London
Monday.
Couldn’t bear this morning, cold, dark, and period cramps which nod in some long way to the face of a catfish. I wish I had remembered to bring painkillers to work. Work is helping the children of the rich get into the Slade School of Fine Art. I know what you’re thinking, but I do not feel bad about it. The art world is already rigged. I have only found a way to live after it.
Before Anastasia and I went through her portfolio we visited an exhibition in Shoreditch. Her father came to collect us when we were done and drove us back to the Strand, where she lives, in his Bentley. I sat in the front. The seats, made of cream leather, were low and warm. Her father was wearing a pale linen shirt and I was in my favourite porridge mohair jumper. To an onlooker the three of us could have been a family, dressed in matching shades of parchment, driving through the city in silence. As we pass Saint Paul’s we pause at the traffic lights beside a sandwich board for the Pret Christmas special (it’s July). Two red baubles hang from its hinges and for a second, under the black sky, in the Bentley, beside the Christmas display, my life is not my own.
Tuesday.
My friend Rose and I are in Soho. The unseasonably bad weather seems to have relented for a day and it is almost warm. We are going to watch Eric Rohmer’s A Summer’s Tale at the Prince Charles cinema, but first I have to return a dress. I bought the dress with money that I made from writing something. More specifically, it is money that a friend transferred to my account after being paid for it herself. She was supposed to write an article for a notable literary magazine, but was too hungover to do it when the deadline came, so as a favour I wrote it for her. I also did it because I wanted the cash. When it went to print under her name she sent me her fee via Paypal.
The dress is the sum total of that fee and the most expensive item of clothing I have ever purchased, new, from a shop. When I got it home it did not look like how it did in the changing room; it sags at the waist and the shoulders are awkward. It is long and it makes me look short. So here I am, bringing it back. I feel embarrassed in front of the shop assistant by my failure to commit to the expensive thing. Edits to my appearance are always disappointing in this way. It is disappointing work, being a woman who wants to look good.
The shop assistant tells me I am not allowed to get a refund, only a credit note because the dress was bought in the sale. The sale, however, is now over. Without the sale everything in the shop is rendered financially out of reach, even with said credit note. So it would seem that no one gets to keep the money for the article that neither my friend nor I technically wrote. It lives now, sheepishly, as a piece of card in my purse.
Wednesday.
The film was good. Funny. It is about a man who thinks the world owes him something, namely adoration. There are three women who will potentially give this to him but he can choose only one (their ultimatum, not his). When the women fail to adore him in the way that he deserves to be adored (because he cannot choose) he blames the women, who he thinks are missing a trick; they cannot see how special, complicated and sensitive he is. His failure to choose (he thinks) being evidence of this.
After the film we went to Bar Italia to drink wine in the sunshine. When I got on the tube to come home my phone, which had run out of data so was up until this point devoid of activity, started to cough up a run of waiting texts from my boyfriend. He has Covid. He has Covid because of the football. When am I coming home? I have to come home (I live with him).
So now we’re at home. I cancel the rest of my sessions with Anastasia for the week. It’s still sunny, so perhaps the isolation will not be that bad; our flat has a porch of sorts which fits a chair and table on, and I prefer being at home to being at work, where I can do the other kind of work I am supposed to do, which is writing.
Thursday.
Wrong. Impossible to concentrate. The world is unjust!
Friday.
I think I feel ill. Am I ill? Impossible to tell.
Saturday.
I refuse to be ill.
Sunday.
I stick a swab up my nose and down my throat which confirms that yes, I should feel awful. I call my mum to tell her.
But you were doing so well, she says, meaning to have evaded it all this time. You have such a strong constitution, she goes on, I’m so surprised. (As if physical weakness were a flaw.) Because she is my mum I have already subscribed to this logic by virtue of being brought up by it, and agree. Now I feel as though I have done badly. I am in a terrible mood. I feel furious! I would like to smash something precious.
Monday.
The furious feeling is subsiding and being replaced with a worse, more tender one; I can’t smell anything. A dampening of the senses feels so perilously slapstick, like when you put on sunglasses and immediately feel like you’re going to get hit by a car.
The weather, which at the start of last week and for most of the year prior resembled a bad day in February is now, finally, sweltering hot. It is strange to realise how much of the sensation of weather is the smell of it; other people’s sweat, Buddleia and tar. Without its scent heat just feels like a joyless thickening of the air.
On the plus side, I haven’t had a cigarette in four days. Maybe I will (could?) quit.
Tuesday.
My boyfriend, who is now feeling much better, has taken over as house nurse and is in the kitchen. Not unrelated to the flaw of physical weakness, I feel bad about lying down all day and cannot justify eating the pasta my boyfriend is cooking to mark the end of it. I order a poke bowl and some kimchi off my phone which somehow seems healthier and more virtuous. He is cooking the pasta for me, and I feel cruel for furtively making other choices; I am supposed to be sick, I am supposed to be gracious.
The food comes and the delivery driver can’t find our flat because it’s in one of those maze-y post-war estates and my boyfriend has to go out and get it, walking around on the phone to the driver whilst giving directions, naming roads and pointing. When he finally finds the driver the food has leaked out from the compostable cardboard it has been transported in, through the paper bag which holds it, and the whole thing has collapsed in on itself. Not inedible exactly, but no longer appealing. My boyfriend hands me the pulp of paper and rice; kimchi juice drips onto my leg. This, the final straw, makes me feel personally victimised by the whole situation and I cry. I should have just eaten with you, I say to my boyfriend, who is unmoved.
As I wipe my leg with a tea towel I develop a new found sympathy for the man in the Eric Rhomer film.
Hannah Regel is a writer and poet. You can buy her recent collection here.