THE CROWN: AN IMMIGRANT THAT MADE ALL IMMIGRANTS NATIVES

Andrea was planning to buy the flowers herself.

Bill’s 60th. Surprise party. Something to shock him out of his system: slob, staring at his phone 24/7. Can’t even speak, just grunts. Caveman alphabet. Playing golf with Ivan all day. 26 guests, including ourselves. Preparations. But first, cup of tea. Turn on the TV.

Same programme on every channel: The Crown. No Queen Elizabeth, just letters. Glitch. Must be going mad, working too hard on that new book. Torture – worse than giving birth. Told them it’d be finished by June and now it’s October. Upcoming conference on language theories and DNA. The Magic Word: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on Vaccination.

Tea’s getting cold. Watch this Crown for five minutes.

*

Switching off the television, A walked to Aldi. A gap emerged in the shelves when B took a tin of chopped tomatoes. C, O, U, 5G and H swam through the aperture, feasting on I’s wet mouth like a kiss. J paid. K cried that there were no fresh fruit and vegetables. L posted an angry Facebook status about stockpiling while M handed him a glass of wine before their 8 p.m. Zoom Quiz. N waved at the screen, preparing pasta. O couldn’t smell her bolognese. After dinner P wanted to play with his dad, but Q was exhausted from coughing. Tired of arguing, R filmed a TikTok in his bedroom. Downstairs, S instagrammed her coffee next to a houseplant. 🙏. #QuarantineAndChill. T followed @MaternityAction on Twitter. FaceTime: U’s mother, shielding, virtually hugged her daughter’s bump while V counted their toilet rolls. W laughed at a toilet roll on eBay for £70. X, jumping to Joe Wickes, wondered if anybody would buy it. Y, furloughed, watched porn. Z watched a lung screening: same pattern. No sign of the magic word. Infection rates increasing. Anxiety about capacity.

*

Switch off. Some bloody pandemic documentary. What next? Dentist, florist, relax with pre-guest glass of wine. Best bit of the night. Thank God for Ivan, distracting Bill. Nasty feeling that Ursula will give birth at the party. Only invited her to be polite, didn’t expect her to accept – third trimester. Politer not to accept. Yoga teacher on YouTube, trying to be Adrienne. Husband Victor constantly counting coins like a Scrooge.

Dentist. Scratchy seats. Magazines. Turn the page. The Crown. Again! Crazy marketing campaign. Advert in the style of a poem. Prophecy. Zodiac? Never believed that crap but nothing better to read.

*

The world’s city centres were freed from alphabets. Languageless, they stood on pause. Entropy was unlocked; nature reclaimed its world. Dolphins swam in the Thames. Disembodied advertisements: Disney+; Uber Eats; Deliveroo. An empty pizza box stood sentry to Buckingham Palace. The Colosseum was returned to Roman ghosts, the Parthenon to Greek gods. Supplication. Goats, once sacrificed, ran riot through empty towns. In a faraway forest a tree fell to the ground. Nobody heard it make a sound.

Countries created Corona Corridors, Baltic Bubbles – an architecture of transport. Unsolvable problems were suddenly solved: schoolchildren were no longer striking for climate change; ISIS ordered terrorists back from the West; immigrants returned home.

Pilate washed his hands for twenty seconds, singing Happy Birthday.

*

Happy birthday Bill. Always embarrassed when people sing to him. Perverse pleasure in putting him on the spot. Stress. Selina’s snobby comments. Thinking she’s all that – world’s her oyster, globe’s her film set, swanning around with all her fancy furs. Stupid boyfriend Rick, virus influencer or whatever. Forced to invite them. Posh side of the family.

Florist. No. No. No. Yes. Thanks Will. Trust Will – has an eye for it. See you later. Tired. Home. Sit down, sofa, cup of tea. TV.

Switch on. The Crown. Every channel! Ridiculous. Somebody hijacking the system. Matrix. Truman Show. Watch anyway, five minutes.

*

A switched off the television and left the house for her allocated hour of exercise. The riverside path was full of runners. B, R, E, A, T, H, I, N and G scattered droplets on H as an ambulance drove past. Inside the ambulance, I could not speak. The alphabet was masticated on his tongue, its letters rolling back like a reel: a primal sound. A grunt. A cry. A breath.

‘Do we have enough ventilators?’ said paramedic J.

‘The hospital’s at capacity,’ said paramedic K. L made a distressing call. M absently picked her nose. N pulled out the stretcher. O tapped the oxygen cannister. Double O: O2. Corpses rolled past the ICU. Time rolled past P, his anxiety about Q momentarily eclipsed: TikTok.

R’s video had gone viral. Viewer stats suggested a magic word, but death stats confirmed it was not the magic word. S slammed the door. There were no new words to spell with the letters they had: their lines were on repeat, like characters on TV. She texted T. T replied, desperate for letters, pausing YouTube. Prenatal Yoga: Suitable for All Trimesters. U, watching her paused self, thought the screen concealed stress. What if she caught COVID while giving birth? V was past caring; unlock lockdown, he said, sitting there in his vest, refreshing the HSBC online banking app.

The app on W’s iPhone crashed: too many users. Self-employed florist. Who would buy his flowers now? Can’t even lay them on graves. Can’t even bury your dead. He threw his phone on the bed and dusted his hands. Plastic bags. Time for Tesco’s. In the socially-distanced queue, W switched places with X, holding a screaming child. The new formation sparked some slight magic. Y, standing behind, tapped his fingers impatiently. Z should be shopping, since she was so smug: Key Word. Sick of clapping. Nobody clapped for him.

*

Switch off. Why were the characters letters? Ha. Tautology. Trish also pregnant, but less. Hope Ursula doesn’t give birth. Waters breaking all over the kitchen floor. Mopping. At least we have doctors, clever side of the family. Fraser’s PhD. Lawrence and Martha: lovely couple. Jim – paramedic. Kathryn, Nick, Orla. Seems only yesterday they were junior doctors. Jeremy Hunt. Tension with Quentin, working in politics. Not a bad egg, though. Family man. Son Peter adores him.

Finish tea with a magazine. OK! Showbiz. Sick of linguistics, after four decades. Retirement soon. What next? Pottering. Dementia. Death. Heaven, hopefully, but you never know. Xavier and his baby picking up Dora from the care home. Chan’s screaming kids. Yassin always complaining. Rude. Don’t understand why Bill’s friends with him. Wife Zehra. Nice. Nurse. Whole hospital in the house – useful if Ursula gives birth.

Turning the page to another advert. The Crown, again! Taking the piss. Pinch. Dreaming?

*

Inside abandoned theatres, everybody is taking turns to play every letter. Everybody is an I: everybody is a U. Nobody has found the magic word. Some scientists suggest that there is no word. Dissecting sentences in their laboratories, they speculate with shapes: circles, rectangles, squares. An organic jigsaw puzzle; biology’s geometry. What is the secret syntax? The confidential grammar? They arrange the alphabet in figural formations but cannot sustain the alignment. Vaccination is a complex articulation.

What is the most efficient way to narrate the situation? Journalists translate the work to the public: Take Back Control, track and trace, demarcate space. Fix borders. Fourteen-day flight quarantine.

Bounce Back. Stay Alert. Pour slogans into your soup, and stir.

*

Stick up a happy birthday banner with blu-tack. Balloons. Turning 60, not 6. Anyway. Wake him up from our social disease of nothingness. Silence and loneliness. Music: scroll and click, but party playlist isn’t working. Spotify glitch? Get Graham to sort. Programmer, Fraser’s boyfriend. Need something on though, background noise. Anything’s better than nothing. Switch on TV.

*

A switched off the television.

‘I miss Brexit.’

‘Nobody’s singing anymore,’ said B, scrolling through World News on the BBC: mass graves, frozen morgues, hydroxychloroquine. C, an immigrant, was exhausted with home-schooling. Three kids in a flat. Care homes hit bad. D, completing a crossword, took her pills: E, F, G. Did the order make a difference? Another syntax? Another sentence? She swallowed with water and picked up the paper. Furlough. Education. A Levels. E flipped through textbooks. Summer holiday cancelled. Bored. Lonely. Bored. The magic word was always on the page you hadn’t revised. Tinder.

F, twenty four, philosophy PhD at Bristol, was discovering how to manipulate time: if he made every day identical, folding along the exact same lines, aligning every hour, every minute, every second – time disappeared. Routine created a shortcut of time. G tried to shortcut time by swallowing a pack of paracetamol. H wondered what to take: paracetamol or ibuprofen? He’d asked for both, left on his doorstep as the neighbour ran away. Self-isolation. Wait it out.

I’s ashes waited in an urn. J couldn’t handle another virtual goodbye; he played virtual Monopoly with K. Take a Chance. Make General Repairs on All Your Property. L couldn’t afford repairs. Real estate had shrunk to a toy market: green plastic houses and red plastic hotels. M closed the window of Rightmove in despair. N opened his bedroom window for fresh air. Silence. Empty roads. Too much traffic on the server, thought O, loading Netflix. She tucked into a rainbow cupcake: treat for a positive antibody test. Asymptomatic.

Unaware of his asymptomatic antibodies, P cried as he said goodbye to his dad, his tears staining the screen. Q was translated into a statistic and swallowed by a curve, presented at the 5 p.m. briefing. They praised R for remaining below 1. S, encouraged by T, called with a question. U, watching her, felt a contraction.

‘Quick! Ambulance!’ But V was aghast; he could’ve sworn he’d just seen the ghost of Christmas past taking out the bins with Superman. W dressed as Darth Vader. X, liking the picture on Insta, was distracted by an ad for an electric shaver. Y shaved his head. Z, on the COVID ward, twisted split ends around her finger. Lockdown was easing too quickly – but she did need a trim.

*

Switch off. Shit. Ripped the plastic tablecloth. Hide under a bowl of crisps. But Selina might notice. Shit. Quick trip to Poundland. No wine. Selina might notice it’s Poundland. Fuck Selina. No time.

Walking through immigrant neighbourhoods. Put on a podcast, something soothing. What! All podcasts gone, replaced by The Crown. Technological virus. Curiosity killed the cat. Click.

*

A thousand magic words glitter through the air; a thousand variations on verbal medication: homeopathic remedies, placebos, alphabetical distillations. Carers sit at bedside tables clutching bottled letters. Monks unbottle their holy oil and, kneeling, scatter prayers through the wind. The secret letters float into houses and light candles in the dark, deep into the night when digitality is dormant. In the dawn, everybody wakes and begins, again, to coax affect out of screens, emotion from electricity. They have learned the texture of digital contact. It is a matter of translating and transcribing; replicating and rhyming; alliterating and aligning. But the magic word?

Perhaps they are using the wrong alphabet.

Perhaps the magic word is located elsewhere: another sea, another shore, another system. Perhaps it is the sum of every letter. Each country has a different method of calculation. What if you click the continents together?

*

Switch off. Sick of spirituality. Self-help. Grey apartments. Glad I don’t live there: tiny balconies, no gardens, curry and ethnic shops. If you stand at a certain angle you can see inside all the living rooms. Seventeen simultaneous TVs. Subtitles. Surreal: alphabets all different but The Crown is the same.

*

א locked the Great Synagogue of Jerusalem. Б disinfected an Orthodox icon, preparing for covert communion. Γ celebrated Easter with a virtual church and ç celebrated Eid with a virtual mosque. ض made a dua for those suffering. The infected now included, read Ե, the Armenian Prime Minister. ვ celebrated the release of lockdown with a friend in a park. ह, a swami, practised yoga under a tree. Sitting in a tree, ই coughed into his arm, hoping his grandfather would be safe at home. ખ, following her grandmother’s grocery list, visited a vegetable vendor in Ahmedabad. Next: Himalayan rock salt. ལ stared at Mount Everest, free of tourists – a contrast with last year’s traffic jam.

ம watched Sonu Sood break a coconut for luck before they all boarded the bus back home. At home, ဏ pricked his fingers on the metal studs of his denim jacket, complaining about the cancellation of Thingyan. With the collapse of tourism, โอะ prepared to save elephants from starvation by travelling to villages on the Myanmar border. In the Laos mountains ປ felt a drop of rain, remembering the 2019 drought. ረ had thought that she was hot because of the weather, but the screening told her she had a temperature. ސ was tired of tourists complaining about the heat. When he served them their discounted hotel breakfast that woman moaned for the thirteenth time (he was counting):

‘When I wished our honeymoon could go on forever, this wasn’t what I meant.’

*

Stop looking. Keep walking. Some kind of hoax. Will ask people later. Play podcast again – perhaps there’s a clue.

*

Each encapsulation contains a series of letters connected by a chain of Chinese Whispers; Russian Scandal; Arabic Telephone; Broken Telephone; Operator; Grapevine; Gossip; Secret Message; The Messenger Game; Pass the Message. A children’s game with a thousand names. Magic words that mutate, fracturing into whispered variations, unstitching the seams of elocution.

Perhaps it is a matter of reconstitution.

Perhaps the magic word is not written in an alphabet at all.

*

Perhaps not. Perhaps going mad. Time to retire. Pregnant with this book – third trimester, same as Ursula. Hope she doesn’t give birth. Hope I don’t give birth. No, hope I do, get it over with. Pension. Poundland. Tablecloth looks fancy but feels cheap. Fuck Selina. Waiting at the counter. Guy, youngish, not noticing me. Asian. Watching something foreign on that TV on the wall. Same logo: The Crown.

*

平仮名, watching anime, wondered where the government was finding money to pay for its own tourism.한국어, watching Parasite, thought the film had acquired an additional resonance. Listening between the lines of the media, 조선말 wondered about the brief disappearance of their leader. 廣東話 celebrated the disappearance of the virus with bubble tea, while 官話 measured reduced nitrogen dioxide in the air of Beijing. In Wuhan, 武汉话 scanned the Johns Hopkins hot spots map.

Perhaps there were antibodies to be derived from the fact of foreignness: an illumination of analogies. The virus was an immigrant that made all immigrants natives. A code that violated codes. An inverted sovereign. A translated crown.

What if the magic word did not make a sound?

What if it only grew when nobody was watching?

The magic word was contained in the world’s DNA, but to solve it one needed to discover what the world was trying to say.

*

Don’t have all day. Cough, new and continuous, to get his attention. British way. £4. Why do they say ‘Everything’s £1’? Lies. Nigel Farage’s bus. Home. Tablecloth. Starry pattern, celestial. Don’t rip. Little tag on the side – another message. The Crown.

*

Far above the skies and the satellites, the alphabet of the galaxy is telling its own story. Planets cohere into characters and dark matter unveils its curtain. A child lies in bed, their face blue and green, wrapped in a starry blanket. They take the thermometer out of their mouth and squint at the red mercury. Their future is illuminated by the bulb of their bedroom sun.

‘Mum,’ they call, slotting stars into speech. ‘My temperature is rising.’

‘Swallow a magic word and some water,’ calls a voice, pointing to a pill in a jar

The pill says: XR.

*

Bloody Extinction Rebellion! After all that. So The Crown’s just their latest campaign. Massive undertaking, hijacking all those networks. Can’t afford it surely. Maybe someone trying to frame them – Trump. Putin. China. Turning the world into a Fortune cookie. Anyway. Snip off the tag with scissors. Bin. Landfill. Ocean.

Doorbell. Henri and his daughter Elise: kiss on both cheeks, continental, always accidental kisses on the mouth. Germs. Glass of prosecco. Elise allowed? Go on then. Knock. Xavier and Dora. Ring. Chan and kids. Knock. Whole hospital arrives at the same time: Jim, Kathryn, Lawrence, Martha, Nick, Orla, walking inside in alphabetical order. Ring. Graham and Fraser. Knock. Quentin and Peter. Ring. Selina, dressed like an absolute swan. Prick. Are those feathers necessary? Rick’s neck chain. Knock. Trish, not too pregnant. Ring. Ursula, far too pregnant. Uninvited party guest, eating for two. Waddling with Victor. Knock. William. Nice man. If he was 20 years older. Ring. Yassin and Zehra. Yassin smirking at balloons. Shove him next to Selina and squirt ketchup in their faces.

Chatting. Waiting. Trying to get Graham to sort Spotify but he says it’s bugged: every song’s happy birthday, twenty second variation. Text from Ivan. On their way. Oh my God. Selina’s got an inflatable crown. For the birthday boy, she says, laughing.

The Crown. Maybe she’s behind all this. Should’ve known. Secret activist. But the crown’s made of plastic, passing itself around. Ursula puts it on and pouts like a limp lotus. Key’s in the lock. Door opens. Bill’s shock. Gobsmacked. Success. Happy Birthday! Twice. Clap clap.

Scream. Ursula. Oh my God! Drops to the ground. Knew it! Idiot. Medics rush to help. Can already see his head coming out of her vagina. Still wearing that stupid crown. Almost as if the crown made her give birth. Secreting birth hormones. Secret plot by Selina, sabotaging the party.

*

A switched off the television.

‘So was it a hoax in the end? Or was she going mad?’ But B wasn’t listening, absorbed in his screen.

‘She’s just given birth. They’re calling him Jonah. But –’

‘But?’

‘They both have corona.’

To cite: Violaris, Elena, ‘The Crown: An Immigrant that Made all Immigrants Natives’, CRASSH: Global Conversations, 192–203