Tag Archives: friendship

Riffs and variations on loss and friendship featuring crochet, black holes, Fred Again, and the dial of destiny…

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“Did you read that thing about the ‘cosmic bass note’?”

“That link you sent me? I only skimmed it. Lost me at super massive black holes colliding and then I got distracted by some unfortunate fashion choices on Insta.”

“So you’re more interested in the come back of crocheted boiler suits than the signature of gravitational waves from the distant universe?”

“First of all, how’d you know that crochet was making a come back? Second of all, it’s not making a come back in boiler suits but they may well be decorating a few wardrobes this year. When did you become Anna Wintour?”

“Who’s Anna Wintour?”

“That’s more like it. You were worrying me there with your sudden extensive knowledge of haute couture. I thought you were about to start advising me on accessorising and form emphasis.”

“You’re changing the subject. We were talking about how shallow you are.”

“Hey, clothes are a visual expression of us as individuals – it’s no less deep than your back holes just because it’s on the cover of Vogue and not Yay Science!”

“I’m pretty sure there isn’t an academic publication called Yay Science. And the very point of black holes is that they are very, very deep.”

“Is it though? I thought the whole point was the light couldn’t escape from them because matter has been compressed so tightly that it produces a huge gravitational pull. So it might not be deep. It might just seem deep because we can’t see into it. Maybe they’re really shallow but, you know, just kinda sucky.”

“Sucky?”

“Sucky. Liable to large amounts of suck.”

“Thanks, I got it. So you did read the article.”

“I did not. I skimmed it. But I have knowledge of things beyond the next must have from Prada’s showing in Milan. Whereas you, despite your lucky guess on crochet, are still dressing like a Gap advert from 1995.”

Pete laughed, glanced down at his jeans, adjusted the phone in his hand.

“You just checked, didn’t you,” said Jen. “You just checked what you’re wearing?”

“Clothes are a visual expression of us as people,” Pete offered. “And I choose to express myself as a Silicon Valley tech start up kind of guy. From the 90s.”

“The 90s will be back in soon, you can just wait for it roll back around,” said Jen. “Anyway, let’s pretend I had read that article. What note do you think it is?”

“What do you mean?”

“The cosmic bass note. Is it like a B? A flat? Or something more basso profondo. G7, maybe. My music theory is a little rusty.”

“Unlike your Astrophysics which is stellar.”

“Interstellar. So what do you think?”

“I think,” said Pete after a pause. “I think you’re not taking this entirely seriously. If I was to humour you though I’d say it was like the bass in a club. Like a proper dance club where you can physically feel it coming out of the subs. Like a throb.”

“Cosmic bass throb. That’s actually not a bad name for a club night. I could see the flyers now. Georgie would have been into that.”

“She would.” Another pause. “Did you see the Fred Again set at Glastonbury? I missed her so much watching that.”

“Yeah, I watched it. I missed her too. There was just something weirdly moving about seeing all those people tuned in to something at exactly the same time. You could tell he was really touched by it.”

“It was completely her sort of thing. She was also trying to get me to one of her DJ nights, she kept talking about it like it was a community, like there was something different that happened to those tunes when a room full of people were all giving themselves up to them together.”

“You’re more of a sad banger kind of guy.”

“Pretty exclusively now. Even then, I guess. Georgie did the uppers and I took care of the downers. Not, you know, literally. Well, sometimes literally.”

“That set was weird though, right? It was euphoric but there was a thread of… I don’t know, a thread of sadness in it. Melancholy. I don’t know.”

“For me there was, sure. It’s just what you bring to it though, isn’t it? I was bringing all my bereavement and loneliness and hurt so even if there’s just a trace of that there I’m going to feel it.”

“Like a gravitational ripple…”

“Like an emotional ripple from the collapsing black hole that was her death,” finished Pete quietly. “That’s a bit melodramatic. Sorry.”

“I thought it was pretty beautiful,” said Jen. “She loved coming down with you, Pete. She used to tell me that she looked forwards to finishing up her sets, exhausted from the adrenaline, from the rush, as much as playing them. Because she could sit with you, put her head back in your lap, listen to whatever slow burn sad song you had queued up, and just be still.”

“I loved that time too,” said Pete. “Stillness was all I wanted, I think. If I could be her point of stillness then that was all I wanted. She was always on the go, always on the move. I just didn’t want her to escape.”

“Like her personal black hole.”

“Yeah, but a nice one. Not a, what did you call it? Not a sucky one. One with a great playlist, a wide selection of movies, and maybe a crafty joint before we’d crawl off to bed.”

“She’d have hated that Ford’s still playing Indiana Jones.”

“True. She didn’t really like him as anyone but Han anyway to be honest so I don’t think she’d have been on board with Dial Of Destiny. He’s what, 80?”

“Something like that. What even is a dial of destiny? I haven’t seen the film. It’s a clock, right?”

“No idea. Shower dial? Your destiny is to be extremely cold and then scalding hot. Indy has a narrow window to wash his hair before disaster strikes. Maybe a sun dial. The whole film just him watching a shadow pass over its surface, a slow rumination on the passing of time and ageing. And then some Nazi’s show up.”

“It could be a really important phone call he has to make. You know, like when you used to ring someone up to ask them out.”

“That could work. They could franchise it. The Dial Of Destiny, followed up by The Date of Desire, and then the trilogy concludes with The Walk Of Shame.”

“That was me and Georgie. Except we skipped the first two. It was just a messy night that turned into a messy morning but one we both wanted to stick around and clear up. Thanks for calling by the way. I appreciate it. Know that I appreciate it.”

“It’s my destiny to be your friend. Just as I was hers. You’re stuck with me.” There was a pause, the usual pause as they ran short of things to say, ran up against the absence. Jen broke the silence in their usual way. “You alright, Pete?”

“Not today, Jen, not today. But ask me again tomorrow.”

This is the third story in July ’23’s mission to write 26,000 words for Great Ormond Street Hospital – fundraising link on main page.

I tend to return to Pete and Jen talking every now and again. It started as an exercise in dialogue and then, over time, I just kinda like listening to them. Their last outing was here and their other conversations are on this page: here

Trenton, Nebraska

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You were walking up the incline, one hand bridged across your forehead to shield your eyes from the setting sun. I watched you approach, idly running my fingers through the grass I was sitting on. There was a patch of earth where I’d pulled up the blades in chunks, letting them scatter on the breeze. They didn’t go far but then nothing in this place went far. You had stopped and turned back to look down and across the town; I. thought maybe you were worried that Marv had noticed that you’d clocked early and had followed you up here. It was unlikely. Any time past three and he could reliably be found at Frank’s, holding forth on the betrayal of the American heartlands, why the great state of Nebraska deserved an NFL franchise, and how folk who didn’t make it to church on Sunday had no place in his town. If you could get past the MAGA hat and the bluster he wasn’t so bad. His perspective was just a little narrow, that’s all. I was finding it a struggle to stop mine narrowing each day too.

“Do you think we’ll do it this year?”

You’d turned back from looking at the town and called up to me.

“Do what?” I humoured you. I knew what you were asking. We played this game all the time.

“Scratch two off the sign. Welcome to Trenton, population 516. Is this the year we make it 514?”

“They won’t change the sign” I smirked. “Someone will squeeze out two more to replace us before the year’s out. Nothing else to do round here. Frank’s and a fumble on Saturday, repent at church on Sunday, try and find work Monday to Friday. Besides, we won’t leave. We’re never getting out.”

You sat down next to me, frowned, and pushed a fist gently into my arm, a playful punch. “That’s what I come up here for my little ray of sunshine.”

“Hey, if you wanted sunshine then you’re in the wrong State. I believe Florida has that one all sewn up.”

We sat quietly for a while. I leant back on my elbows and let my head fall back, tried to watch the sunset, upside down, behind me but it made me feel queasy. Neither of us had ever said it but I liked to think that we came up here because if anyone was watching us from the town we’d be backlit by the setting sun, silhouetted against the horizon. Probably looked pretty cool. But neither of us had said it and I wasn’t going to go first in case you thought it was dumb. It always seemed like a fine line between what was cool and what was dumb and not many people drew that line in the same place as me. Once, couple of years ago, before we graduated, I told some of the other girls in school that I thought it’d be fun to dig out some old Disney movies, have a sleepover round someone’s house, pretend to be kids again. I don’t know, maybe I thought we could be all ironic about it but if I’m honest I think there was part of me that wanted the simplicity of evil step-moms and brave, impossibly big eyed girls again. It didn’t go well. They started posting pictures of my head super-imposed on a succession of Disney Princess bodies and posting them to Snap, Insta, whichever flavour of social was in favour that day. They were captioned. I don’t remember all of them but it was stuff like Beauty & The Beast: definitely the beast or Frozen: panties. Nothing that was going to trouble their GPA. Nothing too smart. The one of my dismembered head being held aloft instead of Simba from The Lion King was quite well executed though. Props for the photoshop talents. They left me alone after a couple of weeks when Jennifer Harlow bleached her hair blonde but did something wrong with the peroxide and it all turned bright orange before starting to fall out in clumps.

I met you later that year. You were a year ahead but flunked graduation and they held you back. I guess I’d been aware of you through school but the older kids didn’t really mix with the other years and you weren’t actually there that much. Hence, the flunking. It must have been hard for you. I felt like we were both misfits and maybe that’s why we started hanging out. I thought Jennifer might join our little tribe of the ostracised but she dropped out of school and works now at Cindy’s Grooming. There were some pretty funny looking pets for a while in Trenton but last time I saw her she said she was getting the hang of it. So it was just me and you.

I got you through graduation and you got me through the year. That ended up being the deal, tacitly understood but never stated. I worked hard enough for both of us and we spend long evenings where I’d catch you up on George Washington or irrigation systems or algebra or The Grapes Of Wrath. It wasn’t like you weren’t smart because you were; you just didn’t see the point and didn’t want to do the work. I saw the work as the only way out but maybe even then you didn’t think there was an exit and you gave up before giving it a try. I was determined to prove you wrong back then, it’s only this last six months or so that I’ve felt like the off ramp to anywhere else but here has been closed for essential maintenance with no indication of when it might be open again. I owe you though. It’s true that I got you through the exams but you had my back that whole year. Nobody messed with me because it meant messing with you and your no-fuck’s-given persona was just unpredictable enough that no-one was quite sure what you’d do and didn’t really want to find out. Someone started a rumour that you had a pistol, that they’d seen you shooting at birds over in Bush Creek. It wasn’t true but you didn’t disabuse them of the notion and gradually people fleshed out their own idea of you as some sort of troubled outlaw, firing clips at Blue Jays down by the river on weekends and spoiling for a fight in school in the week. The most troubled I saw you was on Wednesdays when we used to try and learn math. Or wait, it was actually when we first stated looking at sexual reproduction in biology and you had gotten so flustered that you’d left and said you thought you should learn this by yourself. I thought it was kinda sweet and also, to be honest, a relief.

Eventually you broke the silence. “Marv’s talking about retiring.”

“Retiring? Doesn’t he do that every day? To Frank’s?” I replied.

“No, properly retiring. Says it’s getting too much for him now and wants someone to take the business on. He’d own it. Just needs someone to run it for him.” He paused, looked at me.

“Truck and car washing? You’re not seriously considering it? What about…”

“What about what?” He cut me off. “What else have I got? I’m not getting out. I’m not smart like you, I barely graduated High School. Where would I go? This is all I know.”

“But that’s not true,” I protested. “You kept telling yourself last year that you weren’t smart, that you weren’t cut out for books and school but it wasn’t true. It isn’t true.”

“I’m not like you,” he said. He shook his head firmly as if to emphasise the point, as if that was the end of it. I wasn’t prepared to leave it alone, to leave him alone. We’d been having the same conversation for the last two years, planning where we’d go, what we might do, how we’d leave all this small town small mindedness and find somewhere we felt at home. I thought I was the one having doubts recently but had always been encouraged by his enthusiasm, his talk of scraping enough together to catch the Greyhound to Denver, find some work, keep heading West over to California. He knew I had my heart set on San Francisco, an idealised romantic setting down of roots somewhere made up of misfits, the original home of the dreamers. Somewhere in my head I knew I wouldn’t be writing spoken word poetry in a loft apartment, sunlight streaming through the skylights in the eaves; it’d be spot work at Starbucks and a waitressing gig at night but, maybe, just maybe, I could carve out the other stuff too. I just wasn’t sure I was brave enough to do it without him and the realisation of that hit me as he told me about his new future.

“Why are you so scared to live?” I whispered it but it was loud enough for him to hear. His face flushed briefly with anger.

“I’m not scared of anything,” he said, voice rising. “You think I’m too good for this town, that it? Too good for some honest work running a business. Too good for a beer on Friday with the boys? I ain’t too good for any of that. Maybe you think you are.”

I was angry now. We hadn’t really had a cross word since we’d known each other, united in our deal at school, united in our plots and plans since we’d left. “Maybe I am too good for that. Maybe I give myself a bit of credit and don’t want to wind up either washed up at Frank’s, picking at labels on beer bottles and drinking away my regrets, or knocked up by some local who once had the run of the town ‘cos he was captain of the hockey team but now binge watches Fox and complains about liberals ruining America.”

“A local like me?” he said.

I stopped, held his gaze. “You were really terrible at hockey,” I said finally.

He smiled. “I really was. You got me.”

“And you don’t think liberals are ruining America.”

“No, I think America is managing that pretty well on its own.”

“So, don’t stay. Don’t settle for this. I do think you’re too good for it. Or, maybe a better way of putting it, is that I think it’s bad for you. There’s someone you could be that you won’t become here.”

“I’m not like you,” he said again. “That person you think I could be isn’t like you.”

“I don’t want you to be that,” I said. “I want you to be you, the widescreen, all possibilities version of you that will get narrowed and reduced if you stay here….” I trailed off, considering whether to reveal more of myself. It was another one of those moments where I couldn’t decide if what I wanted to say was kinda cool or kinda dumb. Maybe I needed to stop thinking they were mutually exclusive or maybe I just needed to stop second guessing myself all the time. “I can’t do it without you,” I said eventually. “I’m the one that’s scared. I’m the one that’s scared to live.”

The sun had set behind us and the dark was drawing in, lights winking on down in the town in front of us. You could see how contained, how small Trenton was at night, a neat rectangle of lights marking its boundaries and then darkness save for the strip of illumination, East to West, where Highway 34 sliced through the countryside. You rummaged in your pocket and pulled out a set of keys on a fob from Dirt Dawg Car & Truck Wash. You held them up between us. “Reckon we’ve got twelve solid hours before Marv notices it’s gone. Maybe more if he has a big night at Frank’s tonight.”

“What are you saying?” I asked. It was quiet now, just a distant thrum from the Highway in the distance.

“I’m saying that we leave now, tonight. Leave it all behind. Run to California, ditch the pick-up, hope that by the time they find it that they don’t find us. It ain’t strictly theft if the owner gave you the keys, is it?”

“I guess not,” I said. “At the very least it’s ambiguous.”

“Come on then,” he said, standing up. He reached out his hand, smiling. “You scared?”

I matched his smile, took his hand and let him pull me up beside him. “I’m terrified but that’s living, right?”

At time of writing, July ’23, I am trying to deliver 26,000 words as part of a fundraiser for British children’s hospital, Great Ormond Street. Link for donations: here

Not sure where this one came from but have been main-lining the brilliant Ethel Cain record so perhaps it was partially inspired by her “A House In Nebraska” song. Her record is much better than my story so don’t let the above put you off.

Graduation

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They had let her out on the morning of her graduation. Two years, four months, and five days after entering isolation and six months after widespread adoption of the vaccine. They’d lied about almost everything on the program including how long they needed her for. April hung on to the only things that she still believed were true: her blood had saved her friend and would vaccinate the globe. She’d spent most of her life isolated and now she was connected to almost everyone through millions on millions of injections of something synthesised from inside her.

She felt awkward and out of place in the Great Hall. It was the first set of ceremonies to be conducted back in the Wills Memorial since 2019, more than a decade ago, the first time that everyone felt safe converging in such numbers in a confined space. They had arranged a gown for her and let her change at the hospital before a taxi had picked her up to drive her into town. She had kept it from her parents, there would be time to call them later and she hadn’t wanted them to come straight away. She couldn’t really explain it but she’d completed her studies shut away, it was hers and hers alone and she wanted to keep them separate from her memories of her time in Bristol.

In the cab on the way over she had dropped a text to Aps, just a jokey thing commenting on the weather: beautiful day for a graduation. She knew they’d all had their ceremonies already as the scientists (even the pseudo ones like Leah) had been earlier in the week; she’d listened to them all chat about it on one of their regular video calls and been bombarded with photos afterwards, the usual shots of mortar boards thrown into the air, friends arm in arm, laughing families.

There was a shot of Aps that she loved, eyes glowing, facing down the camera with a broad smile. There was no trace of the shattered and wrecked girl that she’d seen in the HDU, no vestige of the months and months of rehabilitation she’d worked through, rebuilding her body, processing what had happened. They had clung to each other for the last two years, speaking every day, working through their memories of their shared experiences and talking about what they were facing now. April would read to her in the first few weeks of her recovery, dialling her up on video, and voicing over whatever she was studying. Later, as Aps got better, she took over the lead on their conversations and April was grateful for that; there were only so many ways to describe her day when every day was basically the same in isolation.

The pictures of Leah and Cora also brought her joy. Leah had grown her hair out, falling down across her shoulders. It was how she wore her hair growing up, she said, when they’d first moved to Italy. Her parents had flown over for her graduation and there were several shots of her and her dad pulling faces at the camera before a final one of the two of them, his arm across her shoulders, him looking at her with a quiet pride. Cora was mostly alone in her pictures but looked content and comfortable in herself. April knew she’d met someone in the last few months, they were taking it slow but it was making her happy. Cora had confided in her the day of her ceremony. She’d hesitated a little as she’d said that she would always love Rob but that she thought that it was finally time to move on.

April took a seat towards the back of the hall which was beginning to fill up. Everyone else gravitated towards the front, filling the rows with the best view. She didn’t mind. She didn’t really know anyone, they’d tried dialling her in on seminars but it had never properly worked trying to keep up with the flow of discussion in the room. They had usually forgotten she was there, a disembodied face on a propped up tablet. Towards the end she’d managed with just viewing the lectures and picking up one to one conversations with her tutor. She had hoped to meet him but couldn’t pick him out in the sea of faces and she felt still too uncertain to try and mingle in the crowd. It was only after she sat down that she realised how overwhelming it all was, like she was undergoing some sort of social bends, coming back up into a large group of people too quickly after so long on her own.

She took a deep breath and stood up. This was too much. She turned to leave.

In the doorway were three women. They weren’t wearing gowns and looked slightly breathless, flush in the cheeks, as if they’d just run up the gothic stairs on their way to the hall. One of them saw her and pointed. And then they were all running, all four, them to April and April to them. She felt arms around her for the first time in two years. They stayed like that for a long time.

“Why are you crying?” said Leah, finally. “You got a first.”

“Yeah,” agreed Cora. “It’s us that should be in tears. We didn’t have to study on our own for our degree and you still did better than us. I think the University’s a bit embarrassed about it to be honest, you’ve made them look bad.”

“They’ll spin it as evidence of the effectiveness of their distance learning programs,” said Leah. “And, I don’t know how to break this to you Cora but we are all kind of crying.”

“What are you doing here?” said April. “How did you know?”

“Really?” said Aps. “You think we wouldn’t figure out your cryptic little text. Absolutely classic April, can’t just come out with it and ask us to come.”

“I never was very good at asking people for help. Ask my therapist.”

“Which one?” said Leah. April laughed.

“Hey, now you’ve graduated you could be April’s new therapist,” said Aps.

“I really don’t think that’s going to work,” said April.

“You could be my lifetime study,” said Leah. “Don’t rule it out. I’ve already worked out our first session. Tonight. Classics night at the Kandi. Classics with an x, obviously, you haven’t missed that much. Indie dance therapy. I’m going to get it peer reviewed, imagine it will be bigger than CBT.”

“I never really got on with CBT,” said April. “But screaming Nirvana songs in your face under a strobe light I think I can get on board with.”

Cora gestured towards the front of the hall where some members of faculty and local dignitaries were taking their place on a stage underneath the building’s dome. Someone tapped a microphone and the four of them squeezed into seats on the back row, Cora and Leah flanking April and Aps in the middle.

Aps held April’s hand until her friend’s name was read out. She gave it a squeeze and let go and they all watched her walk to the front to receive her honours.

Alone but not lonely.

April alone

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April like to be alone. Not lonely, that was different, that felt unasked for, unchosen, but alone was fine. This felt lonely.

She had been unconscious for three weeks. There was an old Joe Strummer song she liked called Coma Girl that she’d sung afterwards; nobody else seemed to find it as funny as her but nobody else was carrying as much darkness as she was. Too many dark secrets. In some ways she’d preferred it when she was in the coma. It was more honest at least.

They’d brought her back as her blood levels had stabilised, when they were sure her organs weren’t about to shut down. They’d flustered around her, treated her with kid gloves as if scared that they might break her again but she knew it was less about her and more about what she represented to them. She was vaccine. And based on her first conversations about what happened next she was vaccine and not heard. She’d signed the papers to save Aps, waived her rights, offered up her immunity, and agreed to submit to whatever was required to produce the cure. They said it was for her own protection, that it would be too much of a burden to be known publicly as the girl-that-saved-humanity (her embellishment, they’d said something slightly drier). She wasn’t entirely convinced that Vaccine Girl would be joining the celebrity ranks of the Avengers any time soon but was more inclined to believe their other arguments, notably that she might receive a lot of unwelcome attention from the anti-vax movement. It was still a minority fringe but the idea that the virus was a result of mankind’s desire to immunise itself against disease had picked up some traction. All of the test facilities and labs were anonymous now. And it looked like she was too.

They wouldn’t make promises but said they’d probably need her for a year. Maybe eighteen months to be sure. They weren’t really apologetic about it – there’s nobody else that has shown your immune response so we’ve got no choice – but had said that they would be able to open up her contacts, electronically, as long as she stuck to the script. She could continue with her studies remotely, it had all been arranged, most of the lectures were recorded anyway for people that struggled to make it to campus to fulfil their difficult five hours a week schedule. April hadn’t been one of those people. She didn’t mind about the lectures but she knew she would miss the arguments in her tutorials, the smell of books and the silence in the library which had an almost tangible quality, not just the absence of noise but the particular sound of people consciously not making noise. She would miss the walk down to the University and the bustle of the Union bar on a Friday afternoon and the smell of spilt beer on pub floors and the feeling of dancing through dry ice in a club.

Mostly she would miss her friends. It surprised her how much this was true, how much it had become true in the last few months since they’d met as strangers, shared a house, and formed their little coven. She knew no-one except her was calling it a coven. She wanted Leah’s standard greeting, an exaggerated kiss on both cheeks; she wanted Cora to  braid her hair, feel her tease out her tangles and smooth down the strands; she wanted to walk arm in arm with Aps, listening to her talk and talk and talk. She wanted to touch Aps most of all, to feel that she was really there, that she really came back, that she really did save her. She’d seen them all, part of her new video call friendship community but it didn’t feel real until she could hold and be held.

Her captors (again, her embellishment but, hey, this one was broadly true) tried to sell her on her sacrifice. You stay here, they get to go out, and maybe we get to stop this whole thing. She couldn’t argue with it, with its relentless rationale and logic. She could live with that but still couldn’t live with the deception and the cost. Aps had nearly died. If they’d just asked her then she’d have signed up for whatever they needed. She was sure she would. Mostly she was sure she would.

April, you alone can help us with this. Nobody else has your blood profile, your immune response. The whole program rests on you, so we had no choice. You alone.

Her phone rang. April hesitated before picking up, the screen announcing that it was Aps calling which meant that it would be all of them. This was how they usually called. She pressed the button to answer, turned her face to the screen, the small, circular camera, and waited. There was a brief pause as they connected.

“Hey April, it’s us, we see you… we still see you.”

Transfusion

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It helped to think of it as an act of connection. April liked to imagine that they would run a tube from her arm straight over to Aps, joining them together, allowing her blood to flow directly across. She knew it wouldn’t be like that. They had explained it to her as simply as they could, how they’d take her donation and then need to filter it, clean it, then they’d do the transfusion. She preferred to think of it as her giving a part of herself to her friend. An act of connection.

She had signed something to say that she understood the risks. They needed an unusually high volume of blood plasma because of Aps’ worsening condition. It had emerged that the Victory program, as intended, had involved infecting a low risk patient and then testing them with a synthesised vaccine borne from an immune host’s blood. April had listened to the rational, detached description of it all but all she could think was that their low risk patient was currently in high dependency, fighting for her life. Their grand test of whether her immunity was transferable had become pretty binary: Aps lives or Aps dies. In that analysis April weighed all the risks to herself as secondary.

There was more, though, in her blood contract. No disclosure. She wasn’t sure what exactly they would do if she told her story but they gave strong hints that they would just deny and discredit her. Just another hysterical conspiracy theorist to add to the pile. It was true that nobody really fully trusted official sources anymore but they didn’t trust  the alternatives either; truth couldn’t stand buried under lies. She had to submit to an extended stay in the ICU so that they could run more tests, make sure they could successfully develop a vaccine that didn’t rely on permanently draining her of fluid, like she was a bath they had to refill before pulling the plug, sluicing another body full of blood down the drain.

There was a time, not that long ago, where the prospect of the additional stay of isolation wouldn’t have bothered her. Six months, twelve months, make it as many months as you like. She liked being alone and would live inside her own head. It might not always be happy but it was home. It felt different now, it felt like she was giving up a community that she wanted to be part of, people that had coaxed her out of her own head and helped her stand outside, blinking in the sunshine. She knew she could do it, she had the resources to disappear back into herself and hide away, but she wasn’t sure how easy it would be to come back out again. Maybe this would be her last act of connection.

They’d let her see Aps again before they took her to take the blood. She’d stood at the glass and seen a pale facsimile of the person she’d talked and danced and drank and sang and joked with. April closed her eyes and conjured an image of them, the four of them, Leah and Cora were there too. She remembered them walking arm in arm by the harbour in the early evening, winding their way to another pub, laughing about some guy that had just hit on Leah, anticipating another night out. She remembered them in a circle on the dance floor, baiting each other to pull some ridiculous shapes, watching Aps always, always default to the Watusi because she’d seen Uma Thurman do it in some 90s movie. The one time they’d persuaded her to join them in some star jumps she’d slipped over on a stray spillage and had just lay on the floor laughing until they’d helped her up. Movin’ On Up had permanently been rechristened as Fallin’ On Down from that moment on. And look at us now. April opened her eyes. We’ve never been this far down before.

They took her to another room in HDU and waited whilst she changed into a loose hospital gown behind a screen, fumbling at tying a bow in the draw strings behind her head. She lay down on a bed in the middle of the room and stared at the ceiling, grimacing slightly at a sudden scratch on her arm and the feel of something sliding under the line of her skin. She closed her eyes and tried to shut out the chatter of voices from in the room, calls to monitor her blood pressure, someone calling out measurements, litres upon litres. The voices faded as the numbers rose higher.

 

I see you

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Seconds ticked into minutes which unfolded into hours that seeped into days. They were apart, locked away in their separate containment units, but together, each of them almost permanently in contact on a four way group video chat. Sometimes nobody even spoke, it just felt reassuring that they could see each other, a slice of the familiar amongst the unfamiliar tangle of tubes, machines, injections and monitors. Something messy and imprecise to break up the clinical precision and routine. Four days compressing ninety six hours folding up five thousand odd minutes tocking hundreds of thousands of seconds.

On the third day Cora had set them all a challenge, something, anything, to keep their attention away from the swirl of questions that nobody seemed to be able to answer for them: how long will we be here, is Aps okay, will we get sick? She’d called it quarantine karaoke, acknowledged that the title needed some work, and told them the rules. One song, each, that they had to sing to each other over the group chat. Original song as backing track accompaniment allowed. Scores awarded based on song selection, vocals, and performance. April had been reluctant but acquiesced on Aps’ insistence that it would cheer her up. Are you guilt tripping me? Yep, 100% but I’ve got the virus so shut up and sing.

Taking it in turns, they sang. None of them had quite known what to expect and it felt strangely raw, intimate, singing to each other through the small screens of their phones. Leah dedicated her song to her dad, said it reminded her of something he used to sing if they caught the early morning ferry down to Como, days when they needed to visit the larger town. Little darlin’, it’s been a long cold lonely winter. She sang it quietly, not really looking directly at them through the screen until they started to join her on the chorus, here comes the sun, and then she stopped, watching them finish it for her, smiling.

Cora declared that she’d only picked her choice for one line, it was the bit in Hotel California about checking out anytime but you can never leave. At the last minute she changed her mind and did a Lewis Capaldi song from when she was a kid. This time none of the others joined in. Cora kept her eyes closed throughout and they sensed, implicitly, that she was singing a lament for Rob, that they were being let in on something private. As she finished Leah blew her a kiss and April clapped her hands quietly. Jesus, Cora, that was beautiful but you’ve made me like Lewis Capaldi. I don’t know whether I should love you or hate you. Cora shook her head and mouthed you-love-it at the screen.

It was Aps that broke up their back-and-forth. The others watched as she sashayed back and forth belting out Taylor Swift’s ‘Red’, pointing at every indication of her infection in her room to accentuate the chorus. Red. Warning light on her Medlet. Red. Biohazard symbol on her door. Red. Virus positive written in the notes hung over the end of her bed. She clowned it up, pirouetting between her bed and the solitary chair that all of the ICUs had, ducked her face out of view before reappearing in extreme close up. It was gloriously funny and inappropriate, the others weren’t sure initially how to react but found themselves caught up in the dark joy of it. They were all laughing so much by the end that it took them a few moments to notice quite how breathless Aps was, ironically how red her cheeks were. She insisted she was okay. No more skipping Spin City when I get out. She nodded at April. Come on, best ’til last.

None of them knew it but it didn’t matter. A solitary guitar chord, a run of bass notes, and then the rumble of a baritone, April whispering over the top of the words, her eyes never leaving Aps through the screen. She told them afterwards that it was Nick Cave, ‘Straight To You’, and that he’d pretty much got her through her isolation first time round. None of them knew it but they heard what it was: a love song, a love-despite-anything song, a towering love-above-all song. Sad songs you can dance to, right? said April at the end. When all this is done I’m going to waltz you round our living room to this. Us April’s got to stick together. Aps just nodded at her. Deal? Aps nodded again.

Day four. Night four. They went to bed, separate in their own contained, isolated rooms, but they left their phones plugged in, switched on, and left the video chat open. They fell asleep to the soft light of backlit mobile screens and the virtual presence of each other.

 

Isolate

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April watched the Community Trace Officer work; she had gone straight to Aps and was talking her calmly through the standard protocol. Spot test, assess, isolate, full diagnostic.  It was essentially the same process that April had been through as a kid, except then, without the early warning indication through the Medlet you only got picked up through the regular spot testing that they ran with high risk groups. She’d registered a high temperature that she was pretty sure was just a combination of her period and a regular flu bug that had been doing the rounds. They’d run the blood tests and found a viral infection. Later they recorded it as Covid-27.

The CTO was peeling apart a plastic, airtight package, shaking free a syringe. She was working precisely, quickly, clearly moving through steps that had become routine. She pulled up Aps’ sleeve and wrapped an elasticated blue band around her upper arm. April looked away as she inserted the needle, pulled back the plunger and filled the syringe with blood. Aps had looked away as well. Leah was asking questions about the test which the CTO was answering, her responses polite but not straying much beyond a yes or no. They were clear despite her mask. Yes, this was a spot test. Yes, it was safe. Yes, it was authorised in law. No, she hadn’t heard anyone call it the bad lover. Fast, small prick, unreliable, clarified Leah. No, we don’t call it that. But yes, it’s not completely reliable.

They waited. Aps’ sample had been spread across a thin slip of paper and inserted into a small machine, it looked a bit like a baby monitor that April had once found when she was helping her parents clear out some old things from the loft. Just a large LCD screen a couple of large push buttons, and a slot to push the paper into. Her old baby monitor had just shown room temperature and picked up noise; it would light up like a firework display if she’d either started crying or the ambient climate in her nursery had risen half a degree. She had no idea what this machine would show. Leah was evidently thinking much the same as she continued with her questions. So, when do we get the puff of white smoke? What are we looking for here? Cora was silent but had moved across to Aps’ side and was holding her arm. The CTO ignored them all and just stared at the blood test machine.

Something changed on the LCD. There was no flashing light or shrill alarm, just a few symbols and numbers that appeared. The CTO pulled a phone from her pocket and dialled a contact, holding up her other hand to signal that they should hold their questions. CTO attending case 29, 687, on the A4176. Female, 19 years old. April Daniels. Request immediate dispatch of ICA for four. Need pick up on Miss Daniels and her housemates. Case positive. I repeat, case positive. She hung up the phone and told them to pack some clothes.

“This must be a mistake,” said Aps. “You need to check the machine again.”

“I’m sorry,” said the CTO. “It’s just the spot test so it could be a false positive but the readings are very clear, I haven’t seen one like this that has turned out to be wrong. We need to get you somewhere safe, make sure you’re looked after.”

“I was tested this morning,” said Aps. “Literally this morning. At the police station. They wouldn’t have let me go if their test had come back with anything.”

“A few hours can be a long time in viral infection. I’m sorry but you really should pack some things. The ICA will be here soon and they’ll want to get you all into containment as quickly as they can.”

They all packed, cramming clothes and essentials into bags. Leah had whispered to April: What’s an ICA? Isolation Containment Ambulance, April had shot back. She remembered the one that had taken her to ICU the last time. It had seemed like a normal ambulance to her if she was honest, just with ICA embossed on its side alongside one of those biohazard symbols. At the time she’d thought that bit was pretty cool but it had been during her black metal phase. A couple of years after she’d come out of isolation she’d toyed with getting it inked on her arm, to cover up all the scratches from her testing, but she’d seen a couple of tattooists and they’d said it wouldn’t take properly on her scar tissue. Now she just thought they over dramatised the whole thing, giving everything its own acronym, its own special virus status. The sign served no purpose. Unless the CTOs were going to start projecting it in to the sky every time they picked up a positive to call in an ICA, like the bat signal. Maybe not the bat signal. No-one remembered much of that DC stuff now, it was all Marvel.

When they came back downstairs there were two men, full hazmat suits, waiting for them. The CTO had disappeared. They were gestured towards the front door which was open but as they stepped through it wasn’t into the short path down to the street but into a temporarily erected tunnel, plastic walls supported by flexible rods snapped into rectangles. The tunnel ran straight, just twenty feet or so, directly into the back of the ambulance. It smelt faintly of disinfectant. They were told to move.

April remembered her first time. They’d given her a sweet, told her not to worry about anything, a nurse had held her hand. She’d worn gloves but still, she had held her hand. The same nurse had asked her about her friends, about school, about what subjects she liked, what she wanted to do when she was older. She was just a child and they’d treated her like one. They’d explained everything. She hadn’t known enough to be scared.

Now they were all adults. Barely. They treated them like adults. Explained nothing and asked nothing, nobody held their hands, nobody gave them sweets. They didn’t know enough but they were still scared.

Trace

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Cora remembered getting her first Medlet a little differently to the others. There had been a steady improvement in health tracking devices from ’20 onwards but none of them ever hit critical mass across a big enough part of a population to be useful in contact tracing. Governments argued with technology suppliers, nobody could agree a common platform, and some people just refused to wear them. Cora’s own view as a teenager was a more attenuated version of the prevailing mood in Scotland, sceptical and slightly distrustful. After the big Covid-27 outbreak in ’24 things changed. They mass produced the cheap but reliable Medlets and legislated that everyone should wear one, public mood had changed enough that it didn’t raise much debate. Scottish law changed later, holding out for an aligned approach across the EU that never came; there was a straight fault line between north and south.

Cora’s memory was acute because the moment she’d worn it on her wrist she’d felt nothing but guilt and remorse. She had sat in pubs with Rob, talked about freedom and the state and a whole load of bullshit about how nobody was going to tag and trace her. He’d been more laid back about it all, like he was about everything, but he’d said he’d agreed with her. She sometimes wondered if he’d liked seeing her all fired up like that: you’ve got the spirit in you, right enough, Cora. And he’d smile, watching her. She had been convinced that she was right, convinced in the way that only a seventeen year old can be convinced, all black and white before the world shows you that it’s grey. She was sure. And then he died, without warning, and she wasn’t sure of anything anymore.

They had told her afterwards that there was no guarantee that it would have made any difference. It was just there as an early warning signal. Most times it’d be a false alarm, some usual temperature fluctuation, some mis-read fever. Most times. The sceptics still said that the point of the Medlets was never really about the personal warning, it was about the geo-tagging and the tracing, the links to the MedApp and what it allowed local enforcement to do in isolating and locking down pockets of communities. It wasn’t just the sceptics saying that, the scientists were too: they just disagreed on whether that was a good thing or not. Cora didn’t much care about the civil liberties arguments afterwards, she just wanted Rob back and if she could have made that happen, even if it meant everyone else had to stay at home forever then she wouldn’t have thought twice.

She watched the others freeze at the sight of the flashing red warning light on Aps’ Medlet. She knew they were torn between their impulse to reach for her, enfold her, reassure her that it’d be okay, that it was just a warning, torn between that and their fear. It was this abstract fear that they all had, that there was this thing out there that they couldn’t see and it might kill them, but now it wasn’t abstract: it was her. It was a momentary thing. Almost like the briefest inhalation of breath, a heartbeat, and then it passed. They all rushed over to her and smothered her in a jumble of arms and hands. Leah had come out from her room and had half run, half slipped down the stairs to join them in the solidarity of their embrace.

Within five minutes Aps’ phone rang. They all knew that it should but the efficiency of it still felt strange, intrusive. She picked up and had a short conversation with a Community Trace Officer, answering a standard set of questions about her symptoms (“none”) and where she was now, who she was with. That stuff was just for show, they knew exactly where she was and who she was with.

“CTO?” asked April as the call ended.

Aps nodded. “Yep, they’ve registered the warning and said that we can’t leave the house. They’ve dispatched a mobile unit to come round and assess me.”

“You okay?” said Leah.

“I… yeah, I’m okay. Just a bit shocked. I feel fine, maybe it’s a mistake.” She shook her wrist. “This is the new one they gave me this morning, maybe it’s not calibrated right or it’s faulty or something.”

“At least you weren’t long without one,” said Cora. “It’s better to know, right?”

“I guess,” said Aps. “I don’t understand. James left me a message, saying he’d found my old one and it was all showing ‘green’, everything was okay. How can it change so quickly? Don’t they normally cycle through ‘amber’ and stuff first?”

“They’re pretty sensitive now, I think,” said Cora. “Better to be safe than sorry. I’m sure it’s nothing.”

“God, I’m sorry guys,” said Aps. “You should probably all stay away from me or something.”

“Not happening,” said Leah.

“Nope,” said April. “If you’ve got it, we’ve got it. Anyway, I’m Miss Immunity, remember? They tested me practically to destruction so I’m prepared to take my chances on a probably rogue Medlet reading.”

“Do you think I should ring James? Tell him?” said Aps.

“You won’t need to, they’ll do a full contact trace if they follow protocol. Everyone you’ve been near in the last ten days. If you’ve been enough of a social butterfly you might put the whole town back in lockdown.”

“Jesus,” said Aps.

“Really?” said April. “When did you meet him? That’s going to be a bugger to contact trace. At least you know he’ll forgive you.”

“Hey, lapsed Catholic here,” said Leah. “You don’t hear me making jokes about your religion, do you?”

“Satan’s just not that funny,” said April, smirking. “No offence meant. I was just trying to lighten the mood. It’s a new thing I’m trying.”

“Say ten Hail Mary’s and we’ll say nothing else about it,” said Leah.

They saw the flashing lights through the window, the room winking in blues and reds, illuminating their faces as they turned towards the door. The bell rang and Leah, Cora, and April stood first, forming a barrier between Aps and the world outside. The bell rang again, followed by a knock, and a voice calling CTO. 

“It’s okay,” said Aps. “It’s going to be okay.” She slipped in between them and walked to the door, lifting her hand to open it, red light flashing on her wrist.

Better red than dead

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“Where’s Leah?” asked Aps. When they’d returned from the police station she’d headed straight for the shower. She’d been in there so long that Cora had knocked on the door, asked if she was okay. She’d been leaning against the tiles, letting the water cascade down on to her head, letting it wash her eyes clear of tears, hoping she could just rinse the whole experience away. She’d told Cora that she was fine and they’d left her to calm down and waited for her downstairs.

“I think she went to call home,” said April. “She was pretty shaken up.”

“I know how she feels,” said Aps. “Have we got any wine?”

Cora reached into the fridge. There was a folded piece of paper in front of a solitary bottle of white at the back on the top shelf; someone had scrawled ‘in case of emergencies break glass’ on it. Cora pulled out the bottle and held up the paper to the others: “This must qualify, right?”

“It’s the exact set of circumstances I had in mind when I put it there,” said April.

They drank and talked. Aps told them what had happened the night before with James, she gave them a version that was sympathetic to him, she didn’t even really know why except that the thought that the night before her worst ever morning after had been a bit of a letdown was too much to cope with right now. They poured her more wine and she told them about the arrest, about the journey in the police car, and the subsequent questions and tests.

“What tests?” said April, leaning forwards. “What did they do to you?”

“Just bloods I think. And temperature, it seemed pretty standard,” said Aps. “They had me a secure isolation unit, a nurse did them. I guess she was a nurse, anyway.”

“Can they do that?” asked Cora. “Just run tests.”

“I think so,” said April. “I think it was one of the changes a couple of years ago. If you’re under caution I think they can take fluids and insist on a full viral check. If you’re out without your Medlet then it makes everyone get pretty twitchy.”

“I didn’t know what to do,” said Aps. “I think I was in shock. I just went along with it all. I barely remembered to ask to make a call and then I phoned you guys. Thank you, by the way. Thank you for coming.”

“Don’t be soft,” said Cora. “Of course we would come.”

“Yeah, it was your turn to clean the bathrooms on the rota,” said April, smiling.

“This must get me out of that,” said Aps. “Come on, what’s a girl got to do?”

“Oh, you’d need to have at least spent a night in the cells to get out of that,” said April. “You just had a scary arrest, some mildly intrusive medical tests, and a caution. That barely offsets your night of passion with Jamesy boy.”

“Yeah, and we’ve totally gone easy on asking you about that,” added Cora. “Details will be required at a later date. All the details.”

Aps listened to them talk for a bit, swapping slightly lewd observations about what her night had been like, most of them better than the reality. She picked at the strips of tape holding the cotton wool in place on her arm from where they’d scraped at her skin for a blood sample. She teased up the end of the tape and pulled it away quickly. There was a small, red circle on the inside of her arm. It had all happened in a blur and she tried to sort the fragments of her memory to form a clearer recollection of what had happened. She’d rolled up her sleeve, that part was clear. Then she’d looked away. It was something she’d done since she was a kid, she’d never really liked needles and blood. Just look away. There’ll be a small scratch and then you won’t feel a thing. Just like the night before. When she looked back she was being taped up.

Aps’ phone started to vibrate in her pocket. She pulled it out and saw that it was James trying to call; she let it ring through to voicemail. “It’s James,” she said to the others, acknowledging their enquiring looks.

“He’s certainly keen,” said Cora. “You going to answer?”

Aps shook her head and waited for her phone to ring again if he’d left a message. He had. She picked up. “Hey, er, Aps, it’s me, James. Thanks for a lovely night. I just thought you should know that you left your Medlet here. I can drop it round if it’s easier for you. Nothing to worry about, it’s all flashing green.”

“Voicemail,” said Aps. “He’s found my missing Medlet and wants to drop it round.”

“At least it wasn’t your pants,” said April. “Could have been way more embarrassing.”

“That will be covered in the details required at a later date,” said Cora. ” And, for the record, I don’t believe that what Aps was wearing that night would have been described as pants. The lady has some class.”

“Best pants, then,” said April. “Probably not the ones with the bunny rabbits on.”

“How do you know about those?” said Aps, sitting up suddenly.

“Shared house. Shared washing machine. No secrets,” said April. “They’re cute. I mean, I wouldn’t wear them, not being, you know, seven, but they’re cute. Very you.”

Aps was about to reply when she felt a vibrating sensation on her wrist. An urgent tightening. She looked down at the new Medlet they’d given her at the police station and instead of the soft green light she’d seen for as long as she had worn one – green equals clean – she saw an angry, blinking red pulse. It had been drilled into them for years. Red was a warning. Red meant lockdown, seek help. Better red than dead.

To the station…

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Fifteen minutes. That was if the traffic was good. Could be twenty. Leah looked at her phone again, checked the time, flicked open the Uber app. Still showing five minutes away which, based on the last ten minutes, was a lie. Say it was five minutes that meant a minimum of twenty until they could get to Aps. She thought about ringing the driver. April and Cora were over by the window, pulling back the curtain to keep an eye on the street. A black Tesla pulled up outside. The five minutes wasn’t a lie. The latest five minutes at least.

None of them really spoke in the car and the driver had taken this as his cue to turn his radio up, some rock station that April vaguely recognised as something she’d tried when 6 Music had been decommissioned. Some song none of them knew pushed them out onto the pavement outside the police station; a blast of pounding noise and someone singing about gambling. As the Uber door shut behind them and they were left with just the traffic noise on the street, a muffled don’t forget the joker shouted from the radio in the car behind them, Leah realised she had no idea what they were supposed to do.

In the moments after Aps had called it had all been clear. Our friend is in trouble: we go and help her. Nothing to contemplate, nothing to consider, no doubt. How do we get from here to her? The problem was as simple as that but now that problem had been solved, what now? None of them had dealt with this before. Leah was uncomfortably aware that the others were looking to her to guide them. What? Just because she called me? She wondered at that: why had she called me? But now wasn’t really the time. Leah led them inside, through a revolving door. If it wasn’t for the sign announcing The Bridewell Police Station it could have been any other office block, glass panelled walls demarcated into rectangles by red, steel strips. Beyond the initial door there was a decompression zone that was pretty common in large buildings, an expanse of space ended by a series of health screen machines that you had to proceed through to be allowed access further inside. Standard temperature check and cross reference to the national viral health register.

Leah cleared the health screens last. She should have expected it; her EU registered status always took longer to clear now in the UK, there were just more cross references back to the Italian database where her main health records sat. April and Cora were already at the enquiry window as she caught up.

“…we just want to make sure she’s okay,” Cora was saying to a dead pan police woman. She was ensconced behind a screen, mainly some sort of frosted glass that you couldn’t see through but with a clear window through which her head was visible. They were speaking through an intercom. She looked bored.

“What are they saying? Can we see her?” said Leah.

“No, you can’t see her,” replied the police woman, Inspector Martin from her name badge. “She’s still being processed under the terms of her arrest.”

“Can you at least tell us what she’s been arrested for?” said April. “It must be some kind of mistake.”

There was just a shake of a head in response and a gesture that they should all move to sit in the waiting area, a stretch of moulded plastic chairs bolted to the floor. There was a vending machine but most of the numbers displayed against its range of drinks had been scratched out. The three of them sat down. April got up again, walked up to the machine and looked at it.

“Anyone for a hot drink lottery?” she said. The others shook their heads. She swiped her contactless card and punched three numbers: two, two, three. Nothing. She tried again: one, one, two. This time the machine stirred, dropping a cup and filling it with a squirt of some unidentifiable black liquid topped off with hot water. It passed as black coffee and April cradled it back to join Cora and Leah.

“What do we do now?” said Cora.

“We wait, I guess,” said Leah.

“But we can’t do anything.”

“But we came. I think that’s all we could do,” said April. “We’ll be here when she gets released.”

“If she gets released,” said Cora.

“When,” said April. She blew across the top of her coffee and took a sip.

It was three hours before Aps was released, on a caution. In that time they discovered that 112 was definitely black coffee, 114 might have been a cappuccino, and 220 was the worst cup of tea that any of them had ever tasted. Talking about the drinks was the only thing that had distracted them from worrying about their friend. When she emerged, escorted by a woman dressed in blue scrubs, surgical mask hanging loose around her neck, she broke into a run and the four of us collided in the waiting area, Aps clinging to us in a desperate and grateful embrace.

“I lost my MedLet,” she said, repeatedly, as we held her. “I left it at James’s.”

None of them asked the questions they wanted to ask about that. They could all keep until later, for when it was safe to laugh about the whole thing, and start the enquiry about last night. They all bit their tongues about whether there had been any biting of tongues.

“What now?” said Cora. “Can we go?”

“Yes, it’s all sorted, I’m free to go.” Aps held up her wrist to show them a new MedLet, issued in the station, its warning light softly glowing green.

“Green equals clean,” said Leah.

“Green equals clean,” they all repeated.