Fiction: ‘You Can Tell A Lot About A Man By His Mask’
Photography Fredrik Öhlander
What should have been a five-minute stop to pick up a £12 bottle of sauvignon blanc was doubled thanks to social distancing. Until then, I’d been avoiding supermarkets as much as I could. I found them depressing, even before the first mention of coronavirus nine months ago. The fluorescent lighting brought out the worst in everyone’s complexion, so both staff and customers shared similar shades of anaemia. Everyone looked like carriers.
Where are you?
A text from Rob. Or at least that was the name I had saved. He had tipsily stamped his number into my phone earlier in the year at the bar where I worked.
I’m literally just round the corner, I’ll be 5. Sorry. X
I wondered whether the “x” was a bad idea. I had already had a glass of wine by this point. Best not to give him false hope, I thought. I sent my text of apology kissless.
This was my first social outing since lockdown had been lifted. Restaurants and cafes had begun to reopen four weeks earlier, but had been immediately inundated with reservations. This particular booking at Titchy Amor had taken three weeks on a waiting list to secure and, inevitably, I was running 15 minutes late. Even for my beloved local tapas on Burton Road, helmed by the culinary genius I’d been starving for since March, I couldn’t get it together to leave on time.
Feeling the blush from the alcohol, I looked like a limp spectator as the wine was scanned, hypnotised by the red lasers searching for its barcode. I pondered the opaque skin of my own arm and the greying gentlemen queuing for the till next to me.
And I suppose we were all carriers – in some ways.
I wondered whether I should start writing this stuff down. My upcoming novel, Carriers: The Socio-Political Trauma of the Worldwide Pandemic, would be killer, in a life-sparing kind of way.
I snapped awake, tapped my card and thanked the cashier. I caught his expression of polite concern, with his mouth pulled into a flat smile like he was struggling to keep the muscles in his face from collapsing to reveal his true feelings. The slight twitch in his eyebrow gave it away slightly.
I glanced down at the newspapers spread on the counter.
Coronavirus: PM's lockdown plan raises 'more questions than answers', says Labour leader
An image of a troubled Keir Starmer peered pensively underneath. It concerned me how our Labour leader could look fresh out of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a pitchfork-wielding leader of the mob, defending the townspeople's vegetable patches from a colony of greedy rabbits. His eyes were too close together. Also, I could have sworn that was the same headline as I’d seen in May? Only to add to the cycle of groundhog living we had all found ourselves in.
I glanced at myself on the CCTV screen as I walked out. I was wearing a mint-green floral dress that wrapped around my waist, my smallest and neatest feature. Long sleeves to cover my arms. My hair was the longest I had ever grown it, and a sort of gold-copper hybrid from not having seen a hairdresser since January. I had intended to book an appointment, but I was last on a long waiting list, past the point at which the “loyal customers” were given the first serve. Fair, but unfair for me, who was suffering from an identity crisis. Was strawberry blonde my natural hair colour, or was this colour a remnant of great dyes past?
My face shone back to me as I stuck my head into the mirror of the drink aisle; the arsenal of Charlotte Tilbury makeup doing well to combat the shop’s dreadful lighting. I felt pretty happy with the delivery of my new stash of powders and liquids. Totally worth the 80% of my weekly furlough wage. I made another mental note to thank Boris for my fresh look as I took the opportunity to take a selfie beside a carton of Rubicon. With this I concluded that I looked nice, and that Rob was one lucky man.
I arrived six minutes after sending my kissless draft, by which point Rob had made it to the front of the queue, tucked neatly between the shuttered shop next door and a velvet rope. I wondered whether this scenario – having someone queue for me, and idly slipping into place with a faux apology – had been my plan all along.
“Where’s your mask?” he asked immediately.
Oh shit. I opened my bag (another new purchase – I had to question how the economy was still struggling in spite of my efforts to single-handedly keep it afloat) and pulled the mask from within my bag, one that my auntie had sent to me in the post. It was from the Stella McCartney x NHS range. I had had my heart set on a mask from The Kooples, but we agreed that it was perhaps an “aspiration on a number of levels.”
Stella’s was black, which was my colour, a judgement I had decided one day but never heard anyone else support. White threading crossed from one side to the other in the style of Jack Skellington’s stitched mouth. The inside was white, with the inscription “Choose Lives” in its centre.
I wondered for a moment which side to sport on a date, but after a quick consideration went with the stitched mouth, which I believed would be any man’s preference. It was then that I noticed Rob’s mask.
FUCK BORIS
His blonde eyebrows were thick on his face and a head of amateurishly shaved hair suggested he, too, had struggled with the absence of a barber. His eyes were a sharp blue with creases on the edges from too much sun or too much laughter. Not that you could get too much of either of those things. He was better looking than I remembered, with more of an edge to him than I’d seen previously through the fog of his own piss-up.
“Sorry, I didn’t know how long you would be so I let someone take our table, but the next table will be 15 minutes. You said 15 minutes, didn’t you?” he said.
“Well I’m just sorry that I’m late,” I said. The maître d’ looked at me with blank expression. She was clearly feeling weary from her position as ‘organiser-of-the-carriers’ during Tichy Amor’s grand reopening. I imagined social distancing to be difficult to implement based on spurious advice and zero training. She looked at Rob with more enthusiasm, as he was someone who could show up to a booking on time – a trait, I assumed, these two people, about whom I had zero factual information, had in common.
With our masks still attached to our faces, we followed the maître d’ to our table like a squad of ducklings. I glanced at the different couples as we passed through the restaurant: pairs of blondes, pairs of brunettes, fitness fanatics and those with a mutual staleness. I felt I was on my way to Noah’s Ark, and wondered what made me and Rob such a suitable match.
I inhaled a symphony of complimentary spices and seasonings from all the delicious plates circulating. The heat from the kitchen lifted the humidity of the room, which seemed to create an unfamiliar heaviness. Even the candles seemed incapable of a flicker.
We took our seats within the grid of tables, tightly set up for precautionary measures. I placed my bag behind my chair and sat down with the relief that I had made it this far. Rob plonked down on his own, and casually pulled it up closer to the table, scuffing and squeaking against the tiled floor as he did. I smiled, he looked up, and our eyes met, seeming to channel a similar lust for an icebreaker. We had that in common, at least.
“It’s funny the name, Titchy Amor, isn’t it?” Rob started. “It’s like ‘little love’ translated. I thought you were joking when you first mentioned it, but I can see now that you were quite literal.”
I laughed and eased myself into the table, placing my hair behind my ears and shuffling myself forward.
“Do you think we can take our masks off now?” Rob asked, scanning the room for confirmation.
A red-haired waitress bounded up to us at that moment. Tight ringlet curls formed a beautiful bouquet of hair. Her eyes, a similar shade of auburn, sparkled. Freckles dusted her face like brown powder over her dark olive skin.
She placed two menus and a carafe of water between us, and the candlelight danced to the interlude of new energy.
“Hi guys, how are we doing this evening?” she asked, her voice muffled by her mask, which had the raised fist of the Black power salute at its centre. I was excited to see the sparks of protest had made their way into the restaurant and her boldness in delivering this to work, for Titchy Amor didn't seem like a particular stronghold for revolution. Rob’s FUCK BORIS mask looked pathetically docile in comparison.
“Can we take our masks off?” I asked, hoping that we could pursue the evening with some semblance of normality.
Rob started to peel his mask from his face slowly, one F-U-C-K at a time, until the words wiped away.