That Friday, the final Friday of the month, I did not get paid. It’s pretty common, the managing editor said, for there to be a lag in payroll if the employee joins after the cut-off date.
But, I said desperately, I thought I had joined before then. She gazed at me. She had an uncommonly pretty face, framed by thick, blond hair she twirled around both hands. From behind it, the rings on her fingers waxed and waned: a gold signet engraved with her initials flashed, was obscured, then resurfaced alongside a large oval stone nestled above a gold band. You will get paid in arrears, she said at last. You don’t need to worry about that.
I tried not to cry. Yes, but—I took a breath—my bank account is in double digits now.
The managing editor paused. Well, it would be a shame if you had to leave, she said, and I, with requisite terror at the message received, began calculating, as quickly as I could, the cost of a bag of rice and the portion count a tin of beans and a tin of tomatoes would stretch, the size of my flatmate’s freezer, and how much bread I could reasonably store. If I could beg her to pay my contribution to council tax and bills for the next month late, if I could borrow more from my parents, then perhaps . . . I took a deep breath. Just below my temples, I could hear a loud, insistent thrum. I counted the objects on the desk in front of me in an attempt to calm down: the Smythson diary, the wireless mouse, Chanel Huile de Jasmin, the almond butter, the two-ring binder with proofs I had assembled the previous day. I took another breath and let it out.
No, of course, I understand, I said. I really value my position here. I took a breath, and then tentatively, If there’s a possibility of a small advance to help me manage until pay for next month is put through, I’d really appreciate it. I’d be very grateful. The managing editor smiled. I’ll talk to HR, she said, and see what they say.
I went back to my desk; fiddled with my phone. I waited.
But I had turned the notifications back on, on my phone. The push alerts came, blooming kiss upon kiss, in oblong waves onto my home screen. The way apps moved had a lightness, an aerodynamics to them: they hovered, hung, bobbed in and out of view. I experienced a fog. I experienced slips in time. I looked down at my phone: on-screen it was always now; I looked back up, now was an hour later. I looked, more and more, idly fed whatever nerve filled at my swiping, at the anticipation of viewing whatever was delivered. I revived, then dulled at my thumb and its pull-down, release, and refresh of mailbox, timeline, feed, waiting to see who was there, what was there to claim my attention. Algorithms were alive and well: the first notification I got was a post on Twitter, suggested because it had been liked by several users I followed. It contained a screenshot of a Facebook page called “Memory Lane” and above it, the caption, “Can someone please explain?!” The screenshot was a box of text; it had an Instagram filter no one used any more from years back when the platform had first started. Insistently artificial, it dirtied and framed whatever it overlaid to make it look as though the digitally generated contents were, in fact, analogue and aged. Briefly, I marveled at the coalescence of all these social media forms, then read: If you watched Baywatch followed by Gladiators then Blind Date on a Saturday evening, had 4 TV channels, started school with singing in the main hall, played in the woods, always rode your bike, a game was Kiss Chase or Bulldog with not a computer in sight, had to be in before dark, got grounded if you were late, not even the home phone was mobile . . . vandalism was scratching the school desk with a compass, you recorded the top 40 off radio on tape, got 10 sweets in a 10p mix, and you turned out ok, then repost:, THIS IS WHEN BRITAIN WAS GREAT BRITAIN!!!! I saved the tweet on its own app, then opened up Facebook and found the Memory Lane page. On Twitter, the post had engendered its own meme format. Users had begun to create their own captions—@yootywrites: “If you circle jerked a room of people singing God Save the Queen before it got dark without a computer in sight . . . a game was running after a bus for 350 million quid, got a full English in your local caff for £15, and you turned out okay then repost: THIS IS WHEN BRITAIN WAS GREAT BRITAIN!!!!” But on Facebook, a coterie of older users gave responses antiquated in their syntax, which was unstyled and sincere. In comments by the post, avatars displayed next to first and last names hung above sentences that read “Hear hear,” or “Jemma Lane—LOL remember all this? Where have the years gone?”
At lunch, I walked to the gardens by St. James’s Church, sat amid the hollyhocks and bramble planted there, and scrolled through the Memory Lane Facebook page for half an hour more. Some of the posts were photos or text, but more often they were illustrations—beautiful images that could have come from a children’s book. In one of them, two watercolor figures of men in bottle-green uniforms deposited the clean, virtually empty contents of large aluminum cans into the open back of a truck: the illustration was titled “WHO REMEMBERS proper bin men.” I tried my best to recognize that the cultural identification I felt with these posts stemmed only from the fact that the touch points, gestures, images they referenced were things I had been handed through a screen: reruns of nineties shows and period dramas on Netflix; Instagram accounts dedicated to sixties fashion in London. When I looked up, the hollyhocks, the bramble, carefully preened, induced nostalgia for Oxford and its carefully tended-to green; for the University Parks by Bradmore Road. I swallowed hard, the impulse to miss what now felt like home, and in reality, never had been. Another notification did the work of distracting me instead: a couple of days previously, there had been a Cabinet cull. Now, a listicle did the work of synthesizing who was in and who was out. I read the names of the new home secretary, chancellor, foreign secretary. I read a list of names I did not recognize, or barely recognized: these names had resigned, been sacked, quit. The gardens churned. The smell of street food, the sound of ice cream doled out; the office workers in rotas on each bench; the mothers wiping their children’s chins, the pigeons plucking discarded crusts. An email came through: HR could give me two weeks’ worth of advance. I looked up from my phone at the summer recess.