Page 14 of Where Do We Go From Here?
Because no one was up for apologising, things could only get worse after that, so that’s what happened next. Harry and I avoided contact for almost three weeks (which wasn’t exactly difficult, considering the times we were living in) and Todd joined Fiona’s war of nerves by never having time to meet me either. Seeing as his courses were online and all his exams had been cancelled, lack of time seemed unlikely.
By the time that first seemingly interminable lockdown ended things had eased all round. The work situation, though still frenetic, was better and, by comparison with the madness of April, almost relaxed. Sure, we’d lost a lot of staff to illness and burnout and one overweight male nurse had died, and yes, we still had a massive backlog of other patients to see and of course there were still Covid patients coming through the doors, some of whom also continued to die… OK, I’m remembering things more clearly as I tell this… So, no, it wasn’t relaxed at all. But there were now moments in each day when I didn’t need to run and entire weeks when I didn’t cry once.
Family matters had calmed down, too.
Fiona was excitedly preparing for a return to school (or so we all believed), while Todd was engaged in a twenty-four/sevenCall of Dutykilling spree while he waited for thecalculated grades which it had been announced were to replace his exams.
When our valiant PM announced that the two-metre rule was to be dropped and that schools, if they wished, could re-open, Harry and I agreed it was time I moved back home. I’d pack my things up on the Friday after work, we decided, and for Saturday lunch we’d be a family again.
I didn’t quite finish packing on the Friday night because, after my week at work, I felt shattered. As I went to sleep that night, early, it crossed my mind that I was feeling more exhausted than usual and I wondered if I was stressed at the idea of going home.
When I woke the next morning to find the bed sheets soaked in sweat I knew immediately what was going on. There was a poetic absurdity to it that almost made me want to laugh. Almost.
I wasn’t surprised that I’d finally caught the damned thing, only that I’d escaped it for so long.
It was horrible, truly horrible – worse by far than the worst flu I’d ever had. I sneezed and wheezed and coughed so constantly that I ended up lacking sleep. I soaked the bed with sweat to the point where – when finally, three weeks later, I was better – I had to buy Jill a new mattress for her studio. But – and let’s be thankful for big mercies, here – it wasn’t as bad as it might have been. After all, I didn’t get long Covid. And as you guess from the fact I’m telling you this, I didn’t die either.
People were as lovely as people who are terrified of catching something can be.
A senior doctor from work brought me some Tamiflu (which at the time was being used off-label on a trial basis) so I took that religiously even though I was never convinced it helped.
Jill kept me supplied with soup, pots of which she would leave outside my door before knocking and backing away.
And Harry and the kids came round to shout encouragingthings through the window before blowing kisses as they too backed off.
It was the end of August when I finally moved home.
We had an uptick in fresh cases coming into Maidstone at the time, a fact I shared openly with the family. But after some discussion, we decided I’d been ‘vaccinated’ by my illness, and I was probably now one of the lucky few who no longer had anything to fear. We still knew so little.
Things were never quite the same after that, but because the whole Covid drama continued to unfold in its unpredictable way – because there were repeat lockdowns and local variations which affected us all constantly in different ways – I assumed this was par for the course. As Fiona had said: everyone was stressed. We were in the middle of a worldwide pandemic.
Back home, we glided around each other in passive-aggressive semi-silence. When words were spoken they were often terse, occasionally lapsing into downright rudeness.
During periods when I or colleagues at work tested positive (because by then we were too short staffed to stay home sick) I’d go back to Jill’s for two weeks, and these were breaks I began to enjoy. When I returned home there was little sense of relief – no real pleasure at being reunited. Harry and the kids were still avoiding me which, considering the risks, seemed sad but hardly unfair.
In the end, whilst all of our family members survived, thefamily itself did not. This didn’t become clear until near the end of the whole Covid nightmare.
It was a week before Christmas 2021 – the final Christmas ever to be completely ruined by the pandemic. As an aside, I sometimes wonder, if we’d managed to get through Christmas, would everything have been OK? Because it really was Christmas that blew us out of the water.
The government – if you could call the bunch of chancers running the country a ‘government’ – had authorised small Christmas gatherings while simultaneously slapping local restrictions on the south-east. This basically meant that even though lockdown was now over, we were right back in – you guessed it – lockdown.
My Christmas leave got cancelled. Yet another of our EU nurses – Gabriela – had vanished overnight back to Madrid. There had been a drip, drip of these desertions ever since the Brexit vote so eloquently informed them all that they were not wanted, but the pressure of Covid made things that much worse. My boss had quite literally begged me to come in over Christmas despite the fact I was overdue for leave.
‘Oh, by the way, the Christmas bonanza is confirmed,’ I told Harry one morning while I prepared coffee. ‘They need me from Christmas Eve through Boxing Day – day shifts only. Legally I can refuse, but things are pretty desperate. You don’t mind terribly if I go in, do you?’
‘Oh,’ Harry said. ‘About that. I’ve been meaning to have a word.’
‘A word,’ I said lightly. ‘OK. Which word?’
‘Can you stop and, um, look at me?’ Harry asked. I was busy struggling to open a fresh pack of coffee without tipping it all over the place.
‘Oh,’ I said. I put the package down on the counter and after a brief private frown at the wall, I turned to face him with a forced smile. The quiver in his voice had worried me. ‘Go on?’
‘This is…’ Harry said. He coughed. ‘This isn’t, um, going to be easy, so please… Let’s stay calm, if we can. And quiet.’ He glanced behind him at the hallway, presumably thinking about Fiona, who was sleeping upstairs. ‘Todd, um, says he probably won’t come home for Christmas.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Really? Why’s that? What’s he doing instead?’
‘Not if you’re here, that is.’
