56 Days

by Catherine Ryan Howard

  Paracetamol, cough syrup, and some Imodium wouldn’t go astray . . . Maybe some of those dissolvable packet things you drink to replace your electrolytes, whatever electrolytes are. Antibacterial handwash, if they can get it—which she doubts. The shelves in her local Tesco have been empty of it for going on two weeks now.

  She looks up, into the mirror, and notices another mirror on the wall behind her: the door to the medicine cabinet. She’s already had a snoop inside it—she did that the first night she was here—but now she opens it to take an inventory.

  There are only two shelves and they seem to be mostly filled with personal products. A thickening shampoo. Razors. Shaving oil. Two boxes of condoms, one of which is open at one end and lying flat, so she can see there are only a couple left inside.

  A blister pack of sea-green pills with the number 542 stamped on to them, mostly gone; she thinks they might be antihistamines. All that counts for medical supplies is a box of supermarket bandages and a tube of Deep Freeze.

  A thought crosses her mind, unbidden, as she closes the cabinet door.

  No inhalers.

  She finds Oliver in the spare room, lifting her suitcase onto the bare bed. The air smells of furniture polish; he must have been cleaning while she was gone.

  “I promise you I’m not paranoid,” he says when he sees her in the doorway. “Despite all evidence to the contrary.”

  She waves a hand. “It’s fine. Really.”

  The blind is all the way up, offering a view of the courtyard through the leaves of a tree, and the window has been opened a crack. She goes to it to get a better look and sees that a crack is as far as it’ll go; it’s a safety feature.

  Oliver comes up behind her, puts his arms around her waist, and speaks into the fall of her hair.

  “I just want us to be safe,” he says. “For you to be.”

  “I know. Honestly, it’s fine. I want us to be safe too.” She twists around to face him and lifts her lips to his.

  He kisses her once, briefly, and then pulls back to say, “Speaking of—you haven’t been kissing anyone else, have you? Is that why you wouldn’t let me come with you this morning?”

  “I haven’t, no. But I did lick all the buttons at pedestrian crossings between here and my place, so . . .”

  He laughs and kisses her again, longer and deeper.

  Then he pulls her close until they are pressed together, her head turned so she can rest a cheek against his chest.

  She puts her arms around him, sighing contentedly as she relaxes into his hold.

  “What’s it like out there, anyway?” he asks.

  “Weird. You’d really notice the difference since yesterday.”

  “I suppose that’s good? Shows people are taking this seriously.”

  “I don’t know if everyone is, though.”

  She pulls away and goes to her suitcase, starts to unzip its lid. He’s opened the doors of the built-in wardrobes for her and even put some empty hangers on the rail. There’s no question that she’ll be sleeping in his room, but she likes that he’s offered this one for her belongings, what few of them she has.

  She starts lifting items out.

  “What do you mean?” he asks.

  “Well, I called my mother while I was at my place. Ended up spending most of the conversation having to explain to her that, yes, the two-kilometer restriction applies to her too. And why it does.” Ciara rolls her eyes. “She thinks everyone is overreacting.”

  A beat passes before Oliver asks, “Did you tell her?”

  “Tell her what?”

  “About me. About this.”

  “Clearly,” Ciara says, as she takes a black dress from the case and shakes it out, “you haven’t met my mother. That’d be a no and another, louder, more emphatic no. She didn’t even want me to move to Dublin. If she heard about this, she’d probably drive up here and drag me back to Cork by my hair. Actually . . .” Having hung the dress in the wardrobe, she turns to look at him. “I haven’t told anyone. Have you?”

  “I was going to tell my brother, but I don’t have to.”

  “Do, if you want. It’s not classified information, it’s just—”

  “—when you think about it—”

  “—it’d be easier this way, right?”

  Oliver nods. “That’s what I was thinking.”

  “Not just this bit, the moving-in-together-for-lockdown stuff, but—”

  “Everything else, too,” he finishes.

  “I just hate all this stuff, you know? As soon as you tell anyone you’re in a relationship, you have to, like, define everything. And then comes the bloody Spanish Inquisition.” When Oliver frowns at this, she says, “Okay, so, maybe that’s just my family. But this is kind of perfect, isn’t it? We have, what, two weeks? To just be us. To see what happens without having to explain it or label it or justify anything to anyone else. I mean, we literally can’t see anyone else. No one can come visit—not that I even know anyone here yet. And no one knows I’m here. Who’s going to know I’m not still in my own place?”

  Oliver is grinning. “So we’re in a relationship now, are we?”

  “Did you hear anything after that bit or . . . ? And technically any connection between two people is a relationship, so.”

  “Good save.”

  “I thought so.”

  “We are, though.”

  She meets his gaze. “Are we?”

  “Do you want to be?”

  “Do you?”

  “I asked you first,” he says.

  “So we’re playing that game . . .”

  “Well, we’ve literally nothing else to do.”

  She laughs at this.

  “I would like it,” he says then, “if we were.”

  “Me too.”

  “So let’s be.”

  They look at each other, expectant and awkward and embarrassed, until they both break and laugh. Then Ciara turns back to her open suitcase, her cheeks warm, to pull out more clothes.

  Oliver moves to help her.

  Her NASA mug is sitting on top of some jeans. He lifts it out.

  “So you’re a meatball girl then,” he says.

  She has no idea what this means. Her first reaction is that he has insulted her somehow, that she should be offended, but then when she considers that he’s never even come close to saying anything like that before, her second reaction is total confusion.

  “A what girl?”

  Oliver points to the insignia on the mug, the blue circle littered with tiny white stars and slashed with a red vector.

  “That’s what that’s called,” he says. “The meatball. The logo they had in the eighties, the one with just the letters—that’s the worm.” He pauses. “You’ve never heard that before?”

  “Don’t think so.” She turns to pull more clothing from the suitcase and takes it to the wardrobe. “But in that case, I am definitely a meatball girl. I hate that other one. It’s awful.”

  It takes her at least fifteen seconds to hang a dress and refold two T-shirts so she can add them to a stack and in all that time, Oliver says nothing. When she turns back to him, she finds him still holding the mug, looking down at it.

  “Hey,” she says.

  He lifts his head.

  “You okay? You’re staring at that thing like you’re in some kind of daze.”

  “I was just thinking,” he says, “what’s the red slash about?” He points to it on the mug—the sideways V-shape that bisects the blue disc. “What’s that supposed to be?”

  “Isn’t it a wing?”

  He raises his eyebrows.

  “The blue disc is a planet,” she says, “the stars are space, the little white orbital line thingy represents space travel, and the red thing is a wing, for aeronautics.”

  She wants to
add I think to that but she knows she’s right, so she forces herself to swallow it.

  Oliver smiles.

  “Well,” he says, “I guess you learn something new every day.”

  50 Days Ago

  Midmorning, word spreads around the office: Taoiseach Leo Varadkar is about to make a statement, live from Washington, DC.

  The only screen that plays TV channels is the one in the conference room. They pile in there, bringing coffees and sticky pastries so that watching this terrible, unprecedented news can double as their elevenses.

  Oliver is the last one in. Jonas, a Swede who started on the same day as him, is standing just inside the door.

  They exchange nods.

  “Here we go,” Jonas whispers, his eyes flashing with excitement.

  Over the course of the last month or so, Jonas has spent at least twice as much time scouring the internet for coronavirus stories than he has doing any actual work, as far as Oliver can tell. In the last fortnight, the guy has become completely obsessed with northern Italy. Oliver knows this because the other thing Jonas spends an indecent amount of time doing is telling Oliver, in ever-increasing detail, about the stuff he finds online.

  Earlier, he’d been reading something on the New York Times website, intermittently shaking his head and muttering things like, “Oh my God,” and “What the fuck?” Oliver had refused to take the bait but it was pointless, because Jonas eventually leaned into the space between their computer screens and told him all about it anyway. Italy is two days into a draconian national lockdown, he said, shutting everything except pharmacies and grocery stores which, of course, has caused huge lines to form. With not enough ventilators to go around, doctors are having to decide who lives and who dies, literally, and who dies is invariably the elderly.

  “And Ireland is just two weeks behind,” Jonas said gravely. “Two weeks.”

  Oliver didn’t think the New York Times was publishing fake news, but still, these facts felt like they had that kind of quality. They were so outlandish, insane.

  Things couldn’t be that bad a couple of countries away, surely?

  He hadn’t been too worried about it, up until now. He’d just assumed that whatever was going on over there would be stopped long before it arrived here. This would just be like all the other news stories: it would go from so much coverage you’d wonder what the hell they filled the column inches and airtime with before they had this to talk about, to realizing, one day, that you hadn’t heard anything about it in a while.

  Just like Oliver’s own story, once upon a time.

  But now here they are, gathered on a weekday morning to listen to the country’s leader say something about the virus’s arrival in Ireland that is so serious, he can’t wait until he gets back to Ireland to say it.

  A hush falls on the room as the TV screen changes from an anchorman sitting behind a desk in a TV studio to a live shot of the Taoiseach walking to a podium set up outside some grand building. It’s still dark over there. His expression is one of utter seriousness. Over his shoulder, an Irish flag billows in the breeze.

  “Lockdown,” Jonas whispers. “Has to be.”

  But it’s not.

  Varadkar begins to speak, slowly and deliberately, presumably reading from some unseen teleprompter but looking as if he’s talking directly to the lens, as if he’s addressing each person individually and the nation collectively at the same time.

  The virus is all over the world. It will continue to spread but it can be slowed.

  We said we would take the right actions at the right time. We have to move now to have the greatest impact.

  You should continue to go to work if you can but where possible work from home. In order to reduce unnecessary face-to-face interaction in the workplace, break times and working times should be staggered and meetings done remotely or by phone.

  The air in the room is suddenly charged with tension.

  Bodies shift, pairings separate. A few guys exchange nervous smiles, tittering laughter. Oliver counts thirteen of them, standing shoulder to shoulder in this poorly ventilated room, and takes a step backward, out of it.

  He really doesn’t want to end up catching this thing.

  He can’t afford to. Going to a GP, getting tested, being admitted to a hospital—anything like that, anything official, anything that involves IDs and paperwork and history . . .

  The virus is especially dangerous for him, but not for any medical reason. He’s worried about a different kind of exposure.

  As Oliver starts back across the office, he hears the TV fall mute behind him and Kenneth, the managing director, say, “Okay, okay, okay,” in a tone that suggests he wants everyone’s attention. “Go to your desks for now. Alistair is on his way back from a site visit and he and I will sit down this afternoon, work this out. But I think it’s safe to assume we’ll all be working from home for the next couple of weeks, so you can start to plan accordingly . . .”

  Oliver reaches his desk, sits down, and tunes out.

  His phone is lying by the keyboard; he taps the screen to wake it up.

  No new text.

  He thought she might have sent a Still on for tonight? message; maybe she hasn’t seen the news yet.

  He has to admit, though, that, ever since Monday night, he keeps catching himself thinking about her—or maybe what he’s doing is thinking about Monday night.

  To just sit in a bar and have a drink and enjoy a conversation was a lightness he hasn’t felt in a long, long time. It was like someone had built him a bridge across the dark, turbulent water so, for once, he could take a break from trying to claw himself up from its tangled, muddy depths.

  And he liked it.

  He liked just being able to be.

  Before he can think too much about it, he picks up his phone and calls her.

  He’s surprised by how much he welcomes the sound of her voice, how much better he feels knowing that they are still on for tonight.

  But after he hangs up, he feels a prickling sensation at the base of his skull—almost always a sign that he’s doing something he shouldn’t be, that he’s working against whatever primordial survival instinct has carried him this far.

  He’ll be careful, he tells himself.

  He is being careful. He’s already decided this will be the last time. After tonight, he won’t see her again—and he probably won’t be able to see her, so he won’t even have to make the decision.

  It’s just that he liked the feeling of being with her, of being Oliver with her.

  And he wants to feel it one more time.

  33 Days Ago

  Early on Sunday morning, they drive to the largest Tesco they could find on Google Maps, which is a long eight kilometers outside the two-kilometer radius they’re supposed to remain within. Oliver has rented a GoCar for the occasion and is sitting tensed in its driver’s seat, two hands wrapped tightly around the wheel, eyes never leaving the road ahead. She has told him repeatedly that the two-kilometer thing is just for exercise, that you can travel farther to shop for essential items, but he’s unconvinced.

  “God, you really don’t like breaking rules, do you?” she asks him ten minutes into the journey. “Look, if we get stopped, we get stopped. It’s not a big deal. No one’s going to arrest us. They won’t even make us turn around because this is within the rules. And even if they do, so what? We’ll just turn around and go back.”

  There’s one last point on her tongue—and anyway, we’re only doing this because of you—but she bites it back.

  They are on the hunt not just for a week’s groceries, but for a printer as well. Oliver has realized he’s going to need one, twenty-four hours after every retail location that would typically sell such a thing has been ordered to close. Ordering it online might mean waiting a week or more for it to be delivered, so they are taking a risk and driving outside
their inclusion zone to a supermarket megastore in the hope that among the porridge oats and toilet rolls, they will find electrical equipment too.

  A couple of weeks back, when he first started working from home, Oliver went and bought one of those eye-wateringly expensive coffee machines that will only make coffee from just as eye-wateringly expensive coffee capsules. Ciara can’t help but think that would’ve been the time to get whatever he needed to do his job, but she’s keeping quiet on that front as well.

  “It’s not that,” he says. “I’m just not used to driving.” He flicks on an indicator at a T-junction even though they’re the only car on the road. “But I don’t like breaking rules, you’re right.” He throws her a quick smile. “It’s mostly the driving thing, though. I never drove when I was in London.”

  “Should I be worried?”

  “Not when the roads are like this.”

  Traffic is so sparse that almost every time they come to a red light, they are the only vehicle to stop at it. Their route is taking them through empty suburbs; cars sit parked in driveways with the gates closed behind them and curtains remain drawn.

  It’s as if, Ciara thinks, Dublin has decided that since there’s nowhere to go and nothing to do, the only thing for it is to have a citywide lie-in.

  But she’s wrong. As they approach the entrance to the Tesco Extra near Liffey Valley, it becomes clear that in actual fact the entire city has had the exact same idea as them.

  A long tailback of cars waits just to gain entry to the parking lot. It takes nearly twenty minutes to make it to the entrance where a bored-looking teenager in a reflective vest directs them to follow the car in front, as if they couldn’t have figured that out without his waving arm. It takes another ten minutes to find an empty space and their reward for that is to join the line of what must be fifty or sixty people, all spaced two meters apart, that snakes out of the store’s main entrance and down the full length of its facade before twisting back around on itself. Nearly another hour passes before they get to the front of the line, where a stone-faced security guard tells them it’s strictly one-customer-per-cart today.