When Boris Johnson first announced that he had led Britain to victory in the war against Covid and that he was now liberating his people from the tyranny of the facemask, Jackie was unmoved.
Since the start of the pandemic she had been a diligent mask-wearer. Brought up on principles of personal responsibility and consideration for others, she would no more have gone maskless than she would have dropped litter or used the disabled loo. Besides, she has always dreaded being publicly chastised. Throughout the long months of mandatory face coverings, Jackie viewed the maskless with overt scepticism: ‘You don’t look medically exempt to me’. The last time she took a train, a man got on at Watford Junction and placed a takeaway coffee on the table in front of him as if it were a totem of regalia bestowing upon him the privilege of travelling mask-free all the way to Wilmslow. Jackie had fumed in passive-aggressive silence for two full hours. She had always made a point, whenever eating or drinking anything in public, of keeping her mask on and merely inching it downwards for a few brief seconds at a time in order to gain surreptitious access to her mouth. It had taken months of experimenting to manage this without dribbling. At first she had inched the mask upwards instead, because stretching it under her chin had pulled uncomfortably on her ears, but it had invariably wandered northwards from her nose to her eyes so that she couldn’t see the little hole in the plastic lid of her cup and had dribbled even more, causing audible mirth. Despite these humiliations Jackie had persevered, never dreaming of removing her mask altogether.
And now here was Boris telling her she could do just that. The trouble was, Jackie didn’t trust Boris: it hadn’t escaped her that the ending of mask restrictions coincided with the ending of daily Covid-death figures. Furthermore she wanted to distance herself from the silly anti-maskers who insisted that face-coverings were instruments of tyranny. As if Hitler and Stalin had become notorious for forcing their victims to wear little fabric squares on their faces. So Jackie continued to wear a mask until one day, having always vaguely expected that there would be a few in the depths of her bag or glove compartment, crumpled and grubby, she found she had none left. She would have to go maskless into Sainsbury’s. After an initial pang of uncertainty, Jackie reflected that perhaps this was the nudge she needed to shed the mask once and for all: hardly anyone else was wearing one these days and Covid deaths were… well, she didn’t actually know where Covid deaths were, but that probably meant they weren’t going up, very much.
So in she went. Acutely self-conscious of her facial nakedness, she looked out for other maskless shoppers like a first-time naturist seeking reassurance in the wrinkles and wobbles of the comfortably nude. Then she rounded a corner into the ready-meals aisle and bumped into an elderly couple shopping together, tiny and frail, scrupulously masked. They looked at her bare face in dismay and Jackie could actually see the multitudinous plague of Covid virons swarming out of her own mouth and nose and enveloping them in a cloud of death. Mortified, she clasped her hand over her face, turned away and hurried off to buy a packet of masks.
Jackie has now come to terms with the fact that she will be wearing a face-covering for ever.
© C P Jenkinson 24/05/2022
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