Hands up: coronavirus has made touch my enemy

By Ann Wroe

Running downstairs, I slide my bare palm down the banisters – and then rebuke myself. Why did I do that? Do I need to? Hands off. Checking the mail box, I vaguely fret about who has opened the door before me. Only the neighbours. But who says the neighbours are safe? I let the door slam noisily behind me, probably annoying them, rather than grasping the handle and bringing it gently to. Anything rather than touching.

There is a glove in my handbag. It is made of thin, clear plastic that makes my hand sweat. That is why I’m not wearing it yet, trying to save it, since I don’t have many of them; though by saving it, perhaps I am simply turning it into a repository of viruses. I’m still not wearing it as, in the Co-op, I touch a bag of croissants and put it back – then a packet of rolls, and decide not to buy that. Terrible, terrible behaviour. Standing in the aisle, I find myself sighing with frustration: through my mask, because that I have remembered.

My bad history with gloves must be part of the trouble. Winter gloves may be essential, but they lose themselves (always the left-hand glove, oddly, though I am right-handed). They escape at bus stops when the bus comes, slide noiselessly from my lap as I get out of trains. Rubber gloves corrode, congeal and spring leaks. But light gloves, summer gloves, are the worst. There is something prissy about them, shades of Edwardian promenades, when gloves extended even beyond the elbow; or visits to great-aunts, when I would have to sit in silence on the edge of a hard chair, though I longed to run in the garden; or church, where prayer-book and pew had a holiness that could only be touched, if at all, with covered hands. I wore white gloves at secondary school, as a required part of the summer uniform: stupid things, which after a few journeys on the train were greasy and black as pitch. I flung them off one broiling day to eat an ice lolly with great abandon. A prefect saw me and it earned me a detention.

That is the core of the problem: gloves prevent touch, and touch is how we truly know the world, even if we also see and hear it. I palp fruit to test its ripeness, knock a loaf of bread to assess the crust, rustle material through my fingers to tell if it is viscose or silk. I revel in the worn polished surface of an old table, the ridges of rag paper, the cool thin velvet of the petals of a rose. I finger teeth that hurt, stroke my chin to be sure no jowls are forming, tuck my hair behind my ears, scratch my nose: most of these unconscious, thoughtless acts, almost as if I need to keep checking that I am still here. (I must stop doing this!)

Touch, though, is now my enemy. Opening a gate in the depths of the countryside, I contort myself in knots to use my elbow. Ordering a coffee, I’m horrified to see the barista pass it over with a naked hand, or a naked hand buffered with a napkin, but there’s no polite way out. I take it. Perhaps the heat of the cup will kill off any bugs. A brownie is put in a bag with tongs, but then the bag-top is twisted round with hands – and I grip it in the same place. On the bus, having avoided all the hand-rails and resisted my usual desire to clear the windows, I wonder how I will press the bell for my stop without encountering all the fingers that have pressed it before. I sit upright, permanently on alert, as though I need to stop myself experiencing this world – a world in which the press of other people was once just part of city life.

Gloves are the only answer to all this fretting. The government seems not to notice them, but perhaps it should. I take a limp plastic item, already damp, out of my bag, and wrestle it on. I should do both hands; there’s a high chance I will absent-mindedly make merry with the ungloved one. But two gloved hands would be too redolent of the oppressions of my childhood days: the hard chair, the hard pew, the grubby trains, detention. Besides, I’ve only brought one.

The hand that wears it feels odd, abstracted, like a prothesis. It can’t move so freely, and is dulled, even through such a thin layer. But there are definite advantages. Now, at the market stall, I can rootle unrestrained among the cauliflowers to see which one is freshest. I can pick up an apricot, squeeze it and put it back, with no compunction. Perhaps I can no longer appreciate the slight fuzz on it, or tell exactly how much give it has; but I have come close, despite my handicap. And what I have lost in subtlety and depth of experience I seem to have recouped in another way: a sudden onrush of civic virtue so strong that I find myself striding home with my sweaty glove still on, a badge of honour.■

ILLUSTRATIONS ANTONELLO SILVERINI