The Sophist 12: The rich, drowning dreams
It’s the dreams I will miss, when I no longer have covid. The rich, thick drowning of them. The way I go straight into the story the minute my head hits the pillow, or, as happened on Friday, the minute my head hit the kitchen table. Except I haven’t been allowed anywhere near the kitchen table since my positive test result came in an email on Saturday night. Since we found out that I am unclean I have been confined to my bedroom while my daughter and Y, who lives with us, inhabit the rest of the house. My daughter comes to talk to me from the far end of the corridor, showing me her latest Lego creation, a four-storey rainbow house. I tell her that Taylor Swift has put a new album on Spotify and so we listen to a bit of that on my phone.
Then I feel tired and have to go back to bed, back to the sinking. There is a pile of my clothes on the floor and Y, who is Greek and grew up with mythology, comes to the doorway with food and says he thinks the pile looks so complete that it is going to rise up and turn into another person, walk away. I think this would be the best outcome for the pile. I’d be impressed if anyone managed to get out of here.
Y tested negative. My daughter hasn’t been tested. She’s on good form, seems very well, although when I talk to her about the fact that she is now in quarantine until Christmas Day, that she won’t see anyone - that’s hard for a nine-year-old. I hate myself for it. I feel like an idiot. How did I catch this? Did I stop taking care? Was it from the builder who came to fix our broken bathroom and said wearing a mask was humiliating and I stood back and thought I don’t even care any more, let me move out of this house, let me fix all the things that are wrong with it and then get away from here, get away from the police knocking on the door every single week now. It used to be okay living here but I don’t know what to do anymore, not with the threats.
We’re all locked in here til Christmas, with neighbours who - I dream of moving somewhere where my daughter doesn’t think you have to put your head down if you walk outside and see someone who lives beside you, who shares your kitchen wall, your bedroom wall, practically shares your back yard. Avoiding their gaze in case of trouble. Every room in our house shares a wall with one of theirs, a fact that came to life during the first lockdown when they had loads of people round, drinking, a party, another of their endless lockdown parties, and they knocked my fence down with their car, sending a concrete pillar into our yard, smashing everything. So many alternative facts were then told that I ended up in trouble with their housing association for not helping them more with the blood.
Believe me I have tried dealing with it though the appropriate channels, as well as the friendly ones. But nobody does anything. I think my neighbours, in their own way, are just trying to cope.
In 1794 a Frenchman called Xavier de Maistre published a book called A Journey Around My Room. I read it a few years ago and felt I had come home. These were somehow my thoughts, only they had been written by an impetuous soldier who was put under some kind of house arrest in Turin after he got into a duel with another soldier. He was stuck his room for 42 days, where he wrote the manuscript. If I get long Covid and am here for the next six months I might write the reply. I don’t have the book to hand, unfortunately - it’s somewhere else in this house and I feel reluctant to give the others yet another instruction of something to look for for me.
Last night my daughter was sent on a hunt to find certain Roald Dahl books for me because I needed a certain rush of gruesome children’s stories, a certain hit of juicy pain. Not for her, for me. Of course after she found them and hurled them along the corridor at me (a good game, I recommend it, paperbacks only, remember to duck) I then didn’t read them. I just fell asleep with them near my hand. Some kind of osmosis may have occurred.
In the dream I liked the most, late last week, my daughter and I were playing with a real life bear. A brown bear. It was bigger than a dog but my daughter was treating it like a puppy, tickling it and expecting a cute response. I knew she shouldn’t be, because I knew it might eat her, but I didn’t want to say anything and ruin the moment. Well, if it does eat her, I thought to myself. You know. It might have been worth it? Adorable.
At this point I did not know that I had covid, that I was infectious. I think my dream knew though.
Having always had FOMO, it’s nice to finally become part of the thing that everyone’s been talking about all year. As a person with no other bodily collapse, no other risks, I feel some relief in the inevitablity of it, in finally catching it, as well as the guilt. Joining the national, global conversation. Even though my initial symptoms were a headache and a runny nose, and I don’t think a year of listening to the national, global conversation had led me to believe that a headache and a runny nose meant I had covid. My temperature was normal. My taste and smell were great. Why do we still not know? Why was I not eligible for a test until I started coughing? I went near nobody after that.
Why is my daughter still not eligible for a test because she has displayed no symptoms? The anger. The rage. I must rest, I must rest. I fill in the test and trace form sent to me. It wants to track the places I have been. It keeps asking if I have been attending a place of education. I’ve been taking my daughter to school every day and picking her up again, but I only stood in the playground, not inside the building. It wants to know which days I attended this school. But I didn’t attend, so I can’t put it on the list. I was not a pupil. I just hugged and kissed a pupil who sometimes sleeps in my bed with me. But the app is apparently not interested in that, even though it could well be my child who gave me the virus, asymptomatically. I contact the school, who have already closed down for Christmas like others in Hackney, Greenwich, other places. We get us a test ordered. We still have to let the other parents know. Why does the NHS app not understand this, why does the school have to organise it, haven’t they suffered enough?
Where did those billions in tracing spending go?
The rage.
I have to stay calm. I’m in bed. Some of the rage is directed at myself. My accountant says I have to sign a form. I read the email three times and cannot understand it through the fog. I have to forward it to Y who signs it for me with the signature saved on my drive that I can never find. He says it was very straightforward. Was it? Nothing makes sense. I tell him to stop shouting at me from the doorway. He says he is whispering. Then I am laughing. Why did I think he was shouting. Was it me. Was it always me. Was it always this.
In some ways this has been the happiest year of my life. I have laughed so, so hard, so many days, so many nights.
In my waking dreams, Christmas is cancelled.