April 10, 2020

Lockdown Day 4

Nightmares in bed. Then, screams. It takes me awhile to realize that the screams are real, and I run out to the living room, to find my sons attempting to murder each other with badminton racquets. I squint at the clock — it’s only 8am.

“WHAT THE F IS GOING ON?!”

“They’re fighting over the iPad,” says the husband. And then he loses it: “STOPPPPPP!!!!! STOP ITTTTTTTT!!!!!”

The kids have never had so much access to screens before and now they’re behaving like Lindsay Lohan looking for her next cocaine hit. What a way to start Good Friday.

Since it is a public holiday, I hide the iPad under a mound of papers and we read the Children’s Bible — an old gift from one of the husband’s colleague — to relearn the significance of Good Friday. There is so much blood, gore and violence in the story (albeit in cartoon form) that Good Friday must be a misnomer.

We check out famous paintings on the Internet: Da Vinci’s The Last Supper, The Crucifixion by El Greco and, my absolute favorite, The Descent from The Cross by Rembrandt. If there is one thing great about religion, it’s the art it inspires. We are simultaneously disturbed and enthralled.

Our lunch is interrupted by mom, who sends me pictures of her home-cooked laksa from multiple angles. I balk. Our fish burrito looks oh-so-inferior all of a sudden.

I finally have time to catch up on my novel, a somewhat racist, mysogynistic (and partly fictitious) account of Charles Dickens after the Staplehurst Railway Accident, as related by his friend, the seriously unlikeable Wilkie Collins. Accompanying me is a box of steeply discounted chocolates from Fauchon, bought at a time when stores were trying to get rid of their oversupply of perishables.

The coronavirus has now infiltrated war-torn Yemen and a remote Amazonian tribe. It’s also infected as many as 150 members of the Saudi royal family. You know it’s serious when you go to the bike park, and you see plenty of white people in masks.

The day is glorious anyway. We walk the length of the beach, watching parasailers living their best life out on the ocean, but soon I soon find it hard to breathe.

We decide to go home, but not before ordering almost a kilo of takeaway crabs since it’s our way of celebrating the holidays.

I take pictures of the night’s feast. I can’t wait to send it to mother with the text: “I WIN.”