Written by a Junior Fellow during the Covid-19 crisis in response to CCA’s exhibition Transparent Things.

Today, gazing out of his window, Wynne Dawe thinks about what he will do differently. Too many weeks had disappeared with ambivalent drift through the smooth glow of Screen Time. Distractions on demand had benumbed his senses and his boredom began to intensify. Wynne longed for the old normal and the physicality of being with others.

His window overlooks a residential street; Georgian terraces, thirties council flats, and noughties apartments on either side, lined with blossoming trees. At the window, Wynne listens to the distant whine of sirens trickling through the air vent while he scans the empty street for signs of life. Inevitably, no one is around, though everyone is home. Alone together.

Wynne notices neighbours as they appear, disappear and reappear in windows, on balconies and at doorsteps. He doesn’t know his neighbours, it’s not the way in London, he thinks, but what if he were to reach out? What would he say? Hello, stranger … (with an awkward wave in a very small voice). This he briefly considers – but he wouldn’t – before recoiling from view.

He can still see his neighbours; actually, he watches them, they are the cast in his little reality show, and he pulls up a chair.

An elderly man across the street is wearing a white cotton shirt with a lovely yellow stain down the front. He rests on his balcony railings. While he takes in the view he bites and sucks at a peach, and juices drip to the floor below. Then he disappears.

A gay couple tiptoe around their poky balcony making the finishing touches to weeks of campy home improvements – sparkling fairy lights along balcony railings, and candy-coloured buckets filled with plastic flowers. He sees them now, sweaty and shirtless, slumped in bean bags, sipping gin and tonics, soaking up the sun.

A middle-aged woman leans out of her window and inhales from a cigarette serenely. She wears a dressing gown with her yellowed hair up in jumbo rollers. Her heavily painted face is a portrait of calm. She finishes her cigarette, flicks the butt into the road, and retreats inside.

Two women in sunglasses sit at a table in strappy tops and hot pants. They smoke pot and munch crisps while blaring hip-hop from portable speakers. They don’t talk. One acts completely bored and stares unhappily at her phone. The other, from time to time, erupts into fits of laughter.

Here she is! An elderly woman, rarely seen, dangles a hefty sack over her top-floor balcony. She lowers the sack carefully over the railings, swings it back and forth, checks for onlookers, and then, bam – she scores, straight in the dumpster below.

A very large family gathers at the front of a terrace covered in England flags and rainbow-coloured ribbons. Children make chalk drawings on the driveway while the elders chain-smoke, drinking lager and alcopops at the doorway.

The property guardians down the road have transformed a vacant concrete plot into an outdoor living room, assembling furniture and flower beds from spare tyres, pallets and rocks. By evening it’s full of attractive twenty-somethings drinking and playing games

A thunderous din cuts through Wynne’s nap. A few seconds pass before he realises it’s Thursday evening. The scene out of his window is different this time – he sees his neighbours, everyone together, everywhere at once, clapping hands, blowing whistles and banging pans. He hears dogs barking, children laughing and screaming, and passing cars honking horns. 

For a day, Wynne Dawe escaped the flat life of Screen Time into the vivid materiality of the present – and it felt so good. And now, it was as if the entire cast of his reality show had emerged for their curtain call. While clapping for key workers, Wynne spots his cast one by one, and he claps for them too, for they all play their part, he thinks. But as he gazes out of his window, watching his neighbours fondly, Wynne wonders if they will ever be better acquainted.

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