The Great Reopening

The north-facing windows in her south bank apartment face London City Airport. This was both a blessing and a curse, affording her magnificent river views and an exquisite sunset over Canary Wharf (so long as she craned her neck a little to the left), as well as the regular windy roars of arriving and departing planes. She is sitting upright in the wide sill, drinking in the view, as well as an unreasonably large gin. Her phone pings. The Monzo “ka-ching!”. She looks down.

Well, that was unexpected. Their final fight was about him wanting to pay his share of the rent and bills before he returned to Liverpool to be with his brother. He insisted. She refused repeatedly. He had played the breadwinner for too long, and she felt bad enough about everything as it is. In any case, her parents were already supporting the shortfall. She tried not to think about she would do if they were not so flush. She really did not want to share her windowsill with a lodger, assuming the letting agent would even agree to one.

Seeing her bank account swollen to five figures for the first time (“ever?”) should have lifted at least one of the heavy weights from her shoulders. Instead, she swipes the phone back into blackness and looks out once more over Royal Arsenal Riverside.

On this freezing February evening, the sky was a marbled expanse of deep orange and blushed purple, free of both contrails and the sight and sound of the 17:07 Flexflight from Amsterdam, which had appeared to have taken an evening off, as is sometimes the case these days, mid-pandemic. He always ridiculed her for knowing the airport’s schedule, which she found kind of ironic. Hindsight being the wonderful thing it is, alarm bells should have been ringing for her, seeing as the comings and goings of the airport fascinated her more than his own, yet she shrugged off such sentiments as the inevitable and natural aging of a mature relationship. She looks back into her apartment. Dusk has arrived. She hasn’t turned on the lights, nor does she want to.

“I see enough of these four walls”.

She persistently taps her black A5 journal with her left thumb, whilst spinning it on the windowsill with her left index finger. Its leather corners were slightly faded and worn from this mannerism, an innate ritual undertaken by her most evenings, priming her to open the book to write to read.

Tonight, lacking the energy (or the lighting) to scribble, she reads. She starts at the front, glancing at the inside front cover, which she had made the title page, self-styled, in block capitals created by an orange Sharpie.

“HIT LIST”.

Shortly after they had started dating, he had added an “S” before the “HIT”, “...a joke”, apparently. She had laughed it off at the time, though taking care to obscure the errant letter with a heavy block of black marker, with another block added at the end, for fastidiousness’ sake. She now suspects this was not a joke at all, but doesn’t brood upon the idea, flicking through the pages instead.

Notes and memories of meals and restaurants, committed to the ivory paper since their first date take her to her happy place. A million thoughts of moments out of reach raced through her head, mostly involving shuttered restaurants and days and nights out and about in London. She desperately wants to return to Gloria. They had made it their first meal out after the end of the first lockdown in July, toasting flutes of champagne with the servers, before emptying a pan of incredible truffle mafaldine down her neck. She would not be going back with him, but at least she could now afford to buy her own pasta. She smirks. She feels that she misses him, but with her head. Her heart cries louder, lamenting the absent drone of jet engines and the closure of hospitality and travel. “My millionth and first thought”, she chuckled. “That’s just the kind of thing he would say I would say about him”.

She realises that she’s thinking about him. He was – and, as the money had affirmed, is still – too nice for his own good.

She felt a pang of guilt. The pandemic had affected most people, many in more tragic and precipitous ways than her own “issues” (as her mother had called it).

“She always had a way with words, she passed that down the bloodline. She’s part of the reason why I’m sat here alone right now”.

It was her easiest breakup (out of the two she had experienced), mainly because the pandemic had done the laborious task for her (them?) through its deepening of already rapidly emerging cracks, like a freeze-thawing rockface. It was all going to happen sooner or later, and all it took was a global travel ban and the near collapse of a billion-pound economy to do it.

“Sixty billion pounds a year last year”, she had matter-of-factly stated to him, as he lamented the end of his career one night in October of last year. He had rolled his eyes. She had rolled hers.

“How do I know and care more about his industry than he does?”

He seemed to always hate flying. “You only hate it when you’re not raking it in doing it”, she had slurred out, during one of their lowest moments, a quarter of the way through a litre bottle of gin he had picked up on the way out of Heathrow a year or so ago. Sure, for him, flying for pleasure must have been akin to a busman’s holiday, but couldn’t he have at least begrudged her one trip overseas on the rare weekends he was home? She would not have asked for discounts.

“I probably would have asked for discounts”. The guilt pangs return.

She was born to travel. “A collector of experiences, not possessions”, she had proudly written at the top of her Tinder profile in 2018, despite knowing full well she had lifted the line from an influencer she follows.

“So why the hell did he swipe right?”

Turns out he was a homebody just like his brother, an indolent office worker, who saw this new and possibly never-ending excuse to work from home as the best thing to happen to his employment microcosm since casual Fridays and the free canteen. Her dashing pilot, a man of the world on paper (and on Tinder), seemed happy to venture out for meals on the rare occasions he wasn’t rostered, but that was it. He refused to go out to eat at all if he was on call.

“Just bring your cabin bag with you”.

Pang. “Did I really say that to him?”

She loved a good meal, relishing magical evenings with him, with buns at BAO or duck and waffle at Duck and Waffle, but that was less than half of the itch. She flicks to the back of her journal. Here, reading from the back cover towards the front, each double-page spread is identical. The left page is a spider diagram. The body is a destination, the legs are places to see or things to do. The right page is blank, reserved for notes and cognitive keepsakes from when they would eventually and surely visit.

“If they’re at the back of the book they cannot be that important”, he had retorted, after she once (more than once) laid the blame at his feet for so many empty right pages. He often spoke faster than he thought.

“They’re at the back so I can look forward to them”. Her skin crawls with the realisation she has just spat this out loud, into the void of her exanimate lounge. Her anger at him grows. Pang. Though he sometimes spoke faster than he thought, so did she.

“I’ll see more of the world if you’re not in mine”. Eleven words, accurate but spoken in haste, in response to him beaming at her, proud that he had secured a job but hesitantly hopeful she would agree to move home with him until they could get back on their feet.

“Did I really say that to him as well?”

(Pang).

She was not ready for his industriousness. She flitted between jobs, working to live, while he apparently lived to work. He would never tolerate being furloughed, as she is right now. Needing a hobby, he barely handled being out of work for as long as he was. As she remembers this, she wonders with renewed puzzlement why they – by which she means he – did not want to travel anywhere during all that downtime, before Boris slammed the travel corridors firmly shut.

She flicks back into her journal, which she has subconsciously closed, spinning and tapping it with her left digits. She realises, for the first time since Monzo delivered its five-figure news, that she is now cash-rich as well as time-rich. An ideal – if not rare – pairing of conditions to empower her yearning to fill in those blank pages next to the spiders.

“No”. She looks to her right and reaches for her phone, opening WhatsApp. Their chat has slipped some way down the list; she needs to scroll to find him. He is online. She types.

“Hey. What’s with the money. We talked about this”.

“Hiiiii” was his instant reply. She hates how he even sounds nicer than her in a virtual setting. “Don’t worry about it”.

“I told you the folks were helping me”.

“I know”.

What is she supposed to say to that? She stares at the chat for the while. He starts typing.

“Stop spinning that journal thingy you have and go make some actual plans”.

“Like I can travel in a pandemic”. Great. Even she knew she sounded snotty. He is silent. Her turn to keep typing.

“How’s Liverpool?”

“Closed. Like London”.

“And the job?”

“Not started yet. I told you this haha. I have a month or so while they do checks etc.”.

“How will you cope sitting on your ass for that long?”.

“Not as well as you”. She knew that he would be staring at that last message, regretting typing it. Not being able to resist, she swipes up and out of WhatsApp, picking up her journal “thingy” once more.

“I could just send him the money back”. She stares at spiders of Venice, Peru, and Japan. Four spiders of Japan. “But he would just return it, the stubborn bastard”. For twenty thousand she could easily travel those four important spiders, and then some.

The silence of East London’s skies catches her ears once again, ushering a tinnitus of reality. She was not going to Japan any time soon. She always thought it was typical of her luck that her dream destination locked down harder, faster, and longer than most. If she were to put her Sensible Hat on (feeling that having a healthy bank account kind of commands the donning of such a hat), then she should not leave the country anyway, in case the office calls her back from furlough.

“That would be my typical luck too”.

Thanks to her new Sensible Hat, she quickly realises that even travel within the U.K. is basically banned.

“Cash and time rich”. She slides her Bailey ballpoint from her breast pocket, flicking through the rear pages of her journal until she reaches the first empty double-spread. “Both commodities don’t last forever”. She draws a spider with an empty body. It dawns on her that despite living in the country for over three decades, she hasn’t a clue about where to go. Her phone pings, coming to life and bathing her near-dark windowsill in refulgent light. She looks down at the notification.

“You still there? Spinning the book?”

She leaves the phone where it is. Smiling, she writes in the new-born spider’s body.

“Liverpool”.