Pay attention to this next page, the former copy editor said, because it’s by the Editor’s best friend. When you see this name, you’ll know it needs to be perfect.
We were in an office. London, height of summer. Up on the third floor of a six-story building, the wall-sized windows were thrown open, and the heat and the noise and the dirt of the city rose to meet the white-furnished room. The whole thing was open-plan, loped out in the shape of a serif capital “I”—at one end, a soundproofed glass box for the Editor; at the other, a cluster of twenty desks for marketing; and in between, four white wooden islands with twelve 27-inch high-resolution Retina display screens, back-to-back in rows of three. There was an employee for each one. I had blagged my way into the country’s last society magazine, which, I had been informed at interview, was undergoing an unexpected renaissance with a new Editor at its helm. This, from Oxford, I had not known, but in the windows of newsagents there were, indeed, blown-up posters of the magazine’s cover, each issue selling at least as well as other glossies.
You need to be careful with her pages. He will personally check everything by her, my predecessor continued. Always make sure they go straight to the top of the pile. She retrieved an A3 sheet from the printer beside her and slid it towards me; I took a Post-it, wrote, Lady P. Always Urgent. I stuck it on the side of my own giant screen, obscuring the calendar’s date shining out from it: 8 July. Someone a few desks over from mine was having sushi in front of their screen. I wanted the spicy salmon roll they were eating; I wanted to be able to google Lady P.’s name and find out how she fit into the complicated web of marriages, rivalries, and tax havens I had been studying all morning; I wanted to put her name through Twitter and find as much gossip about her as possible. Constantly, I found my mind turning on what was happening outside of the office instead of in it. I looked at the page. Lady P. had sent in a list of items and a 300-word brief on creating modern opulence in the process of interior design. I took in the £20,000 iron chandelier, £3,000 lamp, price-on-request Nureyev trolley. In the top-right corner was a photo of Lady P. in question: draped in Alice Temperley, her arms thrown out. The art director, a woman with coin eyes wrinkled at the edges and a Jane Birkin haircut neither blond nor gray, craned her neck to look at the page. She had a soft, anxious voice.
This is a good moment to point out, she said, before you start work on it, all the things that make the architecture of the page work. You see? Those sofas are facing each other on either side, diagonally, which offsets the head and sell for the article, makes it appealing. And then you have furniture arranged on the page in a way which encourages the reader to visualize buying it all—the lamp on top of the fireplace, and the mirror above the chair, and the wallpaper behind the sofa, and so on. It’s important that they can visualize putting these things in their home. The architecture of the page—she looked up to make sure I was listening—is as much about the commercial as it is about the aesthetic. What you’re looking at isn’t just leisure or taste, it’s product. We make a lot of revenue off these pages.
My predecessor smiled. That’s right, she said. And the page furniture—the prices and headlines you’ll be writing in—play a big part in that, too. She pulled out another page, this time covered in a collage of well-groomed people holding drinks, posing. She began to explain: The party pages are what we’re known for; names are everything here. Names are money, and a lot of readers will buy each issue to see who’s inside . . .
I let her go on. If you looked outside the windows and dropped your eyes, you would see the square. Periodically, outside the huge revolving doors to the building, a young woman in heels carrying an impractically sized bag would stand with her back to them and her front to a photographer, and then leave. This kind of woman who never went in was punctuated by women who did—women in long, floral dresses always paired with Birkenstocks, an iced coffee, a green juice. The square itself contained three distinct zones: a patch of green in which office workers took their lunch under its canopy of trees; a throughfare for buses and taxis; an advancing length of torn-up pavement around which men in neon jackets drilled. From the blemishless white office on the height of the third floor, the square functioned like its own complete ecosystem.
The Editor will always want a witty, snappy, glamorous head for every page, my predecessor was saying. Those are your key words and you have to operate in that kind of universe. So, for example, this page on the Serpentine Party, he approved Top of the Lake.
I felt my brow contract. But that’s a crime show, I said. She nodded. There was something flat about her face in spite of its dark features. Really witty, repurposing it for a glamorous social party, right? she said, and I wondered whether she was joking, or if the association between the murdered women on the show and pouting, stiff-boned women on the page really was lost on her. She looked at her phone. She was dressed more sensibly than anyone in the office.
We’ve got just enough time, she said, to grab a quick coffee, and I’ll finish telling you what everyone does in here. Then you can go to lunch.
I had left Oxford by bus in the last week of May. Hours on it blurred. London appeared along the A40 in leisurely orbit—first fields and asphalt, then shopping center, then that tower block, a Hilton hotel. It was non-time spent in transit. To sit and be carried somewhere with no effort, at a specified rate. To be safe in the knowledge of a destination. In the bus, I had felt cocooned: I fell asleep and woke up with my breath on the windowpane. I had checked Twitter and watched a politician’s gaffe as he pretended to hold his phone in a video someone else had made for him: online, viewers said it was endearing. Things happened, but I could suspend them if I liked. When the view got boring, I drew the curtains on it. When the snoring of my fellow passengers reached my ears, I had headphones ready to counter it.
Eventually the bus had stopped just past Shepherd’s Bush and I’d walked to Barons Court where a friend of a friend had agreed to sublet her sofa for £80 a month. Past the Georgian stucco and white brickwork of West Kensington, trundling a suitcase over uneven slabs of stone in one hand and a small bouquet of crocuses my neighbor had sent me off with in the other. They must have been the last of the spring. He had presented them with a sheepish flourish and said, I will miss you, even though you are ridiculous. Sometimes it was like you were acting out how you thought we’d all like you to be.
I said, What do you mean? and his expression grew more sheepish. He said, Shit, that was terrible, I didn’t mean to offend you—but I waved my hand impatiently, and he went on—You never went out. You never talked to anyone. You seemed to live on fairy meals, like boiled eggs and tangerines and honey. I could have read you in a novel. When I had to carry you out of that party I took you to last year, my friends asked where I had got to the next day. I told them about you and no one remembered your being there. They wanted me to bring you to another party, but you seemed happy enough in your room. I had to narrate you to them—sometimes they asked how you were.
I had cupped the crocuses in my palm and watched him muster himself. He said, I expect you’ll be glad to be gone—off to do literature in the real world and whatnot, and on my part, I felt all the righteousness drain out of me. I suppose, my neighbor had said at the door, we probably won’t speak all that much after this. People always say, let’s keep in touch, but it’s never the case, is it? Might be best to see how it goes. I agreed with him out loud, but in the days before I left I had already been envisioning what it would be like to visit after some period of absence: more beautiful and alive than I had ever been while actually living there, radiant with success.
Towards Barons Court, my suitcase had kept getting stuck on bits of raised pavement, stopping and starting the walk over. I hated it. I had been lied to by every woman who had ever written in a glossy book or magazine about packing a suitcase. There was no leotard and Basis soap; chicly minimized capsule wardrobe and wildcard party dress with a Celine fragrance to match. I could not pack to an itinerary; the contents of my suitcase had no coherent brand. I knew this did not make me a nonperson, and still I resented the assortment of stray mints, chargers, loosely filed papers. My suitcase was a water bottle, a p60 tax form, my clothes without a wardrobe and brutalized with creases—but, I thought, I should not be complaining, there was always someone who had it worse than me. Whenever I forgot, I looked at my phone or self-flagellated with the Guardian. There was a proliferation of opinions on Twitter about what it took to be a good, inclusive, progressive person, but I read such lists and threads on the cusp of going to Waitrose or preparing for sleep, whereupon they were quickly replaced with other lists: sliced bread to be bought, teeth to be brushed. When I remembered I had forgotten them, I felt like a terrible person anew. I wanted to discuss this with someone, but there was never any time. Quickly, I realized the absurd wealth of the places I had been in over the past year: rooms in which such discussions could be played with in theory, without urgency, at any time, and then set aside to be taken up at a later date. The internet was one such room: a constant, useless distress in my pocket. I had resolved to stop looking at my phone if I could help it; to turn off my notifications and live less theoretically.
The girl whose sofa I was to be sleeping on lived in what must have once been an art deco hotel: a long, dilapidated semicircle of a building with five stories, elaborate stonework mossed over, and construction railings going up against each balcony and its flat. Cosseting the building was a rusted fire escape out on which various tenants now stuck their dustbins. The driveway arched round a patch of green and some drooping palm trees. The whole thing was gated, intercommed, needed a key fob for access, but when I went to buzz at my arrival, the set of main gates swung open to let a car out, and I slipped past it.
The lifts on the ground floor still had grates; there were porters’ desks, but they were empty. The stairs leading to each floor were yellowed, linoleum-lined things, with the lights bouncing off them in pearlescent spots. I was on the first floor. When the door swung open, a girl younger than I had expected stood in its frame and waited impatiently. I held out four twenty-pound notes and said, I’m here about the sofa?
She looked confused; asked, How did you get in? I told her, how I had arrived at the moment a car was leaving, how I had gone through the gates before they closed.
Don’t do that again, she said. You can cut yourself keys and clone a fob later today. She let me into a short, narrow corridor quite agitated, saying, Don’t sneak in the gates again.
The corridor opened up to a living room. Immediately I could see there was no way to get in or out of the flat without passing through it, and by extension, the sofa. There was a narrow table which seated four in theory and more probably three in practice: its wood was the same color as the linoleum stairs. There was a dirtied gray carpet my new flatmate walked over shoeless regardless; a small cluster of cabinets with mail on top of them addressed to several different names, none of which, from the quick glance I was able to give, belonged to her. The sofa, she said, like the rest of the furniture in the flat, had been left by the landlord. It opened up into a bed, although she didn’t advise it. It had been there when the previous tenant had lived here, too. She herself was not like the flat. She wore a black, carefully untailored piece of linen and statement earrings; she guided me through a kitchen with grease-stained walls and jewelry tools on the counter; a bathroom with decomposing tiles. That was the price of semi-reasonable rent, she said. In this area, there were a handful of magnificent, crumbling buildings with landlords who would lease them to you for cheap and then invoice you for damage you didn’t notice when you moved in. But if you walked twenty minutes up the road, you would see maisonettes with interiors and owners beautiful enough to be featured in House & Garden, as though opposite each of them, on every road, there was not a council estate. That was worse, my new flatmate said, then caught herself and narrowed her eyes at me. Are you a Tory? I shook my head. Good, she intoned. As she had been saying, she would never want to live at such extremes. These days, everyone with a salary who wasn’t an oligarch left London for the suburbs in the end anyway—and even the oligarchs left their flats unoccupied. She suspected she would leave too, but for now, she worked in a bookshop and sold rings online, so this would do.
I stood clutching my suitcase while she spoke. You’re a bit sad, aren’t you? she said, an eyebrow raised. I offered her a weak smile and she deepened in her disgust. It’s not a personality trait, you know, she said. You want my advice, stop moping and go make something. Do something. She threw a set of keys at me with a deft hand.
My rings, she said, get carried around. They live beyond me, tangibly. It’s transcendent, you understand? They’re not just material things: they’re a way I become something meaningful in other people’s lives. It’s something beyond my everyday self. And it’s a nice wad of extra cash each month. Anyway, she nodded at the keys, you’ll need sheets. I haven’t got any to spare. You’ll need to cut yourself keys. Those ones are mine and I’ll need them back today. And you’ll need to do your own shopping. Will you find your way around?
I said yes, I had lived in London before.
Good. Off you go, she said, and disappeared into her bedroom.
On Kingsway, the linden trees were the only thing that calmed me. I knew them well. My flatmate had suggested a locksmith in Chelsea, but I thought it was possible she was right: that what she took to be sadness was, in fact, my anxiety at being back in the city with no discernible plan. Holborn was a familiar place where life had once had reliable form: I wanted sanctuary. I cut a copy of the keys. I cloned the fob. Then, at the very end of the road, I walked across towards Bloomsbury, found Tottenham Court Road, bought sheets, bought tinned cannellini beans, tangerines, almonds, coffee, and, in spite of myself, a secondhand book. I took it all to Russell Square and unsheathed it beneath the cool, intimate shade thrown onto the grass by the yew, the oak, the Scots elm. The idea had been to read for a while.
I checked Instagram. I checked on Ghislane, but she was no longer posting. She remained, still, in gridded squares, in common rooms, in libraries, in three-minute clips of a popular nineties song. I lay on the grass and listened to her namesake.
I texted my mother. She wrote, I suppose there’s no point asking you to take a train home, and my stomach did its little guilt squeeze, answered, I still need to look for a job.
Years ago, I had studied around Bloomsbury. In Oxford, it had held the idealized sheen of a former home, but now, with the knowledge that I would have to pay for any amenity around it that would make me comfortable—a toilet, a drink—to sit there was unbearable. I could not find it in me to think that amenities would have to wait.
Unfortunately for you, the former copy editor said, sketching out a rough floor plan when we had settled in the café, your main concern is everything and everyone. Don’t lose this—she slashed a rectangle into three desks and above it drew another; carried on, until there were several—and don’t show it to anyone. When she was done, the office we had just come from was laid out, crude in 2D and biro over a stained napkin. The hum of espresso machines and shouted orders dimmed her voice. I strained to hear her.
So, she breathed out, and began tapping her pen over the corresponding desks as she spoke. You’ll want to know that her father is in the House of Lords, she used to sleep with every musician you can think of in the nineties, and her sister does PR at Buckingham Palace. This guy here, his wife is the former editor of the magazine upstairs. What else . . . ? He went to uni with a bunch of royals. Ah, and she’s about to marry into acting royalty. The rest of them are normal, but either they’ve been there longer than you’ve been alive, or they’re working pretty much for free. She pushed the napkin at me and said, It’s horrible describing them all that way, but you can’t be caught off guard. They’re all charming, but you’ll need to watch yourself. I hope you don’t mind my saying so, but you look a bit clueless. I looked you up, nothing showed up about you in terms of connections or fame. I shook my head. She sighed again and asked, half-heartedly, where I was staying.
I’m on a casual contract, I explained, examining the napkin. The managing editor told me to check in with her at the end of each week to see if I’m still needed. I’m on a sofa for now.
I thought as much, she said. Don’t lose that. If you do well here, it’s a good chance they’ll be too lazy to replace you and you’ll become permanent staff. You’ll be the only copy editor on the desk as it is.
I nodded as though it had all made sense, which it hadn’t. The job description had specified a command of English, proficiency in InDesign; none of what I’d just been told. I wanted to ask more questions but could scarcely think of what might be useful to know anymore, and before I had time to think, she waved me off to lunch. So I walked west towards Hyde Park, then doubled back on myself, despondent. On the way back, a man winked at me from the ground and said, You have a good night, girls, keep smiling—but it was midafternoon, and there was only one of me, and I was not smiling. I blurted out, You too, and wondered whether he understood any more of the exchange than I did. When I returned to the office, I saw the former copy editor was already there, the same coffee cup she had been drinking out of in the café now on her desk barely touched. I slid into the desk next to hers. Outside, the construction workers had returned from their lunch and the irregular sound of drilling filtered up from below.
In academia, so much of my work had been tied up in my moral self. I weighed up the value of a particular narrative for a living and attached my name to what, in theory, I would have the world be like. This was nothing like that. To the sound of slabs being taken up from the ground below, I proofed and revised a Cotswolds heiress’s guide to laying a table: she made suggestions like putting flowers in jam jars and sitting on hay bales; her silverware was artfully tarnished. There was no need for the old formalities, she said. She encouraged her guests to turn whichever way they liked and chat away across the table—or even to move away entirely from their assigned seats. I gave it a head: The lady is for turning. There was an at-home interview with a celebrity facialist whose photo shoot was overlaid with yellow boxes: in capital letters the art department had written, MAKE BRIGHT, PUNCHY, OPEN on her purple velvet sofa and her taut, gleaming skin. The interview ran over. Keep the stuff about her being an immigrant, the features editor mused on consultation, and cut the stuff about her house. I was given a page full of chintz cushions and deliberately scuffed tables: country chic was back, and every house was full of it. Rid yourself of stainless steel and loud colors, the copy advised—such things were the height of pretension. I labored over filling in the brand names and prices: a Jo Malone wood sage candle, a Le Creuset dish. There was a couture report with gowns inspired by ancient Rome; I changed a BC to AD in red pen, and then on-screen. A few times the art director stopped me with her winding neck, her breathy vowels cutting short when she said, Don’t move anything on the page. Don’t change the layout, it’s very specifically done. If you can’t make room for it, it doesn’t belong there.
I envy you your job, I said to my flatmate after my first week. Mine is all a sham. No one in my office would be able to report on the life of the one percent if they weren’t either part of it or hustling on the side. The intern sells pills. The features editor gets sent clothes by upcoming brands and they pay her for pictures of her wearing it online. I looked at her glumly. You’re among books. You’ve got the best job in the world.
You really need to wake up, my flatmate said after a pause. I don’t moon around and think and read all day. They’re goods with a price printed on them. I haven’t read most of them, mainly because I don’t have time to. They get delivered in blue plastic crates by guys on minimum wage and I break my back lifting them, getting them onto a trolley, and then arranging them on a shelf so that some fucker can take them down and leave them lying around somewhere under his discarded coffee cup for me to pick up. The owner of my company tells my colleagues and me it’s a noble job and we get paid in honor for doing it, but honor doesn’t pay my bus fare. If I could get more stable commissions for the jewelry I make, I’d leave bookselling in a heartbeat. The staff turnover in my shop has a monthly rate and people leave crying; meanwhile, the owner sits in a town house in Marylebone and cuts himself a million-pound paycheck every year. You do not want my job. She peered at me over the remains of her dinner. Are you sure you’re not a Tory?
I’m not, I said. I’m just adjusting to something new.
Oh. She grimaced. No offense. I suppose that’s a bit weird to assume of a BAME person anyway. I just meant from a class perspective. But maybe Oxford will do that to you, right? I don’t think you should miss it. She paused. Don’t you think it’s weird that you spent a year giving yourself to the place that started the careers of people that openly disdain you, and now you’ve gone to work for a publication that exalts them?
I had only been gone a year, but the city felt different. A month passed and still I could not root myself in it. I jumped at every face, every engine, hurling itself forward. The Tube roared out of its tunnel. I became one of those people who feared being pushed under it. In Oxford I had missed the anonymizing height of the buildings in London. Now they bore down on me, and everywhere, a relentless modernity. The lights were never off.
In the first weeks of moving back, before I had started my job, things were defined by what they were not. The screech of foxes in the city at night was not the thrum of crickets in Bradmore Road’s overgrown grass and, however hard I tried, I could not reconcile the prevalence of shop windows to the stained honeycomb of the walls I was used to in my head. Only the private gardens were recognizable in spirit. Then gradually, the appearance of the same chains—the hipsters with backpacks and the rushed businessmen in Pret; the Zara on the high street where the girls were photo-shoot ready. Familiar patterns evolved, so at first, I had tried to get some transposition involved. I made up the sofa with cotton sheets; I woke up to Greenwich pips. But, too soon, it became a drag to fold and snag the thin white layers; to snap and unfurl them, then spread, like cold butter over cheap cardboard toast, the mass onto the sofa’s fraying edge, then spread and hold myself, briefly, with arms and legs splayed, before cramping up to have my limbs fit my new bed. Only to gather it again in the morning: a sofa was a semi-public thing—my flatmate would want to sit on it, too. I gave up making it up: I threw the cushions from its back to its side: a quick displacement that took two seconds to fix the morning after. I stuffed the sheets into one of the cabinets: it was summer, I did not need covering anyway, I repeated nightly to myself, I did not need covering anyway. And when my back gave up its complaints, had acclimatized, I found a new way to get on. In the first weeks of June, I spent each morning embarrassed. My flatmate was an early riser with no compunction: she saw my sleep-swollen face, the slipped T-shirt, uncovered nipple, the furred tongue and unbrushed hair—she looked at all of this having already brushed her teeth. Cheer up, she said. People used to move all the time. You’re in your natural hunter-gatherer state, cheer up, it’s not like you’re homeless.
I learned to get up before her by leaving the curtains open to the living-room windows. I left before she woke; the kitchen was covered in tools and the dust of semiprecious metal, I got my coffee elsewhere.
I tried spending those early mornings taking the Piccadilly line to Leicester Square and switching over for the Northern line to Goodge Street: I had nowhere to go but Bloomsbury, no way to spend my time but minding a cardboard cup slopping cheap filter over its plastic disc on top. I tried street haunting, but could not walk for the blue-plaqued success of the dead. At dentist offices, embassies, car rental agencies, university buildings, and bookstores—statesmen, architects, pioneers of women’s suffrage, prime ministers, authors, artists had all lived here, and because of this, the price of rent in the area meant I never would. Instead of feeling free to ramble, I felt dread. The Tube was too expensive. I gave up street haunting.
Occasionally I got texts from friends who had heard I was back in the city and asked me out for drinks. But I had no cash to spare; nowhere to host them, and so demurred, promising to get back in touch at a later date. I wanted to be able to invite them to a proper flat; to have four bottles of wine resting idly in their rack, and to pull them out in succession between a starter course, a main, dessert. I tried typing out, I’m broke, and found it was too much to have on-screen privately, even after I’d found the requisite emojis to turn it into more of a joke. I left those drafts unsent. Gradually, the texts stopped coming.
I missed being an academic, and so I read. My great comfort was a particular kind of novel which seemed to be gaining traction in the publishing industry and on bestseller lists. I could not afford them as new hardbacks, but I asked my flatmate to bring proofs back from work whenever she found them. In this kind of novel, the protagonist was always a woman and always sad. At some point, she always mentioned losing her appetite and drinking coffee sweetened with cream and too much sugar instead of having breakfast or lunch; then other characters, or she herself, would remark flippantly on how thin she was. This protagonist had oblique, troubled relationships with men and spent a lot of the book’s plot doing only one thing, but doing it well: sleeping, driving, smoking, going on holiday or having conversations at length—all the while making general observations under very specific circumstances as a veiled way of saying something about the nature of womanhood. The protagonist was inevitably compared to the author. This last thing was what made these books popular: it was revolutionary for a woman to spend 250 pages looking at herself in some way. These books were always written in sparse, spiky prose that ebbed my spare hours away. It was their specificity I admired—their descriptions of buttons on coats, macadamia nuts next to beds. Whatever problems these women had were bound up in their material existence: the more beautiful their circumstances were, the more pleasure I took in absorbing their turmoil. A central character in one of the books equated the dishevelment of her inner life with the renovation of her house for 260 pages. Between applying for jobs, I lay on my flatmate’s moldering sofa for the month of June and read ceaselessly.
Also popular during this time were long-form essays published in book form by women who said the way to vote when the time came would be Lib Dem, advocated centrism, and wore Shrimps coats: ten-thousand-word chapters on breaking up with your iPhone, the tyranny of yoga, the tyranny of Amazon, the conversation they had had with their nonbinary-nonwhite friend which had changed their perspective on—not to sound dramatic—everything, why loneliness was a valid form of existence, why they had checked their privilege, why they could be a feminist and still enjoy the unique pleasure of a Net-A-Porter delivery, and a list of all the times their life had gone wrong—those times had made them the strong woman who was writing the book you were holding today. If you liked the book, you could also buy merchandise on their website; buy tickets to live recordings of their podcast at Liberty or Selfridges. My flatmate brought these books back to roll her eyes at: she read paragraphs out loud over dinner and snorted between commas. When she did, I began to feel self-conscious about my perverse enjoyment of them, but they, along with the novels I was reading, began cropping up on my Instagram feed, their attractive covers decorated in sans-serif font posed decoratively at an angle on a wooden table next to coffee and flowers, or arranged in cotton sheets on someone’s bed. Occasionally, I found a crossover between the two genres: nonfiction in which the author found kinship with a writer, usually dead, usually with a legacy of radical politics. Writers who had worked as street hustlers, who had had abusive parents, who had been vagrants, who had died of AIDS, who had had MI5dossiers made in homage to their activism, who had been barred from entire countries, whose legacies now functioned in the machinations of north London suburbia: the particularly feminine plight of taking one’s children to school; the trauma of swilling Moët at the reception of your own wedding; the drudgery of one’s husband managed through gardening as a form of therapy and then recycled into a paying crowd at a Bloomsbury bookshop. I read these books attuned to each page in the same way some people watched police procedurals or medical dramas. My flatmate sent me interviews with each author once I’d finished: tasteful videos or photo shoots in which such women discussed the theoretical impossibility of the home from behind the marble island in her kitchen, or described the eighties prints above her fireplace as “the spirit of the room.” More than I cared to admit, I wanted to know what the contents of each writer’s fridge was; how she arranged the papers on her desk. It was of key interest to me to notice how, by her front door, she and her family stacked their shoes, and to note what brand of perfume was in her bathroom. This was not my flatmate’s concern on the matter. Ffs, read the accompanying commentary to each link. Could these women be at least a little subtler while they monetize the evolving identity politics of the left and turn them into bored Lib Dem housewife interior design strategies?
When in July I finally secured my job, I took up my spare hours differently: I went out on foot at 7 a.m. and watched carefully what went on around me. London, the workshop. London, the machine. I walked a straight line of an hour and a half alongside the A315: first Persian cafés, bodegas with wasps pushing into pomegranates and Medjool dates stacked outside, then charity shops and alleyways breaking off into mews flats, until it all became the Kensington High Street—overripe with French patisseries, pizzerias, a Cos, a Uniqlo, Whole Foods. At that time of day there were delivery trucks and bin men going by in the pale light: au pairs waiting outside Waitrose for the glass doors to slide open on cue. I saw it all in passing for a minute at most a day. After Knightsbridge, the series of hotels: past the tinted windows of One Hyde Park, in quick succession, the doormen of the Mandarin Oriental, the Berkeley, the Ritz all tipped their hats at me with white-gloved hands. I carried their salutes up through Piccadilly. The only bend came through the turn into the Burlington Arcade: antique jewelry glittered in its cage and Savile Row announced itself scented with aftershave at the end. Below the suited mannequins, under each shop the sliver of a window in the gutter of the street gave way to the scurrying of tailors. Once I hit the office building, I tapped my key card against the magnetized strip by the door, and I was let in. At the end of the day, I made sure my key card was tucked into the pocket inside my bag and walked the same route back to Barons Court.
It’s a £65 day rate, the managing editor said in my first week. Sorry, I should have mentioned.
I heard myself saying, No, of course, thank you for telling me; I’m just here to do a good job—and almost mean it. I could not do anything to impede my chances of a permanent contract. But later, scrolling through Rightmove, dull panic turned practical. £700 on a room, zone 2 or 3, only to find I would still not be able to afford my life. Then hours lost to dream criteria. If I clung on long enough to secure a proper salary at the magazine, then maybe: a flat to myself, where I could feel unembarrassed about how I looked in the morning, would not have to wait to use the bathroom, or regularly find the washing machine loaded with dirty laundry. But the idea could not form credibly in my mind. Already, the more realistic prospect of a long-term flat share had turned into wishful thinking. To my flatmate, on the same salary as me, How do you afford it? And she, barely audible and throwaway, My parents. If you can, you’ll end up doing it too. There’s no other way to stay.
Although I took pains to come in early and work late, the Editor of the magazine was absent for another two weeks. When the former copy editor left, she put a microfiber cloth and room spray on my desk. That’s more for him than it is for you, the picture editor said in response to my confusion. He likes a tidy office. You’ll know when he’s due because you’ll get a bollocking about the state of your workspace.
It was true. When an email emerged in mid-July asking us pointedly to keep all personal possessions off our desks, orchids appeared on each window’s ledge, pale and hovering. The intern was tasked with keeping them alive. They checked each fragile petal with an anxious face, whispering, How do you know if they need something? This was the general state of things. A couple of days prior, the art director had spilt a flat white on the carpet beside her desk; now production was usurped with the process of negotiating with a cleaner over the phone. I’ve been calling for two days now, she said into it, more agitated by the hour, I’ve got a stain that’s really quite urgent.
On 19 July, three days after the orchids appeared, I watched him blow into the office—sunglasses on his head, swathed in the customary ill-fitting clothes of the expensively dressed. The hem of his jeans and sleeves were too short and everything else, somehow, conspicuously loose. He went into the soundproofed glass box of his office for half an hour, then blew back out. His assistant, a small woman who sent the smell of plain miso wafting downwind towards my desk punctually at one o’clock every day, hovered behind him. At his presence, the room became supine. He kissed the associate editor in the European style and with the voice of a true Sloane purred, You looked so good at the Cartier last night. So good. I was only there for fifteen minutes, if you stay any longer at a party, then it’s probably dead, but I saw you there looking so good.
She, far older than him, gave him a luxuriant chuckle and the affection of a great-aunt. Where have you been? she asked. It’s been just hell for me.
He made sure to widen his eyes. Oh?
Look. She gestured extravagantly towards the large, open window beside her desk. Look. Thames Water dug up the road in front of my house and now these bastards, I don’t know who they’re with, have dug up the road here, and all I hear from the moment I wake up to the moment I go to sleep is the sound of a fucking drill. Look, I recorded it on my phone, what they’re doing by my front garden—
She was a foot shorter than him. When she leaned in to show him the video on her phone, her shoulder brushed the crook of his elbow: the phone could not have reached his line of sight. She, squinting at the screen, tapped the play and pause button in quick succession with her index finger so that the recording kept stopping when she meant it to start. That’s arduous, the Editor quipped drily.
It is, it’s real hell, she returned. So do you know what I’ve done? I’ve checked into the Berkeley and sent Thames Water my bill.
That’s good, he said, his attention already lost. There’s a piece in there, we’ve got so much interiors stuff in this issue anyway. It would be good to do a one-eighty on that, you know? Write me something about your life without a home. We’ll call it something like “Nowhere Land.” Actually no, we won’t call it that, but think about it, would you? And there is something else. I want to do a bright young things feature—you know, like new debs. Do you know if any of your nineties boytoys had kids? If you can think of a list, we’ll set up a time to talk. He was already on to the travel editor: and where had she got that fabulous tan from? His assistant turned to the associate editor and began running a manicured nail down a Smythson diary. I went blissfully ignored.
You mustn’t take it personally. You’re young, you know, the art director said once he had retreated back behind the transparent walls at the end of the room. You’re the nobody now. Christ, I remember when I was the nobody. She leaned back in her swivel chair. I was at the Slade, and to be honest with you, that degree did fuck all for me, but I remember it gave me free time to go and rage against Thatcher and the like. And then I tried to start selling some prints, but as I say, I was a nobody, so they didn’t sell. I came here after that. It’s actually kind of a laugh. I mean, it wasn’t then—you felt it all to be very serious, and I was there, screaming about feminism and a woman’s right to her own body. But I mean—I went out there in the street and now I get trolled by young women online who post pictures of my work and write about how it’s of no benefit to them. That’s a very narrow-minded view, she said, suddenly brisk. Just because I work on a society magazine. I don’t even believe in the thing. Not that I’m speaking directly about you, but where your generation is concerned, all I see is a lot of shouting on Twitter and not much else. Anyway, what I was getting at was, you can just use this time to rage, figure out what you want your world to look like—
The phone on her desk rang. She picked it up and after a few seconds sighed into it; said, Oh don’t come now. He’s in the office now, the whole point was to get it cleared up so he wouldn’t notice. I’ll phone you when he leaves again. Then she sagged in her chair and looked over at me. Are you going to the pub?
The pub? I checked the time in the corner of my screen. There were, ostensibly, two hours left in the working day. On my desk, the mess of proof articles to fact-check, copy-edit, then send for approval, had been arranged into two neatly stacked piles. What they had gained in height, they had gained in menace: they were like little towers, could not be conquered, would not let me leave my seat.
Didn’t you get what’s-their-face’s email?
At the desk in front of me, I watched the intern’s body turn incrementally, suddenly stiff.
No. I took the next proof to be edited from the pile and tried to keep my tone light. I don’t think I was cc’d in.
Oh. Well. The art director shrugged. Go anyway. Round the corner on the left, as you head to Savile Row. Big pub. You won’t miss it. I won’t be there, mind. But you younger lot, you always need a few drinks to cope.
Even to myself, I seemed thin-lipped. There was a jibe on my tongue about being too overworked and underpaid to afford the many liters of alcohol I needed to deal with being too overworked and underpaid, but I tapped one of the piles with my pencil and said, We’ll see. My inbox lit up a few minutes later with a single line, it said, Apologies! Forgot to cc you in. The pub is on Maddox Street. Come as you are after work. But it was not like the chain of emails visible above, back-and-forth banter in lowercase and textspeak among the office at large. My brain could not forgive the formality of the message sent only to me, and the relaxed warmth apparent between everyone else. I didn’t reply; worked late, and went home. I was not asked to the pub again.
On 23 July, the entirety of the pavement in front of the thoroughfare and outside of the office was ripped out, save for a thin footpath leading up to the revolving doors. The rest was cordoned off. The surface area left was not wide enough to handle the two-way traffic funneling in and out of the building, let alone the hordes of young women who still gathered insistently in front of it, simply cropping their photos to new angles. The collective temper of the office came sharply down.
Enough with the fucking drill, the associate editor snapped at the brief burr of machinery that operated within her range of sound, and the intern, red-faced: Sorry, it’s the coffee machine. I was making an espresso. Does anyone else want one? From my desk, I could see the editors in the office at large ready to reply, but when they opened their mouths, a succession of grainy recordings issued into the air.
I was brought up, in my father’s house, to believe in democracy. Trust the people. The sound was broadcasting from the iMac in the rightmost corner of the room. It continued—We are masters of our fate. The task which has been set us is not above our strength; its pangs and toils are not beyond our endurance. As long as we have faith in our cause and an unconquerable willpower, salvation will not be denied us. In front of the screen was the senior editor, a wry, jovial man with wisps of gray hair, who leaned back and watched it with the air of taking in a good football match. The office began to gather around him and the voices of Conservative ministers past which heralded the introduction of a party conference to announce its new leader, and by extension, the country’s new prime minister. They began to play a game, could they identify each voice? First Churchill, and now —? The managing editor reached towards the keyboard and increased the volume. It’s a proud thing, to be given the office of Prime Minister of Britain. As for courage, character—I know the British people have these in full measure. Britain has been great, is great, and will stay great, providing we close our ranks and get on with the job.
It was impossible to get a good view. Those who had already descended on the screen obscured it completely. I stood on tiptoe, felt absurd, and listened as best I could. I have only one thing to say, the speakers issued next, you turn if you want to. And laughter. The lady’s not for turning. I will not change just to court popularity. I am happy that my successor will carry on the excellent policies that in fact have finished with the decline of socialism and have brought great prosperity to this country, which have raised Britain’s standing in the world and in fact have brought about a truly capital-owning democracy.
What is “Maggie Thatcher”? said the intern. The senior winked at them; stretched his arms; placed his hands behind his head. As he did so, a space cleared where the editors had parted to make way for his gesture. I caught a small rectangle of a view. There was a seated audience in front of a banner of blue, and intermittently the screen cut to two empty chairs. The senior editor yawned, and the audio clips, overlaid with a gently swelling piano track, went on.
I believe that when our children and grandchildren look back on this turbulent century, they’ll look on those years from 1979 onwards and say, these years changed the face of our nation; they changed the fate of our nation, and they changed them both for the better. The yawn was contagious. It spread while the piano morphed into a chorus of violins: the sort of thing played at the denouement of war movies. The intern, having finished their espresso, fiddled with their vape, and the features editor, who had only just come into the room with her lunch, ate standing—a Niçoise salad, and the crunch of lettuce leaves, the tang of tuna behind me.
Is this it? she asked, picking tomato out of her teeth. Have they announced it yet?
No, the senior editor said, swiveling round to face her and grinning broadly. They’re just having a bit of foreplay over a gramophone.
I peered again at the screen, waiting for the appearance of the politician whose presence had sparked protests outside the Oxford Union building. It’s not just foreplay, I said. They’re writing him into the books. I wanted to speak more; express my anxieties about an election I had no say in, and which I had been told repeatedly by various news outlets had only one outcome. In spite of the gradual familiarization the news stream on my phone had accorded me with his face, I felt a renewal of the shock that had accompanied the Brexit referendum in 2016. The surprise then had been that through misinformation and well-timed jokes, he had altered the social and economic fabric of the country for generations to come. The surprise now was that within the hour, the failure of what he had set in motion meant he would be the person by whom the country would be run. I opened my mouth again, but the features editor jabbed her fork at the screen and asked, Who’s this now? Everyone looked at her instead; began discussing, genially, the cast of characters onstage. It was impossible to take in. On the senior editor’s screen: pseudo-democracy and spectacle for a man who had called the people he was set to govern piccaninnies and letter boxes. Around the senior editor’s screen, lunchtime banter, low laughter, gossip, calm. The world turning as it ever did, as though nothing very much was happening.
This is terrifying, I murmured. I don’t see how, the senior editor said mildly, and then the screen dispensed, Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome—
I pulled my attention back to it. There, considerably tidier than old photos used by news outlets of him riding around the city on his bike, hanging on a zip wire, was the politician with his platinum hair and oafish smile. The camera cut to the two vacant chairs again, and held there as he and his competitor took their seats. I watched the senior editor tap the rightmost side of his keyboard to drive the volume still further up.
This is it, the associate editor said, rubbing her hands together and straining, next to me, to see. The room fell quiet to give way to the sound of declare that the total number of eligible electors was 159,320. The turnout in the election was 87.4 percent. The total number of ballot papers rejected was 509. And the total number of votes given to each candidate was as—
From the square outside, the sound of drills cast itself once more abruptly into the room. The senior editor tapped insistently at the corner of his keyboard again, but the volume, already as high as it would go, remained drowned out by groan of steel against stone, changing only in pitch as the machines burrowed in at new angles to the ground below. It screeched: the screen cut to the two men, somber, turned in the same direction, dumb and blinking as they sat. The drill deepened—the one with the platinum hair said something, rose, shook his opponent’s hand. The drill roared, and everyone on-screen began to stand, beating their hands together, and in front of the new prime minister, several men emerged with Dictaphones, with iPhones, with cameras; he said something else, gave the thumbs-up, began to move towards the stage. The senior editor, by now quite irate, motioned me to close the windows across the room. One by one, as they shut, a bouncing, conversational voice filtered in, strengthening as each latch went. I began at the back of the office. Briefly, before the burst of another drill, I heard, question the wisdom of your decision. And there may even be some people here who still quite wonder what they have done. I closed the first window and found I had to circumvent the islands of each desk and then stretch above them to bring the panes down. I paused to listen again, and heard, the instincts to own your own house, your own home, to earn and spend your own money, to look after your own family. I knocked my knee on the corner of one of the desks and cut my hand with a jagged latch. I wanted, less and less, to carry on, but the senior editor nodded at me and said, It’s working. I closed another, and then wrapped my palm in a tissue. I went on. Do you feel daunted? the voice asked. Another window closed. I felt the tissue start to unravel from my palm and stopped to rebandage my hand once more. I caught, we are going to defeat Jeremy Corbyn, and then, nauseated, refocused my attention to get to the next window. By the middle of the room, I could more or less hear the sound issuing from the speakers of the senior editor’s desk in its entirety. Some wag has already pointed out that deliver, unite, and defeat was not the perfect acronym for an election campaign, since unfortunately it spells dud—but they forgot the final “e,” my friends, for “energize.” And I say to all my doubters, dude, we are going to energize the country. I made it back to the front of the room. The senior editor was no longer looking at the screen.
Bit weird, him saying “dude,” isn’t it? the intern mused. A bit shambolic compared to all the other speeches they played in the run-up. They began to shrug their jacket on, declaring, Well, if that’s done, I’m heading out. The Wolseley, if anyone wants to come. Think about it. You’ll all get wrinkles if you stay here frowning like that and we know how our fearless leader feels about those. Ciao ciao.
Momentarily, I was distracted. More than anyone else in the office, I had assumed the intern was like me: skint, and trying very hard to be kept on board. How can they afford the Wolseley? I asked. I can’t afford that. What pay are they on?
No one answered. The office, having barely altered in aspect or pace, processed the country’s new reality in its own leisurely way. Text from you know who, the features editor said. Anyone with connections to the new PM from school, or friends, or family, please email him, he wants to get a clear picture of the social web we’re working with now. The digital editor turned to her deputy. Being PM won’t make him more photogenic, she mused, I don’t think we’ll get any engagement with images of him. See if you can pull together a style file on his girlfriend, she’s not bad looking, and maybe see if you can find the write-up we did of his old school; update the metadata on it for any potential clicks we can get. The deputy was already buried in her phone. Yep. There’ll be photos of him bowing at Her Maj’s hand over the next few days as well—I’ll stay on the lookout for those. See if we can do a short one on any shade she throws with her clothing, you know: EU brooch or anti-Tory earrings or something. The senior editor chuckled. I wonder, he said, whether that hasn’t been done too many times before. We should try something else. Something audacious.
I made a conscious effort to slacken my jaw and left. At my desk, where I had left them, were the same pages I had been working on since the morning; the mess of biro pens, mechanical pencils, Post-it notes, keyboard, gum, printouts, notebooks, flat plans. None of it had changed. The art director sat stone-faced in front of her iMac, scrolling through Twitter. I rolled my chair over to her.
You didn’t want to watch?
No. Why would you? None of us are the kind of people to be hit hardest by it.
It matters, I said, shocked. She grimaced, though her voice stayed even.
Sure, but how? The part of Brexit you’ll feel will only benefit you. The market might crash, but you won’t notice it—you’ve been living in austerity without knowing it for years. You’re not an immigrant, you have no trouble finding a place to live. When the housing crisis hits, all you’ll see is your rent go down. You’re middle class—your freedom of movement doesn’t end, it just becomes inconvenienced. The only thing you might really find is nutjobs having an easier time making life hard for you because you’re not white, but then again, you’ve been at the same school they have, you work at the magazine they read. You even dress like you vote their way when you come in to work here.
I became indignant. You’re not really saying, I shot back, I should just sit down and let “nutjobs” find it easier to give me a hard time? Anyway, I’m not just thinking about myself. I traversed my brain for what I’d read, and triumphantly pulled out, What about the reformation of basic rights that will be in the hands of a government I don’t trust after we leave the EU? What about rights of workers already being exploited in a zero-hour contract job, or the bodily rights of women already suffering through period poverty? The art editor cocked her head at that.
Don’t shout. And stop regurgitating headlines in abstract, that’s precisely what I mean. You need to start being a bit more honest with yourself when you read your daily news intake. A lot of us don’t care about the decline of humanitarianism and the worsening state of the world when we watch election live streams or Prime Minister’s Questions. We watch it to feel good about ourselves when we tweet our dismay, or at least you lot do. All these people on here—she threw her chin towards her screen—that’s what they’re doing now.
That’s terrible, I said flatly.
You’re not listening to me, the art director said, finally losing her patience. The soft, quavering quality of her voice went short. I’m saying, stop staring at the large screen in order to pick out what you can caterwaul at on the small one in your pocket. The reason to care is not to know what happens in the abstract realm of somebody else’s tweets, or to talk and talk and talk about how it affects people you’ve never met, and actually don’t know anything about. The reason to care is to know the why of what’s happening to the cost of your bread, or the electricity bill in your house. Because when you know that, you’ll know how to make the system work for you. That’s what matters to you.
I care about other people. And I don’t think I’d presume to know what matters to you, I told her. Brexit costs me opportunities in my life.
All right, she said. Fair enough. So, when you voted for your MEP in the European Parliament elections a couple of months back, tell me, who did you vote for, and why?
I bit my lip and knew the reply. I had not voted; I had been picking through my belongings at Bradmore Road, deciding what would go into a suitcase and what would not. It would not turn out favorably for me. The art director, seeming to sense this too, relented, sighed. I know you’ve got good intentions at heart, she said. But you want my opinion? Either read the papers with a bit more self-interest in mind, or find some charities you can donate a few pennies to, and try not to tweet about it when you’ve done that. Do both, if you can.
I shook my head, downcast. Then on impulse: I’ve been staying on a friend’s sofa lately. It’s just been hard to keep up.
She softened. That’s the way it is, she said. I did a few sofa hops in my time. Look, you’re young. Just keep a cool head and keep at it with your work, we can all see you’re trying your best here.
Okay, I said, drawing myself up and starting to organize my desk. What should I do now?
Whatever you were doing before, she said. But all afternoon, I felt guilty, I fidgeted, tried to find something else I could do, except turn the notifications back on, on my phone.