Tag: lockdown

blog

Lockdown. 3

Comfort Purchases

A sumptuous fake black fur coat.

An indoor turbo bike trainer.

A frozen lobster (to eat, not keep as a pet).

A family size bag of Scotmid’s finest cheese puffs. £1. For a family of one.

Signs of panic

Responding to a troll on twitter.

Responding to another troll on twitter.

Stalking trolls on twitter to assess their trollness on a scale of 1-10.

Becoming a troll on twitter.

Physical symptoms

Glasses of three years suddenly too tight and need adjusted immediately.

Headache caused by glasses that are too tight is sinister and life threatening.

Jaw pain connected to the neck pain connected to the shoulder pain connected to the arm pain connected to the sinister headache.

Strange redness appearing on one toe then another then another. Gangrene. Must be gangrene.

WhatsApp messages (received)

OMG

4 weeks childcare and trying to work not pretty honestly think it might be 12.

Sending 100kg of cotton wool (from NZ).

OK. So pissed off mainly tbh at the effing incompetence.

Panic buying

Potatoes

Onions

Toilet roll

Cheese puffs

Commitments

I will read Ulysses (I won’t).

I will finish my brilliant novel about a climate disaster (I won’t).

I will finish my last year’s less brilliant novel about a flat earther (I won’t).

I will finish all the half-arsed short stories sitting in my drafts folder and submit them all to the world’s most important literary magazines and anthologies (who am I kidding?).

How are you? Really?

Tired anxious bored listless fed up frightened pissed off stiff sore nervous bored tired frustrated exhausted frightened sore stiff fragmented spiraling dipping on edge listless did I say listless yet flustered rattled bothered harassed unnerved flapping listless sore worried dithering feverish upset tired bored frightened tremulous panicky pissed off idle bone idle troubled disturbed perturbed reverbed unnerved but the sky’s nice have you seen the sky?

Tags covid19, lockdown

memoir

Memory 1

Of course I should have known. I hadn’t thought it through. So here I am, outside Miro’s and all the blinds are down, and the glass door is covered in paper on the inside. Sellotaped probably. I mean, I don’t think it had blinds before, the cafe. These blinds are not the ones you use to dress up a place. Make a room look dusk pretty. Convivial. No, the new garments give the locked down café a hooded, sombre feel, like it was scuppered years ago and now sits, derelict, waiting for some disaster capitalist to turn it into student flats. So I just stand here, staring at the interloping blinds. It’s the sort of confusion you get when you wake up in the middle of the night and you’re not in your own bed. In a hotel or a friend’s house or even in the other bedroom in your flat because you fancied a firmer mattress or the for-the-guests-only eye-blue Egyptian cotton sheets and you put your hand out, feel around in the dark, groping for the familiar to touch and fix you in a point of place or time, until you catch the smell of the hotel shower gel, or the flash of the amber street light through the thin spare room curtains, and you sink back, reassured. Outside the café with the closed blinds a couple stand beside me, blinking. Three of us blinking as one. Passers by might think we are together, two households out for coffee, a woman who favours her right leg along with her elderly parents, or her aunt and uncle given the lack of shared familial facial features. Do strangers look at each like this? Or is this paranoia? A slippery slope. No, I’ve seen them. Checking, counting, judging. A whisper to their husband. A post on social media. Did you see them? Definitely more than two households. They weren’t even social distancing. And the state of her! Not even a mask.

I look like my father, not my mother. I tested this once twenty years ago. More by accident than design. Goa, India, in a tie-dyed village in a coconut-palmed shack that smelt of scratching dogs and incensed ashrams. Sharing the on-the-road far-too-long-almost-out- of-money beach hut with a cat, three hand-sized filigree moths that clung to the thatched roof and twitched and fluttered, and two young Swedish women. They bewitched me those women. If you change your mind I’m the first in line. Honey, I’m still free. You should do it, they said, stroking each other’s naked scalps. Look at us, we were beautiful before but now we’re so beautiful. Hair is just another word with nothing left to lose. They were. Beautiful. Sinead O’Connor beautiful before she did the habit thing. So they flanked me to the barbers and they sat me in the sweaty plastic chair and giggled as my blond curls grifted, pale, wanton, in amongst the hennaed orange moustache clippings that piled the corners and sank, heartless into discarded clay cups of heavy sweet chai. The mirror, I recall, was greased up with steam and lather and I couldn’t see the new me until I paid up, a handful of rupees, walked out into the mug of the street, and looked at myself in the pharmacist’s window. I was not myself. I was my father. My father with a shaved head.

There’s a cafe up on the High Street, hen, the blinking woman who isn’t my mother or my aunt says to me. Not as flash as them ones here but it’s only one fifty for an egg roll and as much coffee refill as you like. Thanks I say to her, smiling. See that one there, I point to the cafe next door, seven pound fifty for an egg roll. Really, I say as her eyes round, and not even a sprig of parsley. I haven’t forgiven my father for my ugliness. I couldn’t forgive Sweden either. Take a chance on me. My hair grew back in. There is beauty outwith and beauty within. To not have either is a price I continue to pay. I like my eggs sunny side up, the yolk melting sun across a soft white buttered Scottish morning roll.

Tags covid, lockdown

fiction Flash fiction

Kiss Me Quick

‘Kiss me’, she said crying. Jesus Christ. Is that Maureen’s voice? I put the watering can down and lean over the stair banister to have a look. No, can’t be. Yes. No doubt about it. It’s Maureen. With, bloody hell, with Peter. Maureen and Peter, my two neighbours on the ground floor, locked in a grotesque embrace. Never mind social distancing, I’ve seen his pants on the line and they were practically crinoline.

‘I can’t’, Peter says. His arms are all the way around her waist. His fingers, stubbed off short at the best of times, are doing their level best on an intertwine. I gulp some air.

‘Why not?’

“I just can’t.’

I get up on my tiptoes and lean over further. I am four storeys up, and the light is not as good on the ground floor. Their faces are three or four inches apart. Even in the gloom, Peter’s neck is flushing deep pink. Maureen’s hands are trembling on his back, her long baby blue nails digging deep into his spine under his grey cotton mix cardigan. Her purple skirt has slipped out of kilter.

‘Why not?’

‘I just can’t.’

I’m not ageist and I know it’s not kind to say this but you need to know that they’re both the wrong side of sixty and Maureen’s supposed to be in lockdown with her new fancy man on the other side of the high street with an adult-only tree house. And I know it’s not about what you’ve got but who you are but Peter’s only got a dumpy one-bed caravan with the curtains never washed to even get a chance of being shrunk on the boggy side of Glen Tarbert. I know where my loyalties would lie.

She pushes her lips to his. He tilts his head away.

‘I do want to,’ he says.

‘So why can’t you?’

‘I just can’t.’

‘Just for a second.’

‘No.’ She pushes her lips again. Again he tilts his head. I used to have a doll like that. Giggles her name was. She came with a plastic spoon with a heap of green on it. Every time I put the spoon to her mouth she shook her head. Her lips were permanently pursed. I raged at her obstinacy. If I had to eat spinach why shouldn’t she? Ah, Maureen’s speaking again.

‘No one’s looking.’ I sense her coquetry. I snigger and back away from the banister. The holes in my ears are doing the things pupils do when their owners have taken drugs.

‘It’s not about someone looking,’ he says.

‘What is it, love?’ Love? She called him love? What have I missed? Where have I been? Laughter is welling up my gut, about to spill all over the landing. Even the wilting petunias, waiting in growing exacerbation for their daily watering, perk up. ‘Is it me? My breath?’ she asks. Her purple skirt is skittish now. Frisky even. He coughs.

He says ‘it’s my teeth.’

‘What about your teeth?’ I see the shine of his bald crown shimmer. Then shake. He sounds like he might start crying. She pushes her groin into his. She rocks her hips. Where is my phone? I need to get this live. I pat my pockets down. Nothing. Damn thing must be inside. I lean forward again.

‘They’re not in,’ he says.

‘What’s not in?’

‘My upper dentures.’ The words are whispered. She leans back in his arms.

‘Let me see,’ she says. There’s a sound that could be a choked back chuckle.

‘No.’

‘Pretty please.’

‘It’s private.’ Her right arm has moved from his neck to somewhere deep around his front and a bit below his waist.

‘It wasn’t private last week.’ God Almighty, even I’m embarrassed now.

‘Please Maureen, don’t make me.’ He turns his head from side to side but he doesn’t look up. Must be checking to see if anyone’s about. Jesus Christ, is she for real? Can she not see his torment? But I want her to continue. Force him on. Fine tune her lustful torture. It’s the most fun I’ve had since lockdown started. A phone rings in one of the middle flats. ‘Let’s go inside,’ he says. Maybe I should nip in now for my phone. But what if I miss the best part?

‘No.’

‘We’ll go inside. So I can put them in. Then…’ She interrupts him.

‘Let me touch it.’

‘What?

‘Your gums.’ There’s an interminable and dreadful hiatus before he replies.

‘What on earth do you want to do that for?’

‘Because it’s sexy, Peter.’ His stubbed off fingers jump on her back. He just hangs on to his intertwine. His pink flush has turned deep cherry red. Her right hand reappears from somewhere down there and a multi-ringed finger lands on his lips.

‘Open up, honey.’ She is dentist talking to a wayward child. I am transfixed. My mouth opens in harmony with his. I lean further over, the wooden railing digging into my stomach. She’s poking around his mouth with the finger. ‘Actually,’ she says, ‘it’s really rather cute.’

‘Cute?’ He manages to get the word out despite the finger.

‘You know, innocent, adorable.’ I can’t watch. I mustn’t watch. I can’t stop watching. It is appalling. Arse-tightening. Erotic. Dreadful.

‘Really?’ His tone has changed.

‘Oh, yes.’

‘You like it without my teeth?’

‘Like it? I love it.’ Their heads move together. There’s a long squelching sucking noise. The sound of suction. I kick a foot back and knock over the watering can. There’s a stifled scream. I can’t tell whether it’s male or female. I’m too late to move away. I stare down into the gloom. I am paralysed. Two pink cheeked faces look up. They are both open mouthed. They are hungry chicks desperate for a feed.

And, dear readers, as far as I can see, there’s not an upper tooth between them.

Tags lockdown

Flash fiction musings

Protected: Haystack

Post author By Kirsty Lewin
Post date April 28, 2020

Tags covid19, darning, lockdown, needles, relationships

Flash fiction musings

Looking Out

She is sitting at the table. Top floor. Looking out. Yes, the woman could be doing something more interesting. Windows are such overused mechanisms in the arts. But, if she didn’t look out of the window, what would be the point of windows?

The woman is watching a window cleaner. The man is on a ladder, leaning into his work, wiping cloudy water off the glass with a scraper. The man has the trousers of a painter and the belted toolkit of a carpenter. The woman is surprised to see the man. She doesn’t think window cleaning is an essential service. On Easter Friday too. Although, considering the issue for a bit longer, she changes her mind. If eyes are the windows to the soul, a dirty window is not what we need right now. Never have souls been so important. And never have we needed so badly to be able to look into them. She won’t report the window cleaner. She used to be one to make a scene. Not any more.

There is a cat going about the woman’s legs. The cat, under-fed, though probably over-loved, is making small sad sounds that continue, unabated, as the waves do, lapping on the nearby shore. Without further explanation you’ll come to your own conclusions.

The woman is too poor to feed the cat.

Cat food is no longer available.

Or the woman is a witch.

The sun, bright through the naked window, does seem to be throwing the shadow of a coned hat across the light and dark of the room. In this scenario the cat is definitely black.

The plain truth is that the cat is on a diet. The cat must lose 300g in weight. The woman is doing her best to make that happen. She doesn’t always get it right. The cat is the only corporeal thing in the woman’s life right now. Sometimes the woman buries her face in the cat’s soft white underbelly and weeps. Or does she?

Beneath the woman’s feet are wooden floorboards. Beneath those, a child is laughing. A younger child is singing. It’s not possible to know whether they are boys or girls or one of each. You assume that that the children are alive. I’ve already told you that the woman is on the top floor, looking out. But if the woman is indeed a witch, the evil kind, even though the cat’s only on a diet, the children may be dead. Dead and dried and mewling. Wraiths warbling up out of the black ash and crushed shells that separate this floor from the one below.

But in this time of pandemonium and pandemics and a run on pancake flour, desiccated children are simply not required. Readers, and I include you in this, need to be consoled, cossetted, wrapped up with velvety words and slubs of reassurance. There are no dead children under the floor boards. If there had been, I would have been sure to mention the smell.

The other sound, above what is a rather lovely tinkle of young children being young, is the wind. The zephyr, thrilled finally to be taking centre-stage, is poking around the corbels, rattling spits of gravel on the window ledge, sending wisps of plastic whimsy spinning and whirling above the empty street. The woman opens the window to let the new sounds in. The swathe of silence inside has been in danger of becoming a shroud.

A pigeon lands on the guttering. The woman hears the bird’s toes click and curl around the lead rim. The woman catches the pigeon’s eye. The woman and pigeon sit there for a long time, eye to eye. The woman is pondering the shape and colour of the pigeon’s soul. You’ll have to decide for yourself what the pigeon is pondering, if anything. They sit together for longer than is comfortable for the woman. Less so, perhaps, for the pigeon. But the woman cannot stop looking out.