Assembly(4)

‘It’s the principle,’ Rach had told me, earlier that day. ‘Fuck the sexism – harness it!’

Rach was adamant that her entanglement with one of the firm’s global department heads was in fact her prerogative: to reclaim and subvert the narrative of workplace harassment. They were getting serious. Moving from formal praxis to something resembling mundane, genuine emotion. Living together. It was both simpler and more complex than my own relationship.

We had our usual table at the mezzanine coffee point above the office lobby. Rach’s nails, peachy-manicured as always, tip-tapped against her almond latte. We’d slipped from co-workers to friends over the last year as her father recovered from cancer and my grandmother died of it. She was a Home Counties, Kate-loving, Jaeger-shopping, Lean In-feminist who arranged animal-welfare fundraisers at the weekends and bought handmade earrings from Etsy. She once called me in tears from the Hermès store. It’s all too beautiful, she’d sobbed in halting syllables as the shop assistant packaged her scarves.

‘Victimhood is a choice,’ Rach said. Part opinion, part mantra. She insisted on continual improvement: evolution, learning, growth, smashing through all ceilings at all costs. She said there’s a new victim every day. Didn’t my MD just get axed for fucking around with that intern in Legal? She shook her head at such reckless, stupid hubris. This was how our conversations invariably went.

Still, Rach understood – even relished – the cutthroat nature of this place. And so, the coffee breaks, the drinks, the brunches, they continued. We were close, we were friends. We said it with post-postmodern earnestness: best friends. We made lists, reviewed our five-year plans and crunched out the Teflon-lined stomachs necessary for execution. There was a fundamental aspect of myself – un-storied and direct. The ugly machinery that grinds beneath all achievement. Only with Rach did I acknowledge that level.

‘Who will they promote, do you think? To replace him.’ She leaned back to consider her own question. Then lobbed a few names my way, chuckling as she evaluated Lou’s chances.

‘Or maybe they’ll go for a woman,’ she said, laying out each hand in turn, palm up. ‘A woman harmed, another rewarded – sounds legit!’

She laughed, brushing her hands together. Despite the cynicism, I knew it got to her. During our pre-work workout, a few weeks back, I’d seen her running on the treadmill beside me, fast. Too fast. Panting hard, smacking the track with New Balance-soled feet, her angled elbows swinging wildly, sprinting. Until she wasn’t. Having leapt abruptly and landed on the plastic ledges either side of the whizzing track, her torso collapsed against the control panel. After, we’d regrouped as usual outside the changing room. Her composure restored, her still-damp hair appearing a darker blonde. We took the stairs up to the mezzanine floor to caffeinate. Bodies still flushed from the activity.

What compelled Rach to pursue this career? I knew why I did it. Banks – I understood what they were. Ruthless, efficient money-machines with a byproduct of social mobility. Really, what other industry would have offered me the same chance? Unlike my boyfriend, I didn’t have the prerequisite connections or money to venture into politics. The financial industry was the only viable route upwards. I’d traded in my life for a sliver of middle-class comfort. For a future. My parents and grandparents had no such opportunities; I felt I could hardly waste mine. Yet, it didn’t sit right with me to propagate the same beliefs within a new generation of children. It belied the lack of progress – shaping their aspiration into a uniform and compliant form; their selves into workers who were grateful and industrious and understood their role in society. Who knew the limit to any ascent.

I’d rather say something else. Something better. But of course, without the legitimacy of a flashy title at a blue-chip company, I wouldn’t have a platform to say anything at all. Any value my words have in this country is derived from my association with its institutions: universities, banks, government. I can only repeat their words and hope to convey a kind of truth. Perhaps that’s a poor justification for my own complicity. My part in convincing children that they, too, must endure. Silence, surely, was the least harmful choice.

Rach had moved on.

‘This weekend means big things,’ she told me. Serious, exciting things. Things she abstracted to diamond-ring emojis. I wasn’t sure that I was ready for any things. I knew these were the things to want, the right things to reach for. But I felt sick of reaching, enduring. Of the ascent.

His parents tolerated me. As good, socially liberal parents would. They were patient with their son in the matter of his relationships. They imagined, I imagined, that this was a phase. Why prolong it with negative attention? And so they accommodated it. Welcomed it – me, ostensibly. In fact, they insisted, he told me more than once, insisted that I join the family for their anniversary celebrations.

I’d met them before, of course. Though nothing like this weekend. It had always been in London, before, four of us around a restaurant table. A two-or three-hour limit on how long we would all be together. The conversation light, and entertaining. They really did know how to entertain. How to talk, to ask, to listen, how to converse. They conjured a sense of occasion. Especially the father, who wielded words with deft precision, like a physical instrument. A scalpel, perhaps, or a quill.

Sitting around a dim-lit table, a few months back, in a windowless restaurant beneath an art gallery, I watched the father speak through lips tinged red with wine (ordered after a wide-ranging and apparently very welcome, vigorous discussion with the sommelier). He raised up his quill and drew me into their world. On the page of that evening I was a part of it, I belonged. Yet, it was a distanced intimacy. Sincere but lacking permanence or consequence beyond a particular interaction. He asked me variations of the same questions each time. With the same indulging interest he extended to the restaurant staff.