My time with Mark was brief, would be outlasted in years to come by other men who didn’t care for me a great deal. The same goes for the boss who told me that I should find another job that day. I’ve had so many bosses since: some good, some terrible in other ways. But these two people both stand out as the first who made me feel that I had overestimated my value.
At least only one day of my life is ruined! I said to Mark, in reference to the double rejection, and when he at last left, with references to future friendship that we both knew would never be fulfilled, I sat down in the shower – because I was sad but also because it wasn’t possible to stand up in the shower in the flat on Cephas Street – and cried. At that time of year, when the cold air outside froze the pipes, it was easy for tears to flow faster than the water from the taps.
I was due to travel home to upstate New York a couple of weeks later, to spend the Christmas break. It was the last Christmas we’d have in the home my siblings and I grew up in: my parents were putting it on the market, to move to Baltimore, for my father’s new job. But in the days that followed my firing and dumping I decided not to go. If I sat on my parents’ sofa, I believed, I would never get up again, and my whole small life that I’d built in London would be thrown away.
On Boxing Day I called them after spending the day volunteering at a special temporary shelter for homeless people who were unserved in the time between Christmas and New Year, when the social services they depended on were shut for the festive period. My job was to help process people who came in because they had immigration problems: a group of young men from South America who’d been caught sleeping on the floor of the chicken restaurant that employed them. An eighteen-year-old girl who’d been ejected from the home she shared with her husband and his mother. On the phone with my parents I drank a glass of white wine from Marks and Spencer and ate a ready meal beyond the means of my usual budget.
I realized, I said to them, recounting the day, looking out the Velux window over the council estates that stretched before me, up through Tower Hamlets and into Hackney, that there are so many people that have it so much worse than me. I guess I shouldn’t feel so sorry for myself. I have to stop feeling so bad.
Well, said my dad, in his comforting baritone, that’s true, Jean. But that doesn’t mean that you’re not allowed to feel. People’s problems are people’s problems.
For all of the times that I can’t remember what he said in a particular moment, that’s one that I know: precise, and true.
I never saw Mark again, or not on purpose, not other than across a street or at a music festival, but I did continue working at the literary agency for five more months. My boss wanted me to go but she didn’t actually have grounds to fire me. My incompetence was insufficient, so I had to keep going to work every day until I found another job. I went to interview after interview where women who were my prospective new bosses looked at my CV and said things like: Oh, well, we couldn’t hire you, she’d be so upset that we poached you! and I laughed a choking laugh that probably broadcast how much she disliked me. Reading my boss’s emails in the morning, combing through to delete the messages from African princes, I found one from one of her friends. Sorry you have to find a new assistant, he wrote. Make sure the new one is pretty.
On my final day, when I resigned to take a low-paid internship answering to one of my friends, anything to escape the toxic atmosphere, the boss gave me a midpriced handbag and a large bouquet of fresh flowers.
Good luck, she said to me. And then: Don’t write about us!
I won’t, I said. I produced a smile. The smile was fake, but I did feel a little bit happy, that this woman who seemed to dislike me so much might think my writing could be a threat.
I watched her depart and then handed the bouquet to the friend who sat next to me. I returned the handbag to the shop. After my leaving drinks, I got on the Central Line and sobbed so hard, with such extravagance, that strangers, Londoners, the people who are possibly least in the world inclined to acknowledge the emotions of others, offered me tissues, or at least unused Pret a Manger napkins that they dug from the bottoms of handbags.
Thanks, I said, to the people with the paper goods. Thank you.
And then I became a writer, because there was nothing else to do.
5
What did I do next? I did internships. I took weird editorial jobs. I did unpaid work experience at newspapers. I went for drinks with senior male editors who pretended that they were interested in my writing but really just hoped that I’d sleep with them. I contributed articles to a scrappy, ambitious magazine run by friends of a friend in an old factory in Dalston. After nights of editing we’d go out and eat big plates of cheap Turkish stew, drink Efes and talk about how we were going to do great things and get our revenge on all of the older people in the media who had so far failed to recognize that we were destined to do great things.
In time, I started eking a living from words: blog posts, tiny book reviews, B2B magazines. Copywriting for a Danish shipping company, articles about innovations in office furniture. Occasional features for publications that my friends down the pub had heard of. For six months I wrote the view-from-a-woman column for a men’s magazine that they ran with a byline illustration of a woman who was, let’s say, more conventionally hot than me.
(It looks like Gisele Bündchen with brown hair, my friend Ella said, when I showed her the first issue with my column. She paused for a moment. You don’t look like Gisele Bündchen, she said, as if that needed to be clarified.)
I dreamed of a full-time job on a newspaper, clutched the crumbs of occasional assignments and covered shifts at desks for absent low-level editors. But while I waited for that full-time job to happen (it didn’t), I did what I could to make a living. My work was never about affording to be picky. That’s why my favourite job was as a freelance writer for a magazine about conference travel, which is to say: a magazine for people who organized conferences. The writing itself was boring, detailed rundowns of hotel facilities and team-building day trips for men and maybe a few women who were unlike any people who I came into contact with in my real life.
But the assignments meant that all of a sudden I got to go on glamorous international trips, flying business class and staying in five-star hotels, places where I’d come back to my room in the evening to find that the cleaner hadn’t just made the bed but put my toiletries on the bathroom counter in a straight line and placed my inhaler at a right angle to my novel on the bedside table. My assignments paid a decent day rate, indeed an incredible one once I billed the publisher for expenses. At home I was living on the knife-edge of ruin, secretly withdrawing cash from my credit-card account and pushing the machine-fresh stacks of bills, hot in my hands, back into my checking account. Waiting for freelance payments from dawdling accounts payable departments meant that I had to make hard choices about how I’d feed myself. Oatmeal could be OK two times a day. Three times was my limit. But when I went on these press trips I ate like a queen: Yes, I said, I’ll have another helping, a second pass at the buffet. A second deep-fried dinner roll. Of course, please, bring me the dessert menu.
I also took shower after shower, standing up. How unique, I would think, as I shampooed my hair and watched suds run down the full length of my body, what an unusual and pleasant sensation. This could really catch on!
By now the water pressure in the flat on Cephas Street was so bad that in the colder months there were many hours a day where we had no water at all, and through a series of letters citing violation of UN human rights conventions, my neighbours and I had gotten our landlord to reduce the monthly rent by nearly half. When I described this problem to my friends, that we couldn’t wash ourselves or flush the toilet, my friends expressed regret but never suggested that we move. This was London, then, and maybe now: the inconvenience of being never quite clean and perpetually dehydrated was a small price to pay for an affordable home in a cool East London neighbourhood.
One day, I’d thi
nk, as I turned on the bathroom taps at full blast and watched no water at all come out of them, One day I’ll write about this as evidence of all of the suffering I did for my art.
Like many of my writing jobs I got the conference travel one because a man sent me an email. I was unhappy that this was the route, that more often than not the men who emailed me to offer me employment cited some evidence that they knew that I was young and a woman. But when the emails came in and offered me things, it was hard to say no. Will you meet me for coffee? this particular man said in his email, and I said: No, because I didn’t want to go on a date with a father-aged man, and then he wrote back and said: Would you like to write for my magazine about conference travel? It pays, and I wrote back and said, Sure! and he replied: Great, let’s meet for coffee to discuss it.
The man who had sent me the email turned out to be about fifty, and when I entered the Costa near the Farringdon tube station he looked a bit alarmed by the way in which I was a real young human woman. He wore a wedding ring and spoke in a quiet voice. Afterwards he sent me on my first assignment, which was to Estonia, and I was very excited until someone said to me: What if he’s there in the hotel waiting for you! and then I felt very stressed. My time working with older men in journalism had given me the sense that this was a real possibility: that career advancement was a tightrope between taking advantage of opportunity and being taken advantage of.
When I checked in the receptionist said, There’s a gift for you in your room, and I rode the elevator with overwhelming fear and nausea, imagining the editor reclining on a crisp white duvet cover strewn with rose petals. But the gift was a paperweight, lucite with ‘Tallinn!’ painted across the base in gold.
There was no reason for me to visit the destinations I was going to, because all of the information I needed to write the boring articles was on the internet. But the editor of the magazine didn’t seem to know that much about the internet, so I took the opportunity offered to trot around cities with people who worked in municipal conference bureaus – did you know that people work in municipal conference bureaus? I did not – and ask the questions I knew they wanted to hear.
How many chairs are in this room? I would say, as if that information was not on the internet. Someone would say how many chairs and then I would nod and pretend to write it down. Then I accepted the stacks of brochures that they handed me. I disposed of them in the trash of the ladies’ room of whichever airport terminal I was departing from.
After my trip to Tallinn I got to go to Mauritius. Mauritius is an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean: that’s what you have to tell people who haven’t heard of Mauritius, which is maybe an OK place for some people to not have heard of. That’s how small and remote it is: the closest place is Madagascar, but it’s still hundreds of miles away from there. I’d heard of Mauritius before as a place to go on honeymoon, and indeed when I got to the gate at Heathrow for my flight to Mauritius – twelve hours, direct – I seemed to be the only person there who was not nervously twisting a fresh wedding ring around the fourth finger on my left hand. Among the nervous twisters I felt very young, even though I was twenty-seven and had already attended a number of my friends’ weddings. But not since Paul had there been a man in my life in the presence of whom I could say the phrase ‘my boyfriend’ with confidence.
In the queue to get on to the plane one of the ring-twisters said to his new wife: You’ve had more last names than you’ve had hot dinners! and I thought to myself: I wish I was loved.
In Mauritius there was a pineapple cut in a fancy shape in my bedroom and towels rolled into swans and also a typhoon. The typhoon was some of the worst weather in Mauritius in decades, so bad that they’d closed all of the schools in the country. The hotel I was staying in was not designed to be a place where you spent time indoors other than sleeping, and so each morning I walked from my room to the open porch where you ate breakfast and arrived at the breakfast porch sodden, despite my umbrella.
Maybe, I thought, I should feel pity for the people who are here on their once-in-a-lifetime honeymoon and having it ruined by this weather. But when I got to the breakfast porch and no one was eating breakfast besides me and a solitary man with the top part of his wetsuit rolled down and tied around his waist, I thought: But the people on honeymoon are all having sex, whereas I can only eat this delicious Mauritian breakfast custard and wonder if I should talk to this man in a wetsuit.
I ate another breakfast custard.
I was in Mauritius for six days and towards the very end of the trip the weather cleared up. I had some time free after viewing many conference rooms, so I went to the private beach that was owned by the hotel. It had white sand and perfect aquamarine water and palm trees and it was exactly the kind of place you would want to come with the person you loved so much you’d just pledged to spend the rest of your life with them. Or yourself.
On the beach there was a system of flags to indicate your desire for service: if you wanted someone to come over and offer you a selection of delicious treats from the hotel restaurant you stabbed your blue flag in the sand next to you. If you did not want to be disturbed by someone offering you a selection of delicious treats from the hotel restaurant you had a red flag to stab into the sand next to you, lest anyone should bother you with offers of pleasure.
The red flag felt like a degree of imperiousness unlike any I had ever encountered. What would it be like, I wondered, to be so rich and important that you feel like you have to tell people not to serve you?
But I used my blue flag to get a nice man to bring me a club sandwich, and a cool glass of beet juice that sparkled its deep pink-purple hue in the sun.
How can I make my life one in which this is a normal occurrence? I wondered, as I drank the juice, and for just that moment, such a life felt possible.
I had never been so far from home.
The next morning I went to the toilet and when I got up I saw that the contents were bright red, and my legs buckled. I have colon cancer! I thought, the disease that my grandmother died of so young, the thing that my father had warned me about so often. I hadn’t been eating much fibre on my trip to Mauritius, and now here I was, dying on my own on an island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Who would come and help me? I had literally never been so far from home, and now I was not just far from home but alone in a leading international honeymoon destination, dying of colon cancer.
Then I remembered how much beet juice I’d had to drink on the beach the day before.
How silly! I thought. How paranoid am I to think that I am doomed to get colon cancer just because my father is so preoccupied with it!
How wonderful to be young and alone and free in Mauritius, in a body I knew so little about.
6
Sometimes when I tell people about what my life in London was like, they think I was having a bad time. The no-water flat, the bad jobs, the men who failed to appreciate me. The constant damp, the mould, the pallid greasy food.
In fact, I loved living in London.
I loved the flat at the top of the church. I loved its quirks, its slanted ceilings that I often hit my head on. I loved the classy laminate floors that almost looked nice when I vacuumed them, which was a thing I did once in a while.
I loved having people over for dinner. I loved the Thanksgiving when I invited pretty much everyone I knew on the specific day, a Thursday night, and roasted a turkey in the oven and made a pumpkin cheesecake and wore an orange dress. I loved how there weren’t enough places to sit down, not really, I loved how I had to plunder Adam’s apartment downstairs for all his chairs and also for his oven, in which I roasted potatoes to a near-inedible blackness. I loved when I went downstairs to fetch the potatoes and Adam’s father happened to be visiting and he looked on in bemusement while this American woman in an orange dress slammed through the front door without knocking, said an abrupt hello, and slammed out again with a tray of potatoes.
I loved living upstairs from Adam. It was just a coin
cidence that Adam moved in downstairs, Adam who had been in Paris all of those years ago, right there in that bar with Lisa and me and Paul, as Paul and I fell in love. Adam lived directly beneath us and when one morning he texted me that he had been offered a job as a lawyer I already knew because he had been blasting MIA’s ‘Paper Planes’ at full volume on a loop. It was early on a Saturday morning and I was hungover as I always was on Saturday mornings, and when I went downstairs to tell Adam to please turn the music off, Adam cried out, JEANO, I’M NAKED, and I said, I KNOW, YOU ARE PLAYING THIS SONG AT A VOLUME THAT COULD ONLY BE ACCOMPANIED BY NAKED DANCING.
I loved that on dark cold evenings when I rode my bike into the courtyard in front of the church I’d ring the bike bell. The bell made an adorable tinging noise that was not appropriate for admonishing men in cars who were trying to take my life, but was perfect for alerting a neighbour to one’s arrival home. Adam would lean his head out the window and shout, JEANO, WANT A CUP OF TEA? and I would say YES even though I don’t really like tea. Adam made tea in a pot, not in a mug, and the pot wore a knitted cosy. Keep it cosy, Jeano, Adam would say when I made the tea and didn’t put the cosy on, and I would say, I’m AMERICAN, OK? and Adam would shake his head in disgust.
I loved that Adam knew my ex-boyfriend and I knew his ex-girlfriend and because of this we did not see each other as romantic prospects, not at all, not even when my friends thought I should, not even when my friends said it as if it was an original idea: You should marry Adam! and I said, No, never, with uncharacteristic certainty.
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