Like a contact tracer, I need to know where my parents are, where they have been and where they intend to go.
“Which bar will you go to before dinner? There’s a new bar – did you know about that? Seating for five at the counter, or a table if you have a booking, it’s run by the guy – you know the guy from the theatre?” I am talking too fast and getting too excited because they are going out in my town, and I am locked down in another Australian state.
I am living vicariously through my parents going to the pub. This is sad! I order cocktails online – negronis that arrive looking like a plasma donation in their quasi-medical plastic pouch. On a Friday evening walk, all around me are adult people, drinking in the park, looking derelict with their bad hair and tracksuits drinking $27 margaritas from plastic water bottles as they slouch around the parameters like runaway teenagers. This is no way to live!
I ring my parents throughout their weekend in central Victoria. I want details. They went to the farmers’ market (a bit sparsely attended, hippies coming down from the hills in their hand-knitted clothes), had a meal at a crowded pub, went to a bar, browsed at the bookstore and had breakfast at my favourite cafe.
They report back on crowd sizes, meals had, “the vibe”, whether or not they were checked for ID, the weather, the … freedom, I guess.
I want to be there. I am here. Locky D … forever.
The other day I got an email from a MP’s office about a possible story on a woman stuck in New South Wales. “They did the right thing, cut their holiday short, applied for a permit, and hurried home.” There was a problem with their papers at the border – and they’ve been stuck in NSW ever since.
I wonder what my letter would look like. “I relocated temporarily to Sydney for projects (that have since fallen through) but my decision to leave Victoria was based primarily on the fact that ‘Gladys won’t lock down’ and ‘Gladys won’t lock down for long’ and ‘this lockdown doesn’t seem too bad and will end soon’ and I can come home.”
I was wrong on all counts and now I am stuck in Sydney, bleeding cash, with the one suitcase of clothes, no books and one set of sheets. I lived in the manner and with the tools of someone who was just staying for a week or two in a semi-serviced apartment until it all blows over, thinking: “I’ll get home soon.” That is, until it dawned on me, maybe around day 47, that I ain’t going home anytime soon. Maybe not anytime this year.
My parents are at my house in regional Victoria to pack up some of my effects and post them to Sydney. They are small, easily transportable things that remind me of home: linen napkins, some wooden coasters, bone-handled butter knives.
Mum FaceTimes me as she packs up the house, wanting to know what to pack and what to leave. It is horrible. Her camera angles are making me feel sick – I’m looking at the floor, then I’m upside down, then in the pantry, but the view is too close to the spices to make out what they are before suddenly I’m swung upside down again and then it’s dark, then I’m right up close at the bookshelves. My vision whooshes in a way that is unnatural for the human eye.
My father calls from outside the house. There is the larger question of maintenance itself. The house is old. It needs attention. He is crunching around outside and I strain my ear for that very Victorian Saturday afternoon sound – the siren of the footy match from the nearby oval and the honk of car horns along the parameter.
I need to focus. He is telling me I need to do something about a rotten window. A rotten window? Needs replacing? My brain, itself a rotten window looking out on to a tiny slice of the still world, doesn’t know how to “action” this piece of information. Who do I call? How to fix it?
I am still reeling from the last problem. Guests were staying when the temperature got below zero, but when they went to turn the gas log fire on they’d hear a flickering sound, then nothing. “Something wrong with the pilot light?” they wondered.
A repairman came to fix it – and in the gas pipe was the body of a mouse that had got stuck in transit. I related, hard. We’re both stuck.
And what my guests thought was the pilot light? “A flickering of its tail.”
The repairman scooped the mouse out of the pipe.
“Was it alive?”
“Ha ha ha ha. Was it alive? Nah – it was paste.”
Paste.
Meanwhile, in the regions, my house is enjoying community life in a way that makes me jealous. So much love! My place is as busy as Bourke Street. My friend Rohan sent me a photo of my lawn the other day – he’d been over to give it a clip. Erika has a key and comes and collects my mail. Dugald drops in to check on the place and lets me know I have a new rates notice and slips it under the door. Jenny swings by and empties the refrigerator of any perishables. Ed is going to bring in the bin.
In locked-down Sydney I’m taunted by the endless sunshine that obliterates a sense of the seasons, while in regional Victoria, nature goes through her heady, definitive changes. Every day my neighbourhood WhatsApp pings with updates on the abundant winter produce being shared around the street.
The grass grows, the frost melts in the winter morning sun, the wood around the windows continues to rot, mice die trying to get out of a gas pipe.
In the eternal sunshine, inside the eternal lockdown, I tend the houseplants that my Sydney friends gifted me around week four in this cursed city. It’s a way of saying: “Hello, welcome to Sydney, you’re staying put.”
