Becka finished her lashes and turned to the screen, looking thoughtful.
“This is probably good timing, actually.”
“A looming health crisis and cancer treatment is ‘good timing’?”
“Shut up, smart-ass.” She flicked her fingers at the screen. “You know what I mean. You’re home, in the bosom of your family-”
“Only one bosom, really,”
Becka choked on a gasp, holding her hand over her mouth while I laughed.
“I can’t believe you just said that,” Becka wheezed.
I didn’t bother to tell her the many, many dark-humoured jabs my Mum had been coming out with recently. Becka was wry, but I didn’t think she was dark-British-humour wry. Dad hated it, but we both knew it was just Mum’s way of coping.
I waved Becka’s outrage away.
“I jest, I jest. You were saying?” I schooled my expression back to neutral, still enjoying the play of emotions across my best friend’s face.
“Anyway,” she said loudly, “what I was saying… fuck, what was I saying? Oh, yeah. What I was going to say was that now you’re home, no work to distract you, no, well…”
“Boyfriend,” I finished for her. “And we’re still together, just to be clear,” I said, a touch defensively.
Becka sighed. “Fine. I’m just saying that you have the space to focus only on you. You’ve not had that for… maybe ever.”
I frowned, Becka had a point. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d just thought about what I wanted for myself. For the past few years I’d segued from school, to university, to a job in the industry I’d spent years telling myself I wanted to work in, to Korea and… Jihoon.
“See?” Becka said, with not a small amount of triumph. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
I blew out a breath. “You’re not wrong.”
Becka just blew me a kiss.
“I bloody said it,” Dad fumed. “Didn’t I bloody say it?”
Mum just hushed him as he settled onto the sofa beside her, handing her a cup of camomile tea.
We were all sat in the living room, watching the telly.
Earlier in the day, there had been an announcement on the radio that the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, was going to address the nation. Even though we all sort of knew what he was about to say, the words still sent a chill down my spine.
“From this evening, I must give the British people a very simple instruction – you must stay at home.”
Dad was quietly ranting, but as I sat there, watching the end-times be televised, all I could think was that this was the kind of thing I used to read about in young-adult dystopian novels. Hopefully this didn’t mean a horde of zombies were about to come trundling down the street, because we were runningdecidedly short on coffee, and I didn’t think we owned a machete.
“You alright, love?” Mum’s voice broke me out of my colourful imaginings, and I looked over to her.
“Mm? Yeah, just daydreaming.”
“Hopefully something more cheerful than this,” she joked.
I refocused my attention on the screen, and we all watched in silence, listening to the Prime Minister try to reassure the nation.
My attention drifted away from the UK, all the way to Korea. What would this mean for travel? When would I be able to fly again? And then I felt selfish for even considering that, instead of my mum. She out of everyone I knew would be most heavily impacted by this, even though we’d had some preparation from her medical team. We’d known this was a possibility.
“We knew this would happen, love,” Mum said, talking to my dad. She reached across and took my hand.
The papers had been speculating about a national lockdown for weeks, and Mum’s oncology team had been adamant it would happen.
