Lockdown Lunacy (Clovenhoof: The Isolation Chronicles Book 3)
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Thank you from the authors!
Clovenhoof – The Isolation Chronicles
Episode 3: Lockdown Lunacy
Heide Goody & Iain Grant
Pigeon Park Press
‘Clovenhoof: The Isolation Chronicles’ Copyright © Heide Goody and Iain Grant 2020
The moral right of the authors has been asserted. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, except for personal use, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Published by Pigeon Park Press
www.pigeonparkpress.com
info@pigeonparkpress.com
1
Clovenhoof struggled back to the corner booth from the crowded bar of the Boldmere Oak with a Lambrini and a Chardonnay held high to avoid the jostling elbows. “Satan’s balls!” he said, once he’d reached the edge of the throng and slid into the seat opposite Nerys.
“Busy, huh?” said Nerys.
“I’ve never known anything like it,” said Clovenhoof. “Reminds me of that time I fell in the Pit of Slum Landlords back in the Old Place.”
“Well, it is Friday night after all,” she said.
The numbers in the Boldmere Oak ebbed and flowed day to day and week to week, according to the mysterious patterns of human behaviour. Friday and Saturday nights were always busy. Sunday night quiz night tended to draw in a crowd, although Reverend Zack’s specific interests in ornithology, obscure cricketing trivia and disco music were an acquired taste. The rest of the time, the Boldmere Oak was either dead or shambling along like a zombie.
Barman-owner Lennox fitfully tried to inject some life into the place with themed nights. Wild West nights had caused some excitement and interest, although it had resulted in a police warning for illegal gambling, and what Lennox described as “an unacceptable amount of spitting on the floor.” Table tennis night had led to a number of broken glasses, and an unfortunate choking incident involving an open-mouthed drinker and a well-aimed shot by one Mr Jeremy Clovenhoof.
“Do you remember that Murder Mystery night they had in here near Christmas?” said Jeremy. “It was busy then.”
“I do,” said Nerys darkly. “I seem to recall a certain someone leaping up and slapping an am-dram actor around the face with his deerstalker and screaming at him to confess.”
Jeremy smiled at the memory. “And I seem to recall a certain someone taking the ‘corpse’ into the disableds for a snog and post-mortem examination.”
“No idea what you’re on about,” sniffed Nerys, looking away. “But this is busier.”
“The last hurrah.”
Nerys nodded. “If the government is planning on enforcing a lockdown and making pubs close from tomorrow, doesn’t it seem a bit stupid for people to be rushing into the pubs and crowding together to get in a last few drinks before the virus forces us into self-isolation? People are such idiots.”
“We’re here,” Clovenhoof reminded her.
“Yes, but we’d normally be here. This is just us following our normal routine. Most of these people are only here because everything’s going to be shut down. Bloody opportunists; making the pandemic worse.” She drained half her glass in a bitter gulp. “Besides, we have something to celebrate—”
“We do indeed. My first batch of homebrewed handwash is almost ready.”
“—My new job.”
“That too,” agreed Clovenhoof. “Remind me what is it again?”
“Customer Satisfaction Manager for Dukoko.”
“I don’t cocoa,” he replied. “What does any of that mean?”
“It means what it says. Customer Satisfaction Manager. I manage the satisfaction of customers.”
“Like you managed the satisfaction of that murder mystery corpse.”
“I don’t know what rumours you’ve heard, Jeremy…”
“I’m just saying. It’s a rare murder mystery where the corpse gets a happy ending.”
Nerys kicked him under the table. “It’s for Dukoko.”
“Never heard of him.”
“They’re an on-line delivery company. A supermarket. They’re a bit up-market, which is probably why you’re unfamiliar with them. A very well-respected company and even more in demand while we’re on lockdown. You watch, soon everyone will be ordering their shopping on-line, and I’ll be there to manage their satisfaction. Got my training next week.” She gestured at the empty space next to Clovenhoof. “Would have thought Ben would come down to toast my success.”
Clovenhoof snorted. “My man Kitchen is taking this whole pandemic thing very seriously. He’s spent the last two days boxing up books in his shop to bring home. He’s sprayed the rest with gallons of disinfectant, pulled down the shutters and says he’s not opening up again until the whole thing has blown over.”
“And that means he can’t come to the pub for a celebratory pint?”
Clovenhoof looked around at the crowd. “I think he’s already worried he might have caught it off someone. I saw him making a list of everyone he’s been within two metres of in the last month. But we’ll be all right, won’t we?”
Over at the bar a band of beefy chaps had their arms around each other’s shoulders, simultaneously jiggling up and down, sloshing their pints, and singing a near incomprehensible rugby song.
Nerys ran a finger along the tacky table top. “I’d like to think that a decade of drinking here has put us into contact with every bacteria and germ known to science. That which doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger.”
Clovenhoof laughed at that.
“What?” said Nerys.
“We’ve got Nietzsche down in Hell. We variously stab, shoot and garrotte him every day; non-fatally of course. I heard rumours that the Almighty pops down every so often to say hello and remind the man he’s still not dead.”
2
Saturday morning, cherishing what might be his final pub hangover for a few weeks, Clovenhoof popped down a couple of doors to visit retired chemistry bod Persephone.
“Who is it?” she demanded. “I’m not opening the door, you know.”
“It’s Jeremy,” he called through the letter box.
“Don’t go breathing into my house,” she said from behind the frosted glass. “I’ve got my socially distancing stick.”
“Your what?”
Six feet of bevelled dowelling shot out of the letterbox. “No closer than that,” she called.
“Absolutely,” agreed Clovenhoof. “I only popped round to pick up the handwash. I’ve already promised Ben a bottle of our exclusive Lambrini-scented cleanser.”
“It’s in the shed. I’ve already brought my cut into the house.”
“‘My cut’. You’re so cool, Sephone,” he said. “You make it sound like we’re drug dealers.”
“I’ve been watching that Breaking Bad,” she said. “I reckon we could give them a run for their money.”
“Don’t tempt me, lady. I’d do it.”
“But before we enter a life of crime,” she said, “could I ask you to do something as mundane as fetching me some more shopping from the supermarket.”
“You told me you were going to do that on-line.”
“I was,” she agreed. “I went on line with t
hem Dukoko people.”
“Oh, I know them,” said Clovenhoof, who had never heard of them until Nerys had mentioned them the night before. “They’re meant to be good. Proper posh.”
“Well, I wouldn’t know about that,” grumped Persephone. “I spent most of yesterday trying to register with them. The website kept crashing. Too many people, I think. Then when I did get on, I couldn’t find a slot.”
“What kind of slot?”
“A delivery slot. They were all booked up. It’s all well and good these Dukoko people saying they can bring your goodies to you, but if I can’t find a slot…”
“I see,” he said.
“But then they said that new slots would become available at midnight. So I stayed up until midnight.”
“And…?”
“Well, I kept clicking refresh to see when the new slots might come up and then— Poof! Alakazam! The next day’s slots were also gone. Damned bloody pixies snuck in and snaffled them all.”
“I don’t think it was actually pixies, Persephone,” said Clovenhoof gently. He knew you had to humour the old and demented.
The socially distancing stick poking out of the letterbox waggled irritably.
“I was being facetious! The long and the short of it is, I haven’t been able to book any shopping. So, if you’d be so gracious…”
“Of course,” said Clovenhoof. “Anything for my future drug-baron partner-in-crime. Scribble a list and I’ll pop to the shop.”
3
The queue for the supermarket snaked all around the car park. In the weeks since the threat of pandemic had been announced, the supermarkets’ control measures had grown increasingly stringent and more organised. Here, the supermarket had put strips of tape on the concrete every two metres to show folks where they should stand as they waited to get inside.
“Brits love a good queue, don’t they?” Clovenhoof called to the man one position in front of him.
The man turned slightly. “What’s that?” He wore a homemade mask over his mouth. It was made from a red handkerchief which made him look like a Wild West bank robber.
“This.” Clovenhoof gestured at the queue. “There’s queues and then there’s this. A clearly defined queue, absolutely no cutting in and, with social distancing and that, it’s impressively long.”
The man grunted but offered no comment. Clovenhoof turned to the woman behind him.
“You like a bit of this, don’t you?”
“Pardon?” she said.
“A long orderly queue. Bet it gets your juices flowing, doesn’t it? It’s practically patriotic.”
The woman looked at him, alarmed, but said nothing. Clovenhoof wasn’t put off by the lack of interaction with his fellow queuers. He relished it for the very British thing it was and entertained himself by loudly humming the national anthem to himself. This eventually morphed into Land of Hope and Glory, and he improvised some pom-tiddly-om-pom-pom bits in between. He wished he had a flag to wave.
“Hey, let’s do a Mexican wave!” he declared loudly.
He was near the front of the queue. Not long before he’d be let inside. Hardly enough time to organise a decent crowd celebration.
He turned to the woman behind him. “Ready?”
He bobbed and then straightened, flinging his arms up high. The woman gave him an embarrassed and panicked look, then out of simple peer pressure hesitantly put two hands in the air. The man behind her reluctantly raised his also, mostly so that the woman didn’t feel left out. The person behind him coughed and did nothing.
“Come on, people!” Clovenhoof yelled. “You can do much better than that!”
He bent, stretched and leapt. The woman put up her hands, the man too. The wave continued, each iteration weaker than the one before, until only five people later it sputtered and died. Then, several seconds later, a young man halfway round the car park, clearly judging that the now dead wave would have just then reached him, leapt up, hands high, and whooped.
“You, sir!” Clovenhoof yelled. “You, sir, are a national hero!”
And it was Clovenhoof’s turn to go inside.
After such a lengthy queue, Clovenhoof expected to be ushered into a magical storehouse of wonders, aisle upon aisle of well-stocked shelves and fresh produce. Instead, the interior of the supermarket was like a ghost town. The limited number of shoppers allowed inside drifted silently about like fish in a tank, avoiding each other entirely while they busied themselves with filling their trolleys. Although few shelves were empty, there were clearly gaps. No tinned tomatoes, no tinned soups. Almost no tinned goods at all. No pasta, not even the stupidly shaped stuff. No flour, no eggs, and no sugar. The cake baking shoppers of England were surely going to be disappointed.
Clovenhoof did his best to fulfil Persephone’s order. It was a blessing she had the weird and eclectic needs of an old person and her requests for swedes, carrots, mango and frozen faggots were easily met. Finding her bread was a bit tricky. All the ordinary bread, white and brown, had sold out. There were still plenty of bread products on the shelves – pitta pockets, wraps, hot cross buns, crumpets, bagels – but he wasn’t sure if Persephone would find them acceptable sandwich or toast material. Clovenhoof had long concluded the British were perplexed by any bread which didn’t arrive square and uniformly sliced.
Clovenhoof grabbed several random items, hoping that at least one of them would meet Persephone’s needs and went to the till. Perspex screens had been set up around the tills, completely sealing the cashiers off from the buying public.
“Got you all nicely boxed in,” he smiled to the cashier.
“That’s right,” she said, beginning to scan.
“Like a little hamster cage,” he said.
“Er, yeah.”
He tapped the glass partition. “They could fix you up with a little drinker bottle there, with one of them tubes.”
The cashier laughed. “Put vodka in mine.”
Clovenhoof tutted fiercely. “You can’t give vodka to a hamster. I might have to call the RSPCA.”
As he left the store, a young man whooped and did a one-man Mexican wave at Clovenhoof.
“National hero,” Clovenhoof nodded proudly.
4
Clovenhoof dropped Persephone’s goods at her door. He leaned against the garden wall to get his breath back.
“Back off,” she said through the closed door. “I don’t want you breathing and panting all over my food with your corona-breath.”
Clovenhoof staggered back towards the gate and collapsed, exhausted, beside the gatepost. “It’s sodding knackering carrying six bags of shopping back from the supermarket.”
“What about that pink shopping trolley I lent you?”
“Dunno,” he said. “I heard someone stole it and used it to blow up the Korean barbecue on the high street.”
“What’s a Korean barbecue?”
“It’s really nice. You ought to go. Once the lockdown’s over. And once they’ve rebuilt the Korean barbecue, I guess.” He fanned himself with his hand. He might have the body of a sprightly middle-aged man, but he was nearly an infinity-and-one years old and needed a bit of a rest every now and then. “Maybe you could get your on-line shopping thing sorted before you next need food,” he suggested.
“Oh, I’ve given up on that already,” she said. “The Dukoko website keeps crashing. I’ve got a good mind to complain.”
“You should have a word with my neighbour, Nerys.”
“She the mutton dressed as lamb one?”
“That’ll be her. She’s a customer satisfaction manager.”
“What’s that then?”
“Well it means what it says. Customer Satisfaction Manager. She manages the satisfaction of customers.”
“Sounds like a load of nonsense. If it’s all the same with you, could you come round and do some shopping for me next week? I’d ask my daughter, but she lives in Kettering and has got a family of her own. Can’t be doing with infecting one another.”<
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Clovenhoof grunted. “Sometimes I think this is all a big fuss over nothing.”
“People are dying, Jeremy!” she said sternly.
“Oh, I know that. Just the way people say it, you’d think the grim reaper himself is stalking the streets of Sutton Coldfield,” he said, waving goodbye. “I’ll see you next week.”
He went home, leaving the shopping on her doorstep for her to take in once she was satisfied he was gone.
5
Clovenhoof rapped sharply on the door to Ben’s flat. Ben opened the door dressed in surgical mask and yellow rubber gloves. He took one look at the spot where Clovenhoof’s knuckles had touched the door, sprayed it with surface cleaner and gave it a vigorous rub.
“Pandemic paranoia already set in them?” asked Clovenhoof, cheerfully.
“I’m doing a deep clean,” said Ben.
“How’s that different from an ordinary clean?”
“It means I’m going deeper.”
“Cleaning beneath the surface?”
Ben tutted. “Cleaning everything.”
“So cleaning the things you wouldn’t normally clean?”
“Precisely.”
“The undersides of tables.”
“Yes.”
“Behind the fridge.”
“Yes.”
“Disinfecting the ceiling.”
“Er, possibly.”
“Inside your television.”
“Now you’re being silly.”
“Really?” said Clovenhoof, massaging his chin. “Dark, warm, safe. Seems the ideal place for germs to live.”
The doubt and alarm in Ben’s eyes was a delight to behold. It only lasted a second or two, but that was a second or two of joy.
“Did you want something?” said Ben. “You can see I’m busy. I need to get my place clean – pristine! Hygienic! – before I can start running my home-based bookshop business.”
“Home-based bookshop business? Who are you selling books to? People passing by on the landing?”