While it was allowed, I was barely home at all. When the first lockdown eased in June and July, and a social life was possible, occasionally I would bring a date back to my place to talk and make out and listen to Steely Dan until dawn, too buzzed on the novelty of intimacy and park prosecco to think about whether I was being an annoying, noisy neighbour. I had to walk away and live with the memory of us both looking down together at my suspended gesture of politeness, him with disdainful confusion and me with horror. But I couldn’t make my case to the man because I don’t know him. I should be able to explain this to him, let him know I hadn’t touched anyone except my mother – once, briefly – since lockdown began that I wasn’t a renegade handshaker that it was only a stray physical compulsion which had made me do what I’d done. “Here she comes,” I imagined him thinking every time he saw me on the stairs, “Typhoid Mary herself, the insistent spreader of pestilence, the reckless germ disseminator.” It wasn’t fair, I kept thinking. The moment sticks with me not just because of the strangely unsettling feeling of not having a handshake returned, but because I feared my neighbour would forever regard me as a careless, perhaps even dangerous, idiot. My arm quivered in the air between the two of us he glanced at it and back at me, the fool whose body had not learned, even three months into a pandemic, not to touch people at will. The moment seemed to last a long, long time. I’m Megan!” He said hello and told me his name, and as the reflexes of decorum kicked in, without thinking I thrust my hand out to shake his.

As ever, I instinctively tried to disguise my nerves about meeting someone new with vaguely manic effusiveness – shouting: “Hello, we haven’t met yet. I had moved into a new flat a few weeks before, and came upon my upstairs neighbour for the first time on the porch one afternoon as I was bursting out of the front door. Lockdown was beginning to ease very slightly, but the general fear and distrust of other bodies was still acute. The one that keeps coming back to me now is a brief interaction I had in June. The ones that arise without warning are the trifling kind, and are only so acutely chilling because they raise the possibility that everywhere you go, at all times, people are perceiving you as a comical buffoon to be pitied. These are not the profound experiences of belittlement that wounded me seriously and changed the course of my personality and life (those are never very far from my mind and exist as background noise always). They float, unbidden, to the surface of my consciousness as I try to fall asleep, or perhaps in the middle of a professional meeting, so that I freeze briefly in a moment of existential agony, rictus grin wavering while I try to recover. Like most anxious people, incidents of minor humiliation tend to haunt me persistently through the years.

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