Short story: Twelve Weeks' Rest
A reprint of fiction from 2020 that's no longer available online
June 2020 saw the first issue of a new online journal of under-represented writers/writing, Untitled: Voices. In it was a short story of mine called Twelve Weeks’ Rest, about a supermarket home delivery worker who’s been told to shield during the pandemic and her manager isn’t happy about it. It’s not a comedy but there’s a lot of humour in it (comedy drama?).
In some ways the first UK lockdown of March 2020 seems unreal now, a distant hazy memory, but I wrote this in the April when social distancing was new, surfaces were still thought to be a major source of transmission, and many people were scared. At the time, there was a media narrative that ‘everyone’s working from home now’ (serves me right for listening to Radio 4 and reading The Guardian), apparently forgetting that all the shop, factory, warehouse and delivery staff that enabled the home-workers to keep food on the table had to keep going as normal. As my narrator Karen says, “Key workers my ample backside.”
Both my sisters — now in their sixties — work in supermarket deliveries. I remember as a kid looking round houses with them when they decided to move; they could either have a bedroom each at last, or live somewhere halfway nice. They chose the latter. None of us expected them to still be there, sharing a bedroom, thirty-five years later. They obviously loosely1 inspired the story. At the time, early in the pandemic, it seemed like people like them and their colleagues were the ultimate in under-representation and I wanted to take the opportunity to make them more visible.
When I’d written Twelve Weeks’ Rest, I wondered whether the bedroom-sharing or even the house-sharing would seem weird. Undoubtedly it will to some people (see my previous post which explores among other things whether anything is ever truly universal) but outside of my immediate family I know various pairs of sisters who currently or recently share(d) a house and I know pairs of brothers who shared a bedroom into adulthood.
The website for Untitled: Voices appears to have disappeared and I couldn’t find a capture at the Wayback Machine. It’s very much a product of a particular time and situation, but I’m still proud of this story and I think it’s got some good (funny) lines in it, so here it is. Enjoy…
Twelve Weeks' Rest by JY Saville
I'm sat in the manager's office waiting for her to be bothered with me. Even with the chair pushed right back from the desk I don't think I'm two metres away but she doesn't seem fussed.
"Now," Melissa says when she's good and ready, "I understand you've got a letter recommending you stay at home for twelve weeks."
She says it like she's disappointed in me, which she probably is. A loyal employee would tell the government to stick its shielding programme and carry on working. She holds her hand out.
"Can I see it, please?"
I wonder when she last washed her hands but I give her it anyway. She reads it and I'm surprised she doesn't hold it up to the light to check for watermarks, but what does a genuine letter look like? She knows all about the cocktail of underlying health problems that have got me marked down as particularly vulnerable to this virus — she's moaned about the time off for hospital appointments often enough — and she can't argue with the conclusion that I need to be shoved in a bunker for the foreseeable. Though I can tell she's itching to.
"Right, well Karen, you'll have been made aware of the government compensation schemes for those who can't work at the moment. Obviously you've forfeit your Covid-19 bonus —"
"What do you mean, 'obviously'?"
"You've only worked during two weeks of the crisis."
"Risking serious illness." Stuck in a warehouse with three hundred other people, run ragged picking other folks' shopping for minimum wage.
"The bonus will be paid in full at the end of the crisis period so I'm afraid you won't qualify. Now, if I can just speak with Amanda alongside you for a moment then you can go home."
"Mandy's shift finishes in half an hour, I'll wait around till she's done."
Mandy's fifty-one but she's still my little sister.
"Oh no, straight home. We wouldn't want to be seen to be detaining you."
So she's admitting it's all about the look of the thing. Couldn't care less about me. Key workers my ample backside.
Our Mandy comes in, fiddling with her ponytail. Madam doesn't ask her to sit down and Mandy doesn't take the initiative so she's hovering in my peripheral vision for five minutes while we go through more box-ticking.
"Now, I understand you live in the same house." Melissa smiles and her shoulders unstiffen. "Like in Birds of a Feather."
She doesn't look old enough to remember Birds of a Feather. It must have resurfaced, like selfish individuality and dungarees.
"Aye, like Birds of a Feather if it was set in a one-bedroom terrace in Pudsey," Mandy pipes up.
I want to pinch her leg to shut her up but I can't reach and it's probably against the social-distancing rules.
"One bedroom?"
Madam's nose wrinkles like one of us just farted and I can see unpleasant cogs whirring.
"It's a big bedroom," I say, shooting our Mandy a look over my shoulder. "We have us beds as far apart as they'll go, there must be at least two metres between them."
When I bought that house after Dad died I had a double bed, plenty of space, and solitude. Then Mandy's short-lived marriage to a postman from Birkenshaw fell apart, and we were back to sharing a room again like we had when we were kids. What was I supposed to do? Poor kid had nowhere else to go.
"Well," says Melissa, "you can't share a room at the moment otherwise there's no benefit to you being absent. One of you will have to move out."
"I'll check into a hotel shall I?"
The daft cow takes it as a serious proposition and says, "I'm not sure any are open for normal business, are they?"
She lives in one of the detached houses up near the golf course, a bathroom for every bedroom and they don't call it an estate, it's an exclusive new development. I'm half-expecting her to suggest I move to our cottage in the country.
"There must be someone in your family with a spare room you could stay in."
Does she think we share for the fun of it? That I like Mandy playing space invaders on her phone while I'm trying to get to sleep, and leaving her socks all over the floor? When I cottoned on that Mandy was a permanent fixture we looked for a two-bedroomed place but we'd have had to move to a rougher neighbourhood. We chose inconvenience over anxiety, back then, and the years ran away with us. Maybe it's time we had another look, but that doesn't help us now.
"No," I say.
"There's only us two," adds Mandy. "Anyway, you're not supposed to go to other people's houses, are you?"
"One of you will have to sleep on the sofa then," says Melissa. Then she brightens up, you can practically see the lightbulb go on above her glossy hair. "You could use the bedroom in shifts, that might be fun. Amanda will be up and out before three, most mornings. Karen, you could sleep three till eleven perhaps."
"Perhaps," I say, and shoot Mandy another look. Her mouth runs away with her if you don't watch her. I've read the government guidelines and I know it only says you've to encourage your partner to sleep in a different bed where possible, so I doubt it matters that I'm sleeping eight feet away from Mandy but I don't want to get into an argument with management over it.
"And of course," says Melissa, "you'll have to use different rooms during the day."
"It's just the one room downstairs," I say. "Front door opens straight into it, and there's a little kitchen off the back. I wouldn't swear there's enough room to sit on the worktop and I doubt it'd be comfortable. But we do have a small cellar, I could sit down there while Mandy's in the house."
"If that works, great. It'll give you a change of scenery, too."
I don't know why I waste my sarcasm on her.
Half an hour later I'm parked two streets away, listening to the Pet Shop Boys and watching Mandy walking away from work in my wing mirror.
"You'll have to park further away," Mandy says when we set off. "Steven walks down here and you know what he's like for sucking up to her."
Melissa's parting shot was that, naturally, if I was seen outside the house during the next twelve weeks I would be fired.
"We're allowing you to be away from work to protect yourself," she said. "It's not a holiday. We can't be made to look like fools. You do see, don't you?"
What I see is our Mandy, who never learnt to drive and who I don't want mingling with the public any more than she can help. It's a five minute drive and I'm stopping her getting a bus home and a taxi to work every day.
"You don't know who's been in a taxi, do you?" says Mandy as we pull up in our street. "I'd never be happy I'd used enough alcohol handwash. I'll have to make sure I keep to the two-metre rule at work from now on, an' all," she says. "Bugger the pick-rate, I've to keep you safe."
"Right, our kid," I say when I've made us both a cuppa and we're sat at opposite ends of the room. "We'll have to take turns eating at the table, if your knees touch it can't count as social-distancing, can it? So you can eat from a tray on the settee tonight."
She tuts but she's not going to contradict me. I'm the one that's read the guidance so whatever I say goes.
"And you'll have to let me have first shower, and then you have to clean the bathroom when you've done," I say. I wonder how far I can push it, if I can make her do the vacuuming for twelve weeks, but I settle for adding, "Including the toilet."
She rolls her eyes but she nods. We're all set.
Next morning I'm up at quarter past two as normal. We're going to have to start getting up earlier though because now she can't nip in for her contact lenses while I'm cleaning my teeth, or measure out cornflakes hip to hip with me while I'm filling the kettle. She uses my towel without thinking when she washes her hands and that's another delay while I dig out a clean one.
"Hurry up, I'll be late," she says, hopping around by the front door, pulling her trainers on.
There's no traffic until we're within spitting distance of the industrial estate, then I turn down a side street and take a roundabout route till I'm parked as close as I dare to our warehouse, closer than Mandy's comfortable with. I can't take her into the car park where everyone else gets dropped off but I don't like leaving her to walk further than she has to, at this time of night.
"Get gone," she says, "Before anyone sees you."
"I'll watch till you're out of sight. There's nobody around."
And there isn't, neither of us can see anyone moving. Until she's taken three steps from the car and Steven materialises from the shadows of the ginnel over the road.
I slide down in my seat and bang my knee. The seat-belt's throttling me and my heart's hammering. I hear him greet Mandy but I can't hear them moving away.
"Your Karen'll be looking forward to having a lie-in, I dare say," he says, and thank the Lord it sounds like he's turning away.
"Oh aye," says Mandy, fainter as she walks on. "It'll do her the world of good, this. Twelve weeks' total rest."
The next few mornings I take Mandy's advice and drop her further away, and she texts me to say she's safe inside before she switches her phone off for her shift. It's picking her up that's more of a problem. I move further into residential streets day by day and settle on a cul de sac by the end of the week. Nobody's going to drive past me and as far as I know we don't work with anyone who lives down here. There's a green footpath sign at the end but after a few days I haven't seen anyone use the path.
As we slide to the end of week two we're doing fine. Knackered, getting on each other's wicks, but fine. I roll up to the cul de sac ten minutes after her shift's due to end, most days she picks up a bit of shopping before she leaves, then we head home for me to carry on getting bored out of my skull. She fills me in on all the gossip and back-biting while we drive.
She's left her Westlife CD in the car so Thursday dinnertime I'm listening to that, leaning on the window and staring into space when the passenger door opens. I straighten up and turn to ask if she managed to get any soap but it's not Mandy who's leaning in.
"Oy! Get back!" I snap. "That's not even a metre. And take your hands off my car."
Melissa stays where she is, breathing maliciously into my space, sweating in her jogging gear.
"You don't appear to care," she says. "This isn't isolation."
"Not now you're invading, no. But Mandy being on a bus for twenty minutes doesn't protect me, does it?"
"That's not the point," she says. "I did warn you I'd have to fire you. You should have followed the rules. How hard can it be?"
I swallow and my chest starts to feel squashed like it did last June when I was kept in overnight for observation.
You have no idea, love, I want to say, none at all.
Neither of them got fired, or lives in Pudsey, or is divorced, and the entirety of the plot, other characters and dialogue is a product of my imagination, with the exception of this quote from Sister Number Two: "Bugger the pick-rate, I've to keep you safe."