dImage: © Charles Eastwood
One undistinguished weekday, she adds, on impulse, a spiral-bound red notebook to her online shopping delivery. Days later, amid the frugality of a set of ingredients for meals for one – a single aubergine, a small sachet of chow mein sauce, a shrink-wrapped half-cucumber – it arrives. She rests her fingers on the cover. Opens it up. It’s the kind she likes best, narrow-lined inside. Potential, she thinks. At the very least, to be keeping some kind of record.
It’s been eight weeks, five days, since the order to stay at home.
*
Carless, the city goes back in time. Or forwards to a post-human age, where glass and steel cast shade on empty streets. Only a few survivors, masked up, hurry by, clenching latex-gloved fists.
For one sanctioned hour per day, she walks down the middle of roads. Everything is so clean. Her breathing, ragged in the silence.
*
As a counsellor, her WFH time is in high demand. She moves the desk in her spare room, lets the webcam take in the bookshelves. Accretions of language in this small space, intimating counsel you can trust.
Marriages stretched thin like chewing gum. OCD careering off the scales. And the girls who begin to spit and swear, speech peppered with profanity. An epidemic of Tourette’s. As if, in confinement, another, truer language begins to penetrate our own.
*
Chloe-Nicole is sixteen years old, her contouring make-up clownlike and inept. Her still-childlike face fills the screen of Ella’s MacBook, beneath which, to acquire the necessary height, are The Art Book and the DSM-IV.
- And have you been working on the breathing exercises we talked about last time?
- Fucking fat bitch. Sorry. Yes – I’ve been trying. But finding it hard to concentrate, you know. [She gestures] With everything going on.
Jamie, Chloe-Nicole’s little brother, has cystic fibrosis. Their household is shielding.
- And how do you feel about that?
Chloe-Nicole shrugs.
- Saggy cunt. Sorry. I don’t know —
- It’s ok to feel overlooked. To feel jealous, even. We all need to be seen.
*
Spaces are changing. Her mental map of the apartment’s dimensions gets ever more precise: the number of steps between sofa and fridge, the times at which light moves over each white wall. Why are there no pictures? The space is austere, a nun’s cell.
The city likewise, mapped by her body’s movements. She runs, up Division Street, past shuttered bars and the sad defunct shell of the Rare and Racy bookshop. Veers up past the Devonshire Green, then back down West Street, the sunlight liquid silver on the tramlines. Down past the back of City Hall. Apartment buildings high on either side. Then back up Fargate to the Peace Gardens, where the fountains rise and fall, untouristed.
Her motion necessary for thought. Threading sites into a path along which sentences, ideas might flow. She considers her childhood: how she sat at the back of the class, reading the small red Bible with its gilt-edged pages, curious, as others took the piss. Why were they given the Bible, of all things? Perhaps to prepare them for these times.
Time is changing too. The hours of light are too long. We are bleached by it, she thinks.
*
When Ella is assessing, diagnosing, she asks the girl to read aloud. Anything. Whatever she’s studying right now in English, she suggests. Chloe-Nicole disappears offscreen and returns carrying an anthology of American literature. She opens it to a dog-eared page.
- The Brain—Is wider than the Sky—/ For—put them side by side / The one the other will contain / With Ease—and You—beside…
Their eyes meet through the screen.
*
A municipal park, 1am, the wooded end past the playground. A small clearing. She lays a picnic blanket on the ground. Her body, thin; she runs each day now and rations her food. His, paunching a little, the white flesh of his stomach creased. He’s drinking more, justified first by fear and then boredom, a waning marriage, a short commute to the spare room where he works. Late nights and late starts. The realisation that one’s actions are no longer observed.
*
In the red notebook, she writes her own list of unvoiced interjections. Her own profanities, a true language that emerges only under duress.
[When I heard about the virus, my first hope was for Stephen’s death.]
[Our marriage failed because we held each other in contempt; we each saw not a person but a concept / an object / an obstruction]
[A human has an inherent value. We have reaped what we have sown.]
[The apocalypse has sharpened my hunger.]
*
One day she awakes and writes: We can write our way out of this prison. One word in front of the other, one foot in front of the other.
The city belongs to all of us now.
____
Jen Adams is a UK-based researcher and writer; she has previously published short fiction and poetry in journals including Minor Literatures and Burning House Press. Her story The Red Notebook is a response to Paul Auster’s City of Glass from a post-Covid, feminist perspective.