What is flash fiction? I'd never heard of it until I went to Goldsmiths. Not necessarily fiction that's written in a flash, I discovered. It's fiction that's over and done with... in a flash. Often only a few hundred words or so. Sometimes as few as 150 words. I'm part of a writing workshop consisting of other Goldsmiths alumni and during our weekly Zoom session yesterday, the person running it (we take it in turns) suggested we write some flash fiction: a short story, in 150 words. We were given ten minutes to complete it. She then suggested we try something on the theme prediction, up to 500 words. I put the ideas together and wrote for ten minutes on the theme prediction. So here's my first bit of flash fiction, written in a flash, 150 words exactly, on the theme prediction.
I TOLD YOU.
They say no one predicted it but that’s not true. Bob predicted it. Bob had been predicting it for years. Bob read the New Scientist. So when it began, slowly, with a little international news story in the back of the paper – a mysterious sickness in China – Bob was cock-a-hoop. ‘Ah!’ Bob yelled down the telephone line, during their weekly Sunday evening call. ‘I told you! It’s arrived! The global pandemic.’
Susie raised her eyebrows, humoured Bob a little, tried to change the subject, and when that didn’t work she passed the phone over to Jez. ‘Your dad,’ Susie mouthed, raising her eyebrows and continuing to stir the gravy.
She told her friends about it in the café on Friday morning. ‘My father-in-law thinks there’s going to be a global pandemic,’ Susie said, because Bob’s voice was still there in her head somehow, niggling, disquieting, worrying. All her friends laughed.
Swap Bob for my father and Susie for me and you might call that autofiction (also a term I'd never heard of until I studied creative writing). When Valentine's Day came around again this year, I remembered how I'd felt on Valentine's Day last year: worried. Back then my father was saying: we're not taking this seriously enough; if it's in Italy then it's also here; our government is sleepwalking us into catastrophe. During February half-term 2020, I travelled to York with a friend and we nervously joked about the two cases of Coronavirus that had been recorded in the city. But to be honest, local flash flooding seemed the more pressing problem.
The last public event I attended in early March was Elizabeth Day in conversation with Josh Cohen at Goldsmiths College. Travelling to New Cross by busy tube and train, I started to feel properly afraid. All these people crammed together, breathing the same air, I thought, is this how it spreads? Is handwashing (what the government was then advising) not enough? In the corridor of the Richard Hoggart Building, I passed Michael Rosen, who's a professor at the college. He was walking towards the exit, flanked, pop star-like, by a gaggle of students. Not long after, (but not soon enough) Goldsmiths College was closed. And as we all know now lovely Michael Rosen was left fighting for his life.
Some friends urged bravery, suggesting we continue to meet for dinners and coffees when our government finally began cautioning against this in late March. It's not about bravery, my father patiently explained down the telephone line, it's about keeping apart in order to break the chain of transmission so our hospitals aren't overwhelmed. Hospitals overwhelmed? True, this was happening in Italy by then. But surely it couldn't happen in the UK?
My father, Colin, isn't a Cassandra but he really does read the New Scientist and he really did mention the threat of global pandemic before any of us had heard the word Coronavirus. Right at the beginning, when I relayed his fears to a friend, she said: but I thought your father was rational? Well, he is, I replied. And as it turns out, he really was.
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