By Yasmin Ali
They get into the car, Den and Anita. Hand sanitiser, remove masks, seatbelts on. They’ve been shopping.
‘You bought more than usual,’ says Den.
‘I said I’d pick up a few things for Dorothy next door.’
Their neighbour is an elderly woman, widowed a couple of years ago. Thin, grey, she’d barely spoken more than a whispered greeting in all the years they’d lived in the house. It had always been Jim they’d talked to over the garden fence. He’d had an opinion on everything, which Den had nodded along to, even if it seemed like a lot of nonsense.
‘You’ve spoken to her?’
‘She was hanging out the washing. I asked if she needed anything,’ says Anita. ‘She was quite chatty. It made me feel bad for not asking before. I didn’t think. ‘
‘Well, you wouldn’t,’ says Den. ‘When Jim died, and we offered to help, she was polite enough, but you could tell she wanted to be left alone.’
By the time Dorothy has opened the front door a little, peering out uncertainly, Anita has retreated to the other side of the garden gate.
‘It’s on the doorstep, Dorothy. We got everything you asked for, apart from the Toilet Duck. I’ve put in an own-brand instead, but if you don’t want it, we’ll have it.’
‘No, really, that’ll be fine. Thank you.’
She gives her neighbour a little wave as she closes the door, and carries the shopping bag through to the kitchen. Dorothy dons rubber gloves before she stands the jars and tins and bottles in the sink, and the packets on a piece of newspaper on the floor by the back door. Everything that can be washed with hot soapy water, will be. The more fragile packaging will get a rub down with surgical spirit.
The Morrison’s toilet cleaner is in a bottle the same shape as the brand she asked for. Dorothy knows it will do the same job. Her tins of Heinz Baked Beans, the bottle of Robinson’s Barley Water, the Fairy Liquid, all are purchases of habit. And it’s not even her habit.
When Jim had been alive, he’d taken her every Saturday morning to Sainsbury’s for the weekly big shop. Even when the new Morrison’s had opened, much closer to home, cheerful and shiny, with a comical clock tower at the front, they had driven past it. Jim had thought about these things, They were permitted a ‘Dine In for £10’ meal once in a while from M&S. Waitrose they gave a respectful wide berth, Tesco was acceptable, but Jim had decided that they were Sainsbury’s people. Sainsbury’s people, and branded goods people. Middling people, who knew their place, and more to the point, knew everyone else’s place, too. As Dorothy rinsed the bottle of cordial, she made a mental note to stop buying all these brands, the Vosene in the bathroom, the Typhoo tea.
Next door, Den settles down in his armchair whilst Anita deals with the groceries. He picks up the remote control, and the TV comes on, tuned in, as it always seems to be these days, to a rolling news channel. The daily government press conference is in progress. The boy who is Health Secretary is flanked by two scientists. The questions are asked on big screens at the side of the room by journalists sitting in their kitchens, or attic offices.
Den had never cared much about the news, so it’s funny that he watches so much of it now. He has always kept up with what is going on in the world, but in truth he’d always been more interested in the sports news than the heavy stuff. Even Brexit, which had got so many of his friends in a lather, hadn’t got under his skin. He’d just wished they’d get on with it, so they could think about something else. But this virus has been different.
You can’t pick a side in a pandemic. Anita had said that to him one night as they watched News at Ten. Tom Bradby had been fronting the programme. He seemed impatient, on the edge of losing his temper, even, as he asked the science editor questions about whether the government really was “following the science”, as they kept saying. Anita had looked up from her cross stitch and said, ‘It’s not like it’s a Labour thing, or a Conservative thing. You can’t pick a side in a pandemic.’ The phrase stuck in his head. His wife was right of course, but why was she right? It had worried away at him over the weeks that had passed.
Dorothy steps out into the back garden after she’s decontaminated her shopping. It’s been a glorious spring, with seemingly endless warm, clear days. The hedges need trimming, and the lawn’s becoming a little meadow, with poppies and coltsfoot dotting the long grass. The lack of order in the garden had been her own decision. Dorothy wasn’t old yet. She could easily keep the garden in shape if she wanted to. Jim had put in a patio which had taken out half the old lawn, and the shrubs and ornamental trees by the fences were easy to keep tidy. But she hasn’t bothered this spring. She feels safer somehow with the tendrils of unmanicured vegetation curling towards her, green confidants nuzzling in to share her space. Dorothy sits on a chair under a tree, and sets down her mug of tea,
Jim hadn’t been many years retired when the stroke felled him. He was in hospital for nearly a week. Dorothy has never learned to drive. She had a free bus pass which she had never used before. It took her to and from the hospital. She would take grapes, and sit by the bed, eating them. Jim couldn’t. He opened his eyes occasionally, and looked at her. He couldn’t speak, and neither did she. She knew that look.
Den has never been a man for deep thinking. He thinks of himself as a practical type, pragmatic, too. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. It has been a recipe for a cheerful life, a contented marriage. Den always makes the best of things, works diligently, and is usefully occupied at leisure. He doesn’t pick fights, and if they happen anyway he’s likely to defuse them with a joke, or a quiet word, or a firm hand on the shoulder.
On the face of it, nothing much has changed for Den, for Anita. It’s a bit of a palaver to go to the shops now. Watching sports in the pub, watching sports full stop, has been suspended, but Den has filled the footy-shaped hole with documentaries about Viking burial sites, and Roman garrisons. Tony Robinson has replaced Gary Lineker, and it’s no real hardship.
And yet for every walk in the park with the dog, or laughter-filled FaceTime with the family, there are also moments like this, when he stares at the screen and finds himself wondering whether there’s something he’s missing. His life is fine, that’s for sure. The mortgage paid, a bit of money in the bank, the children settled in their lives and careers. Health, wealth and happiness. So it’s something else.
The virus. There’s something unsettling about it, this small thing, invisible, mutable, leaping from species to species, from person to person, from country to country. You can’t lock it up, build a wall. No referendum can banish it, no army can overrun it. Covid-19. It’s Blake’s 7, Space 1999. It’s on telly, it looks silly, it doesn’t look real, it doesn’t belong in our world in our time.
But that’s not it. Den knows he isn’t afraid of the virus, nor is Anita. They’re sensible people, they listen to the government, follow the experts’ advice. Sooner or later the pandemic will subside, treatments are bound to improve, perhaps vaccines will be developed. Life will go on.
After Jim died, Dorothy sold the car. She had thought, fleetingly, about learning to drive, but she quickly came to see that she had no need of a licence. She had her bus pass. She could go on short rides, and long ones, to the city, and to the coast. She could visit places, look at people, with a freedom she had never known before in her life. She had even begun to recognise regulars, men and women like herself, off-peak free pass holders. They began to acknowledge one another, occasionally even to speak. Companionship without obligation.
That’s the thing that makes Dorothy angry. Once she might have said ‘cross’. It had been the highest degree of resentment she would permit herself. But now it is more than that. She feels hard done by. Jim has only been gone for less than two years, but that time had been bliss. She had begun to have a life of her own, probably for the first time ever, now she comes to think about it. And that’s the other thing. All this time, time to think.
Going out on the bus had been so much more than a short journey into town, or a long trip to another county. It was as though a gate had been opened in a high wall, and she had stepped through it, and it wasn’t full of terrors. The bag snatchers, the violent drunks, scroungers, and immigrants, and vandals, and strikers. The socialists, the students, the people who drive too fast, and the people who drive too slow, the council, the people speaking foreign. Her life had been one long caution against a world full of bad people out to get you, to get one over on you. So when she’d finally gone out into that world, on her own, not locked in the car, or at Jim’s protective side, heeding his words of warning as they navigated a shopping mall, or a seaside promenade, she found she was unafraid. More than that. She was thrilled.
If it ain’t broke, thinks Den. If it is broken, though? What then? This is Den’s worry. He has shared his fears with his wife. To his surprise, Anita didn’t tell him that he’s got too much time on his hands, that there’s no need to be anxious. She says she’s been feeling the same way. That there’s something wrong, and it isn’t just about the virus, it’s about more than that. But neither of them can pin it down.
Den silences the television, and walks through into the kitchen. Anita looks up from her phone, and says, ‘Had enough of the news?’
‘You know, sometimes I just think they’re talking rubbish. I’m going to do something useful. See whether I’ve got anything to fix the latch on the back gate.’
‘Sit in the shed for half an hour, do you mean?’
‘Both, maybe?’ The back door is open, and Den steps out into the still warm early evening air.
Dorothy fears that the virus is everywhere. She cleans continuously, her hands are papery from all the handwashing. She resents the virus. When she sees its likeness on the television screen, florid, bulbous, yet somehow without a precise shape, she seems to understand exactly where it has come from, what it was sent to do. Coronavirus is her husband. Jimvirus, the hidden danger, lurking everywhere. Jimvirus has seen her on the bus, or walking through the market, smiling at Pakistanis, sitting next to black men on the No.47. He’s seen her throwing away a Toilet Duck bottle and replacing it with something with a garish yellow Morrison’s label. He is doing what he’s always done, closing things down, shutting things out.
‘He spoils everything!’ says Dorothy out loud.
Over the fence, a fence now hidden by untrimmed shrubs, Dorothy’s words, indistinct, are carried to her neighbour. ‘Is that you, Dorothy? Are you alright, love?’
Dorothy stands, and heads for a space where her face can be seen. ‘I didn’t know you were out here. I was talking to myself. You must think I’m a silly old woman.’
‘Of course not. I talk to the dog.’
‘It’s this Coronavirus. It’s driving us all a bit mad’
‘You’re not wrong there,’ says Den. ‘It’s been making me think about all sorts of things I never used to bother with.’
‘All this time to think. It’s not good for you. I just want my old life back.’
‘I don’t think anything’s going back to the way it was before.’
Dorothy shoots Den a look he’s never seen on her face before. She’s a head and shoulders shorter than he is, and on the other side of the fence, but he takes a slight step back to retreat from her glare. Dorothy mutters, and Den says something about the birdsong as he retreats to the shed. The moment of neighbourly chat is over.
Dorothy watches her neighbour walk away. He’s not a bad man. She’s seen him with his wife, talking like friends, sharing a joke, or a little cuddle. How could he understand her life? She barely understands it herself.
Den leaves the shed door open as he scans his collection of domestic salvage, the things that “might come in useful one day”. He feels a certain pity for the woman next door. She’s lost without her husband.
He’d be lost without Anita. He thinks of her, by his side, an hour or so ago, soaping their hands. Den hopes with all his heart that it’s enough to keep her safe. The Prime Minister comes to mind, jollying them along, telling them, months ago, to sing Happy Birthday as they washed their hands. He nearly died, didn’t he?
Den thinks he might be getting closer to the important thought that keeps eluding him.
You can’t take sides in a pandemic.
If it ain’t broke.
What if they don’t know what they’re doing?
What if it is broken?
Things can’t go back to the way they were before.
Why can’t they go back to the way they were before?
Yasmin Ali writes fiction, and non-fiction
Twitter: @YasminAli