On Monday 11th, we were let out of jail for
good behaviour. We can now walk and shop for groceries without an attestation. I was glad to chuck it away
and rather proud of the fact that I'd only needed to print two copies for the
entire two months of confinement. A judicious use of pencil and rubber almost
saw us both through to the bitter end. Finally, though, the paper gave out and
the space in which you wrote the date and time became but a hole. From now
until the next presidential pronouncement at least, we'll need an excuse-me
note only for journeys of over 100km. As the crow flies, apparently – which is
not that easy to work out even with modern technology. It'll be back to a
compass and pencil to work out the perimeter of our new open prison.
We were quite hopeful of a grant of dispensation for a mission
of mercy back to England, to snatch our daughter from her student house in
Brighton and bring her back to the safety of her family home. Now, however, it
seems that Boritz J has reneged on the British government's initial reciprocal undertaking
to admit visitors from France and other European countries without quarantine.
So, in the wise words of my philosophical mother-in-law who repeats her mantra
almost every time The Good Wife telephones her, 'we'll just have to wait and
see.' The Disunited Kingdom didn't get to where it's got today by failing to
wait and see or to cross that bridge when it came to it.
On Monday 11th, I ventured out in the morning,
further than I'd been for eight long weeks of... I'm sheepish to admit, a
generally very agreeable period of being able to let sleeping dogs lie. A
single red magnificent poppy had opened its petals in the garden for the
occasion: either a good omen or a bad one, depending on your stance on the
Great War. With the car loaded up with strimmer and assorted tool boxes for the
bridge in Brive that now had to be (urgently) crossed, I drove first to nearby
Meyssac for my appointment with the tattooed lady. The hairdresser whose name
is hallowed in this household.
I took a mask with me, but couldn't figure out how
Laetitia could possibly sheer me with something hooked over my ears. Her tiny
little salon on the corner of the street is normally packed to the rafters with
men of all ages waiting their turn. But on Monday it was empty. However, on the
way in I almost bumped into mein
Amerikanische Freund, Steve. He had just been severely shorn and his face
was covered with a mask. He looked startled to see me and it felt like an
encounter with a gunman in a small lawless frontier town. Where the hell was
that goddamn marshal when we needed him?
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| BEFORE... |
The tattooed lady is working strictly by appointment now.
There's no chance of getting too close to some old farmer in need of a trim.
She had a towel and a bottle of hand-wash by the door and once she'd made an
appointment with Steve for his daughter, it was on with my mask and down to
business. She herself was equipped with one of those Perspex visors associated
more with strimming the grassy verges of motorways than with hairdressing. I
had to unhook my mask and clutch it against my face, so she could start around
the ears. Then I re-attached it and sat back for the rest of the cut. Normally,
she asks you what you desire even though my answer is always the same – short at the back and sides, leave a bit of
length on top but quite a bit thinner please – but she was so clearly
stressed by the whole palaver of disinfection that she simply set off straight
away with a no. 2 blade. Had I not stopped her at a point I deemed right and
proper, I'd have come out of there looking like Convict 99.
My attempts to engage her in conversation and slow down
the trajectory of the clippers seemed a bit forced; we usually chat easily and
naturally. I did glean that the confinement has taught her that she has been
working far too hard. It will be strictly by appointment for the future and an
early finish come the afternoon. Likewise, lockdown has shown my wife a way of
getting off the treadmill. For years I have urged her to work less. Yes, she'll
earn less, but she'll also pay fewer taxes and charges. Ultimately she may even
be better off – certainly psychologically and probably financially. Now at last
she sees that it can be so.
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| AFTER |
Serendipitously perhaps, I emerged from the salon with one
of the most satisfactory cuts since I've been going to see the tattooed lady.
That might have had something to do with the sheer weight of hair that I'd
shed, but I felt a lot more presentable and more akin to my old normal self on
the drive to Brive. Nevertheless, the whole experience spooked me and, by the
time I got to the clinic – to discover that the grass in the garden and the
side passage was 'as high as an elephant's eye' and that the French equivalent
of a Saniflo was pumping grey water up to street level without cutting out as
it should do – I was in an unnezzezzary
state of discombobulation.
If in doubt, eat. I figured that the best thing to do
before crossing all the bridges before me was to have some lunch. A bowl of
left-over weekend fridge-bottom soup. The whole experience of stepping back
into the outside world, however, had lathered me into such a state that I could
hardly get the spoon from bowl to mouth without slopping all my soup back into
the bowl. What the fudge!? What was happening to me? I am a grown man; I
understand that the only thing we really have to fear is fear itself. I am not
even particularly afraid of contracting covid-19, because I have faith in my
immune system, and yet my hand was shaking like a field of barley in a warm wet
westerly wind. I could only think that it was the sensation of being a
character in a film like Invasion of the
Body Snatchers or The Stepford Wives,
who scratches away at the superficial normality to find that something
underneath is very, very wrong. Changed,
terribly changed.
I did my strimming and made the garden look reasonably
presentable. I cleaned and disinfected the shower tray where the waste water
had backed up and left a very unsanitary film of something evil and grey, and
decided to leave the faulty sanitation device until next time. Let no man say
unto me that I am not prepared to leave a bridge uncrossed in times of high
dudgeon. I packed up the car and high-tailed it out of there, back to the
familiarity and safety of our open prison.
As for that terrible seizure of fear that gripped me at
my soup, I experienced it again later in the week. During an idle moment, I
clicked on The Guardian home page: to
find image after image of people in masks and panic on the streets. As the
actress Jane Horrocks has said, the only way she has stayed sane during this
time has been a studious avoidance of news bulletins. I did right to steer well
clear of it all, even if it smacks of ostrich behaviour. The mere sight of
those images induced an immediate restriction in my chest, the like of which I
haven't experienced since the asthma attacks I suffered in my late teens and
early twenties. Fear Eats the Soul,
indeed Herr Fassbinder.
Since then, we've both been out on a couple of occasions
more – including our first social engagement since March on Sunday. A long
dog-walk with friends followed by dinner
à quatre. And it was lovely, even if we didn't feel able to embrace. French
society revolves around a custom of handshakes and pecks and – when the
citizens are feeling particularly exuberant – hugs, so it will be a tragedy if
the virus of fear eliminates all that. At least Martel market re-opened on
Saturday morning and, even though the idea of wearing masks in the open air
seems a trifle absurd, little by little we are acclimatising ourselves to the
'new normality'. As for what will happen and where it will all end, I'll just
have to dig into my mother-in-law's compendium of profound maxims for an answer
to that one.