Dawn laughed at that and gestured at her mouth. Once she could speak again, she said, ‘No, I was just wondering what we’d talk about.’
‘This, I suppose,’ I said. ‘Us. Ourweirdvibe.’
‘That conversation wouldn’t take long.’
‘No,’ I agreed. ‘Unless we talked about what led to the weird vibe. Unless we talked about all the stuff we decided we didn’t need to say.’
Dawn pulled a face as if she was in pain. ‘In front of some stranger?’ she said. ‘Makes me feel queasy just to think about it.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Me too, really. So you think we just wait? You think the vibe will just blow over?’
‘Hopefully,’ Dawn said. ‘Yeah, hopefully it will.’
But the awkwardness did not go away, and, if anything, as time passed it got worse – though that may have been simply because we had so much time to think about it.
Within a week, I and half my staff were working from home, and, within two, two-thirds of them had been furloughed, meaning that the government paid eighty per cent of their wages so they could go crazy, locked in their homes. Every single one of our retail customers had been forced to close shop, leaving only our professional clients – electricians and fitters and the like. Even they found their workload drying up. The whole planet was grinding to a halt.
The only good thing to come out of any of it was that I was able to ease my guilt just a touch by helping Cheryl. After the exchange of a few frosty emails, she agreed to cancel her resignation and be furloughed instead. After all, she was hardly going to find another job in the middle of a pandemic.
By week three, Dawn and I were putting on weight and getting cabin fever, so we started walking together, an hour every morning and an hour every evening, and it was on one of these walks, one Saturday morning, that Dawn again broached the subject of our ‘vibe’.
‘You know, I’ve been thinking about what you said before,’ she said, out of the blue.
We were sitting on a bench in King George Park – a sporty forty-five-minute walk from home.
‘What I said when?’ I asked.
‘About how edgy things are,’ Dawn said. ‘About maybe seeing someone.’
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘That. It’s not getting better, is it?’
‘No,’ she agreed. ‘No, not much. I feel like I can’t breathe at home half the time.’
‘Me too,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know how much of that is due to lockdown. It’s all pretty stressful. Just watching the news makes me feel breathless.’
‘Yeah, that’s definitely part of it,’ Dawn said. ‘But the other part is this weird vibe we have going between us. It’s exhausting trying to think of things to say.’
‘I think it might be because there’s an elephant in the room,’ I said. ‘It makes it hard to talk about anything else.’
‘That’s exactly what it feels like,’ Dawn said. ‘It feels like there’s an elephant stealing all our oxygen. Two elephants, actually.’
A little Basset hound came running up to us, followed by an elderly lady wearing a face mask.
‘Please don’t,’ the woman said, as Dawn reached out to pet the dog. ‘They can carry it from one person to another, you know.’
‘Oh,’ Dawn said, snatching her hand back. ‘Sorry.’
Once the woman had clipped the lead onto the dog’s collar and dragged him away, I murmured, ‘They carry it from one person’s ankles to another, you know.’
Dawn snorted. ‘Talk about paranoid!’ Then, ‘You know Mum washes her shopping when she gets home? Do you think we should start doing that? Surely you can’t catch it from shopping, can you?’
I shook my head. ‘Probably not,’ I said, then, ‘Maybe. They’ve got it in Ryan’s grandparents’ care home, you know, out in Westgate? Did I tell you that? Five cases already, apparently.’
‘No,’ Dawn said. ‘You didn’t say. They OK?’
‘So far,’ I said. ‘But he’s worried. I hope they’re OK. I met them once and they were lovely.’
‘God,’ Dawn said. ‘What a worry.’
