Written 19 April, 2020
We drove to the city two days ago, GG and I, staying overnight, mainly to pick up meds that had arrived for K at Darlinghurst post office, and other meds as well. We’d left K at the river, for I don’t want to expose her to danger. The city life was saw was as distressing as we remembered, a nightmare muddle of masks and gloves and handsanitizing and hand washing, and trying to touch nothing. All the things I love about this city had gone, the fascinating mixture of people of many races, the fascinating things they do, the quirky things I overhear, all gone- only the trees at Hyde Park,and now they’re huddling into winter. And always the harbour but now coldly glittering.
On the way home, we have several stops; one is a nursery in Leichhardt where I forage for vegetable seedlings- ready grown and labelled tiny plants! I’m served by tattooed men who’ve worked out at a gym and seem not to notice me, the ageing, anxious woman waving from the other side of the counter. i’m invisible again at Hornsby Westfield when we stop again gor more of K’s meds from health food shop, a long walk from the car through crowds. Hornsby is one of Sydney’s “hotspots” for the disease, but I’m the only person masked, and all around me, crowds of shoppers are calling to each other, eagerly chatting in groups, pushing their trolleys along as happy as children t out of school. They didn’t see each other as innocent killers, as I do. Some come scary close, and I feel invisible again. Often, to keep calm, I amuse myself by pretending to be a character that’s never got into the final version of a novel, but I often start with her because I’m comfortable with her, I am in some way her:
“She was such a plain-faced, awkwardly-put together woman that people didn’t notice her. She had what her mother had called large bones. In crowds people came very close before they noticed her and veered away, and sometimes men especially even stood on her toes, for she had exceptionally long feet. It had happened for so long, all her life in fact, this invisibility, that she’s taken to considering herself invisible, and in public, if the need arose, she’d hitch up her bloomers- she thought of them as bloomers, the word her mother had used, huge, damply billowing things that weighed down the washing line. In fact, as an unlovely teenager in a school play, she’d been given the part of the donkey because no one else had wanted it, and on the stage in front of everyone’s families, she’d forgotten herself, stopped in the middle of a particular loud hee-haw, and with her front paws, she’d hitched up her pants”.
When we get at last to Brooklyn, we drive through the little shopping centre to pick up more meds at the chemist. At the doorway of a little cafe, I’m transfixed by the smell of freshly baked meat pies.
“Would you like to come in?” asks a smiling young woman inside.
And suddenly, I’m like the shoppers in Hornsby, my longing for conversation is like spittle gathering in my mouth. I smile back and light bounces between us.
“Your cooking is enticing,” I say, “but we must get up the river before it’s dark.”
On the floor at my feet are half a dozen boxes of with celery and pumpkin and tomatoes, with labelled names- Roberts, Sutton, Smith, Brown. To lengthen the moment, to keep exchanging smiles, I ask what they are.
“Food orders,” she says.
“Food orders?”
“To help locals, we take food orders, and use our suppliers for them.”
“For locals! How? When? I’m a local! You mean, I could order food?”
She grabs a piece of paper and a pencil, leans dangerously close to me over her glass display of cherry tarts and chocolate cakes, and writes down the days of a week that I can phone in an order, when I can order fruit and vegetables, when I can order bread and pastries.
“But we’re celiacs and need funny flours.”
She says that’s ok.
“But when do i need to pick it up?”
She says anytime.
I laugh with joy, and in an embarrassingly choked voice, I tell her about that black night on the river, when we missed the Woollies delivery man and our food.
She laughs and pretends not to notice that i’m dashing away tears.
“These boxes won’t walk away by themselves.”
And so, more kindness. i wish she was running not just a cafe, but our country. I wish, how I wish, she was running America.
We’ve brought from the city flat the printer for my teaching, and on the boat it sits like a queen on the important high seat overlooking everything ; it says, this grey block of a printer, that the present trip is serious: we’re no longer running away, we’re going home. The river from now on, is our home.
We unload in the dark, me loading on the jetty into the flying fox, and GG unloading from the flying fox on the top deck, and while he takes the shopping into the house, i run up the jetty and put the seedlings into the ground, all by the light of weak solar lamps. K is nowhere to be seen- she’s in her room, watching a movie. We’re both exhausted, cold and cranky. When all the shopping is up- we must load it all for rain is forecast tomorrow – I wash my hands for safety mumbling Happy Birthday twice through, and quickly pan-fry fish – at least she’s taken it out of the freezer – and throw together a salad for just us two.
We sit on the deck, too tired to do anything but gobble.
She comes to the door.
“Where’s mine?”
“You didn’t help us,” says GG. “So…”
GG is seldom so cruel. I’m seldom so cruel. Exhaustion has made us cruel. I know this is what experts recommend, tough love. but it was almost impossible to do with an autistic, needy very bullied child – she holds such it waa sweet spot, a sympathetic spot in our hearts. We were both bullied as children- especially GG who, from seven, had a stutter so bad, he was almost mute. Perhaps we’ve been bad parents. But parenting an autistic child is baffling. We stalk down to the cabin, and I fall asleep at 7.30, under the blankets but fully-dressed.
In the night, I wake to an email from Shelley in New York:
Cuomo’s facts on the State of New York today:
2000 people newly diagnosed With COVID yesterday
600 people died from COVID yesterday
These numbers are tragic.
On the bright side, Cuomo says hospitalizations are down and that we now know social distancing can control the spread of this disease. It is good news. He begins to roll out what a partial return to commerce would look like.
However, because none of the States have the resources to test the vast amounts of people necessary for us to get back to work safely. The Federal government has not been helpful in this matter; From the start of his presidency, Trump has enjoyed dismantling mch of our health, human services, and disaster relief bureaucracy.
Therefore, New York will remain on ‘PAUSE’ until at least May 15.
This basically means we stay home pretty much all the time. We are all getting cabin fever. But I have to say that the consequences of removing us from our current state at this time really scares me.
To answer your question about Trump—slightly more than 50 per cent of the US voting population(I can’t believe it isn
There is little we can do except support Joe Biden’s candidacy in anyway we can. Hopefully, he will win and our 4 years of being kidnapped by this ignorant, narcissistic maniac will end. He is the worst possible leader to get the US through a pandemic, let alone the world.
That said, many Americans who dislike him are so distraught that they’re trying not to think about him at all right now that we have to live with an even deadlier predator. We desperately need at least the crumbs of feeling safe and calm, given the reality of COVID19. Therapists worldwide are begging people to cut back on how much time they spend on the news, so as not add more panic and anxiety to their already cortisol and adrenaline overloaded nervous systems—
I close down the computer and fall back to sleep, lulled by the river’s night sounds- the water lapping, the crickets calling, the hush. It promises safety. Or does it?
Sue, I’m intrigued by this idea that you play a character, that you see yourself as invisible, even. I can’t imagine a room big enough to hold you. This invisibility, this cloak, I refuse to wear it, and it refuses to contain me. The idea of a technicolour dreamcoat appeals more, particularly now when it is becoming so cold. I think you wear a dreamcoat, always, even if you don’t know it.
I want to walk down the street like a peacock, even – especially – if there is no-one else around, swooshing through the autumn leaves in Castlemaine. In the early days of the virus my book came out and I wanted to parade in metallic silver top and pink leggings through the town, stomping in docs, dancing with a ghetto blaster on my shoulder playing Duran Duran and Birthday Party, so everyone would come out to listen and smile. But I felt my way into the world and there was no joy on the streets. People were scared. It was a party of one and I went back inside.
With the virus, everyone becomes seen. You are hyper-aware of the person walking towards you in the street, doing a dance of distance, the one breathing down your neck (why do older men stand so close!) in the supermarket aisle. The cop car that followed me down the street because I was driving so slowly because I was following my daughter wobbling on her bike on the footpath.
The other day, when it was rough, you offered to hold my hand, Sue, a gesture that is one of the most meaningful in my life and rarely felt. I’ve had only two friends hold my hand, ever, Jill and Sophie, who reached out at profound moments, and just sat or walked with me with my hand in theirs. I have small hands. Enclosed. A time of complete letting go. Free falling. Scary and luminous. No words at all. I don’t know how to ask for this kind of touch. Or even if it can be asked for. Something exchanged of a love more satisfying than almost anything, free of conditions and complications.
I miss this the most. The warm cheek of a friend. The squeeze of a tipsy hug as we say goodbye. It is sensory deprivation, a new idea. Something I’ve never had the chance to miss. I realise my own tendency to walk in and offer, to kiss and hug people I’ve just met. I love going to France with the cheek kissing, especially the Basque region where it can go on and on, takes forever to leave a party. Some people don’t like this touch with strangers. But for me it makes the world feel right. My daughter, who’s 9, asks one night if we can French kiss. I explain to her what that really means. With tongues! She still wants to try it with me. I say no and she asks if I like it with boys or girls. I say yes, a lot. But that she needs to wait for the right person. We settle on the term Parisian kissing and she wants to do 57 Parisian kisses every night but I negotiate to 10.
Before the all consuming heat of the fires. I guess you could say I met someone. After exiting a 25 year relationship, and hibernating, ruminating, for two years, a long distance lover made sense. Now touch has become truly virtual, about border-crossings and missed messages, erotic-enforced, screen-shaped. State sanctioned longing. But after lockdown, I shy away from the possibilities because they no longer seem possible; even my imagination, a galloping black stallion, is reigned in. It bucks, pigroots, about definitions and where the boundaries lie and keeps asking, when? I turn to music each night because the answers seem to lie there. On a bed with me. Felt in the body, and able to be expressed.
As the days get colder, I see my son, in grade 6, inhabiting that ‘tender territory’ (as Robert Forster puts it) between child and man. He lies in the bath listening to NY Times crime fiction audiobooks spoken in a Texan drawl. I press my ear against the door and there are cannibals and bombshells and dead bodies in car trunks. Should I let him listen? I’m so open to it. His next story for school is full of dead dogs and horror and the rhythm of a pounding James Elroy. It is fucking sensational. The teacher won’t let him read it aloud in his Zoom-in classroom.
My son calls me in every night at lights out now. A single mum away from family and friends in iso, my children are the only ones I touch. He want me to pat him to sleep. A new thing (from the olden days). We go through the games we used to play in the times before school but now he likes to reverse the roles. I rub his back. He won’t let me go. He then says ‘you’re crushing me, Mum!’ He sends me out when he’s had enough. I’ve learnt pretty quick that my teaching at home skills are so-so. I let them watch Brooklyn 99 all day when I’m working. I believe that I learnt as much from television for my career as almost anything else.
In these times, his needs are evident. My daughter’s too, loud: you can’t miss them. Mine stay furtive, unexpressed. As he hugs me each day and says ‘love you too’, he’s completely self-sufficient, in the asking for, and taking of, touch, and love. It feels like a small triumph in this strange silence, and each night after I go to their bedroom doors to check for the soft sounds of asleep, I get in the bath, still warm and clean because he never uses soap like I ask him to – and listen to music, and ask again, when?
Kirsten, As I was reading this by the river with the pot-belly crackling and the dawn pink-streaking the sky,because of the way you put things down, I could almost hear you breathe. I could hear your children sleeping. Thank you for this. What is it do you think about death suddenly being so close, so commonplace that it’s reported in its tens of thousands like a Saturday football score, (only 93 have died of it today in Australia! Only 6893 in Sweden! Deaths fallen by 717 in New York from this day last week!) that we can’t pretend any more that we won’t die for a long time, why, if we’re lucky we mightn’t even die at all- what is it about this heartless massacre that allows us to share these whisperings? Is this how the dying talk to each other?
I feel I must confess my fears for the cowardly who can’t confess. Even though that might be only me.