In the year of the pandemic, we came together.
Upon those cold, post-Hogmanay weeks, as tales of a virulent virus spreading from the East began to trickle through the news, we tended your horses and went for walks on frozen January days. We shivered, hand in hand, on closed-up seaside promenades, eating Fish and Chips in dark, deserted pubs.
We always slept at yours, in an attic room with no door, its unpartitioned-off bathroom and Stanley Knife blades inexpiably peppering the floor. And your dog always slept with us too.
Some months we were locked down apart. As the virus became more than a jumble of yarns but raged in the headlines and the streets fell still. Others, we spent together. As spring turned to summer, we grew close: eating out, rambling far, many an intimate night upon that mattress beneath the eaves, on the splintered wooden floorboards of your gabled-cottage room.
You came to mine just once, said the flat was too cramped, too many books and the bed too small, so we didn’t stay. We bought Pizza instead; went back to yours, and did I sense, then, the tenderness we’d shared was imperceptibly starting to ebb?
As autumn arrived and the pandemic made ministerial mockery, once more, whilst tragedy for, oh, so many, I cleared my garret flat. I bought a new bed: bigger and softer and wider and brighter, stowing away the books and clutter of bachelor days.
On my birthday we seemed closer than ever, walking through October’s softening hues, colours still vibrant through autumnally misted sunlit dew. The air swam in a cidery scent of tumbled apples and melancholy, as we wandered the genuine olde-worlde within that open-air Weald and Down museum. Our arms around each other’s waists, we merged together within pitchforked feudal dwellings, peasants’ hovels and craftsmen’s homes, all wattle and timber and hay and daub; through lowly farmsteads to halls of the medieval well-to-do; all who would have known a black pandemic too.
We ate at my local that night, full of cheer and happy times, but as I turned the key in my door, you asked if I minded if you didn’t stay the night. You needed to get back to your children, the horses, the dogs: such a busy agenda in the morning. We kissed a loving goodbye, but in its joy, autumn’s waning already lingered.
As November blew in coldly, we were locked down, apart, once more. The pandemic surging through the land. Whilst the government had parties, we, the mere public, were curfewed in our homes, alone. Yet as Christmas neared and the restrictions lifted, you called, full of joie de vivre, to meet up, to eat and see the Christmas lights in the old market town. But then you called again later that day, simply to say it was over, without explanation.
That night I lay alone in the bed I’d bought for you; the bed you never slept in.
