London, framed by rising white columns. The last of October; the gray. The traffic on Millbank, and the Thames, seeping. It had turned autumn. Beyond the portico under which I stood, there was rain. I could envisage it farther out beyond where I was, pouring plashless over Big Ben, over statues, over Westminster—slick and patterning the city’s corsets, the pipe iron casings around clock and Parliament, holding them in and lacing them up. And here, from the steps of Tate Britain, from its square of pillars for anyone to observe: the 87 bus on its rounds. The rushing red body; the black leather whirling round the pavement. Some streaks of rain-dashed color shone on the road below it: rainbows hovering on black tar, itself brushed and covered by the leaves which had departed their boughs—wizened past season, adding orange to the mix. Those bursts of color in covert gleams, here and there between the city’s uniformity, its color of chalky stone, of colleges, of embassies; towards the Thames, the color of glass, silver high-rises over silver water. I shook my umbrella out to it all, heaved my suitcase onto the museum’s virgin floor. I made the first wet tracks. 10 a.m.: opening hour. A woman wearing a lanyard offered me a cloakroom. I could not say yes. I gripped the long metal hook trundling my case, but she, firm—You really can’t take it in there.
I felt argumentative. Well, why not? Because it obstructed the floor space in the galleries for other visitors. I looked around: it was 10 a.m. on a Thursday, there were no other visitors. Yes, but there would be. Ah, I said, well, what if I left before it got crowded? It was like Wimbledon, but out of season and for petty admin. Her backhand was impeccable. If I did not leave my items in the cloakroom, I would have to leave. We smiled at each other. I submitted to her. I expected her eyes to follow me: heading left, past the paintings from the 1930s and towards the Clore Gallery, but beyond the matter of my luggage she did not care about me. I passed through unwatched.
The clatter-click of my shoes went acoustic on the Clore Gallery floor; started low, wood paneling emitting the odd squeak, then opened out, embraced the curved white ceiling and bounced off burgundy walls. I stood at the foot of its main corridor. The casings to each room had no doors, were twice the size and fit of regular doors, and devoid of any sense of entry or exit. The point was just to create a break in the walls, which themselves existed only for the paintings: to group them by subject and give them their place; to hold them aloft for each museum-goer’s staring face. People began to drift through. I could spy on them at an angle through the gaps in the walls. They were pensioners and groups of schoolchildren in neon jackets. They were artists setting up easels in front of their chosen paintings.
I knew I did not have long before some man’s maddening phone was pushed in front of every canvas I wanted to see. I took the first room on the left. The walls there were the shade of a pigeon’s underbelly: three paintings affixed to each, and a fat little bench with short legs and a puff of quilted red leather split into six seats in the center of everything. A graying man with a waxed hooded jacket listening to his wireless through earphones was already on it: the wireless was turned up to maximum sound. From the seat’s left side you could hear, in digest, a Bronze Age monument discovered in the Forest of Dean; the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 1 Report; a reminder of the upcoming general election; placations from Number 10 about the Brexit delay. I took the middle of the bench. The Tate was refuge, procrastination; I had however long the museum’s Turner collection lasted me before I ran out of reasons to catch a train out of London. I closed my eyes. The backs of my lids lit up with little rainbow squares: they were like the pavement—the colors dived and fluttered. The little tin sound of public radio came through like an earworm. It was the chart-topping song I couldn’t get away from. The country, going to shit: played over and over on everyone’s electronic devices. I squeezed my eyes tighter.
When I opened them again, there was Devonshire in a heavy bronze frame, and two black-coated men in their twenties in front of it. I took them in. Cloth tote bags, wool beanies, exposed ankles, and old socks in their clean white shoes. One of them rolled a cigarette while the other proselytized.
Of course, that’s the grand irony of referring to Turner as a British artist. He paused to allow his companion time to lick along the length of the cigarette’s Rizla; the fag was sealed with a flourish, and then, when he was sure of his friend’s undivided attention, the proselytizing continued. All of this stuff is essentially Italianate. And his best work, as far as this museum is concerned, is in the other room: the studies of light in France and Belgium. Of the ports. Those paintings have a sense of motion. He grew animated. They are the product of advancing technologies—steam power; the increasing availability of travel. See the magnificence such availability brought.
To me it seemed his companion was bored because it sounded as though his friend was quoting from a catalogue—in any event, he shrugged. He had a German accent in contrast to his friend’s Queen’s English, but like his companion, his clothes were pure London. I do not know, he said. These paintings will be on your country’s banknotes soon, no? Clearly they still have some nationalist value. Then seeing the frown on his friend’s face, added, Shall we see the ones you like again before I go and smoke this?
They went on strolling the perimeter of the room until they found the gap in the wall.
Unseeing their words took time. It was labor to regain the canvas, to extract the hipster-beanie-art-school-craft-beer pallor overlaid on the image. As an extra precaution, I took my phone out intending to listen to white noise through my earphones: instead I found an iCloud notification; two missed calls from my mother. I ignored the calls and swiped the notification instead. My phone’s photo gallery appeared, rearranged with a line of white sans-serif text over it that read, One year ago. The room I’d rented in Bradmore Road with ten cardboard boxes and a suitcase yet unpacked; various close-ups of carpet stains, cracks in the walls, and the scuffs on the wooden armrests of an easy chair to be noted in inventory. To which my phone: Would you like to share this memory? Over a year ago, flattened out into pixels on my screen and being callously replayed. I remembered the unpacking, the wasps on the windows. How late last year’s summer had stayed. I had reached the point where my days at Bradmore began to lay themselves under new ones; had acquired the perfectly poignant distance of 365 days. I was not ready to feel it, it was too painful. I stuffed my phone back in my pocket.
Devonshire on a wall. If I had closed my eyes again, I would have been able to place myself in it, but to do so would mean not looking at the painting again. I looked. For the first ten minutes all I could think of was cigarette smoke: Turner’s clouds traveling to the left of the canvas in rising spirals. At the bottom of the painting was a brook, and two figures in it. There was another at its edge. I did not want the implication of another person’s thought. I ignored them. I wanted something else—to see the painting as it truly was; to have a landscape in my mind’s eye, alone.
First the brook: it had no breadth; it ran umber in foreshortened depth. The bed of water bled into the bank and out of it. Two tree trunks slashed into the foreground’s left; on the right, a set of shrubs laced the beginnings of a forest. Then, between the curtain of rising bough-bends, the foliage thickening upwards, another body of water in the background, center-left, streaming out towards more green. There was a viaduct loping from one wall of trees to the next, and at its end, a stucco house with yellow walls and peeling white stains, with frail, blown-out draperies: a lemon-sherbet treat of a thing in its wrinkling paper bag. Half hidden beyond it, encased in English countryside, I could see a glimpse of abstract buildings; a town. But this did not stir in me the same feeling that the landscape did. I was done with towns, with cities. Farther back, before the sky broke the land, after yet more green stippled into the distance before it—I did not know why I thought it was, only that it must be—the Channel. Only after having looked at the land did the clouds become something else: idyllic, hung in blemishless English sky.
I looked for long enough to understand the initial impulse to climb inside. There was a clearing in the forest, carved and deepening beyond the suggestion of paint; there was shading down the inside of the viaduct’s farthermost parapet, it hinted at pavement that could be walked on. There was a set of boulders by the brook’s edge on which to sit—numerous places within the painting to reside. I felt, unexpectedly and in my chest, a kind of swelling, a sense of pleasure, or fantasy enjoyment. For a moment, in my head, it was summer, and I could have been on some green with a picnic basket for luggage and the sound of wrens over babbling water. I could have been biting into a Braeburn or reclining in a gentle breeze. Then a woman walked in front of my frame. I scowled, but she wasn’t facing me; she was leaning back to get my landscape into her phone. When she had finished, she leaned over the museum label to the left of the frame. I could have killed her.
I did not. At some point, the man with the wireless radio had left. There was a whole new turnover of people in the room. I checked my phone. I had been there for half an hour, it seemed reasonable to look at something else. A palate cleanser. On my phone’s screen, Twitter had sent me an “in case you missed it” notification: I opened it. There was my corner of the internet, ironic, cackling with glee, Happy Brexit Day. I allowed myself a moment of smugness, too, at the failure of the venture. Further down, there was more on the implications of a second referendum; which party was for a people’s vote and which one against, which party opposed the prospect of no deal, but the joy I had felt began to leak out of me. I tried to regain it in front of another canvas and realized with horror that what I had felt earlier was patriotism. I could more clearly identify it now: the canvas was all ochre and verdant lea with rushed scruffs of paint for trees—there was no sun, but there was a lightening in the blue sky, a patch of yellowish white, orb shaped. Somewhere in the center of that was a turreted gray mass, the suggestion of a crumbling manor. The whole thing was abstract enough in style to take on whatever you gave it; and so, though it was unmistakably English, it could have been Yorkshire, it could have been Sussex, it could have been the view of the fields off the M25 around Hertfordshire. Whatever bit of English countryside you could connect it to in your head took hold, and because the painting was a beautiful thing, with its warm tint, its heavy golden frame, and its place in the airy, magnificent gallery, the country became beautiful, too.
After this realization, I could not enjoy the pleasure I felt looking at a room full of Turners. But nor could I quash it. When I looked at the tangled fields, a chorus of associations independent of my own wishes struck up in my head: Heathcliff, looking out across the moor for his love; Lizzie Bennet against the backdrop of Netherfield, in stubborn refusal of hers. All of it was compounded by the lushness of period dramas from which the original materials had sprung. The BBC had a lot to answer for. I was newly uncomfortable in the gallery, but I did not want to leave. For the first time since I had had my own room in Oxford, walking through the gallery conferred a mode of solitude in which I could figure out what I thought, what that made me, and how I had arrived at the things I did. Because the room I was in did not belong to me, I could not do this infinitely. But for the moment I was in it at least, I had the dignity and freedom of a sense of self which belonged entirely to me. I wanted to keep it. I reflected. I could not be like Ghislane, who did not care about the permanence or strength or stability of such things; who had no bodily self and was happy to flit and transmit herself through photos, or a song, or on a page. I could not be like the intern, who compromised to a fault; managed on only espressos for lunch and the hope they would sell a coat to make up for poor wages—all that to cling to a place to which they only tenuously belonged. Where I was going, I would still have to share the bathroom; be conscious of the length of my showers; suffer interruptions of thought if I had to make breakfast in the kitchen, or explain where I had been after leaving the house. Despite my discomfort, I wanted to stay in the Clore Gallery a moment longer.
To resolve this, I thought it best to try to notice what was false in each painting, and by extension, in my own feelings. I began to feel restless; forced myself to move to the next one. This time, I did not marvel at the suggestion of vetiver on the banks of a stream, the willows bending over it, and the clear azure sweep near the top of the frame. I looked up.
The Clore Gallery lit its rooms with strips of rectangular light lined flat into the ceiling, and though this would have been ugly under any circumstance, after the general majesty of what was below, it seemed an affront. Now that the light was ugly, I followed it down. The piece I was standing in front of had a heavy, ornate frame with the painting’s catalogue number, title, and year carved into it. Parts of it shone more brightly than others: certain groves were deliberately blackened to give an even greater impression of depth.
A woman in a face mask came next to me. I switched my attention to her: she too was a part of the painting now; made up the experience of looking at it. She ignored me; looked briefly at the label, took a picture; then, clearly uncomfortable with being looked at, left. I went back to my original view. I could see the weft of the fabric. It bobbled the pastoral landscape; divided it up into little patches and squares. There was a rip in the canvas that bulged beyond the paint.
It was impossible to look at anything like this for long. It required constant vigilance. With its joylessness, its state of compulsory paranoia, I became less of a person. And then there was the fact of my attention: overripe with two hours spent in the gallery and in need of rest. I might have taken myself to lunch, except I could not justify spending what it would cost to sit in one of the museum’s restaurants or cafés. There were more missed calls from my mother on my phone. And at some point or another, I would have to collect my suitcase from the cloakroom. I resigned myself to leaving.
Squeezing my case between the aisle and seats on the 9 and 87 bus had been awkward enough in the morning, on the way in. I did not want to do it again. I also did not want to lug the thing to Pimlico; to hoist it gracelessly down the Underground, past the barriers, the escalators; to grip it constantly, and keep it from sliding around the Tube. Despite my reservations about lunch, or perhaps because of them, and my increasingly insistent hunger, I wanted comfort. I got an Uber.
The car that arrived was clean enough to eradicate any suggestion of a personality. Before I got in it I could hear the driver’s playlist coming through over the speakers and towards the back seat, but once he had put my suitcase in the boot and we were settled in, he turned it off and lowered the volume on the navigation app displayed on his phone, too. The silence was stultifying. I did not want to force inane conversation, and yet I felt it reflected badly to seem indifferent towards the person who was performing a service for me. The car was a small one. The proximity of space, coupled with the aspect of antisocialness my sitting in the back had induced, was made all the more terrible by lack of sound. I asked how his day was.
Not bad, he said. The silence went on, difficult, as it had been before. I didn’t want to, but I tried again. Busy day?
Not really, he said. It had been a slow, boring morning, though he had been intrigued by the idea of a pickup from the Tate. Was I an artist? I told him no. Oh, that’s a shame, he said. He was keen to talk artists as of late. His girlfriend was one: they had been having an ongoing disagreement over something she had read. The very gallery I had been in was advertising a job in one of their coffee shops for 5K more than its curators made. I leaned forward. Where had she found that?
Twitter, he said. He might have been able to discuss this with his girlfriend’s friends, but apart from one day off yesterday, work had kept him away. He would not be able to do so for a few more days. I nodded; plugged his keywords into my phone. On Twitter, a well-known progressive artist had retweeted a photo of a column from the Times, which read, The daily grind is better rewarded at the Tate galleries if you’re in hospitality rather than something as trivial as art. The Tate is seeking a “head of coffee,” for which it is offering salary of £39,500. That is £5,000 more than it pays its current exhibition curators. The advert says it is seeking someone with “extensive experience of cupping.” Presumably they don’t require customers to cough while they do it. Above it, the artist himself had written, I give up, they’ve won. I read this all to the driver while he turned off the Victoria Embankment and towards the Strand. We hit traffic near Kingsway.
No, I don’t know who that is, he said once I had given him the artist’s name. But the conversation he’d been having with his girlfriend was about perceived value in the traditional sense. I asked him what he meant. His girlfriend had not liked the disparity in salary between restaurant staff, whom she saw as unskilled workers, and curators, who, by her implication, were skilled. The Times column I had just read had done the same thing by implying the coffee job was “trivial,” or, at least, more trivial than working in the arts. This, he disagreed with. Despite the silliness of the ad, the strange HR-ification of the job title designed to make essentially boring work sound fun, what was being advertised was a high-pressure, front-of-house managerial job, which required time-management skills, efficiency, a way with people, and a detailed knowledge of a particular beverage industry. He had told his girlfriend there was more pride and practical use to be found in a job like this than in any of the posturing and simpering and affectation he saw in the art world.
He shrugged. Understandably, she had taken offense. But he stood by it. The whole argument was stupidly middle-class in tone. Yet, in his ends, people who did service work were often underpaid and badly treated. He would take his stance on the difference in pay between gallery and food service staff to his grave. On the other hand, he regretted the irony of the fact that the gig work he was doing now meant he could not resolve the rift this stance had created in his relationship. Having heard one thing, his girlfriend was now finding it difficult to believe that he had not been belittling her job. He had just been standing up for ones like his.
I nodded. That was understandable. Where were his ends? Where was he from?
Notting Dale. His eyes flicked up to the rearview mirror, searching for any sign of recognition, and then back to the road. I shook my head. He went on: close by the Grenfell Tower. And catching my eyes again, added that he was not there anymore.
By now we were at Holborn. My stomach dropped, churned. Had he read the inquiry report? He had. Had I? I had not.
It had taken him all day yesterday. He’d felt duty-bound to do it. The report was more than eight hundred pages long, and truthfully, a lot of it blurred in his mind. He’d skipped around a bit. Some parts were very technical, showed spandrel locations and sloping angles; noted the burning rate of combustible synthetics found in the cladding. There were graphs and photos of the estate from the year it had been built: construction frames climbing half-assembled rooms and window frames with computer-generated arrows drawn on them. It was beyond his reach to picture what was once someone’s home as foam insulation and beams, or as “fig.1,” with JPEG arrows overlaid. But the report also contained photos from inside the tower after the fire. At this point, he had stopped for a moment and wept. There had been a diagram of the kitchen where it had started, and over the impersonal, bureaucratic floor plan, its occupant had made some additions in blocky, elegant biro: labeled the number of cupboards, the location of the smoke alarm; the extent of the smoke when he had first seen it, light and white in color.
When the Uber driver had resumed reading, a lot of the survivor testimony had induced secondhand fear in him—descriptions of occupants fighting for breath; running back for their family; telling the operators on 999 they were scared. But other parts of the report, for reasons he could not unpack, had felt devastating. One survivor had described the heat in her living room as similar to the heat you feel when you take a cake out of the oven. In the testimony of firefighters and 999 calls going through the control room, there were repeated variations on the advice given to occupants that they wet blankets, bedding, and towels as defense strategy against the smoke: the image of all the repurposed, sodden cloth had set him off crying again. There was the fact that the witness testimony included repeated descriptions of the ventilation fans throughout the building humming in response to the fire; quiet, haunting groaning. The report described the failure of various domestic structures within each home in the building. The intensity of the heat from the fire was such that the windows failed, allowing the flames to penetrate the flats. The extractor fan units in the kitchens had nearly all deformed and dislodged, providing the flames another point of entry. The fire doors did not hold back smoke, or lacked effective self-closing devices.
He turned into the taxi ramp at Euston. I made no move to get out. Finally, he exhaled. More than anything, he had cried at the number of preventable deaths lost to the instruction given on the night, that residents would be safest if they stayed put inside their homes. Some people did not understand that in this country, you had to be a particular type of person to always be safe at home. At the end of the report, when it was done, he had gone out; driven up and down the A40 near the tower block multiple times. Two years on. He was tired. He had seen Grenfell, now covered with some kind of gray sheet; a banner on top: Forever in Our Hearts. He wished whoever it was who’d put it there—the estate, the borough council, the government—had had the courage to leave the building exposed: incised into people’s eyes and buckling the expression on their faces, where it could not be ignored. What good was it to store something like that away in a place as private and messy and ineffectual as the heart? The human cost, the class snobbery, the neglect of the thing. The gray sheet showed that the most important thing to the inhabitants of this city was its veneer: that things should look okay, even if they weren’t. He wanted that tower to mean something else. He wanted that burnt-out, blackened husk to disturb the gentile, white buildings in Kensington and Whitehall. It did not. It stood tastefully covered up.
The cabs behind us began to sound their horns. The Uber driver swung himself out of the car and retrieved my suitcase from the boot. When I followed, he was taller than I expected, in turned-up jeans and a black fleece; with a swollen face and bags under his eyes. He looked apologetic—perhaps the conversation had been a bit much for two strangers on a short drive. On my part, the impulse to be polite crashed into the admiration and honesty I wanted to show him. We shook hands. While he held mine, he made a joke about giving me a five-star rating via the app on account of our therapy session.
Euston, not as large as it should have been. Euston, squat and hulking. There was the square outside the station: it had statues and pigeons looking for their lunch. It was all shades of gray and the curling fug of cigarette smoke, the strawberry-scented issue from vapes. People kept appearing suddenly and slowing my progress, tangling their suitcase with my suitcase, or else stopping entirely to stand in one place. I wanted to say, am I invisible to you? To the lady who had stepped directly in front of me to take a phone call. Out of all proportion, I wanted to tear off her face. In my stomach, there was the familiar, anxious poison of fear and bitterness.
Inside the station, I took a left. The automated machines. £13.25 for a yellow-and-orange ticket with font on it that belonged to an eighties computer game. After I’d shoved it into the back of my phone case, my neck craned up at the screen showing train times. Delayed. Well, of course. I had a book with me, but it was thin and I was already more than halfway through it: I had wanted to pass the time on the train by reading. With nothing else to do, I sat on my case. Out of unthinking habit, I checked my emails. The previous day, the managing editor had sent me a list of questions asking where on the shared hard drive fact-checks and versions of proofs were, and I’d replied courteously, elated despite myself that I might still be needed, and things might fail without me. She had not emailed back. Not even in thanks. Leaving work was like being broken up with within a semi-abusive relationship. Today my inbox was empty. I sat on my case and pulled down refresh thirty-seven times until I lost count.
When the platform number was announced for the train, the main body of the station and the ramps towards the platform began hemorrhaging. Things fell apart. It was midafternoon, and the station was crowded, but not particularly full. Yet traveling salesmen in leather shoes flew past voluptuously grouped families, past teenage girls with Primark shopping bags; jammed their tickets into the barrier gate; stabbed the open/close button on carriage doors like animals in pain. I noted all this with distaste. Then I noted my distaste. This was my main fear in leaving London. That a parochial habit of watching what other people did and a running commentary on their failings would lodge itself in my brain. That such commentary would become my main form of anecdote. I wanted, always, to maintain the metropolitan affect of never being fazed. I walked at normal pace to the very front of the train, and got into passenger car A. Two other commuters followed. And once we had settled into the carriage space, chosen discrete corners in which to pass the journey, I took my coat off. I hoisted my luggage into the overhead compartment and saw a girl curled into a window seat with her shoes off and her feet on the furred green seats. She was propping her phone up against the bulk of a WH Smith bag on the grim plastic table in front of her, watching Netflix as though she were in bed with her earphones in. I saw another slightly older woman near the end of the carriage, unwrapping an M&S sandwich and leaving it on the little table that folded down from the seat in front of her. She set aside her flapjack and bottle of water, put on her reading glasses, and began to look over a bundle of printed documents. She bit into the sandwich and started up her laptop on the seat next to her.
I dropped back into my chair. I wished I’d thought to buy a newspaper, or food; that I possessed whatever ability it was which made these women so able to create little nests of space wherever they were. The carriage shuddered, the conductor came on overhead. We began to move. London’s outer boroughs, its rows of suburban housing, washed themselves in faded brown and gray over each window; peeled successively away in diminishing forms. I had my book. I tried to read but the words slid along the page, making no impression on my mind. I hadn’t had lunch, and I was hungry. Each past sentence I read evaporated in my memory as soon as the next one took hold. The futility of the task was oppressive enough that when a call came from my mother, I took it, and prayed that at some point, the train would drive into a tunnel so that the signal would break the conversation off at a natural, early end. It turned out there was not much to do but listen. A new couple had moved in next door, and they were fuming on account of the Brexit delay, it was inadvisable to stop for a chat if I saw them on my way in. She herself had endured a very long, arduous conversation about the general election with them, and they’d assumed she voted their way. Then, my father had turned up, and by the sounds of his accent, it was very clear that she didn’t. There was a palaver about apologizing for the rude things they’d said about Remoaners: of course, by the looks of my father, in his suit, with his iPhone 10 and regional-accent-inflected English, there could be no question he paid his taxes; worked as a valued member of the UK economy. My mother cackled down the phone. The English were too polite for convictions. By the way, there was a new housing development being built on the fields across the road, and so I might like to wear sensible shoes when I arrived, things were a bit muddy.
I said it was too late, I was already on the train and all I had were heels and fashionable trainers because I had just spent the last four months working at a society magazine in London. Outside, the scenery came to a stop; became Wembley, dispensing passengers and long whistle blows. Don’t you raise your voice at me for it, my mother said, there was enough noise going on her end already. But I was having waking nightmares about being assaulted with mud, the sound of drills, of construction work, again. I thought the whole point of the countryside was that nothing ever happened in it, I said.
Yes, very droll, she said. There was a lot of construction happening all over, actually. People being priced out of London were moving into the villages and towns. There wasn’t enough housing to keep up with the demand. The newer houses were expensive; full of modern technology built into the walls, but equally, there weren’t enough amenities to keep up with the influx of population. The roads leading to the high street were consistently jammed. The schools were struggling to keep the number of pupils in classrooms down. Yesterday, she had waited half an hour at the checkouts in Morrisons, when a few years ago, she had only used to wait five minutes. I felt my eyes roll into the back of my head. Wembley unclenched from the window. Look, I feel awkward being the only passenger talking on the train, I said. I’ll see you when I’m there. She called me poppet and said she was getting things ready for me before she hung up the phone. I pictured my mother dusting the mantelpiece with its framed family photos; going over the rugs with a vacuum and plumping the cushions so that they stood up against each other on the sofa, like little tents. I could hear her complaining to no one in particular that the dust from the construction was dirtying the windows, and felt tenderly towards her. I sent a warmer, love-laden text. I was not without shame.
The ticket inspector came into the train car with his ticket machine: the woman eating a meal deal from M&S showed him hers first. She had to pile her papers under her chin and shift her laptop, now balanced on her knees, awkwardly about to look for it. When at last she had pulled it out, the inspector nodded briefly, said, That’s great, thanks, and continued on. It took enough time for the train to move in and out of Watford.
The girl at the window seat watching Netflix sat straight up, as though she’d been caught cheating on a test; swung her feet immediately off the seats and took her earphones out. She, too, showed him her ticket, and he gave a nod as he passed. Now, it was me. I had no bearings to collect. I flashed him the back of my phone. It took ten seconds: he peered at the card wedged between the device and the protective cover; he said, Nice one, as though my ticket had somehow been better than all the rest. He disappeared into the driver’s compartment of the train. I went back to my book. I turned pages without reading. I looked out of the window again. We had traveled far enough out of London for the view to turn into pasture. England, the fat impasto of the land painted on faintly clouded Plexiglas, hung through a dirty, rust-covered frame. I took it in. It had its own terrible majesty. Dashed landscape rippling past me, shaken out like sheets over a bed, and the sky like a blade. The sight of it went through me. I could have been looking at my old nursery, or the first cot I ever lay in. Despite my efforts to feel the contrary, there was some sentiment attached. Tomorrow, in my mother’s wellingtons, I would take a walk up hills and fields. Shortly after my leaving home, my parents had moved to a small market town. This was where I would be. I would be stomping over to where an iron sign announced its borders, black and official and brilliant and hard. I had a fascination with road and street signs like these, which looked like they had been made midcentury and then left out for the successive generations they guided. In the town where my parents lived, there was an absence of blue plaques, and an abundance of little black-and-white street signs. They pointed to the markets, the schools, the railway lines. I tried to imagine who I would be, as a result of this town. In however long it would take to find another job, I wanted to think I would turn fresh-faced after all the walks and good, sharp air. I would have time to cultivate habits impossible to sustain in London—I would cook whole, robust meals and read voraciously. I would make myself better. I began to daydream.
The doors in an imaginary house swung open. There was a kitchen, ranks of dried herbs, spices, legumes. Worktops, washing machine, boiler. I saw violets resting in a jug in the sink and hand soap in its dispenser. There was a living room, too, with ivy-colored walls. Two sofas in the center, facing each other, and a coffee table in between, piled with clutter: newspapers and stray pens. One bedroom, more or less filled with a double bed; a nondescript bathroom, remarkable only in that it was clean. I did not know who I shared the house with, but there were two toothbrushes under the mirror, on the sink; two sponges resting on the bath.
The reality was that it was drizzling and the train pulled up to its next stop. I’d closed my eyes—I knew this only because I had to open them. The girl with her feet on the seats watching Netflix was stuffing her shoes on. She wrapped her scarf around her and stepped onto the platform outside. By the way she kept her film streaming on the phone in her hand and her head bent towards it, it was clear: she knew where she was. The WH Smith bag dangled tidily off the crook of her wrist and knocked about her thigh. I craned my neck out for her. She was gone before the train left.
What had a rented room in Oxford and a sofa in London made me? Where had there been to make me? For all my plans, it seemed impossible I could achieve anything. There had been no place I could have dragged a sofa into, painted the walls whatever color I wanted, stayed in long enough to find inviting colleagues over for dinner and drinks a worthwhile task. I had not found a job with which I could afford to put my life in one place, then nurture my relationship with family and friends. Yet somehow, I had spent the year keeping my possessions, temporarily, in what were ostensibly the highest echelons the country had to offer. I had even felt a sense of ownership over each building, granted by the access various keys, fobs, and magnetized cards I had carried for them. There was humiliation attached to the feeling that these buildings were no longer mine. Had probably never been mine. I pictured my parents’ house: the architectural and interior design opposite of everything I would have chosen for myself. It would not be mine, either. I thought of the last time I had been to stay. It was a house with thin walls. During the night, I had heard my parents turning in their bed; my father’s whistling snore and my mother’s gentle breathing. In the morning I had woken them up by closing the front door too loudly when I went out for a run at six. I had irritated them by buying impossible quantities of bread which were invariably left in the cupboards to mold past the time I left. Now, I did not even have a set of house keys.
Don’t worry, my mother said when I texted her, you can use the spare set here. What had happened to mine? Well, mine were the spare set. I had scarcely been home. She had seen no reason not to lend them to guests, or the neighbors when she and my father went on holiday and the plants needed watering. It was true, but it did not stop me from feeling offended. I sent the thumbs-up emoji. I wanted to put my phone away but my mother did not know that the thumbs-up emoji constituted the end of a conversation in text. She had questions. Would I be looking for another job? If I found one, would I be moving back to London? I was welcome to stay however long I wanted, but if it was temporary, how long did I think I would stay? The guilt mechanism permanently embedded in my head thrust the conversation I’d had with the Uber driver to the forefront of my head and how not twenty minutes ago I had been ashamed of the way I treated her—but I was bad-tempered and hungry, and most of all, I was tired. I switched my phone off.
Other than the view from the window, all there was to look at was the train carriage. There were two of us left in it. The woman with the laptop and printed papers had finished her M&S sandwich and flapjack dessert—at some point, she had gotten up and squashed them into a small metal bin built into one of the seats. The bin itself either had not been emptied regularly enough or was too small for the litter generated by the number of seats the carriage contained. The triangular cardboard smeared with lettuce leaves and mayonnaise poked out of it; there was a lid attached to the bin on a stiff hinge, it disfigured the rubbish it clamped down on and made the whole effect worse.
The more I looked, the more disgusting the carriage grew. There was a faint layer of brown on each of the brightly patterned seats, stretching upwards and becoming more concentrated at the headrests. I drew my head instinctively away from mine. It was impossible not to picture how many years and numbers of passengers sitting down would have to pass, and how long the seats would have to go without being cleaned, to build up that noticeable layer of brown. How could anyone sit comfortably once they had seen this? And how, without standing, could I rearrange myself so that I came into as little contact with that layer of brown as possible? I took my coat off the seat next to me and put it back on as a protective layer. As much as I could, I raised my back and my thighs off the chair so that the only part of me still on it was my behind, but this soon turned into a hellish form of public transport yoga. My limbs went heavy. I fell back into the seat.
It was impossible to slow the turn of my mind. The countryside cast itself past me, never the same from one second to the next. I tried looking out of the other windows in the passenger car so that it whipped by twice, in different perspectives. I tried to focus on my book, looked at the page—but after reading a chapter or two a shadow seemed to lie across the page. It was a straight, dark bar, a shadow shaped something like the letter I.
The train began to slow at another stop where the tracks had not been built far enough from the trees. A succession of branches slid up against the window until we came to rest, and then the wind drew them backwards and forwards: each bough, tapping against the carriage like a heartbeat. The other woman, my last companion in the passenger car, gathered her coat and bag; stood up; exited the train.
All year there had been a sound rising in me, I had never said it right. I stood up and over the stained seats, the smeared windows, into the carriage, screamed—I
The train moved off again. I jolted with it. The sound I had made broke round the empty space without use; waited, for the next stop to be home.