Charles West Cope, Hope Deferred, and Hope and Fear Igniting Hopevia Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.
In London, rubbish is called rubbish and throwing it away is a science. There are rubbish bags, compost bags and recycling bags, bags which are awarded by the local neighborhood council and will not be picked up if they are not in the appropriate advisory bag once every two weeks on Wednesdays between 6 PM and 7 PMwhich is called 18:00 and 19:00. All rubbish is put in bins with child safety locks which are not intended for children but for foxes.
I moved to England with my boyfriend, who was enrolled in graduate school in London. My job is flexible and I thought I’d jump in. I think, It won’t be much different. They speak English.
An apartment is called a flat and applying for one is not much different, I think, from applying to the CIA, which is called MI6. If someone is approved for a flat, they have to order Wi-Fi from a company called EE, who won’t send someone to set up your Wi-Fi if it’s a bank holiday, which there are many, or if it’s raining. It always rains. In many flats, the heating is connected to the internet, so one cannot get heating unless there is Wi-Fi and cannot get Wi-Fi if it rains or is a bank holiday.
Under some blankets, my boyfriend said, “It’s like we live in a different era,” an era before the internet and warming, a time when time moved slower.
It took a month before the rainless holiday arrived, and with it a man from EE. The guy from EE wanted a cup of tea and a biscuit. Cookies are called biscuits because there is a tariff on cookies but not on biscuits, so this is a verbal loophole for UK cookie companies to avoid higher taxes.
Our flat was in Lower Clapton, which is often referred to as Murder Mile. It is located not far from where Jack the Ripper operated. To leave Murder Mile, one must take a red double-decker bus to the ground and then take a subway to the subway, which takes no less than an hour, wherever you go. Murder Mile is beautiful, and so is our flat. It has many original prints. Unfortunately, there’s also a lot of original mold left—those unpleasant black spots that appear in bathroom corners, on dishwashers, on bay windows. It has a kitchen with counter space where I make some stews, although I never cook in New York.
I often didn’t feel like braving the rain to take a bus to an overground train to an underground train to venture into the London boroughs and found myself confined to my flat, at first for days at a time. Then weeks. Cooking and hanging laundry—most apartments don’t have dryers, and clothes have to be hung on lines or racks—and preventing the spread of mold stains while my boyfriend is at school. “It’s as if our gender roles are from a different era too,” I joked.
On our second or third date, my boyfriend asked me, “If you could live in any period in history, what period would you choose?” Without thinking, I said, “This one.” He agrees that he wouldn’t live in another time. And then we went back in time, to London.
“I think that’s a broad generalization,” said my new British friend. The UK has the amenities and necessities of the twenty-first century: streaming platforms (BFI player) and food delivery apps (Deliveroo) as well as mold removal services. So my setback was definitely personal.
I felt there was no point in getting dressed, as I wasn’t going to leave the house, so I wandered around the flat in sweatpants while smoking a duty-free American cigarette. I started blaming my newfound homebody tendencies on my newfound tiredness, and I blamed my newfound tiredness on the weather. When the tiredness wouldn’t subside, I attributed it to the mold spores I inhaled every day. I contacted the owner about the mold. He responded immediately, assuring me that the black substance was not mold but rather pigmentation in the wood. I countered by saying, respectfully, that wood pigmentation also sometimes shows up on bathroom tiles and laminate countertops, window frames, and books. He didn’t answer. I looked at the scattered spots like a Rorschach test, tried to find meaning in them, but found none.
***
My boyfriend and I had a fight a few months after moving when he neglected to tell me he was going to stay late at school and I neglected to tell him that I had made soup again. I said in annoyance that I was cooped up at home all day, looking after the flat, fighting mold with aggressive British cleaning agents, hanging up the washing machine, and cook. He gently pointed out that this house arrest was self-imposed. I was free to get dressed and use several modes of transport to get to the city centre, exploring and shopping and visiting the world class theaters and museums that London has to offer. I have the privilege of being a modern American woman with a flexible work schedule, so why should I sort my trash at home? We’re not actually living in the 1800s. He suggested, again very gently, that I might be experiencing a bit of depression. I agree there is something wrong but depression is not the right word for it.
It came to me: melancholy. I checked it. Melancholia was classified as an illness in Victorian England, but in the 20th century it became a synonym for depression. Doctors once thought that melancholic people had “black bile” building up inside them, making them sick. I imagined my veins filled with mud, mold on the inner walls of my skin. Or wood pigmentation, as it is called here.
Our refrigerator is full of stew. I befriended the butcher down the road, who recommended a different, more ambitious cut of beef. “Try hogget, darling.” Hogget is a juvenile sheep. I made Chris hogget. He suggested that I see a therapist. Chris looked at me helplessly. He loves London. The 1800s were generally better for men. I called my mother. I told him I had cooked a juvenile lamb. He said to go home for a while.
Instead I went to Romania alone for the weekend. I could sense that Chris thought this was strange and impulsive but he didn’t say anything. At least I’m out of the house. I flew into a regional airport outside Sibiu, rented a car, and drove to a small village in the Transylvanian mountains. I passed a cart pulled by an ox carrying Amazon packages. I have learned that when melancholic people cannot be cured, they are thought to be under demonic possession. I don’t think I was possessed, but I wouldn’t rule out the possibility. I bought a hat that looks like a badger and is also made from badgers. How terrible, I thought, for a body in death to play a trick on itself in life.
When I returned to London, I started breastfeeding. Chris finds out about this, and he is very upset. Several pregnancy tests confirmed that I was not pregnant. I had blood tests and an MRI. I looked at the brain scan as if it were another Rorschach test, trying to understand its shape. Is that a butterfly? My father? I didn’t see anything. The doctor noticed a growth on my head, not on my brain but nearby. A prolactinoma. A buildup of cells in my pituitary gland. The pituitary gland regulates hormones, so its growth made my hormones malfunction. We had contracted prolactinoma at a stage that could still be treated with medication. The doctor told me that the prolactin tumor was genetic and not the result of demonic possession.
Soon after my appointment, I returned to the future. I left the mold and melancholy behind, landed at JFK wearing a Romanian sable, grabbed my things from the carousel, ordered coffee, which I then didn’t properly recycle, went home, put my clothes in the dryer, and ordered dinner. I don’t make soup. In New York, I didn’t even have pot.
Madeline Cash is a writer living in London and New York. Her debut novel, Lost Lambs, is now published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Gaming center adalah sebuah tempat atau fasilitas yang menyediakan berbagai perangkat dan layanan untuk bermain video game, baik di PC, konsol, maupun mesin arcade. Gaming center ini bisa dikunjungi oleh siapa saja yang ingin bermain game secara individu atau bersama teman-teman. Beberapa gaming center juga sering digunakan sebagai lokasi turnamen game atau esports.
