Page 80 of 56 Days
“Youcan’t, actually.”
“Watch ’em try to stop me.”
Ciara smiles as she pictures Siobhán busting through a Garda checkpoint somewhere on the motorway,Thelma and Louisestyle.
“I’ll call you again in a few days,” she tells her sister.
“Make sure you do.”
26 Days Ago
When Ciara suggests that they head to Merrion Square Park with a picnic, Oliver points out that according to Google Maps, it’s technicallythreekilometers from the Crossings.
But he’s only teasing her. The Gardaí would hardly bother with pedestrians, and he wants to go there too. It’s a beautiful,blue-skySunday—and an increasingly warm one. The very last year you’d want it to happen, summer has decided to show up early, unexpectedly, in the middle of spring. The kind of weather that makes you want to sit on freshly cut grass in open space and lift your face to the sun.
The streets that connect the Crossings with Portobello Bridge are lifeless, but when they reach the canal it’s as if they’ve slipped into another world. The waterside paths are thronged with people and pets strolling, and wherever there’s a patch of grass or somewhere to sit and swing your legs out over the water, pale limbs and heads thrown back in laughter have already gathered around collections of supermarket bags filled with cans. Houses facing the water stand with their front doors flung open, letting the tinny sounds of Lyric FM drift out into the air.Next-doorneighbors sit in deck chairs on the grass, having slightly shouted conversations with each other over walls and fences. Outside one house, two young children are having the time of their lives with a simple garden sprinkler, running repeatedly through its thin, upright stream with squealing, giggling abandon. In another, a disposable barbecue is cooking up a feast.
It’s almost as if everyone saw the weather forecast and prearranged a socially distanced block party.
An alien visitor would have to know what to look for to find evidence that anything is wrong, but it’s there. Everyone milling about is doing so in small, confined pods; signs begging Help Stop the Spread of COVID-19 arecable-tiedto every second lamppost; and whenever Ciara and Oliver come to pass another person or couple walking in the opposite direction, one or both parties steps aside, onto the grass or even down off the curb and onto the road, flashing a friendly smile as they politely try to get as far away as they physically can.
When they turn onto Leeson Street, a stretch of city dominated by office buildings and schools that would’ve been quiet anyway on a Sunday, there’s an unusual depth to its desertion. A solidness. At the opposite end, the gates of Stephen’s Green remain locked. On the other side of the park, taxi ranks stand empty. Theopen-toppedtour buses and horses and carts that tend to lay in wait on sunny spring weekends like this for foolish tourists on the northwest side are gone and the Shelbourne Hotel, normally a hive of activity with lines ofblacked-outSUVs and uniformed doormen helpingwell-heeledguests to and from them, is shut, locked up, dark inside. Grafton Street, one of the busiest shopping streets in the world, a gauntlet of other people’s swinging shopping bags, street performers, and elbows during normal times, empty, is the most disconcerting sight of all. It’s something that was never meant to be seen like this, like when the lights come on in the club at the end of the night.
But none of it is weirder than the fact that Oliver is seeing all this with Ciara by his side.
Every now and then he steals a glance at her, or squeezes her hand, or lifts the hand he holds to his lips to kiss it lightly, just to prove to himself that she really is there.
Still, despite everything.
But for how much longer?
There was nothing resembling a picnic blanket in Oliver’s apartment—or hers even, if they’d been prepared to take a detour—so they lie flat on their backs in the park on a white bedsheet Ciara worries they’ll never get the grass stains out of. She has no shades, so she rests her arm on her forehead, shielding her eyes from the glare of the sun. She’s hoping her old bottle ofoff-brandbody lotion isn’t lying about being SPF30, because that’s all she has on in the way of sunscreen. She didn’t think she’d have to worry aboutsunbathing-in-the-park essentials when lockdown began, but here they are.
Apart from the occasional distantbelly-laughor child’s excited squeal, she can’t hear anything except Oliver’s gentle breathing as he dozes beside her after their lunch of sugary carbs and fizzy alcohol that they picked up in an almost deserted Marks & Spencers food hall on Grafton Street. They found a spot right in the southwest corner of the park, near the railings and so near the road, but there’s no traffic noise because there’s no traffic to make it. They are right in the city center but the soundtrack is Idyllic Countryside.
“Lockdown has its advantages,” she whispers.
Oliver stirs, hoisting himself up onto his elbows to look around the park. His forehead, she sees, is getting a little red. He searches among the plastic carton debris of their picnic lunch until he finds a water bottle and then sits up to take a long gulp.
She sits up too.
The expanse of grass around them seems, at first glance, to be densely packed with lounging bodies, but a closer inspection reveals dozens of groups gathered together but staying a fair distance apart. There’s a few who are definitely breaking theone-householdrule unless they live in a house where every single corner ischock-fullof bunk beds, but it’s hard to get worked up about it when they’re all outside, and outside is looking as it does today: the sky a canopy of cornflower blue and the sun shining from almost directly overhead.
“It’s weird,” Oliver says, “isn’t it? It feels normal but also...not. Like we’re in aBlack Mirrorepisode where some computer company has made a simulation of the world, but everything is just a little off.”
“I’ve never seenBlack Mirror.”
“Oh, we’resoadding that to thebinge-watchlist.”
“But isn’t that all, like, dystopian stuff? The world is going in the wrong direction, etc., etc.? I’m not sure we really need to be watching that kinda thing right now.”
“Fair point. We’ll stick it on the After list.”
The Afterlist.
A promise of the future, dropped casually into the conversation. Ciara takes it and holds it and adds it to her collection, along with something he said about Ranelagh being a fun place forthemto live and how she’s going to love his brother’s wife, Nicki, whenever it is they manage to travel home from Australia again.
Even though she shouldn’t be collecting such things.
