading. I looked out of the window again. We had traveled far enough out of London for the view to turn into pasture. England, the fat impasto of the land painted on faintly clouded Plexiglas, hung through a dirty, rust-covered frame. I took it in. It had its own terrible majesty. Dashed landscape rippling past me, shaken out like sheets over a bed, and the sky like a blade. The sight of it went through me. I could have been looking at my old nursery, or the first cot I ever lay in. Despite my efforts to feel the contrary, there was some sentiment attached. Tomorrow, in my mother’s wellingtons, I would take a walk up hills and fields. Shortly after my leaving home, my parents had moved to a small market town. This was where I would be. I would be stomping over to where an iron sign announced its borders, black and official and brilliant and hard. I had a fascination with road and street signs like these, which looked like they had been made midcentury and then left out for the successive generations they guided. In the town where my parents lived, there was an absence of blue plaques, and an abundance of little black-and-white street signs. They pointed to the markets, the schools, the railway lines. I tried to imagine who I would be, as a result of this town. In however long it would take to find another job, I wanted to think I would turn fresh-faced after all the walks and good, sharp air. I would have time to cultivate habits impossible to sustain in London—I would cook whole, robust meals and read voraciously. I would make myself better. I began to daydream.

  The doors in an imaginary house swung open. There was a kitchen, ranks of dried herbs, spices, legumes. Worktops, washing machine, boiler. I saw violets resting in a jug in the sink and hand soap in its dispenser. There was a living room, too, with ivy-colored walls. Two sofas in the center, facing each other, and a coffee table in between, piled with clutter: newspapers and stray pens. One bedroom, more or less filled with a double bed; a nondescript bathroom, remarkable only in that it was clean. I did not know who I shared the house with, but there were two toothbrushes under the mirror, on the sink; two sponges resting on the bath.

  The reality was that it was drizzling and the train pulled up to its next stop. I’d closed my eyes—I knew this only because I had to open them. The girl with her feet on the seats watching Netflix was stuffing her shoes on. She wrapped her scarf around her and stepped onto the platform outside. By the way she kept her film streaming on the phone in her hand and her head bent towards it, it was clear: she knew where she was. The WH Smith bag dangled tidily off the crook of her wrist and knocked about her thigh. I craned my neck out for her. She was gone before the train left.

  What had a rented room in Oxford and a sofa in London made me? Where had there been to make me? For all my plans, it seemed impossible I could achieve anything. There had been no place I could have dragged a sofa into, painted the walls whatever color I wanted, stayed in long enough to find inviting colleagues over for dinner and drinks a worthwhile task. I had not found a job with which I could afford to put my life in one place, then nurture my relationship with family and friends. Yet somehow, I had spent the year keeping my possessions, temporarily, in what were ostensibly the highest echelons the country had to offer. I had even felt a sense of ownership over each building, granted by the access various keys, fobs, and magnetized cards I had carried for them. There was humiliation attached to the feeling that these buildings were no longer mine. Had probably never been mine. I pictured my parents’ house: the architectural and interior design opposite of everything I would have chosen for myself. It would not be mine, either. I thought of the last time I had been to stay. It was a house wi
th thin walls. During the night, I had heard my parents turning in their bed; my father’s whistling snore and my mother’s gentle breathing. In the morning I had woken them up by closing the front door too loudly when I went out for a run at six. I had irritated them by buying impossible quantities of bread which were invariably left in the cupboards to mold past the time I left. Now, I did not even have a set of house keys.

  Don’t worry, my mother said when I texted her, you can use the spare set here. What had happened to mine? Well, mine were the spare set. I had scarcely been home. She had seen no reason not to lend them to guests, or the neighbors when she and my father went on holiday and the plants needed watering. It was true, but it did not stop me from feeling offended. I sent the thumbs-up emoji. I wanted to put my phone away but my mother did not know that the thumbs-up emoji constituted the end of a conversation in text. She had questions. Would I be looking for another job? If I found one, would I be moving back to London? I was welcome to stay however long I wanted, but if it was temporary, how long did I think I would stay? The guilt mechanism permanently embedded in my head thrust the conversation I’d had with the Uber driver to the forefront of my head and how not twenty minutes ago I had been ashamed of the way I treated her—but I was bad-tempered and hungry, and most of all, I was tired. I switched my phone off.

  Other than the view from the window, all there was to look at was the train carriage. There were two of us left in it. The woman with the laptop and printed papers had finished her M&S sandwich and flapjack dessert—at some point, she had gotten up and squashed them into a small metal bin built into one of the seats. The bin itself either had not been emptied regularly enough or was too small for the litter generated by the number of seats the carriage contained. The triangular cardboard smeared with lettuce leaves and mayonnaise poked out of it; there was a lid attached to the bin on a stiff hinge, it disfigured the rubbish it clamped down on and made the whole effect worse.

  The more I looked, the more disgusting the carriage grew. There was a faint layer of brown on each of the brightly patterned seats, stretching upwards and becoming more concentrated at the headrests. I drew my head instinctively away from mine. It was impossible not to picture how many years and numbers of passengers sitting down would have to pass, and how long the seats would have to go without being cleaned, to build up that noticeable layer of brown. How could anyone sit comfortably once they had seen this? And how, without standing, could I rearrange myself so that I came into as little contact with that layer of brown as possible? I took my coat off the seat next to me and put it back on as a protective layer. As much as I could, I raised my back and my thighs off the chair so that the only part of me still on it was my behind, but this soon turned into a hellish form of public transport yoga. My limbs went heavy. I fell back into the seat.

  It was impossible to slow the turn of my mind. The countryside cast itself past me, never the same from one second to the next. I tried looking out of the other windows in the passenger car so that it whipped by twice, in different perspectives. I tried to focus on my book, looked at the page—but after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight, dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter I.

  The train began to slow at another stop where the tracks had not been built far enough from the trees. A succession of branches slid up against the window until we came to rest, and then the wind drew them backwards and forwards: each bough, tapping against the carriage like a heartbeat. The other woman, my last companion in the passenger car, gathered her coat and bag; stood up; exited the train.

  All year there had been a sound rising in me, I had never said it right. I stood up and over the stained seats, the smeared windows, into the carriage, screamed—I

  The train moved off again. I jolted with it. The sound I had made broke round the empty space without use; waited, for the next stop to be home.

  Author’s Note

  Three Rooms is a novel about the danger of withholding capital, principally domestic and financial. Through the unconditional faith and care of a large cohort of people, I have been the beneficiary of both while writing this book, and of much love.

  To my parents, who did not bat an eye when I left my job and holed up in their house to write a book that might have amounted to nothing at all—I love you. Dziękuje też mojej babci. Część tej książki została napisana u Ciebie, na wsi. Czuję w niej Twoją miłość.

  Thom Insley, Sophie Haydock, Charlie Selvaggi-Castelletti, Benjamin Wood, Nicole Seredenko, Alice Bonomini Borges: whether in part or in full, you read it first, and kept me going. I owe you drinks. Serena Buccoliero, Rosy Cooley, Sveva Scenarelli: before, during, and after my writing this book, you’ve always made sure I had a home with you. I will always do the same in turn.

  To Dredheza Maloku, Ana Fletcher, Naomi Gibbs, and Harriet Moore . . . you’ve changed my life completely. My first room of my own, the ability to do what I love, is down to your kindness and commitment. For that, and to everyone at Jonathan Cape, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and David Higham, I am immeasurably and eternally yours.

  Finally, quotations can be found throughout from Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, Rosemary Tonks’s “The Sofas, Fogs, and Cinemas” and Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own. I am also incredibly grateful to Hannah Sullivan, whose Three Poems and Tenants instructed my work, and whose emails have shown invaluable patience and support. Further acknowledgments go to the LRB classifieds, articles from the Times, Tatler, and Guardian, Sting and the Police, the inventiveness of protesters holding signs at the anti-Brexit March of 2019, members of the Memory Lane Facebook page, and the testimony which makes up the Grenfell Fire Inquiry Phase 1 Report. Transcriptions, personally made, from the 2019 Conservative Party leadership election have also been used.

  About the Author

  © Urszula Soltys

  Jo Hamya has an English degree from King’s College London and a MSt in contemporary literature and culture from Oxford University. She has worked as a copyeditor for Tatler and a freelance manuscript editor. She has also written for the Financial Times. Three Rooms is her first novel. She lives in London.

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