Three Rooms by Jo Hamya

Author:Jo Hamya
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780358571964
Publisher: HMH Books
Published: 2021-08-30T00:00:00+00:00

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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

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