‘I think it’ll be easier,” said Mr Z, “if we think of this as a pre-industrial era, rather than a lockdown. Schools haven’t been invented. Your job hasn’t been invented. We’re just all in the same cottage, living.”
“Wait,” I objected. “My job has been invented. Your job hasn’t been invented. They didn’t even have mental health charities in the 1700s.”
“But they had lifestyle columnists?”
“I’m a pol.em.i.cist.”
It is the old joke about working from home: the hardest thing about it is persuading your partner that staring out of the window is work. But I have been doing this for a long time. It is really obvious when I am working, because momentarily I am not talking. The whole family loves it when that happens. “Ah, she’s working,” they say, with palpable relief, like someone has finally unplugged a bandsaw.
Typically, couples like to argue about whose work is more important, except not with words, because that would bring out too many home truths (first rule of lockdown: don’t do truths at home). Instead, they argue with passive-aggressive suggestions: “Perhaps,” one might suggest, “you could get the door when the package arrives in 20 minutes?” “I’ll be on a call,” the other person might reply, because “on a call” sounds like work, while “on the phone” sounds like you are in the 80s, talking to your friend about nail varnish. “Hopefully a neighbour will take it in.” (The neighbour is a bold touch, in my pass-agg imagineering).
We don’t really have that argument, since Mr Z is helping to tackle serious mental illness (the job literally has “serious” in the title), while I … I am a pol.em.i.cist.
The only couple who could possibly adapt to this new reality is the one in which both people work from home already, engaged in house-appropriate industry. They haven’t got children that need to be home schooled; they haven’t been furloughed or made redundant or seen their work dry up or become obsolete in a way that has completely collapsed their identity.
The functioning lockdown couple doesn’t exist, in other words, but people on social media are making a decent fist of pretending to be one. Spouses on Twitter are surprising and delighting one another with hitherto undreamed-of skills and talents. I don’t really understand how this works, unless one of them is a juggler and the other is a stonemason. Since the lockdown began, my beloved has spent most of the days looking at a computer and talking on the phone. I already knew he could do these things.
Still, I was not prepared for the DIY. We used to have a normal relationship. Something would break, I would suggest a handyman, he would say: “Oh, I can do that – that’s easy,” and the thing would remain broken. It was fine. Who am I, I would think, pondering the burnt-out light fittings into which I had put the wrong lightbulbs, to complain? All physical matter slides toward entropy. I could just as well complain about gravity.
Then the DIY started. I had never considered what it would entail, changing lights. Actual wires, with electricity coming out of them. A man wondering aloud which one was live, in the new money colours of brown and blue, and saying “bugger” every 15 seconds. I surveyed the whole scene with as much confidence as I would were he attempting to remove someone’s appendix. Really, I was just wondering which A&E would be the emptiest and how we could make a decent account of ourselves, for being in there. It would depend on the nature of the injury, I decided, sagely.
Installing a dishwasher brought a new vocabulary, words I had never heard before in my own home: “Waste pipe”; “spigot”; “flange”; “You either have to help or you have to stop watching. You can’t just commentate.” (Not commentate – polemicise.) It turns out we have tools, screwdrivers of all shapes and sizes, special ones that detect electricity, allen keys. I never even wondered what that large, tool-shaped box was; I thought it was full of plastic bags and swimming goggles.
We have psychological baggage. His dad shouting over flatpack instructions. My mum mending things so long after they had broken that it was more like an act of archeology, guessing the lifestyle of your primitive forebears by wondering which way the U-bend used to point. I have no experience at all of someone mending something and then it working again. Lights coming on. A dishwasher, filling with water, unfilling again. I thought I would be impressed – I am impressed – but I also feel as if he has been actively hiding this from me. It is an act of subterfuge, stretched out over a really long time.
“It’s fine,” he said. “It’s like Mr and Mrs Smith, except you’re not an assassin – only I’m an assassin.”
“It’s not like Mr and Mrs Smith – it’s more like Breaking Bad. I’m going to find out in a minute that you have two phones and a chemistry degree. You’ve nailed a bobcat into the attic until you can find the time to skin it. You probably have an airgun and some water-purifying tablets. And enemies – many, many enemies, not all of them still with us.”
“Wait,” he said. “Is this another polemic?”
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
