The Weekend
Dorothy has taken to crossing off the days on the calendar that hangs next to the wedding photographs in the hall. She likes to change into Brian’s favourite pyjamas, brush her teeth, gargle and make the trip back down the stairs to mark the passing of another day in lockdown. She does this with a thin blue pen that she picked up in a café. The name of a well-known bookmaker is printed along the side of the pen. This makes Dorothy chuckle because she’s never placed a bet in her life. Her father enjoyed following the horses, as people used to say, but the only women who went inside betting shops in those days were the cleaners. Dorothy had a cleaner who came in once a week, but she hasn’t heard from Kat since she called to say she had been told to stop going into other people’s homes. Kat, who has no end of talents, would be able to darn Brian’s pyjamas where they are thinning, but Dorothy thinks she might have gone back to Poland, if she was able to get out before the planes were mothballed. She doesn’t think it would be right to call, but it would be nice to know that Katarina is safe and healthy.
The first thing that went wrong was the buttons. One came off in Dorothy’s hand when she pulled the pyjamas out of the suitcase under the bed. She managed to sew it back on, but it was one of those days when the tremble in her right hand was bad and the button came off that night when she was trying to fasten the top. Two more have come off since and Dorothy can’t be bothered to fix them. She leaves the top under the pillow and wears an old rugby jersey instead. The problem is that Brian, old bony bum, had almost worn through the seat of the pants and apart from anything else, they aren’t very warm. Brian was all skin and bones at the end and it breaks Dorothy’s heart that she can’t shake the memory of those pyjamas hanging off him. She should have thrown them out. As she scores a blue X onto the calendar at the bottom of the stairs, she wonders if weekends have any currency in this new world.
When her husband finally joined her in retirement, Dorothy volunteered to work behind the counter at the St. Joseph’s charity shop on the high street. She had been waiting for five years for Brian to hand over the reins to their son-in-law and during this time she had filled her afternoons, and some mornings, with wine. She knew which wine left little or no trace on her breath and which mouthwash made doubly sure her husband would only suspect she was becoming obsessed with her teeth again. Brian wanted to tour around Europe in his pride and joy Triumph, but it took a year of mornings in the shop and afternoons at meetings in church halls and community centres before she felt she could trust herself to accompany her husband on his dream trip. She could not understand how his prostate had slipped through the net – and him so fastidious – but it had and it was too late and they never even got as far as Dover. She gave up on the shop and the meetings and since then Saturdays and Sundays have been as difficult as the rest of the week.
Dorothy is proud that she stopped drinking after the first week of lockdown and is grateful that Brian insisted that she learned how to use the laptop he brought home from the office. She has a tablet now and that is how she keeps on with the meetings. She isn’t the only one in the groups who remembers when a Zoom was an ice lolly and she thinks it funny that her fingers would be too sticky to Zoom if she was eating a Zoom. She hasn’t heard the ice cream van since lockdown and she misses the plinkety-plonk of Greensleeves. How are her grandchildren coping with confinement? It could be worse, like in Spain where the children were not allowed out for weeks; and unless they have moved – she wouldn’t put it past Helen to move and not tell her – they have a long garden to play in and they have each other of course. But they will miss their friends. Do they miss their granny? That’s another phone call she can’t make.
Most of the households in the street are drinking more. As the tide turned away from Dorothy, a huge, crashing wave of booze broke through numbers twenty seven to forty one and there has been plenty of tell tale clinking from both sets of neighbours. Dorothy wishes them luck and doesn’t blame them for taking whatever steps are required to get through lockdown. It’s a shame that Friday night could now be Tuesday night. No one is getting dressed up to go anywhere, but still, isn’t the presence of your husband or wife or children enough motivation to comb your hair or shave your beard or put on a shirt with a collar? It hasn’t occurred to Dorothy that people can see through her nets and some might ask the same of her. Isn’t it about time she washed that rugby top and put on some proper trousers?