I didn’t know what to expect at the time. We all just got the notice that the Uni had put us in a house share which was fine for me; I grew up with two sisters so I was used to having my space occupied. All the usual safe guarding stuff was in place, so they’d given us names, a picture, and a link to check medical records – just the relevant bits, they still redacted where something wasn’t infectious – and I’d had a quick look. I was curious but not really bothered. I’d known people that had spent time in the ICUs and it hadn’t changed how I’d been around them. I don’t know, sometimes I thought we were all over-reacting but I guess I didn’t really see the ugly side of it so I kept that to myself. There were strong views on both sides and my opinion didn’t much matter. I was more interested in the names, trying to imagine these new house mates, my mysterious new companions for the year ahead. Leah. Cora. My namesake, April. Mostly I was interested in April.

The dates on April’s ICU were in ’24 so she must have been mid teens when it happened. Pretty rough. I’d been lucky and never picked anything up in the window when you got treated as a high risk to everyone else. Ages 8 to 18 they reckoned. Like I say, I knew people that got isolated – one day they’d be in school, the next they wouldn’t. The first time it happened it was a big deal and we all made a real effort to keep connected – Paul Jacobson was the one I remembered. He was just one of the class, I didn’t really know him or his friends but overnight he became the most popular guy in the school. Those first few times, when it was a big deal, we really tried with the people put on ice – that was what we called it, isolation containment. No-one ever agreed on what the E stood for. I don’t know when we stopped trying so much but after a while it lost its novelty, was just something that happened. People got iced and until they thawed we sort of forgot about them.

The other two, Leah and Cora, didn’t have flags on their records. It showed as clean the same as mine. I was never that comfortable with the language, the inference being that, you know, if you’d isolated you were dirty, but everyone said it was just a reference to being virally clean. Just a medical thing, nothing else. There wasn’t much else to figure out about the three of them. Nobody connected up on social anymore before they met, it was one of the weird things that happened afterwards, the more people’s personal history was made public the less they wanted to share. I still had a private Insta and sometimes dipped back into Twitter but mostly to remind myself why I’d never really bothered with it: getting called out as the toxic generation in an endless echo chamber wasn’t my idea of being social. None of my pending housemates had any kind of footprint online, other than the legislated stuff. Nothing public anyway.

I moved in first. I was back from my year out travelling a little early, there was an alert in Melbourne about a possible recurrence of Covid-32 and the FO advice was to come home. It was okay. I was on the last leg of my trip and felt pretty lucky, I’d made it across most of South America and had a few good weeks in Australia before anything had happened. I knew some people the year before who’d got caught in the big 31 outbreak and got stuck in local lockdown for three months. No one our age could afford travel insurance anymore so they just ended up loading on debt before they’d even started their studying. I was back unscathed and at a loose end so had asked if I could move up to Bristol a week early, try and get a sense of the place. Mainly I just wanted to bag the best room. The house buttressed up against a row of Georgian terraces but it had obviously been built later. It started a new run of more modern houses, individually painted to mark them out as separate: ours was green, our neighbour pale blue, before the rest of the run exploded in pink and yellow. It overlooked the Downs and that alone made my decision to arrive first worthwhile as only two of the bedrooms had that outlook, the other two facing back onto an unloved stretch of concrete instead of a garden and the rear of flats in an adjoining road. I picked the front room on the top floor. It was small but it had the best view.

The day the others were due to arrive I had made an effort to clean the place up for them. Got a bottle of wine for the fridge, picked up some flowers from a shop in Clifton which I haphazardly arranged in a cheap vase someone had left in one of the cupboards, and I pushed the ancient Dyson round. I’d never seen one before. It wheezed a bit. Maybe that’s why people stopped using them, maybe they were all banged up in ICUs, maybe it wasn’t that government contract stuff. It did the job anyway, if the job was to displace dust from one location to another; I managed to make it look presentable as long as you didn’t get too close to the skirting boards. If anyone got that close to the floor they’d probably be drunk so I decided it would be okay.

When the door buzzer rang I jumped up without thinking, surprised myself how much I’d missed company in the last week, how much I was looking forward to meeting some new people. Our intercom had a camera and through the small lens I could see a mess of black hair, dark upturned eyes, lots of mascara. It was April. I buzzed her in.