We go to a funeral by webcam. We wear black on our top halves, wonder whether we need black bottoms too. Out of respect, we do. Unseen, it turns out, we watch a death diminished. There should have been hundreds there.
I check the news. Only 427 dead. Hope! It’s so much less than last week I forget that’s more than four Hillsboroughs.
The funeral, like everything, is interrupted by Abba from the builders next door. I am saturated with noise. The banging and yelling on the scaffolding outside, the conference calls and juvenile yowling inside, the sounds of my own brain scrambling. The last time I completed a thought was sometime in early March.
I check the news. 739 dead, actually. They’ve added in the care homes.
My father is unwell. With a virus, my mother thinks, but not – she hopes – the virus. They are stranded alone in Lincolnshire; I can’t travel to help them. Everyone dies alone, isn’t that what they say? They didn’t mean it like this.
I check the news on TV while checking the news on my phone. Testing success! Over 100,000 tests done. With Boris back from the Styx, all the cabinet chat is of success – though their death-graph shows us racing to take silver in the Coronalympics.
Publishing is on hold, bookshops shut, launches postponed. My new novel is in limbo, and most tutoring is cancelled; there are no exams now. Things that suggest the passing of time take me by surprise. My nails need cutting again. It’s Thursday already, time for the NHS clap to reveal the street’s missing.
Check news. Trump has ‘evidence’ the virus originated in a Chinese lab. He does not say what.
I feel the same terrifying sense of vertigo as when my son was born. He, though, remains sunny and sanguine, even as his FaceTime playdates recede into reports of tantrums and high emotion. I understand his little friends’ melancholy. My own Zoom enthusiasm has only declined. It’s been weeks since I joined an event online.
Check news. They are way under on testing, actually.
We have a lucky little London garden and I have a weird vegetable fixation. I coo in ecstasy over an erupting asparagus pea, a tromboncino curly courgette. I am become Uncle Monty. The park is open again – out for the first time in a month, I run into the friends I’d seen last before lockdown. It is as if they have crossed over from another life, a parallel world. We talk from metres away.
Emails. ‘Unprecedented times’ is still doing the rounds I see.
It’s impossibly fragile, isn’t it, civilisation? We forget how recently our normals happened: flying, electric light, vaccines. The ’flu vaccine has been around for less than a hundred years. Penicillin, too – once our salvation, now the means by which mechanised mass-farming can hasten the apocalypse. Shutting down the world was so recently inconceivable, even to avoid catastrophic climate change, but it’s radically altered overnight. Or has it? Is this lockdown constructed to ensure we get back to destroying the planet as quickly as . . . Hang on—
Stop checking the news, says my husband. I check Twitter. Kim Jong Un lives.
I am cooking. I am home-schooling. I am fantasising about murdering. I conceive a broken short story of vengeance wrought upon singing builders by a plucky young (yes) Fifties housewife.
News. More than 32,000 dead. We have overtaken Italy as the worst-hit country in Europe.
How can things ever be normal again? What will be left to welcome us? I dream thickly of pubs and music and dancing. The Soho settings of my first novel – The French House, Trisha’s – are on their knees. Will schools really reopen before September? Even then?
Fake news.
Venetia Welby’s debut novel Mother of Darkness was published by Quartet Books in 2017. Her writing has appeared in The London Magazine, Review 31, La Revista and various other places. She lives inside.