ASSEMBLY
It’s a story. There are challenges. There’s hard work, pulling up laces, rolling up shirtsleeves, and forcing yourself. Up. Overcoming, transcending, et cetera. You’ve heard it before. It’s not my life, but it’s illuminated two metres tall behind me and I’m speaking it into the soft, malleable faces tilted forwards on uniformed shoulders. I recite my old lines like new secrets. Click to the next slide. Giant, diverse, smiling faces in grey suits point at charts, shake hands and wave behind me. The projector whirrs and their smiles morph into the bank’s roaring logo. Time to wrap up. I look out around the rows of schoolgirls. Thank them for listening, before taking questions.
One asks if I live in a mansion.
It was a hit, the programme coordinator tells me and the head teacher nods a frazzled bob of greying hair. Her tense lips part, flashing coffee-yellow teeth. We’re walking round and down a small back stairway and I’m gagging on the warm air, that boiled-veg school smell. The head teacher thanks me for coming, says the girls were all inspired. Shrieks, laughter and a booming, melodic chatter echo around us as the students splash out of the assembly hall and into concrete corridors. Simply inspirational, she says.
Back at the office, Lou’s not in yet. He rarely shows up before eleven. As if each morning, fresh mediocrity slides out of the ocean, slimes its way over mossy rocks and sand, then sprouts skittering appendages that stretch and morph and twist into limbs as it forges on inland until finally, fully formed, Lou! strolls into the lobby on two flat feet in shined shoes. Shining, tapping, waiting for the lift to our floor. Nodding to the Beats buds in his ears. He’s never roped in to all this. I do these talks – schools and universities, women’s panels, recruiting fairs – every few weeks. It’s an expectation of the job. The diversity must be seen. How many women and girls have I lied to? How many have seen my grinning face advocating for this or that firm, or this industry, or that university, this life? Such questions aren’t constructive. I need to catch up on the morning’s lost hours.
For much of my own childhood, I lived next to a cemetery. Through the front windows, I’d watch funeral processions snake along the road: black horses followed by black hearses followed by regular cars in different colours. Sometimes a man marched in front with a top hat and cane. Then the people: getting out of the cars and the hearses and gathering themselves, carrying wreaths, carrying hats. Carrying coffins, too, I guess. I don’t remember seeing that. They’d gather by the mounds of fresh-dug dirt and wait around, wreaths piled neat beside them, or they’d just stand there holding flowers. Or holding each other. Little faraway creatures, clinging together for comfort. I watched from above.
Last year, I bought the top floor of a Georgian conversion in an up-and-coming area. The other two flats are each rented out by youngish, anxious couples. A tense argument over music volumes escalates nightly between them.
The improbably named Adam and Evie have the ground floor. When we met in the stairwell, Evie introduced herself first, as Adam’s girlfriend. She brushed wispy strands of blonde hair back from her forehead and told me she worked in publishing. When the music’s too loud, she’ll knock at the flat above and implore them to please, turn it down. Just a tad. Her cut-glass exasperation sends shards right up through my own floor.
The other couple is sullen and reclusive. They rarely speak, though I’ve heard their enthusiastic wailing over 90s bangers. They’re both pretty; brunettes with sharp features and small feet. Two pairs of tiny, muddy football boots lie drying outside their front door every Thursday morning.
The familiar rhythms of our stacked lives have become a kind of closeness.
At work, I think of the flat as parents must pine when they see their kids’ smiling faces framed and propped up amongst the papers and cups on their desks. My friend Rach – small, spoilt, energetic – waves away her own home in a leafy West London suburb. Says she wants a bigger house, a better boyfriend, more money! She wants all these things without shame or subtlety and I’m both fearful and admiring of her appetite. My own is gone. I’ve sunk too deep, pulled down further by a creeping, winding tightness around my limbs. Still, I hold my breath.
What else is there?
Generations of sacrifice; hard work and harder living. So much suffered, so much forfeited, so much – for this opportunity. For my life. And I’ve tried, tried living up to it. But after years of struggling, fighting against the current, I’m ready to slow my arms. Stop kicking. Breathe the water in. I’m exhausted. Perhaps it’s time to end this story.