Thora was on Focalin. Or had been, until they found out she had been snorting it off James’s iPad, the iPad he loaded with podcasts about political crimes and interviews with precocious teens starting businesses. She’d tried listening to one of them once, one of James’s beloved podcasts: when had life become so dull, an extended social-studies class where you were supposed to summon interest in the workings of corporations, the minutiae of historical events, spend your free time cramming for a test that didn’t exist?

Everyone was suddenly trying, so very hard, to learn things.

The next night, Ally was reading her doll-maker book. Occasionally she pressed a hand to her heart, overcome. Russell had brought Thora a magazine from town, but she’d seen it already. A page of various celebrities with cellulite blurring their thighs. A different celebrity recording everything she ate in a day. Like all of them, around 3 p.m. the celebrity ate a handful of almonds as a snack. A cut-up bell pepper with hummus. Living that way seemed to require skills that Thora lacked. The ability to take your own life seriously, believing that you were a solid enough entity to require maintenance, as if any of it would add up to something.

Flattery! It was so long since anyone had flattered him. So long! His wife had kicked him out six months ago. Lonely, grim months. Such solitude. It was unbearable. Longing all week to see his kids, then this desperate panic all the time he was with them, trying to make it wonderful, to eke out every last second, and then the agony when they were taken away from him again. Tom started to cry. He missed his wife, his little children. He was the architect of his own downfall. He was a fool and Linda was a fool to flatter him! He was about to tell her this but then he paused. She’ll find out soon enough, he thought.

I began to photograph trees. My attention was particularly drawn to the ways they had accommodated themselves to the urban environment, or the ways they had been pressed into making such accommodation. Everything in tree life, I came to feel, was a negotiation made visible. On many more trees than I had noticed before, I saw evidence of pruning, trimming, thinning, pollarding, supplemental support and coerced tropism. Trees grew out of concrete, next to fences, through fences. They seemed to be fighting silent battles or suffering indignities, appeared to emanate strain, stress and heroic endurance. Such twists and torsions, such violent constraint and wild entanglement, when I noticed them in a young beech that had entwined itself around a utility pole on Cleveland Street, just south of Broadway, brought my mind back to the Laocoön sculptures. The interlaced branches were now arms, now serpents. The beech was a tragic hero, petrified. I made many pictures of such trees, and each time, some analogy to art would impress itself on me, the more so because of the universally locked museum doors. The dramatic stage, as it were, was now out on the streets: here was a spiky shrub as in Dürer’s Quarry, here a pyramidal arrangement of diagonals as in David’s Oath of the Horatii.

Before concluding that the wings were made of gold, Hoyt thought it might be a trick of the light. Sunshine in summertime can be deceptive. He’s seen diamonds of dew on blades of grass evaporate and quarters shimmering at the bottom of the community pool turn into gum wads. From his tree fort, he’s watched sparks of gold rise from the earth and hover in the branches. Before his childhood brain can right itself those fireflies are worth a fortune.

At least it is a piece about the world. At least it’s angry. What is this self-flagellating urge to read all the lockdown diaries, all the ‘Not another lockdown diary!’ first lines? These reams of writerly vacuities, column after mot juste-hunting column describing this shape of the day, this view from the window, such-and-such a tree and such, this which is on the desk, this which is in the fridge what with food not being as easy to get these days, these the new modes of going to the shops, this which is the conversation that was had with this friend or child or neighbour, this, now you mention it, which is the newly warm neighbourly discourse, this the recourse to Netflix, this the thing the author had thought they would miss and does not, this the one they weren’t expecting to and do. This the sense that things will never be the same again. Et cetera, repeat to fade. They provoke incredulousness greater than the sky. Who gives a fuck?

In the city, amid the tragedy and trauma, we’re granted a new silence. Distinct. Not total, any more than what we used to think of as London quiet, in the minutes between cars at night, the sound of a distant train part of the silence itself. Now you can hear the wings of a bird you watch. And when a car or van or a delivery driver on a scooter – one of the new heroes – passes by, the interruption startles. Glimpsing home-exercisers through windows you’re overwhelmed with affection for a new sort of community. Mist comes and goes across your vision: your mask sends breath on to your glasses. What would this lockdown be if it were autumn? What if it were winter?