Arriving home to a heatwave, I open the front door to see the house has swollen in the heat. It’s an old miner’s cottage built on dirt, no proper foundations. It seems to breathe and change form depending on the weather. Remember that scene in Willy Wonka where Violet Beauregarde eats the forbidden gum and turns purple then expands like a blueberry? My house is Violet Beauregarde.
The skirting boards have popped off and detached from the wall, a deep crack has appeared in the ceiling, and the ceiling and the wall appears to have separated. Will the house cleave in two if the heatwave continues? And if so, what does that mean? What should I do?
There’s been a run of 37C days. I take cold showers at night and sleep with a wet cloth on my head. The air has weight and thickness. Breathing feels like taking something in that’s heavier than air. I buy some fans and am dismayed to learn upon opening the box that I have to assemble them myself. Making a fan seems a task too complex and important for a layperson. I worry that my friends in the spare room will be killed in the night, decapitated by a fan blade flying through the air as it becomes detached and airborne.
* * *
We are in a liminal zone – the days between Christmas and New Year’s. Who even knows what day it is? Time seems to stretch, a week crawls and purposelessness pervades. It has always been like this – but Omicron gives this baggy week a sinister edge.
The detritus on the kitchen table reflects this new place where we have found ourselves: the plastic swabs and small bottles of solution, results windows and concertina instructions of the rapid antigen tests. I take Rats, my friends take Rats, we send each other photos or screenshots of our negative Rats or inform each other over group Whatsapp of a positive Rat – until a point, just after New Year’s, where there are no Rats, but everyone seems to know someone who is sick, or are sick themselves (the scratchy throat, the dry cough … ) or are isolating or waiting in some queue, somewhere, for a PCR, until after hours and hours of not moving or the centre closes, they go away.
But on New Year’s Eve we are all negative – and there are some grounds for hope. 2022 will be better. This year is almost over. We don’t have it. We are not in lockdown. We can go out.
* * *
On the last day of the year we walk along a ridge, over the tufts of dry grass where last year I saw a brown snake cross our path – and we cool off by jumping in an old quarry converted into a reservoir. It’s like a Frederick McCubbin painting. The last hours of the year we sit under a tree, share a bottle of wine and say what we want from the new year. The wants are modest. This is Year 3, after all, and no one is dreaming big.
Two days later, a cabbie comes to take me to the train station. The house is still swelling. Maybe when I return I’ll have two houses.
As the cab pulls up, I’m outside with a glass of water, and instead of throwing the water out – which I intend to do – the glass slips from my hand and smashes dramatically on the porch. It looks like the operatic gesture of a mad person, like I’ve just gone outside and wantonly hurled a glass. It is one of those heavy crystal tumblers; the shards will be stepped on for years.
The cabbie helps me clean it up and tells me that houses like mine are diabolical: “Only good for keeping the animals out.” Each year city people fall in love with them “because they’re cute”. They do a summer there and realise “it’s like sleeping in a hot tent”, he says. “They flip them pretty quick after that.”
Not me. I love my sweat lodge.
“The house is swelling up,” I tell him. “It’s coming apart at the seams. The other day the ceiling split from the walls.”
On the way to the station he tells me about his house, which has double glazing and a split-system cooling. We say goodbye then he returns to the station because, inexplicably, he finds my credit card on the road. He comes back a third time – just before I get on the train – because I’ve left my phone in the backseat.
“The heat makes me crazy and forgetful,” I say.
* * *
Down at the beach I reunite with friends who have been away from Australia for more than two years and had to delay coming back because they got Covid.
They have been living in the UK and are pasty and jet lagged. The wind is nasty and hot, a southerly that is dragging the seaweed up from the shore and dumping it in huge piles on the sand.
When we get to the beach, one of my friends drops to his knees in the sand and says: “The beach, the beach.” I am not sure if he is being ironic or real, but I leave him to it. Even though the conditions are bad (sand whipping around in circles, jellyfish particles washed up on the sand, a recent bull shark sighting), he runs into the sea and comes back grinning with joy.
* * *
I take a three-and-a-half-hour train journey down the west coast. The coast is cold and windy and the heat and my swollen house seem like another country. I visit friends in isolation and bring them morning coffees. Other friends visit me and send me screenshots of negative Rat tests. Other friends cancel visits because of positive Rat tests.
But the wheels are falling off faster in 2022 – which is itself an extension of the Christmas/New Year’s liminal zone. In this popular tourist town, restaurants and cafes are shut, unable to get staff or because workers are isolating. No one can buy tests anymore. So many people are sick now. Even last week’s modest resolutions and hopes for the new year seemed outlandishly ambitious and out of reach. We are only four days in … but still.
Down the coast I’m looking after a dog that eats plastic ornaments off the Christmas tree. He just jumps up and gobbles them whole.
It is the least strange thing about this summer.
Brigid Delaney is a columnist for Guardian Australia
