off the rails
The weather is so good it feels like divine punishment.
Blossom drifts across the road and lands in patches on the concrete slabs of our garden. The sun rotates, hot and beaming in a clear blue sky and I am also a kind of blue. Birds make a variety of noises. The air fills with poison. Everyone worries about their breathing, like dogs on bones.
Everything appears beautiful, ripening, opening up. The seasons don’t care about disease. Spring is a cannibal.
We arrange ourselves behind panes of glass. I hold my breath. I panic I cannot breathe, then, when I cannot breathe, I panic. At first, the sensation comes in spasms, like irregular contractions, but then the gaps between these moments decrease in frequency and duration, until panic becomes my default state.
A spiteful creature squats on my chest, cackling.
People keep sharing the same photos of clear blue water teeming with tiny fish and scuttling crabs. Nature moves into spaces left empty by Italian quarantine. One photo shows a dolphin swimming through a canal. Nature just hit the reset button on us.
The water is blue and clear, Gloria Beggiato says. She is the owner of a famous Venetian hotel; it’s a few steps from St Mark’s square and has a view over the lagoon. It is calm like a pondbecause there are no more waves caused by motorised boats transporting day-tripper tourists. On Twitter, many people make the same point more explicitly: humans are the virus *crying face*; we’re the real virus *anguished face*. The dolphin photo is proved to be a fake, eco-fascists climb out of the woodwork. But I understand the desire to find meaning in the face of devastation; to try and find a sense of righteous order; the chance of something good. Nature moves into empty space, nature resets. I also like to be punished and cleansed.
Harvey Weinstein tests positive for the virus and I send the headline to all my friends. Silver linings! Divine punishment; purification.
Bet he’ll get treatment and won’t die though *cowboy face*
The ultimate proof no one gets what they deserve!!
Apparently the government is working on a deal with various fizzy drinks companies, as part of their new virus legislation. It is either to do with using refrigerator space to store excess bodies, or about using drinks cans as cooling aids, packed around bodies.
Either way it’s about bodies, about pleasure being requisitioned into death.
One of the first plans put in place in London is the building of a new morgue.
I sit outside under the sharp and beautiful sky, the sun heating my upper arms and chest. Beauty isn’t a consolation, it’s a slap. Blood rises to the surface of my skin and I think about corpses.
In the first half of the nineteenth century, the population of London more than doubled, but the amount of land set aside for graveyards remained unchanged. The oldest graves were regularly exhumed to make space for fresh corpses, but nevertheless, the graveyards became congested. A Royal Commission established in 1842 concluded that London's burial grounds had become so overcrowded that it was impossible to dig a new grave without cutting through an existing one. Decaying corpses contaminated the water supply. Cholera and typhoid bubbled up from the streams and gutters; people became diseased. In the late 1840s, a cholera epidemic killed 14,601 people in London. The burial system was totally overwhelmed. Even relatively recent graves were exhumed, in an attempt to deal with the sudden influx of corpses. Bodies were left piled in heaps, awaiting burial.
I lift up my empty plate and underneath is a hoard of crumbs, flattened to the table like a paste. They must have been loose on the counter, then stuck to the plate’s still-damp underside. Yes, I think, that’s what it feels like. On the surface, everything looks fine, possibly even good. But just underneath, out of sight, everything is crumby, hateful. The mess was already there, you just didn’t notice it and thought you were safe and now you’re crying in the kitchen over a handful of crumbs, a handful of dirt, dust, this small, stupid life.
In 1854, the London Necropolis Railway was opened in response to the severe overcrowding in the city’s cemeteries and graveyards. The railway - still a terrifyingly new technology - was intended to carry corpses and mourners twenty-three miles south of London, to Brockwood Cemetery in Surrey, which was designed to be large enough to contain all the capital’s corpses for centuries to come. The London Necropolis Company aimed to gain a monopoly on the burial industry.
Trains embarked from a dedicated station in Waterloo. On reaching Brockwood, they reversed down a dedicated branch line to two different cemetery stations: one for Anglicans and one for Non-Conformists. The train compartments and the station waiting rooms were also divided by religion and class, to stop people from different social backgrounds from mixing, a potential source of distress for mourners. This separation applied to passengers both living and dead.
The London Necropolis Company offered three classes of funeral, which determined the type of railway ticket sold. A first class funeral allowed the buyer to select a grave site of their choice, anywhere in the cemetery. In 1854, first class prices started at £2 10s, which roughly equates to £236 in 2020. Second class cost £1, or £95, and erecting a memorial cost an extra 10s, or £47. Buyers of second class funerals had some choice over grave location, but if a permanent memorial was not erected the Company reserved the right to re-use the grave in future. Third class funerals were reserved for pauper funerals. In this case, families were not allowed to erect a permanent memorial, but they were offered the chance to upgrade to a higher class, if they could afford to. This was rare.
On the 22 March 2020, headlines announce that the UK government’s strategy for dealing with the virus is likely to cause up to 70,000 excess deaths.
Everyone watches the death toll rise.
I watch the death toll rise. It seems obscene to look away, and yet it is also an obscene way to bear witness. The numbers jump, faceless and nameless, only occasionally attached to an age or gender. An 102 year old man; an 18 year old man, or boy. I am not an adequate witness, but yes, it takes its toll.
The word tolling comes from the tradition of telling a death by ringing a bell. Historically, this death knell was the second of three bells rung before and after death. The first was a passing bell, which was rung when the person was still dying, to warn of their impending death, their passing. Then the death knell. Finally, the lych bell would sound, slowly and with a heavy pause between strikes, as the funeral procession approached the church. The ringing of the lych bell is now known as the funeral toll, but sometimes the lych bell is also called the corpse bell.
Across Italy, church bells have been ringing in unison for the first time since the end of the Second World War, due to the outbreak of the virus and the country’s spiralling death toll. In Bologna bells ring at 19.00 on nine consecutive days, as part of a novena prayer. We are praying against this epidemic from which we hope to emerge very soon, a bell ringer says.
By the seventh day of the novena prayer, there are 59,138 cases of the virus in Italy. 5,476 people have died. All funerals, weddings and masses in Italy are suspended. On the 22 March 2020, two people in the UK die from the virus each hour. As the bell tolls.
Of course, in the case of death toll, the word toll simply means count, or cost. toll: value measured by what must be given or done or undergone to obtain something; "the cost in human life was enormous"; "the price of success is hard work"; "what price glory?"
As the numbers jump I feel the spiteful creature on my chest leap maniacally, hitting my sternum. I cough.
In the meantime, tell your friends!