Time and the Virus
This essay was written one year prior to publication.
CW: sexual harassment/assault, threats of violence.
I am writing to you from the past.
I don’t know what your world is like, or what you need from me, if anything. Nobody wanted disaster movies after 9/11, so perhaps no one wants to hear this. But I know enough to understand that it is a writer’s job to pay attention.
To write is to be in love with time, even as it kills you. I am not a doctor. I am not a nurse or a virologist. I am not even a statistician or a fact checker or anything really helpful. But I can pay attention to what this felt like, to the sounds and sights and smells of a world which is changing, and I can hope that it is useful.
I am living with time, so much time. Time on the desk, time in the cupboards; so much time that I have stacked it up to the picture rails. Let me tell you about the future.
My dad has two lung conditions and, so far, has refused to self isolate. We may lose him. In many ways I have spent the past few years rehearsing this in my head. I can see myself at the bedside as he coughs like a consumption victim. He has always refused to talk about death. “Just stick me in a binliner and put me out for the lorry,” that’s his way. He has the lung capacity of a hundred and two year old, so say the doctors, and is as stubborn as a cat. I have spent years imagining the hacking cough, the painkillers, the polite and careful nurses. I’ve made myself ready, as much as I can. In that quiet way that the children of sick parents do, I have rehearsed his death in my head so that it will not come as a shock.
Of course if he contracts coronavirus it will not be like this. The nurses will be slapdash and exhausted. I will not be there, because he will be in some kind of isolation. His brothers would never have gotten visas to come for a funeral anyway, but now they won’t even be able to send anything because the postal connections to Zimbabwe are unreliable. If he dies of this he will simply vanish.
If, if, if.
Of course, I could die myself. I have a blocked nose at the moment, it could turn into anything. You must understand that where I am- when I am writing from we don’t quite understand the symptoms. It is the 27th of March 2020. We don’t know if the bodies of the corona-killed are dangerous. We don’t know which name the future will settle on for this outbreak. We don’t know, we don’t know. I’m a playwright; I know what suspense in the first act feels like, right before the story ramps into extremis. Shortness of breath is the killer, they say. We are all short of breath just now, because we are holding it.
Let me tell you about the present.
It is normal, but not normal. Inside my flat I cook for my partner. We eat chocolate, we eat brown rice, we brew cider and make weak applejack by freeze distillation. We laugh together and we talk about all the normal things. Actually our relationship feels easier than it has in months. We have time for each other.
Outside, the supermarket is only letting eight people in at a time. The shops are closed with polite signs in their windows. The outside world feels dangerous; I don’t press the button at crossing or put my foot up on a lamp post to tie my laces.
We don’t know what will happen. Maybe we will get good at caring for each other, and the future will be a caring place. Maybe the borders, once closed, will be hard to open. I hope not.
My cousin in Melbourne has just had a son named Thomas, and he has the extra delicate little nostrils that babies in our family always do. My aunt is in Malaysia, leading a women’s rights charity from her flat on the sixteenth floor; she says the smog is gone and you can see the eagles over Kuala Lumpur. My friends, one holed up in Wisconsin with the cats and her new husband, others in Lima, Manchester, Harare, Colombo.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. If, if, if.
We all live with different amounts of time. Right now, time is one of those infuriating people who bottles up bad news because they think it’s too much for you, even when you’re killing yourself to know. The horror is on a drip feed.
Let me tell you about the past.
When I was eighteen my father threatened to kill me. He did it with a long, purple and blue polka dotted broom handle at the top of the stairs. I remember thinking two things; first how small and angry and sad he seemed. Second: how I refused to die at the hands of a five foot six man wielding a purple and blue polka dotted broom handle. I will not take that to Saint Peter. And he wouldn’t have forgiven himself.
Actually, looking back on his exact words, I am not sure that he wasn’t threatening to kill himself. But that didn’t occur to me at the time.
Home felt unsafe, so I packed a bag and left. It was easy, almost too easy, to leave the home I’d lived in my entire life. I had my IPod, I had my favourite blue jeans and my grandmother’s photo album. The week after I snuck into the flat for my passport, birth certificate, national insurance card. I took all my old swimming awards too. I remember that day so well, the finality of picking through my mother’s papers for my documents, tiptoeing into my room for extra shirts. I didn’t want to disturb the carpet pile so I walked around the edges of the rooms, careful, aware of my body. It felt much the same as the streets do now.
What am I saying? That it was easier to be a homeless eighteen year old with little more than a suitcase and a clutch of school shirts than to be a twenty seven year old writer with money saved and a secure place to lay my head?
Yes. No.
I’m not sure. It’s at least the same kind of difficulty. It’s a gutting of how the world functions. Like discovering there is an extra stair when you were expecting solid ground; that sudden lurch and the calm that comes after.
I was helped, in the past. My school gave me £2.50 a day towards my lunch out of the RE budget. Friend after friend took me in, made sure I had places to sleep, and I managed to spin out their goodwill until I’d finished my A levels. I hated it; the constant asking and the cowtowing and the looks of pity. I went to a Jobcentre for help- in a suit no less. The woman in the job centre looked at me in confusion
“Eighteen and in full time education?”
“Yes,”
“Your parents are responsible.”
“I don’t live with them.”
“Are you looking for full time work?”
“No, I’m doing A levels.”
“You can apply for an EMA.”
“EMAs were scrapped. I was at the protest, they were scrapped months ago and the last applications closed last week.”
“Were they?”
She conferred with a colleague. I was right.
“You can apply for Jobseekers Allowance but not if you’re in full time education. And you can apply for housing through the council, but as you’re a single adult man it will probably be about eighteen months.”
I left. For a while I stayed with a friend from school, and after that with extended family, and then I bummed around, telling each person that I was being put up by someone else. Sometimes I slept on the night bus because I preferred it to asking for help. I got a gardening job that paid me thirty pounds a week and started moving between youth hostels. I saw some pretty good parts of London city this way. Also, Willesden.
In one of the hostels the proprietor tried to coerce me into sex
“You remind me of all my little Bangladeshi boyfriends,” he said, pinning me the way a shark pins prey. I smiled and made small talk until it was safe to slip back to my bunk. Outside, the London riots were in full swing and no-one knew exactly how far they would spread. During the day I printed CVs in a Rymans and trawled the high street applying for jobs, none of which I got. I learned that the proprietor’s rhythms and tried to sneak in when he’d already be asleep. Useless. When the riots started up in earnest I had to come back earlier, and he’d walk belly first into the room where I was staying.
I stayed though. Better a little Bangladeshi boy with a bed to sleep in, than a black kid on the streets while the police are out, I thought. Bide my time. Bide my time.
It seemed less shameful than asking for help.
One night I woke up to find one of the other guests in the hostel had climbed into my bunk and was pressing his erection into the small of my back. I pretended to still be asleep.
If a writer’s job in times of crisis is to notice, then I cannot help notice that none of the feelings of the current moment are new to me. They remind me of that time, when I breathed uncertainty, where I learned to watch my body rage and cry and be violated in a hundred small, inhuman ways, and yet still I functioned.
The word for this is dissociation. It was like hearing a scream, and going over to the window to yell at the person screaming to shut up, only to realise that actually it was you all along. But if I’d stopped to scream I wouldn’t have gotten through.
There were good things in that summer. There was a small hostel near Borough, where I would be woken at five by the sound of a large German man snoring, walk to the river alone, watch light swipe along the South Bank. The baristas in the Cutty Sark Starbucks let me charge my phone each day on a glass of tap water. I wrote poems, applied for jobs, listened to podcasts. I registered the small, quick miracle of each second passing that I remained alive, remained ok.
I could not have lived like this forever, but I could do it for a few months. I stole books from bookshops and swiped strawberries from market stalls. Wherever I lived I spread out a cloth that a friend bought me from Saudi Arabia, and put a candlestick on it, even if I wasn’t allowed to light it. I made myself little homes-in-lieu-of-a-home.
From March to October, I did this. Now it feels like the world is learning the same skills. I am watching white, middle class people feel a police officer’s eyes rasp across their skin. I am watching the newspapers begin to worry about people trapped living with sexual predators because they have nowhere else to go. There is a mean, hurt part of me that wants to say hey, what’s the big idea? Where were you when this was happening to me?
But better late than never.
Let me tell you about the future, by way of the past.
I was cruel for a year, after it all ended. Everything about me turned sharp and condescending. I called people’s outfits brave, I slutshamed, I lied. I made people feel stupid on purpose. I’m good at these things; I know how to use words to hurt people. Worse, I know how to do it in a way that makes them blame themselves.
I’m sorry. God I’m sorry. But that’s not the point of me writing this. I’m writing it to say that I hope our world isn’t cruel in the wake of the virus, or that if it is, that the cruelty lasts only a short time. We will have to guard against it.
My dad and I made up the summer after. His mother had died and I was the only one well enough to travel with him to Zimbabwe. We spent twelve hours in a metal tube together, and had an asthma attack at thirty thousand feet, which was when he realised his inhaler was in the hold. During our transit in Johannesburg a security guard accused him of smuggling drugs inside his dreadlocks.
Last week we had what must have been our longest phone conversation this decade. It was four minutes long. Immediately afterwards I surprised my partner by letting him throw away the boxes I’ve kept packed since 2016, just in case we have to hit the road all of a sudden. It took me nine years to relax again, to soothe the piece of my brain that has been convinced it will never properly be able to stay at home.
(In fact what date did I leave home? Surely not. Wow. Today. It was today, nine years ago. The night of the polka-dot-broom. I remember the date because it was the day of the last census. Exactly nine years ago today.
I don’t think I can include this in the final draft. It sounds contrived, it sounds ridiculous and tied up with a bow. No one will believe that I didn’t plot this or fudge the dates. It’s far too cringey, far too on the nose.
It’s true though.
Nine years ago the inside world began to be dangerous. Today it is the outside.
Time is my lover, and apparently she remembers the important anniversaries.)
Let me tell you about the future, the one you are living in now.
There are some people who are still alive for me who are not for you. There are some phrases we say that you do not, concepts we take for granted that you think incredible. There are hardships in your life that I cannot possibly comprehend, and an ignorance in mine that you wish desperately to return to.
I don’t know what this will become. I don’t know which of the thousand possible futures you are hearing this from, or who will be alive and well in it, and I’m sorry, but I don’t know what I can do just now to make it a good one. I’m staying home, I’m taking notes. I’m paying attention.
I’m hoping that it will help.
