Somewhen

My cherry tree in April

I returned to London in September from a month of hot French summer, and by the time my quarantine ended the year had turned. The electric barbecue was put away in its box, and instead we ate tartiflette and warm aubergine curries and chicken pastry pies, and shut all the windows and brought out the slippers. Halfway through my confinement, in the middle of a Zoom meeting, the council arrived on the street with a shredder and an army of chainsawyers, who swarmed up the cherry tree like orcs at Helms Deep. Unable to concentrate and worried for Cyril the Squirrel, and Mrs Blackbird who I had introduced, by playing an online mating song, to Mr Blackbird, and for all our other treefriends, at last I hung out of the fourth floor window and greeted the nearest invader. “You’re not chopping it down, are you?” I called, during a brief chainsaw interlude. “No”, he replied. “Just pruning.” And then he added, quite kindly, “You should still have blossom in the spring”. I was grateful for his sensitivity, and that he understood how important my tree was, but still they stayed up there for another hour, after which time the poor thing was pared back to a naked trunk and a few sad branches. 

I went out as soon as I was allowed, and walked to Kennington Park under a gloomful sky. How different the world seemed to the last time I was here in early August. Summer had left overnight. Half the buildings on our street were now scaffolded, and I remembered that they had put scaffolding up on our building the week before lockdown, done nothing for some time, and taken it down again weeks later. The timing coincided, I suspected, with the end-of-year council budget. 

My legs hummed with energy, and I was very aware of how large the sky was. Past the little shop where the toilet-roll queues used to gather hopefully at lunchtimes. Through the greenery of the estate, where, in the summer, no one had come to mow the lawn for weeks, and the simple flowers danced in the rewilded grasses around Henry Moore. Today I saw that they had recently sent the mowers, and the flowers were gone. Outside St Agnes’ Church: a smart new Jesus, skeletally and lugubriously recrucified. 

And now to the park: here, on the deserted damp green, there had been hundreds; socially-distanced picnickers, grunting exercisers, lolloping dogs, sunbathing women lying prone; chin-leaning, flippers back, like mackerel on ice. Under this old London plane tree in the dappled sunlight I worked on my press-ups all summer, and lay hot and aching watching the parakeets in the canopy. Over there I ate mango sorbet with my friend Phil, and talked about Spain. Here, behind the skatepark, I had a wee in a bush, when the pubs had opened their bars but not their facilities. I’d had to wait in a polite queue under the trees. On this path a woman, scared of the virus, had unjustly shouted at my boyfriend - no more in her vicinity than anyone else - to move away from her. He did so, since he had somewhere to go, but she continued attacking him until he was out of earshot, her sharp voice ricocheting over the heads of an unmolested multitude of people much closer to her. Possibly, I reflected, she’s still shouting at him now. 

Now only the tenacious runners were out. It was raining lightly, but only on my glasses, so the turning plane leaves looked silver and damp. The parakeets were still here, shouting about their lost summer. The clouds lurked very low, and I thought of France's high cerulean cupola, the sun warming my beer faster than I could drink it. 

When life as we knew it screeched to a halt in early March, I had the sense that as the present moment applied the emergency brake, the tail end of my past concertinaed in on itself, crumpled, and rear-ended Now. From here, it seemed, I could step into a fold of my previous life which used to be linearly distant but now was adjacent to today, and emerge into my childhood. Memories of events that happened years ago resurfaced unexpectedly, very lucid, as if they only happened yesterday. Events I hadn't thought about since they occurred decades earlier rose to the surface like dreambubbles. I experienced this memory tunnel particularly during my recent quarantine, and I think this is because after working at my laptop all day, my extra-curricular activities - reading, writing, piano, languages - are all a foot from my face. My eyes, which are my brain, are left wanting. 

In September, I think, in an adjacent part of my crumpled timeline, I swim in the Adriatic in the bay of Dubrovnik, a few hours before the storms break. In October I hunt mushrooms in the bronzed forest with Ginette, who knows where the best ceps and pieds-de-mouton are growing this year. Last week I was in the Long Bar at Raffles and allowed to order only a virgin Singapore Sling because I was still a child. This year the only markers of the passage of time are the weather and the light, but when quarantine starts in one season and ends in another, it’s no wonder I don’t know when I am. I am, I feel, everywhen.

Later, a week after the timberpeople had left, a solitary squirrel honked in anguish at the top of the cherry tree that had been the verdant middle, looking fruitlessly for its family. I couldn’t be sure it wasn’t Cyril. 

Somewhen over the rainbow

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