Breshly News

Charles West Cope, Hope Deferred, and Hopes and Fears That Kindle Hope, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

In London, trash is called rubbish and taking it out is a science. There is a bag for trash, a bag for compost, and a bag for recycling, a bag that is bestowed by one’s neighbo(u)rhood council and will not be picked up if not in the proper counsel bag every other week on Wednesday between 6 P.M. and 7 P.M., which are called 18:00 and 19:00. All rubbish goes in a bin with a secure child lock that isn’t for children but for foxes.

I moved to the UK with my boyfriend, who’d enrolled in graduate school in London. My work is flexible and I thought I’d tag along. I thought, It won’t be so different. They speak English, after all. 

Apartments are called flats and applying for a flat isn’t dissimilar, I’d imagine, from applying to the CIA, which is called MI6. If one is approved for a flat, one must order Wi-Fi from a company called EE, which will not send someone to set up your Wi-Fi if it is a bank holiday, of which there are many, or if it is raining. It is always raining. For many flats, the heating is connected to the internet, so one cannot get heat unless one gets Wi-Fi and one cannot get Wi-Fi if it is raining or a bank holiday.

Beneath several blankets, my boyfriend said, “It’s like we’re living in a different era,” an era before internet and heating, a time when time moved slower.

It took a month before a nonraining nonholiday came along, and with it a man from EE. The man 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 the British cookie companies to avoid higher taxes.

Our flat is in Lower Clapton, which many like to point out used to be called Murder Mile. It’s not far from where Jack the Ripper operated. To leave Murder Mile, one must take a red double-decker bus to the overground and then take the overground to the tube, which takes no less than an hour, no matter where you’re going. Murder Mile is very beautiful and so is our flat. It has much of the original molding. Unfortunately it also has much of its original mold—ominous black speckles that appear in the corners of the bathroom, in the dishwasher, on the bay windows. It has a kitchen with counter space on which I’ve made several stews, though I never cooked in New York.

I often didn’t feel like braving the rain to take the bus to the aboveground train to the belowground train to venture out into greater London and found myself confined to the flat, first for days. Then weeks. Cooking and hanging laundry—most flats do not have tumble dryers, and clothes must be hung on a line or a rack—and keeping the spreading mold blotches at bay while my boyfriend was at school. “It’s as though 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 would it be?” Without thinking I said, “This one.” He agreed that he wouldn’t rather live in any other time. And then we went back in time, to London.

“I think that’s a sweeping generalization,” said my new British friend. The UK has twenty-first-century amenities and necessities: streaming platforms (BFI player) and food delivery apps (Deliveroo) and mold removal services. So my regression must have been personal.

I saw no point in getting dressed, since I wasn’t leaving the house, so I wandered the flat in my sweatpants smoking my duty-free American cigarettes. I started blaming my new homebody tendencies on my new tiredness, and I blamed my new tiredness on the weather. When the fatigue didn’t let up, I attributed it to the mold spores I was inhaling daily. I contacted the landlord regarding the mold. He responded promptly, assuring me that the black substance was not mold but pigmentation in the wood. I wrote back saying, respectfully, that the wood pigmentation also sometimes appeared on the bathroom tiles and laminate countertops and windowsills and books. He did not respond. I looked at the spreading blotches like a Rorschach test, trying to find meaning in them, but found none. 

***

My boyfriend and I got in a fight a few months into the move when he neglected to tell me he’d be staying late at school and I neglected to tell him that I’d made another stew. I said irritably that I had been cooped up at home all day, tending the flat, fighting the mold with aggressive British cleaning solvents, hanging the wash, and cooking. He gently pointed out that this house arrest was self-inflicted. I was free to get dressed and take several modes of transportation into the city center, to explore and shop and visit the world-class theaters and museums London has to offer. I had the privilege of being a modern American woman with a flexible work schedule, so why was I home sorting trash? We did not in fact live in the 1800s. He suggested, again ever so gently, that I might have a touch of depression. I agreed something was wrong but depression wasn’t the right word for it.

It came to me: melancholy. I looked into it. Melancholia was classified as a disease in Victorian Britain but by the twentieth century became a synonym for depression. Doctors once thought that melancholic people had “black bile” built up inside them, making them ill. I imagined my veins full of sludge, mold on the inner walls of my skin. Or wood pigmentation, as it’s called here. 

Our refrigerator filled with stew. I befriended the butcher down the road, who recommended different and more ambitious cuts of beef. “Try hogget, love.” Hogget is a teenage sheep. I made Chris hogget. He suggested I see a therapist. Chris looked at me helplessly. He loved London. The 1800s were typically better for men. I called my mother. I told her I’d cooked a teenage sheep. She said to come 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 was getting 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 had learned that when melancholic people could not be cured, they were thought to be under demonic possession. I didn’t think I was possessed, but I didn’t rule out the possibility. I bought a hat that was shaped like a badger and also made out of a badger. How awful, I thought, a body in death playing itself in life. 

When I got back to London, I started lactating. Chris discovered this, much to his dismay. Several pregnancy tests confirmed that I was not pregnant. I got a blood test and an MRI. I looked at the brain scan like it was another Rorschach test, trying to make sense of the shapes. Were they butterflies? My father? I saw nothing. The doctor saw a growth in my head, not on my brain but near it. A prolactinoma. Cell buildup on my pituitary gland. The pituitary gland regulates hormones, so the growth was making my hormones malfunction. We had caught the prolactinoma at a stage where it could still be treated with medication. The doctor told me prolactin tumors are genetic and not a result of demonic possession. 

Soon after my appointment, I went back to the future. I left the mold and melancholia, landed at JFK wearing my Romanian badger, collected my things from the carousel, ordered a coffee, which later I did not properly recycle, drove home, put my clothes in the dryer, and ordered dinner. I did not make stew. In New York, I didn’t even own a pot.

Madeline Cash is writer living in London and New York. Her debut novel, Lost Lambs, is out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.