I was locked down quite on my own and was foolish enough to think that this was no change.
My life was already fairly locked down enough. I live alone and share my treats and my chores with nobody. I work from home and talk to myself around the coffee machine, mostly about how I need to stop talking to myself.
I live in London and am consequently in as utter a solitude as can only be found among millions of people desperately minding their own business.
So, I thought lockdown would be no change.
No. I thought lockdown would be a treat. No meetings, no presentations, no shopping, no distractions. No requests, responsibilities or requirements.
Nowhere to be and nothing to do.
Except everything. I could read, at last, all day. Watch films, play instruments, practice drawing, work on my project.
And then as day after identical day slipped past, I realised I was doing precisely none of these things. I had nothing to do and I was doing nothing.
My mind was quite empty.
It sat in my skull like a large smooth sphere of mud, stolid, still, it’s milky surface unrippled by the shadows of thought.
I stared at the pages of books, unturning. I stared at screens, unseeing. I stared into the open fridge, uneating. I drank too much but could not get drunk. And when I went to bed at night, I fell asleep immediately and opened my eyes eight hours later and did not dream between.
Until, three weeks into isolation, I was woken by someone speaking my name.
There was no one else in the flat, of course. There is hardly room in it for someone being obvious, let alone someone trying to hide. I checked anyway.
I couldn’t decide whether it had been my mother's voice, or a stranger’s. Or my own.
Hypnopompic auditory hallucination, said the Internet. Voices heard as you were waking up. Perfectly normal.
It had seemed quite close, the voice, but also to be coming from downstairs. I have no stairs.
It might be caused by stress, said the Internet. By anxiety. I don’t think I’d spoken to another human in about 10 days.
All in my head.
Perhaps isolation was having an affect on me, after all.
It was as if lockdown, in stripping away all those mundane exercises, social rituals and quotidian necessities had removed a whole layer of self. All those routine annoyances I affected to hate, I apparently needed. Perhaps I was more defined by all those banal interactions then I’d like to think. Perhaps I was more defined by my hatred of them than was entirely healthy. But without them, there appeared to be no one left behind. And no one was not a good person with whom to be locked up.
At least I could go outside.
If lockdown had removed the everyday from life, it had also removed it from London. Streets, pavements and buildings were deserted. No shouts or horns, no throng of crowds, no snarl of traffic. In the alleys and secret places of the city, silence.
And with the commonplace pared away, the uncommon was revealed. Unmuddled by pedestrians, squares stood empty, pushing the buildings apart. Devoid of traffic, the streets were no longer divisions but thoroughfares. The shops shut and dark, the storeys above them were suddenly present, looming over the pavements.
London was created anew, and that newness was its past. Buildings you’d never seen before, passageways that had been hidden, statues that you’d walked by, unnoticing, signs that had faded into the walls, unread. The forgotten things, the overlooked things, the sad and lonely things. All this time they had been waiting for us to notice them, waiting to be seen.
And so I went to see them.
Clerkenwell and Cannon Street, Shoreditch and Southwark, Bloomsbury and Barbican, Aldwych and Aldgate, I wandered all over, poking my nose in all the nooks and byways and hidden places, filling the empty days with the emptiness of the city.
And I discovered that it wasn’t empty.
A city is built for people and they are implicit in every street crossing and stairwell, building and bike lane. The flagstones expect the feet and the doors, the hands. Even when the city is deserted, you’re surrounded by people. The memory of them.
Because they are the history of the city, they are the forgotten and the overlooked. All those footsore centuries that trod down those flagstones, all those eager hands that pressed at those doors. The walls had been smoothed by their shouts, the stillness stirred by their whispers. Down every alleyway, round every corner had passed multitudes, thousands of years of thousands of people. The stale air in that square had been sighed out by the dead, the water in that tap had been wept by the departed.
And all this time we had been surrounded by them, unsuspecting. Inaudible under the rushing crowds, invisible behind the flickering lights and passing shadows. We just hadn’t seen them. But now we were cleared away, they could be discovered. All those people the city expected, all those people who had brought it to life.
And then, somewhere behind Ludgate, a voice spoke my name.
Another auditory hallucination, of course.
On either side of Fleet Street there are numerous squares and alleys and steep sided, shadowed courtyards. And the voice, somewhere in that labyrinth, had called.
Just my imagination.
My footsteps clapped back at me under a dark arch, and a pigeon, disturbed, applauded its own takeoff, the blind windows in the court beyond, reflecting back the slapping wings. I stood listening to the flat echoes concatenate.
And a voice spoke my name.
“Hello?” I said.
“Hello,” said the walls.
Somewhere, just on the edge of hearing, many voices were talking, a low jumble of unintelligible words that I couldn’t hear at all under the ringing silence. There was a distinct impression that, somewhere around the next corner, in the next square, a crowd of people were hiding, holding their breath.
I hadn’t spoken out loud in days and the echoes of my words startled me.
“Is someone here?” I said.
“Someone here,” said a corner.
There was a passageway, dark and narrow.
“Did someone say something?”
“Was it something I said?”
The echoes were flat, many, impossible to place. I ran towards them. All so close they faded away.
“Where are you? Are you playing a game?”
“Where are you?” repeated the walls.
“Are you playing a game?”
All in my head.
A narrow alley leading to a steep stair down between buildings.
“Someone here,” said the steps, “Playing a game.”
Who was there in the shadows? Who was playing in my head?
A dark entry, half hidden by rusted gates
“Show yourself! Who’s there?”
The passage was dark and full of nothing.
“Save yourself,” said the voices, “We’re here.”
A city is built for people and without them it is lifeless. History is meaningless without the present. Without the living, the dead have no meaning. They are lost. Overlooked, forgotten. Sad and lonely. We went away and they missed us.
I live in solitude in London surrounded by the ghosts of everyone else who ever has. I have a one bedroom flat that is full of a thousand years. I talk to myself and voices answer.
I was locked down but by myself. Isolation but never alone. I had company now.