Civilisation

The community centre has been shut for weeks. I’m not even sure how long now, days have become hard to differentiate; but since before we were told we had to close by the government. We saw what was coming. Although, like most people, we didn’t imagine how bad it was actually going to get, and how quickly.

Community is something of an abstract concept right now. In a city of a quarter of a million people, I haven’t actually seen more than a few dozen people since we closed our doors. From that time until today I hadn’t been further than the supermarket at the end of the street, although I’ve been in contact via email with Colin, by text with Rami, and by phone with the chair of the trustees (“You should go out more, darling! I meet my friend every day for a walk. We pretend we’re not together. Get on your bike and go and see your girlfriend!”). I didn’t get on my bike. I have stayed indoors as much as possible. The community centre is a world away on the other side of town, but I have seen a few of the regular centre users in my brief ventures out of the house for food. The day after we closed our doors I saw Beta from the community massage clinic in my local supermarket. We exchanged a few words across our different queues at the checkouts:

“I only came in for potatoes and onions,” she shouted at me, distressed (distressed and shouting is Beta’s default setting, so I found this quite reassuring at the time). “I’ve had to make do with these crisps,” she complained, stuffing handfuls of them into her mouth. The woman behind her in the queue looked both disturbed and concerned. None of us knew it then, of course, but we were all standing at bottom of the cliff face to the unimaginable. We wouldn’t see a real potato for at least another week.

The second person I recognised was a few days ago: the middle-aged male carer/partner of an overweight wheelchair-bound woman who attends fortnightly astrology lectures. Her other half and I were both in my local supermarket’s now-normal hour-long outside queue, waiting patiently to shop on the vacant wind-swept concourse of its second-story car-park, a handful of strangers between us. I failed to catch his eye and offer a consolatory ‘what can you do?’ raised eyebrow and/or shrug, He spent the whole wait talking on his mobile phone to somebody. I imagined it was his charge, belittling him – as I had heard her do so many times before – for his incompetence in attending to her needs.

The third familiar person I saw this morning. A scraggly man in his sixties, head down and hunched over himself, sporting his usual dirty yellow high-visibility vest over a greying white t-shirt, talking to himself as he walked down the street. I didn’t manage to meet his eye either. He didn’t even look up.

My walk outside today took me further than I have been in weeks. Almost half a mile. Distance has new parameters now. It’s become a measure bounded by time and exposure to others. It’s a lot to get your head around. Most of the people that I passed looked like they were struggling to get their heads around it too. Still, the sun was shining and the roadworks – that for months have turned my journey to work into a warren of orange barricaded dead ends – have finally cleared. Unfortunately for now there is nowhere for these newly emerged paths to lead. Every familiar shop is closed. Every further destination out of bounds.

In the evenings I find solace listening to podcasts. I learn about art heists and radioactive boy scouts, about the worst video games ever made and the problems of identifying sun bleached human remains in the Arizona desert. I learn that black holes are not actually holes at all; they are, the scientists think, entities so large in mass that their gravitational fields pull all surrounding matter into them. The gravity of a black hole is so great that not even light can escape it, hence why they appear to us as, literally, black holes in the glittering fabric of space. But that’s not a hole, that’s some thing so big that we can’t see it. The ‘thing’ itself, they call ‘the singularity’. They call the point when something gets close enough to be drawn in by its gravitational field – the point beyond which nothing can re-emerge, not even light, let alone matter – ‘the event horizon’. I find all this way more terrifying than the idea of a big fucking hole. It’s not nothing, it’s something. It reminds me of watching The Day the Earth Caught Fire as a kid and how convinced I was that I was seeing something imminent, something that I would experience in my lifetime. I spent most of my adult life telling myself how silly I had been. Prescience is what I call it now. Anyway, someone really should have given black holes a better and more accurate name and I take comfort in the idea that I will never have to face one. Although the idea of never having to actually face something so terrible it’s impossible to comprehend has kind of been turned upside down by world events of the last month, so who knows.

I also learn about mall walkers. About how shopping malls in America put up distance markers within them for the benefit of older people who take their exercise there. Welcome to the future, kids.

I watch increasingly worked up Italian mayors warning the world of their intentions. One youthful incumbent trying to convince young people who want to go outside that they are not Will Smith in I Am Legend; that they will die. An older mayor is less forgiving. He tells his constituents to stop having parties. He says that if he finds out anyone in his town is having a party, he will personally send the police around to their homes and that those police will be armed with flamethrowers. It all sounded quite reasonable at the time.

I also learnt, from a book I was reading in the bath yesterday, about a man who believed he was a fried egg. He was constantly on his feet and could get no rest because he worried that if he ever sat down his yolk would split. Psychiatrists tried everything to help him with no success until one doctor decided to go against everything he had been taught and instead of re-inforcing his version of realty, decided to enter into the man’s delusion alongside him. “What would help?” he asked him. “What would stop you from worrying about your yolk splitting when you sat down?” From then on the man who believed he was a fried egg starting carrying around a piece of toast in his pocket. Whenever he wanted to sit down he would place the piece of toast between himself and the seat. His anxiety was cured. No longer was he afraid that if his yolk split he would be lost. He still believed he was a fried egg, but it no longer upset him.

The streets around where I live are noticeably quieter than normal, but not empty. Stepping out of the front door today I see groups of students living in shared houses sunbathing on the pavements outside their doorsteps and sitting in front gardens. We’re all waiting for this to be over, with no sense of how long that will be, just a vague idea that it can’t possibly go on for ever. Can it?

One of my friends signed up for one of the mutual aid schemes that have been organised in the city, their intention to help people who are self-isolating, quarantined or vulnerable. But she quickly became dispirited upon seeing the messages posted. My favourites of those she recounted were:

“If anyone is interested, I think I saw some wild kale growing by the bins. I haven’t tried it yet…“

and

“Have organic coffee that I can’t drink because of caffeine sensitivity. Will barter for tahini.“

I want a t-shirt that says that on. In the ‘Stay Calm’ font with gold lettering on soft, forest-green cotton. I’ll wear it indoors, sitting on my couch covered in crumbs and stains while I’m fishing for muskie in the Rocky Mountains of the late 19th century, slowly dying of virtual tuberculosis. Incurable. Not the diagnosis I was wanting from one of my few well-being resources right now. Even the virtual world is taking the piss.

Yet despite the intermittently paralysing fear of what the fuck is going on, and throughout all the queuing up in supermarket car parks (the experience making me feel like I’m in one of those old news clips showing Russian food lines), I do at least feel like all the TV I consumed as a kid, all the warnings of imminent nuclear attack and how to survive the aftermath, all that subliminal BBC post-war programming, has finally proved useful. In some ways I feel like I’ve been preparing for what I’m experiencing now my whole life. I am Will Smith in I Am Legend. We all are.

There’s a cornershop at the end of my street, with a freshly painted bright pink facade whose modernity contrasts with a sign above the door that still reads – in a font born before I was – Bailey’s Superette. Pie in the Sky we used to call the shop, because the previous owner reminded us of Richard Griffiths. Pie in the Sky‘s shelves were always bare; a tin of Heinz baked beans and a bottle of Sarsons on one, a couple of tins of Whiskas and a jar of Robertson’s marmalade on another. From the back room you’d often hear the sound of Richard Griffiths’ almost-twin younger brother practising the clarinet. Eventually the Griffiths brothers sold their failing shop to a Turkish family who completely turned the place around. There’s almost too much stuff in there now. Floor to ceiling, its shelves are packed with every kind of grocery item imaginable. While members of the family serve during the day, in the evenings they employ Amir. Amir is a friend of the family. A cab driver who had a brain aneurysm so had to stop driving. He would have carried on but the government told him he would be breaking the law. Apparently somewhere there’s a law that says people with serious brain conditions aren’t allowed to drive minicabs (although many are clearly slipping through the net). Frustrated but powerless, Amir has resigned himself to the situation. He shrugs his shoulders, slips away into reverie, thinking fondly of a time when he will once again be back behind the wheel of his car instead of a convenience store counter. He doesn’t like working in the cornershop. He feels all cooped up.

On my way to bed the lodger opens the door to his room to show me what he’s been working on the last few nights. On the screen of his laptop a miniature Roman city that he has built from scratch goes about its everyday business: tiny citizens, pixels high, walk the streets, go to work, pay taxes, bake bread, build houses, visit markets, worship in temples, survey the binary horizon.

“Look,” says the lodger, “you can click on any one of them and find out what they’re thinking.” He demonstrates by placing his cursor on a random figure strolling along a pixelated agora lined with olive trees. A caption box filled with statistics and text appears above their head. The lodger sighs. “They’re complaining that there aren’t enough people in the city,” he says, “nothing is getting done. It’s a fine balance. You have to make the city attractive enough so people will want to come and live in it. But then you have to make sure the infrastructure is there to support them. And then you have the gods to worry about too. If you don’t keep them happy they’ll mess things up by sending you plagues and other sorts of natural disasters.

“You’ve got to keep the gods happy,” I tell him.

“I’ll build another temple,” he says, clicking on a square of the map and accessing a sub-menu. Within seconds minute Roman stonemasons begin building the foundations.