THE LOCKDOWN KID

Dedicated to the memory of Mr Stephen Sondheim (March 1930-November 2021)

Alex had always been an outgoing, outdoors kind of kid, frequently playing sport at school and daily in his local park after school. He had not succumbed to the predictable addiction to tech as had most of his peers and greatly relished any opportunity he had to get outside and play.

Many evenings he would stay out til late, practicing his free kicks or doing pull ups on the monkey bars in the play area, before jogging home through the mazy woods near his home.

He especially loved the summer when the dusk with its crimson sunsets would draw the day to a close and everything around him seemed serene and quiet. He didn’t think of such things as freedom at the time but perhaps intuitively he felt it atmospherically in these heightened moments of existence.

If he had friends to play with great, but he was just as content to practice alone.

Throughout the winter of 2019, he had continued to keep himself active even on the rawest and most bitter of days. He had impressed all of his sports teachers at school with his grit and steely performances in rugby, football and cross-country. He was by their consensus, very much the yardstick by which all his teammates and competitors from other schools were measured.

Then, unusually for Alex, he succumbed to a nasty virus which had cut him down like an inside centre in the last weeks of January. It was the first time for Alex that he discovered he could also be susceptible to illness just like everyone else. As a consequence of this lingering illness, he was finally forced to miss school for a week or two and recover for longer than he’d ever been previously accustomed to.

Aside from a dramatic case of chicken pox when he was four, he had barely had so much as a sniffle throughout his childhood.

February continued to be cold, wet and dark, and hardy as Alex was he hadn’t ventured out of his front door for a long while, which was most strange for him.

Emerging from the dark winter months, the promise of spring was just around the corner but with that same promise came the contrasting threat of a newly discovered virus, one that had been discovered in Wuhan, China and was spreading like wild fire across its citizen population and beyond its borders.

After finally recovering fully from his malingering winter illness, Alex was preparing for his return to school when emergency measures were suddenly introduced by the government to control the spread of the newfound Coronavirus disease which had made its way to the little town where he lived, where nothing exciting or dramatic ever happened outside of the village fete.

From the abstractly unrealness of faraway news to the suddenly very real reality that was approaching, this was the first time something Alex had seen or heard reported in the media directly affected him in a way that made him feel tangibly unsettled.

“Why do they have to close everything,” he nervously asked his mother who was still fighting off the remnants of the same winter virus he had recently suffered from.

“They don’t want people to spread it.”

“So, everything just shuts down?”

“I suppose so. I really don’t know. This is unprecedented in my lifetime. In our lifetime. “

Unsatisfied with her lack of reassurance for him, Alex returned to his bedroom where he began to investigate the news reports regarding the virus and its global implications on his barely used laptop.

For the first time in his young life, he began to feel very real dread in his young heart and those dreams of summer nights kicking free kicks from thirty yards now appeared to be under genuine threat.

Later that night Alex woke up in a cold sweat, anxiety coursing through his veins. The secure perception of reality he had enjoyed most of his life so far had suddenly been broken.

Clutching his chest which seemed tight, he felt as if he’d just run a marathon and almost had to catch his breath at the accelerated speed of his heart.

‘Mum!”

After midnight, unable to sleep, he padded all the way down the carpeted hallway to his mother’s bedroom.

He pushed open the door and stood in the half light of the room where his silhouette spread across the walls, dwarfing his own physical body. He saw his mother was fast asleep, wearing her silk sleep mask and tried to wake her. But she was clearly dead to the world. It was only when Alex noticed the small bottle of sleeping pills on her bedside table that he sensed he would have to wait til morning before she would be properly alert.

Back in his bedroom, he checked the time and decided to call his father who was away working in Boston, America, but the call was not answered which only further disturbed him, his fear running amok through his young mind.

Accepting he probably wouldn’t sleep at all, he reverted to watching some random gamer’s live stream via his computer.

The flickering light of the screen strobed his face in the darkness of his room, nullifying to some extent the worry that had consumed him all evening though when dawn finally arrived, Alex had suffered his first ever sleepless night and he felt truly exhausted.

The change started slowly at first, but after a month of lockdown it become abundantly obvious to his mother that something had altered in her son. The natural exuberance and enthusiasm Alex had always presented was no longer there. He had become increasingly low in energy and spent most of his time in his room like an introverted gremlin. When she’d suggest that he go and spend some time exercising in the park, he declined, preferring to take refuge in his bed and online instead.

“You can go out you know?”

“I know.”

“Well, I think it would be good if you kept to your old routine. It always made you so happy.”

“I will.

But he didn’t.

Weeks went by and the athletic, fun loving Alex had become a shadow of his former self, preferring to watch TikTok videos and gamer friends’ live streams.

The government-mandated time slot for daily exercise seemed an incomprehensible concept to young Alex, who already struggled with the concept of the virus itself, and although he knew many of his friends were ignoring the lockdown rules, his newly acquired fear kept him from joining them.

His mother, running her internet business on a daily basis, was often too pre-occupied with her many zoom meetings and client issues to pay enough attention to Alex who was becoming increasingly introverted.

It seemed cruelly ironic to many that the sun at this time was so regularly consistent in its appearance each day during this new and depressing phenomena called lockdown, as if it was knowingly taunting the populace under its collective house arrest. If anything would surely lure Alex from the confines of his room with its siren song then surely it would be that. But the damage was becoming more ingrained to his psyche as if someone had turned the light switch off in his soul and he had now become permanently averse to his old way of life.

“Come on Alex. We’re going for a walk,” his mother insisted firmly.

Resembling an adolescent vampire under duress, Alex now clearly disliked the bright outdoor light and had his head bowed throughout the entire duration of their walk. His anxiety had become significant enough that he felt nervous at the sight of other people approaching them.

“Don’t get too close Mum.”

“Relax. Everyone is being perfectly respectful of each other’s space. We’re outdoors. Not in a shopping centre.”

If anything, this excursion only exacerbated Alex’s fears and desire to return to his room. The sad realisation for his mother was that her outdoor experiment had proved Alex was in a far more serious state than she had previously judged.

As Alex felt relief upon returning back indoors, his mother felt increasing anxiety.

One evening in May, to her surprise, his mother found his bedroom deserted.

It was only after some investigation she discovered he’d fallen asleep in his old play cupboard, watched over by toys of childhood past.

Held tight in his arms was his favourite teddy who he called Jeddi (after Star Wars). As sweet as the image was on the surface of things, the fact was he was regressing to a place she’d thought and hoped he’d grown out of.

She left him to sleep, leaving the cupboard doors ajar to let in the last of the late evening sunset to wake him up.

Only later that night, when she took to her own bed and found her bottle of sleeping pills missing from the bedside table did she suddenly realise the true horror of what had happened.

After the socially distanced funeral, it was the mother's turn to become the son as she now retreated into her bedroom and hid away from the world.  

No distraction was strong enough to divert her mind from the trauma of losing her child. Like a more ghostly Miss Haversham, she wanted only to preserve the way things were when Alex was alive refusing to acknowledge the present reality as it now was.

She would remain locked down in time forevermore, clutching tightly onto his favourite teddy and hoping she'd be re-united with Alex in her dreams.