Reader fiction: Lockdown

I can think of nothing to write. Because suddenly I have been given everything I ever wanted. Time and lots of it. But now the words don’t come.

I sit here in my pretend office. It’s actually my mother’s back field. She is not here. My mother. Social Distancing and Cocooning, those new phrases, have lengthened her stay in Galway. She is exiled from her home.

And I am here. Breaking the 2km restriction to collect post, turn off central heating. I brought my computer. Just in case.

As far as my eye can see, there are fields and the mountains. And trees. Hundreds of them. And cattle in the next field and everything is golden under an unusually warm and bright Leitrim sun. Normally everything here looks a washed out colour of green and grey. But during lockdown it is a different colour. The trees and the hedges, until recently nothing but bare branches, are full of colour, and humming. Humming with the birds that nest and mate in them and the bees who steal honey from the flowers growing on them.

I saw fish jump in the canal which runs alongside my lane. Not just one or two, but a whole shoal of them. Jumping with glee at the freedom and no diesel in the water and no barges or boats. I miss the barges and boats. But I prefer to see the fish, and them jumping, causing ripples that hypnotise me. I can see right down to the bottom of the river bed now. Again, because the water is no longer full of oil or rubbish thrown overboard by lazy tourists.

I have a feeling of unease, as though I am mitching school, or work. Waiting to be caught and forced indoors when the sun wants to warm my pale skin and kiss it with freckles.

No tanning booths are open. No hairdressers. No beauty salons. My nails are recovering from the damage done by gels over the years, while my hair is fading to a colour I have not chosen from a chart. But it is silky now, chemical free. The curls that I spent a decade having professionally straightened are now falling around my shoulders. I like it this way. I look more like the person I tried not to be.

But still I can’t write. My hands rest on the closed lid of my laptop. I take off my shoes. Grass tickles my feet and I watch as a ladybird slowly walks across my toes. I remember the rhyme my grandmother taught me, ‘Ladybird, Ladybird, fly away home …’ and I am amazed that I can still remember the words.

I thought of her, Alice. My maternal grandmother. How she would chase me from her kitchen on a sunny day to get the sun on my legs. I rise my skirt a little and scrunch it under me. It isn’t long before my knees begin to redden. I tell myself that you can’t get sunburnt in April. Not in Ireland.

There is a chainsaw being used somewhere nearby. I stand to look over the yellow whin bushes and wave. The sawing stopped. He waves back. A big man. Maybe in his sixties or thereabouts. A stranger.

He walks closer and I pull up the straps of my top.

‘I’ll stay the two metres,’ he shouts.

I laugh. Nod my head.

‘You’re minding the place?’ he asks, his hand pointing toward the cottage. ‘It’s good to see it lived in again.’

I look back, as though surprised it was there. ‘The wild woman in the woods’ is what we jokingly called my mother. And her buying a wreck of a place in the middle of nowhere.

‘To get away from you lot,’ she’d reply.

‘You know,’ the un-named man said, ‘that house was tossed during the famine.’

My eyes widen.

‘Tossed? In the famine?’

‘Yes. An eviction. But I’d say those stone walls are the same ones. They’d only take off the roof you see. Thatched it would have been.’

I turn around once again to look at the cottage. Yes, I could see the stone walls. The ones I complained about, saying they made Wi-Fi and mobile phone coverage impossible. With the thickness of them.

‘You’re the writer,’ he shouts. ‘Your mother talks about you. Though I don’t read myself.’

I smile, nod my head.

‘I am.’

‘You’re working on something now?’ he shouts again, this time pointing at the un-opened laptop now lying on the grass.

‘No,’ I reply, feeling the sting of sunburn on my knees. ‘Just thinking.’

‘Sure, isn’t that were it begins,’ he says and the chainsaw starts again.

I walk back towards the cottage. Place my hands on the cool solid walls and I listen, to their tale.