Lockdown Day 9: Tuesday 31st March, 2020

We pull up outside the russet sandstone tenement. This is still an exclusive area despite the city’s decline, a peaceful, easy feeling of tree-lined avenues, parklands and immaculate tenements.

The curtains are drawn in many windows as a mark of respect. For forty years Aunt Vivien lived here, entertained and partied here. Extrovert and exciting, a socialite, a golfer, a businesswoman as much as a mother, she insinuated herself deeply into local life, Clydesdale the sports club, Hutchie the school, the south side business community, maintaining her place at the top table through changing rollcalls, rotating hosts and endless anodyne chairmen. Many of those colleagues pre-deceased her, some long gone, some not so much, but gone all the same, generations fleeting transience emphasised. And with her passing, the memory of those parted others grows all the fainter. I glimpse a fleeting truth – we collect the dead until we too are finally collected.
I am a story with a beginning, many middles and an end, no matter what else I might think.  

  There is no room to park with so many cars in the cortege so I drop off my still-yapping sister and scout for a spot. I’m smiling, as she was talking about our ‘druncles’, those drunk uncles haunting our childhood memories of these family occasions with laughter. It finds me around the corner and down the road half a mile or so, outside the park. I remember walking here as a child. It seemed so strange, so far away, across the city, south of the river Clyde. What lay there but otherness, exotica to a five year old. A mystical park alongside a secret railway which would fill with acrid smoke as the steam engines hauled the carriages on into Central Station through mysterious tunnels.

  We would stroll from the flat through the park and along to the corner-shop by the old blacksmith’s yard where Aunt Vivien would always buy a treat, jube-jubes or threepence worth of black-striped balls, the mints I would have sold my untested infant soul for. And if a visit to the Southside was exciting, Aunt Vivien was always enticing and glamorous. Mum was Mum, always there, comforting, familiar, pushing my sisters along in the well-shared Silvercross pram. My cousins were older, so they would be running and climbing and yelling and fighting while I toddled along with Aunt Vivien clasping my hand, strange and comforting, yet warm and intriguing at the same time. And in the Narnian winter, when snow blanketed the ground, when mystic trees were barren and the wind-scattered steam evanesced in the damp, white morning as the trains whistled by, she would hold me closer and smother me with the warming hug my mother couldn’t give me because she was too busy dealing with my troublesome sisters.  

  Through the open leaded-glass door, the tenement close is as I remember it. It had changed little in the hundred years before I was born so there was little likelihood of it having changed in the ten years or so since I last walked up these steps. Faded china tiles gleam greenfully in the refracted light, illuminating stairs perfumed in bleach as I climb to the second floor and open the rich oak door.

I gaze down the parquet hallway with its magnificent wood paneling to see all is as I remembered. On the left, attendant doors guard the bedrooms whilst on the right the deserted dental surgery stands empty, mistrust still emanating through frosted glass. I fancy I catch a whiff of the past, the aroma of amalgam and mouthwash, sweating patients, drilled enamel and novocaine. Stiff memories hard earned in the congealing blood of a six year old, imprinted in the bitter taste of eight teeth extracted.
I never drink Root Beer because its taste reminds me of visiting the Dentist, that ethereal, orthodontic bogey man.
But it’s all in my mind. The surgery has been closed for years, bleached, disinfected and sanitised as we all are.

  At the foot of the corridor, the kitchen and dining room split off to the left with the living room on the opposite side and that enormous lounge directly ahead. Though I haven’t been here in years, all that time and distance, living around the globe, Australia, America, Asia, Europe, nothing here has changed. Except the obvious.

Despite the hubbub made by the reverential throng, the apartment lacks life, it feels strangely deserted.
It is our loss.