Chapter Text
“Fifteeen-hundred quid — a week!?” Con’s head swims and, though he doesn’t know it yet, his psyche will be twisting in the wind for another two years.
The teenage nurse-in-training wearing the sickly pink polo shirt just shrugs. I didn’t ask to be the face of this scam, the gesture intimates. She swings open a heavy institutional door. “It comes with an en-suite toilet,” she says, consolingly. As if Con were checking his elderly mum into The Savoy Hotel and not a mid-range Surrey care home with plastic fixtures and fluorescent lights.
Con looks around. The “en-suite toilet” is windowless and faceless, dominated by a stand-up shower with a plastic chair screwed to the floor. The basin is a disgrace. The cheapest from the hardware store with a rob-the-workman layer of adhesive attaching it to the walls. Does no one know how to attach wall anchors anymore? He turns on the tap, puts his fingers under the stream. The water is ice cold. In his mind’s eye, he sees himself dunking his head underwater and silently screaming.
“There’s no hot water,” he says, dully.
The nurse shrugs again. This one is more eloquent. It says: but I am paid to shield you from unpleasant realities. So just let me get on with that. “Wouldn’t want her to burn herself.”
Con shakes his head, looks at himself in the polished mirror. Who is that tired old man staring back at him? He takes a deep breath, tasting the bitter blue cleaner in the back of his throat. “Could you excuse me a minute?”
The nurse-in-training nods. She understands. His crushing new reality is her daily routine. “Yeah, if you don’t mind, I’m going to take a sneaky fag break,” she flashes a faint, confidential smile.
“Sure,” he says, not looking in her direction.
Alone, he takes a slow tour of the bedroom, which is also the sitting room. It’s really just one room. Blank white walls, portable porcelain commode, boxy hospital bed, polyester curtains framing a postage stamp window with a view of slate rooftops and slate rain. What could possibly merit fifteen-hundred pounds a week? There’d better be real fucking gold dust pressed into her medications.
He whispers aloud to the only person he prays to now. “There’s American money in the next job. When the first cheque clears, I’ll put down the deposit at that luxury care home in North London. I promise… Mum.”
In his mind’s eye, he’s sixteen in the dining room chair while Mum trims his hair. She’s gone prematurely silver, but she styles it long, with curled ends and a neat fringe. A 60’s hairstyle that embarrasses her son who is obsessed with the here and now.
As Mum tidies the line of hair at the nape of his neck, she says, “Why throw good money after bad, Rob?” The name she’s always called him. “I told you, if I ever go ga-ga, just stick me in an NHS care home and spend the money on a real car. That beater hatchback from Liverpool doesn’t even have a catalytic converter.”
Mum is well-versed in practical matters like cars. Had to when Dad lost his job as a mining engineer and sunk into a black depression. To the day of his death, you could say any foul word in his presence except “Thatcher.”
Con sinks further into the scene. The two-up, two-down Granddad bought with his merchant mariner’s pension after the war. For how much, was it? About fifteen-hundred pounds, he reckons.
The scissors snip audibly next to his ear. “You promised, Rob.”
It’s true. Con had agreed with her, but he knows what those NHS care homes are like. Heard horror stories from his cousin Trish, who was a Long-Term Care nurse for a total of forty-eight hours. On her first overnight shift, she discovered a resident’s room overrun with ants. When she told her co-workers, they didn’t care. Said she could clean it up, or no one would. So she napalmed the ants with something toxic, but couldn’t find their source. Until she lifted the sheet to check the patient for pressure sores and found that they had nested…oh, god, just to think of it — they were nesting in her vagina.
No. Not going to happen. Not to Mum.
“Sorry, Mum.” The dining room evaporates. Back in the en-suite toilet, he toes the floor. His boot scuffs the fake wood-grain linoleum black.
That was 1 February, 2020.
Chapter Text
3 February, 2020
London
As other European countries impose strict lockdowns to slow the exponential spread of the Coronavirus, Prime Minister Boris Johnson keeps Britain open.
In a speech, Johnson warns the public: "coronavirus will trigger a panic and a desire for market segregation that go beyond what is medically rational to the point of doing real and unnecessary economic damage.”
1 March, 2020
Surrey
In the care home dining room, Con fills the electric kettle with cold water from the tap.
In the next room, an evangelical vicar plays acoustic guitar, crooning “Jesus Loves Me” as the unsinging residents clutch service sheets. Mum always preferred her religion abstract and Catholic. Con starts to close the door, but a robust Haitian nurse warns, “health and safety.” The universal prohibition. He capitulates, leaving it open.
When the kettle boils, he fills the teapot and joins Mum by the window in matched, worn easy chairs. He’ll have to let it cool to a nigh-undrinkable tepid temperature. The stroke left Mum half-paralysed and non-verbal. With her still-functioning left side, she can do some simple tasks, but her personality, once so indomitable, is locked inside. Part of Con is locked in there, too.
He puts his hand over hers. Her skin is like paper, but her fingers are still long and elegant.
“That new hairdresser takes his share, but he did a serviceable job,” he says conversationally. It’s true. The bloke takes advantage of his captive audience and charges twice the standard price for haircuts. Still, Mum’s silver hair, newly styled into a textured bob with a side fringe, looks fetching.
Mum stares at, not out, the window. Outside are the bare branches of a magnolia tree. Con does what he’s learned to do since the stroke, supplying her side of the conversation in his own mind. “What’s the point of having long, thick hair in your seventies if someone’s just going to chop it off?” Mum asks.
He answers aloud, not particularly caring what anyone else thinks, “You should experiment. Remember when I finally worked up the courage to ask you to style me like Annie Lennox? Showed you the cover of Sweet Dreams on cassette and everything. I couldn’t believe it when you said ‘yes.’ You worked so carefully, checking the album cover every so often for reference. Then I looked in the mirror — and it was the same short-back-and-sides you always gave me. Work won’t let me get an orange pixie cut now, but you could get one just to take the mickey.”
In his head, he hears Mum chuckle. “Sure. Then you can stick me on the porch like a jack-o’-lantern to scare the children. Anyway, I want to hear about the outside world. How is Marcel?”
Con lays his palm on the teapot, then jerks it away. Still too hot. Gazing at its floral pattern, he answers aloud, “We broke up.”
“Rob — I liked Marcel! He made the best Algerian cuisine. How many more boyfriends and girlfriends do you want me to invest in, only to have my heart broken?”
Hell with it. Con pours himself a scalding cup of too-weak tea, just to have something to pin his focus on. “I don’t think I’m the marrying type, Mum.”
“Was Marcel?”
Con doesn’t answer.
Mum’s voice presses on. “I know you won’t take this advice now. But I’m going to plant it like a seed, so that it germinates at just the right moment. A partner won’t stand between you and being alone and decrepit in a care home. No one will. So stop forcing yourself to find that one person and open your heart to world around you. Do it while you have the strength for it.”
The thought is such a revelation to Con that he perks up from his reverie and looks at Mum square in the face. He searches her expression for some hint that this idea has originated from her. But her once-quick brown eyes just gaze past him.
Chapter Text
23 March, 2020
London
When the stay-at-home order is issued, Con is furious with himself. What a stupid bloody idea to dump Mum in a care home, assuming that infectious diseases just blow over. Didn’t he live through the fucking 80’s? He’ll take care of her himself if he has to. His jobs are indefinitely on hold and there is nothing to do except try not to over-water the plants in his boredom.
He calls the care home’s office. After listening to a blank line for twelve minutes (which makes him appreciate the necessity of hold music), he hears a tired, familiar voice say, “Imminent Horizon Care Home.”
“Hello. I’d like to move my mum. Quick as possible.”
“Sure,” the nurse-in-training says, sounding relieved. But with an uncomfortable edge of darkness that gives Con pause. Somehow he’d expected resistance.
“That’s it?” he asks.
There’s an unnerving silence. Then, she continues in a confidential tone, “I shouldn’t tell you this, but the waiting list is three times as long as when I got here. Most people are rushing their aging parents into care homes. The maintenance care to keep your mum alive is going to be impossible to access in a few weeks’ time.”
“What’s she need?”
“Besides dialysis?”
“Can she do that at home?”
The nurse-in-training laughs once, mirthlessly, then coughs a sad smoker’s cough. “I know you can wikihow DIY dialysis. But if it were my mum, she’d want to eat a bullet first.”
Shit .
“Well, I’ll come to see her, at least.”
The silence on the other end of the line suffocates him.
—
7 April, 2020
London
The nurse-in-training — Lorna, her name is — arranges a facetime call between Con and Mum every time she’s on shift. Even fixes Mum’s hair according to Con’s instructions. Not like Mum could do, not by a mile. But bless her, she tries.
Though he finds himself with more time, he has less motivation. The plants are beginning to brown around the edges. And sometimes it feels like the things around him aren’t real.
On this facetime call — which he doesn’t yet know will be the last — Lorna’s phone beeps, interrupting them. Con grits his teeth, annoyed.
“Oh,” Lorna gasps. And after several seconds: “The Prime Minister’s been moved to intensive care.”
Con laughs out loud. Then he sees, on the screen, Mum’s lips twitch. Is it a smile or reproof? Doesn’t matter. That’s a response. For the first time since this nightmare started, he feels hopeful.
Chapter Text
15 April 2020
News
Mass graves are dug in London. Bristol erects a tent mortuary in a hospital car park.
—
1 May 2020
London
And then the bottom falls out from this tenuous routine. Lorna’s furloughed, along with half of the nurses, and untrained part-time staff are drafted in. “It’s hard economic times,” the senior management’s form e-mail says. The mixed fonts give Con a headache.
The care home only offers weekly voice calls, but Mum’s nonverbal, so that’s fucking useless. Still, he calls just to listen for the stirring of her breath and makes sure to thank whatever shift worker holds the phone. It’s a new one each time.
He can’t leave the flat more than once a day for exercise. Like clockwork, at 12 pm he goes on a pre-lunch run on the south bank of the Thames, gazing out at the ghost town of Canary Wharf.
On the way back, he stops at the Tesco Express on the corner to pick up any staples left on the shelves, which always seem to have been picked-over by locusts. The queue is unbelievable.
Two metres ahead of Con, a portly pensioner in thick NHS glasses and a moth-eaten wool pullover leans heavily on a walking stick. Suddenly, the pensioner erupts into a paroxysm of coughing. A wide berth opens around him.
“It’s—it’s—emph—emphysema,” the pensioner chokes out. But his unmistakable Blackpool accent seals his fate.
A work-from-home banker wearing a posh shirt over tapered gray sweatpants shouts, “Go home!”
The pensioner looks around helplessly and, when no one jumps to his defence, he gets the message. He yields his place in line, coughing and sputtering as he retreats. Con feels a stab of guilt, but sensing the mounting impatience of the people behind him, takes the pensioner’s place in the queue.
—
22 May, 2020
News
The Guardian and The Mirror publish articles about their joint investigation of Dominic Cummings. When he tested positive for COVID-19, instead of following the legally-mandated requirement to self-isolate, The Prime Minister’s senior advisor drove 264 miles from London to Durham.
—
1 June, 2020
London
The plants are dead and rotting in their pots. Loneliness lances him like a slow blade. He’d read somewhere that isolation activates the same receptors as physical pain. What he’d give for a punch across his face rather than this diffuse, unshakeable feeling that broken glass is grinding placelessly in his soul.
Con’s been walking circuits around his flat: bedroom, office, sitting room, kitchen, toilet, again and again. He’s always alone, but the flat is always crowded with friends, lovers, regrets… He’s never been an anxious person, but for the first time in his life he’s convinced his inner critic is actually trying to kill him. Tells him he was a selfish cunt for breaking up with Marcel in February. A relationship he’d mentally checked-out of was surely better than slowly going mad alone in a too-‘spensive flat in Greenwich with no garden. Long ago, he’d concluded that it was his fault for throwing people away in favour of his own pursuits. And what do these amount to now that he’s alone? You can’t listen to the steadying heartbeat of an Olivier Award to soothe the existential panic. He’s tried.
And now he can’t even escape into the endless tunnel of social media. The other day, he got a dm from a friend in Wigan saying COVID had gotten Tim. He went cold. Golden-haired twink Tim? Tim, aged 22 on his deathbed in 1995? Tim saved in the nick of time with the new protease inhibitors. Now he’s dead at 50, drowned in blood clots like pancakes.
Unbidden, his memories play like a film that he can’t shut his eyes to.
Chapter Text
1 October 1993
Liverpool
On a visit to Wigan to visit Mum and Dad, Con takes the bus to Liverpool for the opening night of Angels in America at the Empire Theatre. Growing up, no matter how much he flattened his tone and reined-in his gestures, blokes knew he was queer. And not the ones whose attention he wanted.
Just walking down the street in Liverpool, the dockworkers would shout ‘poof’ in his direction. And at his height, he had to cultivate an aura of sullen menace so they wouldn’t see him as an easy target. So Tony Kushner’s play showing in Liverpool marks the first time he feels like he belongs in his own region.
The problem is, two rows ahead and three to the left, he’s distracted from the play’s celestial metaphors by an actual fucking angel: a sweet-faced young man in brass-rimmed spectacles and an honest-to-God hoop earring in his right ear. Who uses that code since the straights picked-up on it? He feels a tug in his chest and knows he needs to talk to this fella.
At intermission, Con follows the young man outside as a discreet distance. Under a streetlamp, the guy is patting his greatcoat pockets looking for fags. Gotcha.
Con shuffles up, takes out his cigarette case. It’s full of hand-rolled fags and he doesn’t care if that makes him look poor.
“Oh, you shouldn’t.”
“I’ve got extra.”
The guy takes a cigarette, smiling in a way that would make angels weep. Con lights the fella’s cigarette and gazes into his hazel eyes as the flame flickers in the irises. Gorgeous.
“Moving, isn’t it?” Con says, expansively.
The fella exhales. “A bit fucking assimilationist for my tastes. It’s Black transsexuals who are suffering the most, but he thinks pasting a white face on AIDS will make us more sympathetic.”
Con frowns, he lights his own cigarette to take that in. “I never thought about it like that.”
The guy barks a laugh, but Con can hear the sorrow. “No one does.” He shakes the burning cherry out of the half-finished cigarette and stashes the fag end in his breast pocket.
Con thinks fast. He doesn’t want this interaction to end. “Wait! Look, I’m sorry for whatever stupid thing I’ve said. Want to skip the second half and I’ll buy you a drink?”
“I don’t drink,” the guy says.
“Oh…”
“But I’ve got mandie back at my flat.”
“Who’s Mandie?”
The fella’s generous lips make a slow, knowing smile. It gets Con right in the groin.