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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.

Babbo, bambina

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She could still remember how frightened she had been. She had been thirteen years old, her first time in Milan, a late birthday present from her parents. The stadium tour at the San Siro seemed to be more of a present for Papa but, later, he had followed them first round the shops and then the Duomo without complaint so they had all visited their own cathedrals. The trouble had started as they spilled out into the piazza.

There was a crowd of protesters gathering in the square, maybe three hundred or so people, dressed in a dazzling rainbow array of colours. Hoisted placards for Sinistra Italiana and Giustizia e Liberta jostled for attention and various chants and songs broke out, stalled, and eventually settled on a repeated call for freedom. Liberta, liberta, liberta. Leah’s parents exchanged a glance and her father pointed over to the other side of the square where a similarly sized group was beginning to form. Similar in size but immediately different in tone; scarves pulled up over the bottom of faces, balaclavas, flags, a few signs proclaiming for Lega Nord, some other banners Leah didn’t fully understand. Someone lit a flare, it fizzed into a red, steaming light, and launched it into the middle of the square.

Her parents pulled her across the square as quickly as they could as the groups converged. For years her father berated himself for not thinking, they should have just turned and gone back into the cathedral, waited it out. More flares were thrown and then, unseen by Leah until now, groups of Carabinieri armed with riot shields and batons charged the freedom group. They didn’t bother to disguise their allegiance and the square descended into panic as the ragtag representatives of the left were either beaten or chased away by the police and a mob. Her father wore a small lapel button in support of Sinistra Italiana. It was something he’d taken to wearing since they’d returned from Britain, his small gesture of defiance against what he saw as his country sliding, lurching to the right in the confusion after the outbreaks. As the Carabinieri passed them one lifted a baton as if to strike him. Papa! Babbo! She had shouted and tried to put herself in the way. Another policeman stopped, gestured at the Inter shirt he was still wearing under his jacket, and they exchanged a few words before opting to leave him alone. She heard them repeating ‘Babbo’ and laughing.

Her father had left Britain, taken them all back ‘home’, after the Brexit vote. Leah had never noticed anything really change but she didn’t have an accent, nothing changed in the playground, nobody told her it wasn’t her country. When Italy left the EU in ’23 her father seemed to retreat in to himself, as if he wanted to turn his back on all of it, bunker them down in their little corner of Lake Como and pretend that none of it affected them. And mostly it didn’t, not really, day to day. The lockdown protocols became stricter, the border controls tightened, they got used to curfews, sometimes understandable, sometimes seemingly arbitrary, and they got used to wearing a health tracking bracelet. But virtually the whole world got used to that. Italy wasn’t so special.

For her it had all seemed the other way round. She’d grown up in the Italy that he grew to despise but without any of the memories of how it’d been before. It was hard not to love the mountains around the great lake but all of the rose-tinted nostalgia she had was for her earlier childhood in Britain and she knew that was partly why she’d wanted to come back. It had broken his heart but it was breaking hers to stay.

The experience with Aps and the police station had shaken her more than she was prepared to admit to the others. Too many memories. She read the news, heard the stories, so she wasn’t sure why she’d been so shocked. Everyone knew you couldn’t be out without your Medlet, everyone knew the gist, if not the detail, of the Viral Health Act and the extensions to the Criminal Justice Bill. For her generation it had been like one of those sets of terms and conditions you get when you download an app, something you trusted was okay and clicked ‘accept’. For the greater good. Even when the health services were built back up after the neglect in the early ’00s and contact tracing was sorted out they never seemed to row back the changes in the legislation. She’d just gotten used to it like they all had as they cycled through the repeated outbreaks of the last nine years.

Leah picked up her phone and placed a video call home. Her mum picked up and they talked quietly, just like they usually did. She knew that Papa would appear briefly at some point, wave and then pretend that he had something that he was in the middle of. She’d never called him Babbo since that day in the square, it had felt like that day was her line between childhood and adolescence. It felt baby-ish. Bambina. She’d told him to stop calling her that.

He appeared over her mother’s shoulder, bent down and waved into the camera, almost immediately turning to move away.

“Babbo,” she called, almost without thinking. He stopped, half turned, and looked back at the screen. Leah was crying, the phone shaking slightly in her hand. Softly, over and over, she said ‘babbo’.

He put his hand on her mother’s shoulder, something in his grip must have signalled to her to move as she relinquished the chair so that he could sit and face into the computer screen they had set up on the kitchen table. The one where Leah had sat poring over her homework.

“Bambino,” he said. “Sono qui. I am here. I am here.”

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.

Aps arrested

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I had thought about walking the long way home in the early sunshine, taking an extended morning after walk of shame or stride of pride depending on your point of view. I wasn’t ashamed to be honest but it hadn’t been a night to take much satisfaction in either. The amble of ambivalence? Whatever. My desire for a shower trumped all.

I was half way back when they stopped me. Two police officers approached from Redland Park, I didn’t think much about it until they got a little closer and I realised they hadn’t shifted their gaze from me. They were wearing the mask attachments on their helmets, I’d only really seen that in footage of what they did during lockdown, patrolling. You didn’t see it on the streets; if they needed masks you were usually indoors.

“We need to take you back to the station, Miss Daniels,”

I’d read about the CCTV and ID bank upgrades but it still took me by surprise to be addressed by name. “I don’t understand…,” I started.

“We’re placing you under arrest under the Viral Health Act, 2024….” It was the guy that continued talking, reading out my rights, but I didn’t hear the words. I felt exposed, rubbed at my arm and wished that I hadn’t taken my jacket off. It was the other one, the woman, that placed a firm, gloved hand on my shoulder and began to escort me up the street. They didn’t say much and I was too shocked to make much sense, just repeatedly asking what I had done. “We’ll tell you more when you’re secured from the public, Miss Daniels.”

They had a car parked around the corner on Whiteladies Road. I sat in the back, a screen sealing them off from me. It must have been soundproof because I could see the guy talking into a walkie-talkie but I couldn’t hear him. She drove. No sirens, no flashing lights, just me sitting in silence as we passed the University. I thought there was a police station down near the Royal Infirmary so I assumed we were going there. I only knew where the Infirmary was because directions to the nearest hospital had been in the student welcome pack we’d all got, part of the viral awareness literature that had been pushed on us since we were at school but updated a bit now we were older. Mainly stuff about risks through fluid exchange, the old romantics. I was feeling a little calmer, the strange quiet in the back of the car had helped me gather my thoughts. It must be a mistake. Or something silly. It’ll be fine.

In the station they took me straight to a temporary ICU. I didn’t even know they had them but so many places had isolation units for emergencies now that it didn’t surprise me. Technically it wasn’t a cell and they didn’t seem to lock the door but someone stayed outside the whole time, I could see him through the porthole window. They told me that someone would attend to me soon and to make myself comfortable. I paced up and down for a bit and tried to think through what I needed to ask, what I was entitled to. Most of my police procedural knowledge was from that night me and the girls had watched those VSI re-runs and I was pretty sure screaming for my attorney wasn’t going to help. I didn’t have one, for a start, unless Jane Atkins, a girl I’d met in the first term who was studying law counted, and I had a nagging feeling they weren’t even called attorney’s in the UK. All the times someone had asked for a phone call on the show seemed to have worked though so maybe that was legit.

Eventually a woman came in, asked me a few health questions, and requested to take a blood test.

“Listen, you can refuse,” she said. “But then I just have to get a warrant processed as part of your arrest and we do the test anyway and all you’ve achieved is some time and pissing everyone off.”

I let her scratch into my arm, it didn’t seem like a big deal. She even managed a thin smile and a muttered ‘thank you’. As she was finishing up, blotting a small piece of cotton wool onto the place she’d made the incision, deftly taping it down, she moved her hand down my arm and tapped my bare wrist.

“You know why you’re here, right?” She tapped again and looked at me and I realised I wasn’t wearing my MedLet. The good parts of last night came back to me, the kissing parts, the undressing parts, the taking off my MedLet part.

“It’s just a mistake,” I said quickly. “I haven’t got any symptoms, I’m not hiding anything. I just stayed at a friend’s house last night, I must have taken it off to sleep and forgotten it. You can’t be serious?”

She smiled, glanced up at my slightly disheveled hair. “Well I hope your ‘friend’ was worth it because, unfortunately, failure to wear a health monitoring and tracking device is serious and can carry a big penalty. Let’s hope you’re not carrying. You might just get a caution if you’re clean.”

“What do we do now?” I said.

“I need some time to run the test diagnostic. In the meantime you wait here.”

My earlier calm had evaporated now and all I could think to lean on were some of the lines I’d rehearsed in my mind earlier. “Can I make a phone call?”. She nodded, said to use my own mobile but she’d wait while I just made one. I didn’t know who could help or what anyone was allowed to do. I called Leah and burst into tears when she picked up. She listened as I explained what had happened, forcing the words out through sobs and shortness of breath. There was no hesitation on the other end of the line.

“Hang on, Aps, we’re coming.”

Kiss and no tell

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I woke up and I could hear a shower running next door. I knew I was in his room, in his bed, kind of naked in his bed. None of that was a surprise. I hadn’t been so out of it that I didn’t remember, it just took me a bit of time to piece it back together. I tried to see if my clothes were in reach or if I was going to have to risk ducking out from under the duvet before he reappeared from the shower. I couldn’t see them.

So, last night. From the top. We’d met as planned at the Kandi Klub and as promised the girls had left us alone to talk. I had occasionally caught a glimpse of Leah pulling faces at me over his shoulder but nothing that he would see. He’d seemed a bit more sure of himself than usual which I’d hoped was him finally relaxing around me, the whole shy-nervous-sweet thing was starting to wear thin. I thought there was some chemistry but I didn’t usually like to really judge until I’d kissed someone. Someone said that was a bit shallow but I never thought so; I wasn’t judging him, I was judging us, together, whether or not we were going to be a thing. Okay, I was probably judging him a bit. I’m a spectacular kisser.

He’d had a couple of drinks already and I topped him up. He wasn’t drunk but he was definitely looser, it was the first time we’d danced together. Or, you know, sort of awkwardly facing each other in amongst our circle of friends who were also dancing. I don’t think you can dance together in an indie club anyway. It wasn’t even the sort of place that stuck a slow one on at the end. The DJ usually faded the lights up to Daydream Believer so the most you might manage is holding hands, lifting them in to the air, and swaying in a mass singalong. Anyway, we danced. After a while I beckoned him off the floor, gestured that we should get another drink.

I was probably a bit buzzy from the couple of beers I’d had and the dancing. As we walked toward the bar I’d grabbed his hand, met with no resistance, and guided him off to a table back under the stairs that led down from the entrance. I sat him down and he looked, momentarily, a bit startled, like he’d sobered up very quickly and remembered that he was Mr shy-nervous-sweet. I didn’t really want him to remember that, it was no good for my purposes, and so I leaned in and started to kiss him. He tasted faintly of beer but I assumed I did too so that was okay. I’d closed my eyes so I couldn’t see if we’d managed to banish the unsure guy between us but from the movement of his lips, the push back from his tongue, I was pretty sure we had.

I don’t remember that much about the taxi, other than it was unusual to get one. Most nights me and the girls would walk back home, grab something to eat on the way. He’d suggested it straight after I’d suggested that maybe I should go back to his. I thought I should spare him running the gauntlet with my housemates and, to be honest, I sort of preferred it this way round. It meant I could leave when I wanted to, either that night if our flickering chemistry didn’t catch light, or the next morning. Assuming I could find my clothes.

I remember how it started. I’d asked for the tour, before his housemates got back, and stopped him in his room. I kissed him again and asked if he minded if I stayed over. From that point on I kind of led him through it, unbuttoning his jeans, slipping my shirt off over my head, guiding his hands to my hips. After that it wasn’t so elegant, both of us fumbling at our remaining clothes, removing everything and doing that thing where you’re both sneaking a look but both racing for the security of the duvet at the same time. As I reached to kiss him again I must have caught him with the edge of my MedLet, enough for a short intake of breath, so I whispered an apology and took it off, put it on a table by the bed.

And that was it. Last night, from the top. I’ve missed a bit out obviously but, sad to report, it was quite a short bit in the end. Sweet but short. I don’t want to sound mean but the sex took less time than it took him to get the condom on. I wondered if we’d talk for a bit and he’d be one who might come back around for another go but he fell asleep almost instantly. I toyed with the idea of leaving then but I wasn’t sure if I could find everything in the dark without waking him and I didn’t want to have a conversation about wanting a main course but just getting a starter. I guess I do sound mean. I’ll dress up his performance for the girls though, I’m not that mean.

The shower stopped running and I listened to the sounds of him doing whatever it is that boy’s do in the bathroom. No toilet flushing, thankfully. He came back in, fully clothed, rubbing at his damp hair with a towel. He seemed to clock that I was a bit uncomfortable and picked up my clothes, which I now saw folded in a pile on a chair by the bathroom, and passed them to me. It was weird that all my bravado from last night was as easily undone by the thought of him picking up and folding my knickers away.

He left me to get dressed. I said I’d call him.

Lockdown: April

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April used the time on lockdown like she’d always done: she read and studied, listened to music, drank wine in the evenings. She sensed the slight edginess in the rest of the house but just shut it out, retreated behind her thoughts, and bunkered down with books, a bottle, and Bowie. That first one, six months in the ICU, had been the hardest but even then she felt like she’d coped okay… and that was before she’d added alcohol to her distractions. They frowned on that when you were fourteen. This one was only four days old, routine community contact trace, would probably be over tomorrow.

There were tests coming up at the end of term so she read back through her notes on the set texts. It was probably adding to the tension the others were feeling, particularly the scientists who rarely passed up an opportunity to point out the imbalance in workload between their courses and April’s. She was prepared to cede the point to Cora and Aps but not Leah. Surely Psychology didn’t count? Pseudo science at best. Leah had spent an hour after that comment trying to explore what had happened in her upbringing that might explain her suspicion of trying to understand the workings of the human mind. It hadn’t convinced April any more of the scientific basis of the discipline. She was content to tell her that spending six months in solitary in your formative teenage years was enough time inside of your own head to not need anyone else to try and explain it to you. She mostly believed it.

The tests didn’t bother her. They never did, she’d always excelled at them. All of them except the ones that had been carried out on her. Those ones she seemed to have consistently failed or how else to explain why they’d kept coming back to carry out more? She looked at the faded red lines across the inside of her arm, faint fractured traces of her time in containment. She knew they’d been looking for a vaccine. They never quite came out and said it but she heard enough snatches of conversation between consultants and doctors and nurses to piece it together. Her parents knew more than they were letting on, too. They just kept telling her that there was nothing to worry about, they just wanted more tests because they thought she was special, thought she might help them figure out more about the mutations. April had never asked them much about it after she was released – sorry, reintegrated – because she’d stopped believing they would tell her anything she hadn’t worked out for herself. She didn’t even blame them but when she was older she did wonder exactly what they had known.

They’d talked a lot about her scars in the few months after coming out. Once a week with a dermatologist and twice a week with a therapist. We need to heal your psychological scars as well as your physical ones. Maybe that’s why she was a bit dismissive of Leah’s academic calling. Too much time having her thoughts and feelings prodded and pulled by well meaning strangers. Why don’t you use these crayons to express how isolation felt to you? Have you tried writing a story to explore that? You can change how you’re feeling, April, tell me, what do you believe about yourself? She’d preferred the dermatology. Lie back and let them apply some balms directly to the surface of her skin. None of this scratching around under it.

There had been one therapist, when she was about seventeen, that had stuck at it longer than the others. She was never quite sure whether her parents moved her on to someone new or if, privately, they waved a little white counselling flag and gave up. She won’t talk about how she feels. You can’t administer talking therapy if someone won’t talk about how they feel. The persistent guy was called Dr Lau. Anthony. She liked him despite herself. He’d said to her early on that she was probably going to get fed up with him repeating the same questions, making the same points, regular as a metronome. She hadn’t known what that was and when he’d told her she’d said it sounded a bit like a drum machine; she’d just gotten into the Sisters and told him about the one they used, Doktor Avalanche. It’s settled then, I will be your drum machine and you may call me Doctor Avalanche. She couldn’t really take him seriously when he called himself that but when she thought about it now she wondered if that had been his point. He had gotten her to talk.

What else makes you happy? That was one of his sessions. It was shortly after she’d told him about the Sisters, with probably a more detailed account of Wayne Hussey’s exit than he’d necessarily wanted for clinical purposes, and this was his follow up. Even then she was savvy enough, guarded enough, to recognise what this was. He’d patiently taken notes as she’d enthused about the early singles, listened intently to her make the case for them as punk band, really, not a goth one. It was all in the spirit of the thing, that was her point. She could feel herself speaking, in the moment, and there was nothing self-conscious about it, no division between thought and word, no accompanying bone dry commentary from internal April. And she knew that was what he wanted because she knew he thought that would be the source of her truth. That would be the route to all the insecurities and anxieties and issues that they all thought must be there from the six months locked up on her own. For a moment she had felt out of control but only for a moment. She composed herself and reeled off a pre-prepared list of things that she always said made her happy: her parents, her friends, school, shopping. Avalanche just nodded and made some more notes.

It hadn’t all been a lie. Not in retrospect at least. If she was speaking to him now and if she was honest with him now then she would still say ‘friends’. She hadn’t expected to enjoy sharing a house as much as she had and she couldn’t imagine not seeing Cora, Aps, and Leah every day now. What else would she tell him? Holding a sip of purple-black Shiraz in the roof of your mouth, letting the cherry and tobacco flavours seep into your tongue and down your throat. Reading the description of blank, silent snow drifting into the warm office of William Stoner in John William’s novel. She knew all her therapists would have a field day with that one. So you enjoy the metaphorical encroachment of winter into a place of comfort and security? The ridiculously grandiose choral introduction to This Corrosion; so huge and confident. Wagner and Jim Steinman’s beautiful bastard offspring. Dancing. That made her happy. Particularly on her own. Imagining she could see herself suspended as a sequence of snapshots, frozen through a fog of dry ice by the pulses of a strobe. Listening to the others talk, sitting just on the periphery and observing their lightness, their ease, their grace. She was sure that’s not how they saw themselves necessarily but that was what she saw. Their joy. That made her happy.

All of that stuff’s external, isn’t it? Things you observe or consume or experience. Avalanche would have said something like that. What about you? Inside you. What makes you happy from in there? That was where he’d been going with that line of questioning, that line of attack as she would have seen it then, and that was why she’d put the shutters up again.

She wasn’t sure she knew the answer, even now. She wasn’t entirely sure there was one.

Lockdown: Aps

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I hadn’t told the others yet that he’d started messaging me. I don’t think they’d noticed us talking in the club, it was the week after April had hit that idiot that had been harassing Cora at the bar. They can’t have noticed because there’s no way they would have kept their mouths shut. It had seemed to happen quite naturally in the end, I’d turned away from the bar and bumped in to him, spilling most of my drink over his arm. It seemed natural although I was a bit suspicious that he’d finally decided that the only way he could work up the nerve to speak to me was by forcing us into a collision. He’d insisted it was all his fault – it wasn’t – and bought me another drink. I think the others were dancing to Marilyn Manson but I didn’t like the heavier stuff.

“His real name’s Brian,” he shouted over the noise.

“Your name’s Brian?” I shouted back, mishearing.

“No. I’m James,” he said, leaning in slightly closer to be heard. “Marilyn Manson. His real name is Brian. Kinda funny isn’t it?”

I shook my head, decided to have some fun with him. “Not really, James. My name’s Bryony and I’ve got a brother called Brian. It’s been in my family for generations. My dad can trace us back to Brian’s in the seventeen hundreds.”

For a moment I thought I had him. He looked down, raised his palms in apology, and was just about to stammer an apology when he caught the smile on my face, noticed the eyebrow raised in what I hoped gave me a look of arch amusement and not one of someone who’d had half a botched face lift. He laughed and apologised anyway. He spent quite a lot of the conversation apologising but I found his gentle nervousness kind of sweet. Unthreatening. And he had kind, green eyes that peered out from under a mop of curly brown hair. I wasn’t sure if I fancied him but there was something about him that I liked.

We’d swapped numbers at the bar and he’d left with a bunch of friends before the others reappeared from the dance floor. He’d messaged me the next day. I thought that was kind of sweet as well but I left an industry standard two days before I texted him back. Since then we’d been in touch pretty much every day and just before lockdown I was going to suggest we meet up, it was becoming evident that I’d be waiting quite a while if I wanted him to make the first move. It was still sweet and way preferable to the guy in the first term that had started sending me unsolicited dick pics but I did want him to show a bit of courage. Some backbone. Just, you know, no other kind of bone.

Lockdown had brought a different intensity to the messages. I figured he’d done the same thing as me and was using his laptop to write instead of his phone and it had meant that our exchanges grew longer. It felt almost old fashioned, like we were in a Jane Austen novel. Was that right? Were they the ones where formal gentlemen wrote stately letters of courtship to regal ladies? What did I know. I was a chemist and checked out of English at GCSE. Anyway, we moved from half sentences, emojis and gifs to paragraphs and punctuation. I had a suspicion that he was looking to hit me with some poetry.

On the third night he sent me a link to a livestream happening in a couple of hours. Phoebe Bridgers. I knew her a little bit, my eldest sister, Hannah, used to make me playlists to, in her words, educate me when I was younger. She tended to have songs that she’d regularly string together in sequence, little patterns that she was obviously pleased with, or maybe she just forgot that she’d put them on some of the other mixes for me already. One went from Fiona Apple’s cover of ‘Across The Universe’ in to Phoebe Bridgers’ ‘Motion Sickness’ and then out to the whole of Emmylou Harris’ ‘Wrecking Ball’ album. It was a great record but I wasn’t sure if she meant to add all of it or just made a mistake. I never asked her because she got a bit prickly if I questioned anything to do with her music. I always thought she was a bit snobby about it; she still hasn’t really forgiven me for going to that Little Mix reunion gig last year.

It was pretty late by the time the stream started but it was coming from the East Coast in the States so we must have been a few hours ahead. I had my screen divided between the music and a chat window with James. I didn’t really notice at first but after the first few songs I realised that he wouldn’t message me whilst she was singing, like he was at a real gig and didn’t want to talk during the songs. If I was honest I was finding him a bit too intense. It was getting a bit claustrophobic in the house as it was, I knew Cora was particularly finding it tough, and I was looking for an escape, a connection. In a way it wasn’t fair to try and judge how this might go when things went back to normal, everyone coped with the lockdowns differently, but then I guess that these periods of community quarantine were part of ‘normal’ now so maybe it wasn’t so unfair after all. I think I just wanted to imagine that if we ever really watched her play in concert that, at some point he’d reach for my hand and not let go until we were both clapping her back for an encore. It was late and I was tired. I left the laptop running but crawled into bed as she was finishing up another one I knew from my sister. It was another sad one but that was Hannah. I drifted off with the song’s coda whispering me down into sleep: anyway don’t be a stranger, don’t be a stranger.

I guess that was our first date.