On the eighth of October I set an alarm that went off at 5:45 a.m. the next day with a sharp peal. It split me from my bed. I saw the room come into light with the first article Twitter hyperlinked onto my screen and learned that workers’ rights were to be diminished even in the event of a deal. This article proposed the creation of a common rule book of rights, breaches of which could be dealt with by a supranational court. This article proposed that the deregulation of workers’ rights was an opportunity for the UK to match, if not surpass, other nations in the creation of new ones. This article failed to tell me what my soon-to-be stripped rights were, and so it was impossible to worry in a way that wasn’t vague. It was hard to feel specifically outraged. In any event, the establishment of a supranational court was a far more interesting theory to mull over because it seemed to me, as I lay in bed and philosophized in the aftershock of my alarm, that no one was above borders or nation, or some kind of entity they carried with them in lieu of home. A judge still had a passport, paid tax, at some point returned to a house plotted upon a piece of land. I finished, pushed, with the upward swipe of my thumb, the article away, and put the radio on; I spooned coffee grains into a cafetière.
When it was done, the sound of an ironically titled daily bird program on Radio 4, Tweet of the Day, swam back into the room: a voice like sandpaper soothing wood into a level plane reported not on sound as news, but on sound as natural phenomena. It told me I was listening to larks’ songs recorded from Spain. I pressed the plunger down on my cafetière and felt idyllic. Five short tones and a final long one signaled the beginning of the Today program and set me back to work. A plummy, rich voice warbled in and out of focus, and on each hour, the Greenwich Time Signal carved the occasions of that morning into distinct parts. To them, teeth cleaned, a hot towel passed over pores, rolled nylon flat over thighs. I transposed the room into a bag. House key, fob, vanity mirror, shawl, tissues, set text, lanyard, Vaseline lip therapy, a sheaf of notes. I left the house and listened to it all rattle under my arm.
Ghislane did not appear in the Bodleian, the English faculty library, nor its dark wood and glassy building. Over the course of a few weeks, I recognized those students she had pointed out at the department party, who now seemed like pale creations without her estimations of them, given over a glass of champagne and driving them on. Eventually I tamed the little impulse that asked where she was. Then, for a while, things became the same. The days shortened. Dust fell on routine. I transcribed manuscripts and learned how not to fall asleep in front of online databases. I ate shop-bought vegan wraps with bad chipotle and an abundance of starch. I kept spare change for coffee. In the morning, the wake-up radio beat out pips of time before the same road, the same load under my arm as I went—eventually I could have done it in my sleep. Eastbound path through the park towards the faculty. Four hours later, down Holywell Street, until I hit Broad Street. And the papers to look over. And lectures to sit in on, then hear translated in another seminar. I stopped craving candy for dinner. Only the fire drills carried out by the college accommodation office disturbed the peace: irregularly done and with the siren, occasionally, an accompanying knock on the door, at which point the house was timed for the efficiency of its evacuation. It was the only time I ever saw tenants other than my neighbor—once a month, with sleep in their eyes, in boxer shorts or slogan T-shirts and their arms wrapped around their chests for warmth, averting their gaze from each other’s pajamas.
When October was done, November ceased to exist. Shop windows dressed to look like living rooms with a centerpiece tree and wrapped presents underneath obscured time’s flow. On walks home, I kept to the shade around Christmas lights which cast their glow over street markets selling hot chocolate to passersby. Gingerbread men and thick wool socks affected coziness. To all this, I expected snow, which did not come, but frost set over the building’s roofs and windowpanes: the city, beatified, and tourists in ill-suited shoes, trying not to skid.
I worked. Between seminars and on my lunch breaks I became obsessed with an oil painting by Turner, hung landscape in the Ashmolean. It was dated 1810 and showed the High Street, looking west: University College on the frame’s left and the spire of St. Mary’s rising above everything. Each cobblestone and window was exact. I took a photo of the canvas and carried it to the High Street—held my phone up so that the beadles, the scholars in their gowns, were suddenly thrust into present day. Then I took a photo of the High Street as I knew it and held it up to the canvas the next time I saw it; lined it up so that it filled the painting’s frame. I went back, from week to week, holding up photos with varying lights, kinds of weather, shifting casts. I considered asking my neighbor whether he would take a picture of me on the High Street so that I could later crop the photo and insert myself into Oxford, 1810—but embarrassment prevented me from doing so. I did not want to be thought of as sad, or vain.
I worked. I had disputes with my supervisor on his students’ tutorial essays. He took these lightly; I did not. He laughed good-naturedly over a paper on archive and the environment, and what to do with all the world’s paper once climate change brought us down to bare necessities. It said: eat the rich for fuel; vote which literature goes into bunkers by popular rule. I argued strongly for one he disliked on the difference between what the American literary domestic was and the UK’s notion of home. In America, everyone was always searching for home. Who could lay claim? Huck Finn and Jim floating four walls on a raft down the river, picking up grifters as they went; Nick Carraway marveling at the summer bungalow he was newly able to rent. America’s foremost piece of literature was its constitution, which tied its politics inextricably to its land—the question of who owned it, and who had tilled it; the disparity between the two. In England, only myths, only fictions defined the land: Chaucer’s pilgrims and their tales; Wordsworth, spinning his prophecy to open vales. In England, there was no question of home: depending on who you were, it was either always there, or not. It all worked by empire, by assumption. An orphan girl could advertise and inherit another woman’s burnt trove. Orlando found nothing different within themself in the same mirror, hung within the same ancestral abode. The rest went unmentioned. I emailed him to say I thought this deserved high praise. I’m uneasy about essays which come down strongly on one side, he replied. Few essays make such expansive arguments with rigor. Dialectics create more intelligent arguments: ideas are better served when they are complicated rather than cheered or booed as at a football match. I replied, of course, and stared, suddenly deflated, at the screen.
I worked. I found a girl Ghislane had pointed out to me at the party crying quietly in a Starbucks on Cornmarket—burnout, anxiety, SAD. I asked if she was all right.
The country’s going to hell and I can’t finish my essay, she said. How do I know what matters when I can’t get a look-in? Marking criteria were too vague, and, besides, didn’t I know? May was holding private meetings with backbench MPs. The pound hit a twenty-month low—what use was an English degree now that fake news had eliminated the meaning of words anyway? The vote was delayed, the tick on her word count wouldn’t grow. There was general bewilderment that it should all be going this slow. She crumpled in her chair—I just feel I’ve fallen behind on my personal self-care.
Relax, I said. Keep yourself healthy. Take long walks. Take a bath with oils. Find a Boots and take Bach Rescue Remedy. Perhaps it should have occurred to me to say, Take responsibility for the degree you paid for and chose, but before I thought to, confidence was partially restored. After she left, the words hung uselessly in the air.
I worked. In the evenings, my neighbor interrupted me with news updates and jasmine tea: he had a new girlfriend, or so he thought. She was Czech, he couldn’t quite tell. He was sleeping with her, but he couldn’t quite tell—what was the deal with women now? When she said things, he was convinced there was subtext, but every time he asked her for it, she looked at him confused, and made him feel mad. I soaked my mouth in warm, fragrant water which absolved me of the expectation of response—he was free to talk on end. He wasn’t on Twitter, he said, and real time didn’t seem to be a fast-enough pace to keep up with changing social codes. Should he open doors for her? Should he take it for granted that she would come and go? Should he text her, and ask her to let him know? Even the waiters didn’t know which way the bill should go if they went out for lunch. One time, the thin white strip tucked discreetly into leather was waved back and forth over them, as though their server sensed this was not yet a relationship of equals and equilibrium. In the end, it was decided he should pay for rented use of knives and forks, of linen, now stained with overcooked pork. And she, my neighbor groaned, half smiled, half bristled, as though it were ludicrous that he should pay, but he may as well now, all the same. It was the most confusing and expensive relationship he had ever known, and yet he was a willing participant in its misery.
I worked. I went to an advisory session on mental health and well-being. The world was a difficult place, the internet even more so. I had found the equivalent of a lonely hearts column in Oxford, a Facebook page called Oxlove, and another for the airing of grievances, Oxfess, and wasted hours a day going through them. Why is every girl here a basic white girl??? Even the brown ones; and beret man, feel free to chirpse on Monday, will be wearing silver boots (below, tagged, a number of men pictured in berets and omg is this you?); and definitive ranking of Christmas sandwiches, if u rate the M&S one, ur a Tory; and To the incredibly kind girls who picked me up off the floor on Bridge Thursday, you’ve restored my faith in humanity; and TRIGGER WARNING MENTAL HEALTH—I just don’t see any point in going on; and we live in a society; and zero-hour contracts and low wage is pretty much the norm, last week I saw the homeless guy outside college disappear and no one noticed; and ugh, can someone explain why middle class is a dirty word, like it’s my *fault*; and, y’all will like memes about having zero in your bank account and then go back to the Home Counties to your five-bedroomed house owned outright by your parents, I hate you all, y’all have no idea what it’s actually like to struggle. Stay off the internet, the mental health adviser advised.
I worked. My mother kept interrupting to tell me I never called; to tell me I never came home; to ask whether I wanted to join her and my father on holiday for a month. I told her I could not take that kind of time off work, and I was still settling in. I needed that month to make my new life stable, but would wait and see whether I could go home for a week sometime soon. She told me I’d go into an early grave. I said, well, that’s how it was these days, and subsequently received a chain of WhatsApp messages. This was not what she expected from any daughter of hers; could I not just take the damn holiday, it’s not like I would even have to pay for it; why could I not at least pretend to be grateful, and by the way, this was my father’s view on the matter, too. We did not speak over Christmas. When she got back in touch to tell me they had returned to the country safely, something had changed. She asked me about my life in the same forced, dutiful tone of voice I used to ask about her trip.
I worked. In the literary journals I researched, advertising overtook articles and declared property for sale. Escape from Brexit for the tranquility of rural Ireland. A book lover’s home with shelving and a study. Two adjacent traditional cottages in County Clare, sleeping five, plus seven acres, but handy for Shannon airport and the wild Atlantic coast, for €285,000 or equivalent. Below that: Calm German writer looking for a room in New York City. My novel caused a scandal in Germany. NYC is my exile.
And in the New Year, there was a TV film—Brexit, with bad wigs and a dramatic score. It was criticized by those who watched it from a streaming service offered by Channel 4. The events of 2016 played out over again. Twitter became a country divided. The times were already a costume drama. You could get used to anything if it was administered in the correct dose.
I began to have strange dreams over this period. The news bled into them. Perhaps it was a natural side effect of listening to the radio first thing in the morning and reading my Twitter feed at night—but they were disappointingly sedate. In one of them, I met an amalgam politician, a composite of centrist, start-of-the-decade neoconservative ideals, and he was not so unreasonable that I felt I could decline his invitation to breakfast. He led me with overblown courteousness to the hall of his former college, where we settled on a bench in the middle of the room. You sit, and I’ll choose for you, he grinned, and bounded off. He returned with two trays laden with small pots of Bonne Maman jam, boiled eggs, butter, bacon, then held a finger up and disappeared once more. When he came back, it was with a rack of toast and a coffeepot. He took his phone out of his pocket and placed it, screen-up, on the table. I imitated him. Finally, he sat down.
Now, then—he surveyed me over the table—you look like . . . those, I think. He pushed two of the small pots of raspberry conserve towards me. He buttered me a piece of toast and set it down on my plate, where it went ignored. He didn’t seem to notice or mind. Having done his due diligence towards me, he piled his plate with bacon and began cutting up another square of toast into thin slices with gusto. When this was done he took another plate, set his knife above it, and sliced the head off of an egg. Yolk slopped up from over the rim of the shell. The mess took thirty seconds to make. I poured myself a cup of coffee. I asked the burning question my dream self apparently wanted to know.
What was boarding school like?
The politician shot me a pained glance through a mouthful of bacon. Hell, if you must know, he said. I willed him to say more. He began to look like he rather regretted inviting me into the hall. It was boring, he said finally. It was school.
It was just a boring school? I sounded incredulous to myself even in my dream, as though the investment of my subconscious time was yielding conspicuously low return.
Yes, he said. In spite of himself, he stopped chewing momentarily and seemed to catch the end of a stray thought. It occurred to me later this could not have been the case given that all reality as it took place in that hall was constructed entirely out of my own. In any case, the politician swallowed his bacon, more of which had somehow multiplied on the plate before him, and said, I tell you what though, the night parties were fun.
There came a martyred sigh to indicate he didn’t need prompting anymore. A few more eggs had begun to rock on their sides on the plate in front of him, sloughing their shells. I went to eat my toast, but it had disappeared.
You got split into houses, where you got given your own room, he explained. Then you got a timetable. Regimented sort of thing: eat then, sleep then, shit then, lessons in between. I imagine it was meant to inspire a sense of discipline but obviously the only thing a curfew could inspire was the urge to break it. We’d sneak bottles of anything we could into each other’s rooms at night and one-up each other.
What, I asked, “I’ve seen more naked girls than you have?”
Don’t be crass. Yes. But also, my god is better than your god kind of thing. It was intellectual, too.
I snorted, and he shot me a dirty look. Don’t laugh, he said. You could really make or break yourself on these things. I remember one night, there was this boy, Felix, who almost ruined me. He began to slice up another piece of toast. The eggs he had been eating, meanwhile, had disappeared from his plate and reappeared on mine. He transferred them back onto his. Then he continued. It was my first night party. I had sherry that I’d stolen from my mother’s pantry because I’d just been home for the weekend, and I invited the whole bloody house into my tiny room.
And?
It went great. I was the toast of the town, as it were. He looked at his buttered soldiers and chortled. Anyway, we had a good night, but of course, at some point they all had to go back to their own rooms, otherwise the dame—
The what?
Like a matron, he sped on impatiently, she would have had kittens. We all got caught at one point or another, actually, it’s not easy to make it back to your dorm when you’re drunk.
I opened my mouth to express my condolences but he shot me a warning look and I shut up. I took some toast from the rack; the butter, the jam; began making myself breakfast. He selected another egg with exaggerated solemnity.
There I am, trying to get them all out of my room, and the last person left is Felix, who pipes up and says, I feel terribly ill. May I sleep here? And because the party had been such a success, and I was feeling magnanimous the way you do when you’re sixteen, I said yes. But only if he slept on the floor, cleared off in the morning, and didn’t tell anyone about it. Instead, I woke up at three in the morning to find him next to me in bed with a cramp in his leg from all the alcohol, making the most awful sort of noise—
What noise?
His plate was now a mountain of bacon. He pushed it aside to allow us a good view of each other, then screwed up his nose and closed his eyes. He began to moan in soft vowel sounds. Ai, ai, ai. Awful noise, he said, face relaxed and eyes back open. I hated it. He kept holding his leg really tightly and making it worse. I ought to have hit him. The politician intuited my expression and rearranged his features accordingly. Yes, I know. I didn’t, of course. Gave him some water, told him he’d be all right. He ran off anyway and I went back to bed. I didn’t think any more of it, except he’d gone to the school nurse because he thought he was dying and the whole school found out that he’d stayed in my bed and had taken ill for an entire day after. The next morning I went down to breakfast. We ate in a hall with benches and the food was always cold—rather like this. He gestured vaguely at our surroundings within the college, the mess on his plates. Anyway, I sat down with my soldiers and my friends, and they’re all congratulating me on the night, and then someone yells quite loudly, Apparently Felix got sick from sleeping in your bed.
He paused. I had to quash all kinds of Chinese whispers after that. It sounds so odd to say, but this was years ago. Calling someone gay was still a credible insult. Catching germs from someone was still a viable notion. The UK and US hadn’t even legalized same-sex marriage at that point.
We fell silent.
Actually, he resumed sheepishly, when I say he almost “ruined” me, that might have been too grand a word.
I could think of nothing to say. He watched my face with ill-concealed anxiety, toying with some of the toast I’d made myself before tearing it, inattentively, into small pieces. At last, he could stand it no longer.
I’ve got nothing against people being gay, you know.
All right, I said. The politician paled. He said, I’ve got nothing against people being Black, or brown, or them belonging to any kind of ethnic minority; nothing against them being gay, or bi, or trans; I have disabled friends, I support women’s rights. I just couldn’t let there be any confusion about Felix and my bed.
Oh. I shrugged. He nodded, satisfied, before springing forward again. I say, he smiled, would you mind making me some toast?
I stood up to fetch more bread and another plate. The dream morphed into something else.
When I woke up, what seemed strange to me was the fact that I had had no instinctive understanding of what this figure wanted or meant. Despite its presence in my subconscious, that apparent signal of my desire, if not design of its being there, I had not been able to find any veracity in its words, or feel any kinship with them as they came out. I knew only with certainty that I had been hungry, and that I had observed the ease with which sitting in that hall, piling up a plate, eating one’s fill, and telling a good story came to him. It was an unappealing characteristic, but not one I could truly say I had no sympathy with.