This story takes place in York. York has been badly hit by Covid-19 and this story concerns something that happened before the beginning of the outbreak of the virus in the year of the pandemic. Not that I witnessed the events that follow. I live as far from York as it is possible to live and still be on the same planet. I live in the present day, 2021, while much of York exists on the southern fringes of the eighteenth century where bear-baiters dress their prejudice in bigotry's velvet knee breeches.

So, the story was told to me by my sister.

My sister lives in a particularly entrenched part of the eighteenth-century city. It's a part of the city in which everyday judgements on all aspects of society are lost to the powdered wigs and minuets of back fence gossips. She has lived there for many years and she seems comfortable with the prevailing mores. In my sister's part of York, they probably still burn witches, if only metaphorically. This story is not about my sister.

On the map of time, York is precariously placed near the border between pre-railway England and reality. It's an ancient city, even older than most of the pre-railway England where for the most part it's still stuck. Possibly because there's no railway in pre-railway England to establish a route out, although York was one of the first places in England to have a functioning railway... York is a city in and of confusion. Its twenty thousand student population trail their imported modern-day manners and behaviours through streets awash with dour suspicion, and those imported manners and behaviours inevitably leach into the blunt psyche of the new-fangled loom-woven practices of the dour and suspicious locals. Etiquette ebbs and flows like a tide of uncertainty down Micklegate and Swinegate. Some days, the feel is all feathered hats and coster-mongering, other days it's all craft beer and Zara.

My sister - I know this story isn't about my sister, but she is a point of reference - my sister hasn't lived her whole life in York. She's still alive, so she hasn't lived her whole life anywhere yet.

My sister and her husband rent a small terraced house with a large garden. They've lived in the same house for years and they're not about to leave any time soon. The rent is low, the location is convenient and the large garden is a place where they can bury the bodies.

My sister and her husband both work hard beneath a kind of defeated inevitability, like hamsters in a wheel. They married in the autumn. Her for the second time, the first time being to someone else, and the someone else having long since exited the scene like a character in a Fielding farce; he for the first time, heading for the ceremony like a character entering the scene in a Fielding farce. The continuation of the format seemed pre-ordained. And totally fitting.

They were as happy as married people expect to be unless the married people are relatives of Noddy and as appropriately naïve. They were compatible and they showed great respect for each other. She went out with her girlfriends on a Friday evening, he went out with his male mates at the same time. At the end of the evening, they would meet at an agreed place at an agreed time - outside the Grob and Ducat at midnight, or outside the Corner Pin at midnight - and they would catch a taxi home together.

- Good time the neet

- Sithee

- Y'sen

- Ey up

And the week would go on until the next Friday night. The weeks went on for about five years. And the five years sometimes spanned 1780 - 1785 and they sometimes spanned moments derived from the twenty-first century, depending on the ebb and flow of uncertainty down Micklegate and Swinegate.

Then something happened or something didn't happen. Whichever it was, the effect was gradual but fatal. It was the twenty-first-century-fatal-blue-screen-of-death in terms of the marriage. They stopped talking to each other, maybe after an argument about carrots or after an argument about payment of bills or after an argument about where the car was parked. The cause of the argument, like the argument itself, is lost to the mists of time. Probably around 1768.

The silence inside the house grew. The silence was the small child they never had. It got bigger and the bigger the silence-child became, the more difficult it was to control. They still went out on a Friday evening, but they came home separately, in different taxis. She talked to her girlfriends about the growing silence.

- I don't know. He's just really stubborn

- He'll come 'round

- He's an idiot

- We'll see

And he talked to his mates about the growing silence.

- Sithee

- Y'sen

- Ey up

There was no easy resolution.

The problem was, they were both obstinate and they were both convinced the other was in the wrong and they were both determined to not be the first to give in. Even when their four cats died, the silence continued. The four dead cats became the bodies buried in the garden. 

They started to communicate by post-it note. Each day, one of them would leave a note on the kitchen table with information about dinner or with information about the necessity to take out the bins. And in the evening, the other would have responded, if a response was needed, by leaving an addition to the original note. Sometimes the response was too long or too involved for it to be tacked onto the end of the original note like an addendum. In those times, a new note altogether would be written. An actual conversation would have been more efficient, more effective and an actual conversation might even have resulted in the resumption of a normal cross-century married life. An actual conversation never happened though. Post-it notes remained the only source of contact between my sister and her husband.

After some years of staccato communication in scribbled haste, the situation remained unchanged. The idea that my sister's husband would 'come 'round' had long been abandoned. The four cats were still dead. The marriage was now the siege of Troy and the notes on the kitchen table were the wooden horse. Except that the notes contained empty words so Troy would unlikely be breached. I called my sister.

- Why don't you just leave? You can't go on like this

- Why should I leave? He can leave

- Okay, why doesn't he just leave. He can't go on like this

- I don't know. Ask him

- Have you asked him? Maybe you can put the idea on a kitchen table post-it note

- I don't care

And then Covid-19 came to York and everyone had to self-isolate. Everyone had to stay inside their own homes as the virus ran amok through the city streets, killing more people per capita than in most other towns and cities in the country.

Luckily, my sister and her husband were essential workers who continued to go to work every day. The adolescent silence-child they shared the house with was allowed to grow unhindered.

This story is about the silence that grew, at first like a child my sister never had, and then like the virus that stalked the streets of York, irrespective of whether those streets ran through the suburbs of reality or through the suburbs of the eighteenth century. This story is about the silence that still grows. So, the story never ends.