“Doggo,” Coralie muttered on the sofa.
“Erected,” Adam replied.
“Agility course.”
But neither of them was laughing the next morning. A cabinet minister went onGood Morning Britainto say children of separated parents had to stay in one house for lockdown. Zora was in Camden. They might not see her for weeks!
Adam found the clip on Twitter and sent it on to Tom:Exactly what is your pathetic government playing at?Ten minutes later, on a different show, the cabinet minister said that he’d misspoken: Children of separated parents were allowed to see and stay with both. Adam tried to delete the message, but there were already two blue ticks. Fortunately (or worryingly), Tom did not reply. When Boris Johnson, the health secretary, and the chief medical officer were alldiagnosed with Covid on the same day, Adam messaged that he hoped Tom was all right. Tom replied with an italicized red 100 emoji. That seemed to be an English thing, operating on a small emotional chessboard with only four main moves: Jolly, Polite, Withdrawn, Cold. What was a 100 emoji? Polite/withdrawn cusp? At least Tom still drove Zora between their two houses, so she didn’t have to catch the train.
•••
At the beginningof lockdown, they’d started a tradition of family lunch, sitting down together at half past twelve every day. But it was a chaotic and loud affair: Maxi in his high chair, throwing or mashing finger food, and Florence tapping her feet against the chair, knocking her glass off the table with her elbow, sliding down onto the floor. Zora looked more and more stressed every mealtime, the food on her plate untouched.
Coralie offered to bring up meals to her room. But that shone a spotlight on her, only highlighting that most of the food came back down again. Zora washed her knives and forks and plates separately from the rest of the household’s and dried them on paper towels, in case any meat (or meat steam from the dishwasher) had touched them, or meat water from the washing machine had touched the dishcloth. Even after Coralie stopped cooking meat altogether, Zora still said she could smell it.
Coralie had never had a regular one-on-one text correspondence with Marina, but from the beginning of lockdown, they shared, without small talk, what was working.Fage Greek yogurt full fat, plastic spoon not metal. Waitrose blueberries organic, soaked to get rid of white stuff. Broadway Market kefir, plain not fruit, I’ll send two bottles home with her. Peanut butter crunchy, not smooth, glass jar better thanplastic tub.Calories were going into Zora; she certainly wasn’t starving. But if there was any tension or noise in the room when she was eating, her throat closed over and she could hardly swallow or breathe.
Coralie had read so many books when she was young, because to read was to enter a different, and private, world, one her parents might have been suspicious of but ultimately had to respect. She often wondered why Zora (with her clearly superior intellect and almost-unlimited access to books) didn’t read as much as she had. Perhaps it was because, unlike Coralie, Zora didn’t have anything to escape. She was content to exist in real life and didn’t need to be swept away for entire days at a time. It was sad, then, when the trauma of the global pandemic plunged Zora into constant, insatiable, dissociative reading, all day and half the night. Coralie spent Maxi’s naptime taking down favorite novels from the alcove shelves in the sitting room, dusting them, and arranging them to make them attractive and accessible to Zora:Love in a Cold Climate,I Capture the Castle,Bonjour Tristesse,Prep. It felt odd to touch books again because she had barely read a chapter since the start of the pandemic. And as for writing—ha! Scrolling the news was all she could do.
Having written four full-length books of nonfiction on crash schedules, Adam thought he knew what it was to be confined to his desk. But he’d still been able to record his pods, go into the newsroom and Westminster, have lunches and coffees with colleagues and sources, and swim (only rarely) at the pool. Locked down for weeks on end, his show on Times Radio not starting till June, he withered from lack of connection, spending endless hours on Twitter reading #longreads from American science communicators about how even mild cases of Covid led to chronic brain damage. Because the events had taken place in a different universe, no onecared about his December 2019 election book, scheduled for release at Easter. He wasn’t happy about that, and he was nervous about the radio show—whether he’d be good enough, whether anyone would listen. But he didn’t express his anxiety in a way that Coralie could deal with, empathize over, and try to soothe. It came out instead as tsk-ing irritation, minor explosions, or he’d zone out for half a conversation, then come to with a scathing “What?”
He tried to impose order in a world where there was none by controlling what he could: namely, the twice- or three-times-daily stacking of the dishwasher in a precise way and to a precise schedule known only to himself. Often Coralie would be at the chopping board, preparing yet another elaborate vegetarian meal (meals being the main way of marking the passage of time), only to find Adam hovering behind her, waiting to slot her knife into the cutlery basket.
•••
One Sunday night,Coralie, Adam, and Zora watched the Queen’s national address from the sofa. “Republic now,” Coralie murmured. “And not just Australia—here.” But that old lady had really lived through a lot, including (unlike most people fulminating about the Blitz spirit) actual World War II. For a moment, her mere existence seemed to say that everything would one day be okay. “Okay, republic soon.” Coralie backed down. “Oh, Anne’s on FaceTime. Anne? Did you watch the Queen? Quite moving, I thought.”
“Silly,” Anne said.
“What exercises should I do in the house, Granny?”
“Zora? Do Yoga with Adriene.”
“What did you ring for?” Adam was scrolling his phone. “Shit! Boris Johnson’s been taken to hospital!”
Well, anyone could have foreseen that! He was clearly so fat andunfit! Anne was still on FaceTime, so Coralie rushed to get her laptop and search Twitter. But as she watched the news spreading through the Westminster hacks, through Boris’s supporters and his many enemies, she found herself unable to feel gleeful, or even to blame the victim. Her heart was racing. She was scared.
“Yes, it must be day eight, or thereabouts,” Anne was saying. “That’s when it takes a turn for the worse. Well, as long as it’s not pneumonia.”
“What would happen then?” Zora’s face was pale. Was it wrong to let her hear all this? Were they like those parents who let their kids watch 9/11 on the news?
Lots of doctors were on Adam’s Liverpool WhatsApp. One of them said it was well known in “medic circles” that Boris was already “prone and vented.”
Prone and vented! Fucking hell.
She thought about the prime minister’s body and joined what she knew of it with the images she’d seen from Italy of old men lying on their fronts, their vulnerable white folds of back skin exposed—weren’t they cold? Would Boris’s back have bristles, like the hair sometimes left on roast pork, which she no longer cooked because Zora’s revulsion had infected her? Would he have rough skin with inflamed follicles, or soft baby skin, untouched by the sun after years of justifiable embarrassment about taking his shirt off?
All this was rushing through Coralie’s mind as she contemplated the prime minister’s death. As a plot development it was dramatic, a season one finale–level shock. Who would be in charge if he was in a coma? If he died now, and she was given the option (was godlike in some way, or a showrunner), would she go back in time and make him die before Brexit? Yes, if he had to die, and she was giventhe choice, she would opt for 2015. But if he could stay alive? Maybe weakened—perhaps even bald? She found that she would prefer it.
A few days later, somewhat anticlimactically, Rishi Sunak reported that the prime minister was “sitting up in bed and engaging positively with the clinical team,” raising the intriguing prospect that he’d previously been lying down and engaging in a way that was negative. Little bitch, getting Coralie all worried—the ultimate selfish act from the ultimate selfish man!
•••
Ever since shewas a child, she’d made sense of her life by looking forward. As soon as she’d known Maxi’s due date, she’d created a spreadsheet in her Dropbox labeledLife Plan, with columns for her, Adam, Zora, Flo, and Maxi. In September 2020, Florence was due to start preschool at the primary school next to the park. Maxi would start Montessori in September 2021, just as Zora was starting Year 9. When Coralie was forty-one, in 2024, both her children would be in primary school. Would any of that happen? What was life if you couldn’t rely on LifePlan.xls?
As lockdown spring unfolded, sunnier and more beautiful than any London spring she could remember, Coralie realized that her old full-time job at the agency had allowed her to dream of more time with Florence with no prospect of it coming true. Then, the nine-to-three-thirty Montessori schedule had left so many remaining hours of the day for parenting that she’d briefly (for the six shining months Florence had attended in-person classes) felt like a capital-G, capital-MGood Mother. Now, having no Montessori, or any childcare at all, and a baby boy who was beginning to assert himself, she was in the unusual (for her) position of wantinglesstimewith the children—much less. It was bad enough to be a personal chef, food source, bum-wiper, teacher, and entertainer for fifteen hours a day plus night feeds; it also felt bad to feel bad about hating it. It was perhaps unwise to have spent so much time reading about gentle parenting and attachment, about childhood trauma and “breaking the cycle.” If she knew anything, it was the impact a parent had upon a child.
Overwhelmed, stymied, full to the brim with resentment, she targeted Adam with all the anger it was otherwise unsafe to express, snapping at him to get off the sofa, to leave the house, to get over his dishwasher fixation, and toman up(where did that come from?) about starting his new job. She snarled at him to get off her side of the bed (“an invisible line, running down the mattress—don’t cross it”), stop polluting her air with his flatulence, stop laughing loudly on the phone, stop moaning about his book, stop talking to her, stop looking at her, and give her some fucking space! She was like a sandcastle, and Adam and the kids were like the sea, eroding her and flattening her with their proximity and demands. If she went for a walk, or listened to a podcast, she could begin rebuilding her ramparts, only to get knocked down again by wave after wave ofneeds.
