Journal of a family in isolation
Matthew Condon chronicles a tight-knit family on the verge of unravelling in lockdown.
FIRST WEEK
Wednesday
Sardines on toast for breakfast.
The family – Son #1 (14), Daughter #1 (11), Son #2 (seven), and my wife – are scattered throughout the house somewhere. With the kids at home – there’s not much room in the Inn – I have carved out a little workstation in the barbecue area out the back of the house, beside the unused, folded-up ping pong table. My day is measured by the passage of the sun. It blindly hits my outdoor desk between 8am and 10am. Shadows shift across the table.
But there are butterflies. And birds. And flies. So many flies in the house. Out in the backyard. Around the clothesline. How come we suddenly live in Birdsville? It must be our isolated dogs, I reckon. We take Scout and Primrose out for a walk as much as we can but still the excrement is showing up in surprising places and in surprising volume.
The three kids have been home from school now for more than a week and their official Easter break begins soon. Already worn down to a nub. The cracks are starting to show. Every night my extremely social daughter begs for takeaway food or to go for a drive, or a bike ride, or a trip where we can stay in a hotel, or a sleepover with her best friends, or to go to a movie or to fly down to Sydney to see her grandparents. I’m sorry, I say. This is it for a while, I’m afraid.
The neighbour at the back starts up his leaf blower. The neighbour on the left side is shouting for his dogs. FLOYD! DOODLE! The neighbour on the right has cranked up his sound system and is playing Rocket Man by Elton John. “And I think it’s gonna be a long long time / And I think it’s gonna be a long long time / And I think it’s gonna be a long long time….” I know where I’d love to shove my neighbour’s rocket, man.
Primrose attends to her toilet across the yard, braced, tail at a stiff 45-degree angle, droppage then a 5cm shuffle forward, droppage, shuffle, droppage, shuffle. I am strangely mesmerised by this. This is what my life has become.
Thursday
Sardines on toast for breakfast.
The kids have taken to eating meals in their rooms. To get a bit of personal space. The house has become a miniature hotel. That’s all fine, except in the morning they leave their dirty dishes, cups and glasses outside their bedroom doors. When did we turn into the Hilton?
Considering ringing the nearest Hilton and booking my kids in there for the duration of our isolation. Not sure if it’s legal. Note to self: ring lawyer friend Scotty and ask him about the legislation surrounding installing kids in the Hilton without guardians. Researched the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Looks like a no-go.
Friday
Sardines on toast for breakfast.
My wife says we need milk and bread and… “I’ll go!” I say. I race upstairs and brush my teeth and check the hair and apply a little aftershave and slip on the sneakers and grab the recycled shopping bag and wallet and I’m out the door before she can finish her sentence.
A walk to the corner store. It’s as exciting now as catching a show on Broadway or being led to a long-booked table at restaurant Mirazur in France. It’s an outing. All 1.3km there and back. I perambulate slowly, marvelling at ’80s cream brick houses I would never have noticed before, studying people’s letterboxes, the flora and fauna. I haven’t ventured this far from the house since last Thursday, when I took the rubbish bins to the end of our short driveway.
We have a rotating family timetable for the bins. Oh, the joy of it, walking in the outside world, albeit 10m to the footpath and back. Over the road is a house that’s been abandoned for more than a year. Just for fun I take its bins out and wheel them back in. This is where the world has changed. Chores have flipped and become freedoms. Mowing the grass two weeks ago? I could’ve been Julie Andrews waltzing through fields of heather in the Austrian Alps I was so happy.
At the shop, they’ve set up barrels of hand sanitiser at the front door. It has a dud squirter and it fires a liberal amount of fluid onto my T-shirt. Not to worry. There are arrow markings on the floor of the little store, directing you through its four aisles. I want to browse. At anything. Plant-based fish fillets. Packets of Mount Warning ham. Labels on soy milk containers. But I’m forced to do the corona shuffle to the checkouts.
When I get there I engage the cash register assistant with blustery hyper-conversation about anything and everything – a fresh set of ears, right? And I’m still explaining to her how great the TV series Ozark is and deconstructing the narrative plotlines for her as I’m walking backwards out the store. And I wave at her profusely as I leave. Why? I can’t remember having ever waved at anybody before self-isolation.
When I come down off my corner store trip high and walk back into prison, it’s only then I wonder – how many foreign hands have touched my loaf of bread? Did the people who packaged my milk and stacked it neatly in the store refrigerator wash their hands sufficiently? What about the young woman behind the cash register who seemed so indifferent to Ozark? Who knows where she’s been, who she’s consorted with, and what deadly pathogens linger upon her person? Then I slump into a post-adventure depression. And wearily open another container of rice and tuna.
Saturday
Sardines on toast for breakfast. Must remember to put on shopping list: MORE SARDINES.
The neighbour at the back starts up his hedge-trimmer. The neighbour on the left side is shouting for his dogs. DOODLE! FLOYD!
One of our dogs has developed a limp. We check the paw. Seems normal. But still she limps. What do we do? Are vets open? If so, do we risk it? Getting in the car. Heading to the vets. Opening the door to the surgery. How many other possibly infected people have touched the door handle?
Once we’re inside, will staff take our dog’s lead and walk her into one of the consulting rooms? Surely in a surgery these people have clean hands. What if they don’t and we get dog-lead transmission? What if there are other people there, waiting with their dogs? Can dogs carry coronavirus on their coats? What if our dog and other dogs do what dogs do best, and get well inside the 1.5m zone and start doing the head-to-toe reverse genital sniff? Could we all end up dying because our dear Scouty girl sniffed a strange dog’s butt at the veterinary surgery, picked up corona, and liberally passed it on to her beloved family?
We look at Scout’s long, mournful face as she rests on her dog bed. Occasionally she licks at the troubled paw. When did life become so freighted with questions?
SECOND WEEK
Monday
Sardines for breakfast. My youngest son asks: “Why do you eat those stinky fish every day?” Good question. Pre-isolation (PI), the last time I had sardines on toast was when I was a young child. Didn’t much like them then. The nasal proximity to the stinky fish is an abiding and unpleasant childhood olfactory memory.
Now I have become a sad sardine connoisseur. I quickly settle on Brunswick Premium Skinless & Boneless Sardines in Olive Oil, and/or with Chilli. There are no purchase limits on sardines in the supermarket. Phew. But why, now, do I suddenly have this pregnancy-style craving for small oily fish caught in Canada or Poland, canned and shipped out of Morocco, only to find themselves on a piece of toast in our home prison at the bottom of the world?
They are saying we are on the brink of a Great Depression. Perhaps there’s a clue here. Perhaps I am acclimatising to Depression-era food, in advance of a global economic collapse. Perhaps I am steeling myself for a future diet of “bread and iffit”, as my grandparents used to say, or bread lashed with lard, or lamb’s fry and bacon, tripe, brains and ox tails.
Have made myself ill. Skip lunch.
Wednesday
Sardines.
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough iPad for today?” I ask my daughter.
“No.”
“Well, I seem to recall you were on it when I got up this morning at around 6.30am.”
“Yeah,” she says.
“And what time is it now?”
“Don’t know.”
“It’s 4.15pm.”
“OK.”
“Which means you’ve been glued to that thing for almost 10 hours.”
“I wasn’t on it when I had lunch.”
“Right.”
“And when I fed the dogs,” she says without looking up from the screen.
“OK. So we’re back to nine and a half hours?”
“Yeah.”
“I think you’ve had enough, don’t you?”
“But Dad, me and Sarah and Lilly are about to go on House Party.”
“Then after that Clare will be livestreaming on Instagram.”
“And?”
“After that I have to Facetime Nanna.”
“Right.”
“House Party starts in one minute, Dad.”
“I see,” I say. “It was just a beautiful day outside and you could’ve gone for a bike ride and gotten some exercise and some fresh air, or walked with me to the shop to get some milk and bread, and helped me with the neighbour’s bins.”
“Forty-five seconds, Dad.”
“Oh, OK.”
“Can you close the door?”
“Sure.”
“Thanks Dad.”
Thursday
The penny’s dropped about what everyone else is doing during their isolation. They’re sitting bored witless on the couch with their mobile phones and scrolling through their contacts list and seeing the names of old friends or acquaintances and punching in the numbers and settling in for long, warm fireside-style chats.
They’re starting at “A” in their contacts, as you do. Unfortunately, I’m in the C’s. Which might explain the sudden rash of phone calls I’ve received from people I haven’t heard from in decades.
“Heeeyyyyy,” they say. “How are youuuuuuuu?”
“Hello… David?”
“Heeeyyyy.”
“When did we last speak? That 30th birthday party at the London Hotel, was it? Balmain? 2001?
“Yeahhh. I think that’s right.”
“How you been doing?”
“I got four kids now! No hair, but four kids! So, what you been up to? Tell me everything.”
And on it goes. Who are these people? And what has prompted them to call? It’s corona-phona-virus. It’s people thinking more about their own mortality than usual, phoning everyone they have known in their lives to feel more connected, wanted, loved. Trying to slot into a pipeline that goes all the way back to fun times and zero social distancing and carousing and making new friends and not thinking about death every time you went out the front door.
Long-lost friends have been sending links to coronavirus documentaries. The email inbox is choked with pithy corona videos and virus gags from people I don’t remember; the dead wood that constitutes every phone contact list. Sometimes you see these videos and gags they send you on Facebook, then an hour later half a dozen friends have sent you the same video, then 12 hours later in comes another wave, this time on Instagram or Facebook Messenger. LOL, most of them comment. All of a sudden everyone wants to talk, to connect, to electronically wave at you and poke you and “like” you and Facetime you and Zoom you. This isolation thing is getting way too crowded. LOL? There is nothing LOL about it. This is the era of profound FFS, not LOL. IMO.
THIRD WEEK
Monday
Sardines with chilli on toast for breakfast.
Later in the morning I see my first roll of toilet paper in weeks on the shelf of a small country town store in the hills behind where we live. It’s like spotting an elusive night parrot. My mouth involuntarily forms an “O”.
Happened to be in the country store on a brief “outing”. The outing was a trip to the nearby chemist for a prescription. The thing is, we chose a chemist 35km away to get the script, and not the one close to us, so we could (albeit briefly) see grass and trees and cows and other cars and farmers tilling their fields and feel fresh air through the windows. We still had to go through all the appropriate hand sanitising and social distancing, but for an hour the world felt slightly normal again.
On the way home we stop in the small country town for bread and milk and there, high on a shelf, are two solitary rolls of toilet paper. They have a picture of a smiling green frog on the wrapping.
Back home, I hop on the phone and share the glorious news about the toilet roll purchase with my parents and sister. This is now what compels us to contact others. “Incredible news!” I say.
My mother is pragmatic. “In our day,” she says, “we didn’t have toilet paper. In our day, we had squares of newspaper slipped onto a hook. In our day,” she continues, “we didn’t have fancy rolls of fluffy white toilet paper. Oh no.”
Having worked for newspapers for decades, it never occurred to me that they had once served this function. They gave you the news of the day, then wiped away the remains of the day. What if my mother’s “day” has come full circle, and is now our day as well? Is this what has happened?
“Grandma says that in her day they didn’t have toilet rolls, but little squares of newspaper stuck on a hook,” I announce to the children. Bit of history never went astray. My contribution to their home schooling.
My youngest boy mulls this over for some time.
“Little squares?” he asks. “On a hook?”
“Apparently so.”
“Why not just roll the newspapers into rolls?”
I have no answer.
Tuesday
Sardines for breakfast.
The neighbour at the back starts up his hedge-trimmer. The neighbour on the left side is shouting for his dogs. FLOYD! DOODLE!
Suddenly everybody’s a book expert. List after list emerges on the internet. Books to dive into during isolation. Top 10 coronavirus reads. Classics to read on the desert island that is your self-isolation.
I make the fatal error of downloading American philosopher and essayist Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, his account of living near Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, for just over two years, embedding himself in nature and sorting out the wheat from the chaff of this thing we call life.
Was hoping to learn some lessons about solitude and getting back to basics, but find Thoreau a bit haughty. In a chapter entitled “Solitude” he writes: “Society is commonly too cheap. We meet at very short intervals, not having had time to acquire any new value for each other.” Speak for yourself, Henry. “I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” Maybe Henry was just born a social distancer. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
Well, Henry, here’s what pandemic isolation has to teach me, almost 170 years after you published your tome: don’t choose a workspace near where the dogs do their morning toilette; never again do I wish to hear the names Floyd and Doodle in my lifetime; I understand that prolonged solitude may produce post-traumatic stress disorder when it comes to future audible contact with leaf-blowers, mowers and hedge-clippers; I embrace the fact that the internet modem is our new shrine, our object of worship, and that it is perfectly all right for the entire family to kneel before it and hold their collective breath when the little light goes orange, and that prayers and mantras will be uttered with increasing urgency until the light passes to blue and then, finally, to green, the colour of God.
Not Sure What Day It Is
The rug that is our family is starting to fray at the edges. Who ate all my Easter eggs? someone wails. There’s Turkish Delight squashed all over the couch. Where’s Mum? Doing a yoga class on her phone. Daaaaad? Can I get a video game for $37? Can we get takeaway pizza for dinner? Bloody Doodle and Floyd!
Son #1 is trying to learn the bass line to a song that breaks every rule of neighbourly goodwill. I beg him to learn the bass line to another song. I get on my hands and knees and prostrate myself before him. Please. PLEASE. Any other song but this song. But he is a teenager and headstrong and won’t have a bar of it. Nope, he says. This is a personal goal. He will keep trying to learn Smoke on the Water if it kills him. (Or has him killed.)
Whose turn is it to feed the dogs?
Dad, what’s up with your hair?Whaddya mean? Well, it’s growing outward. Yes, as hair does. I mean, really outward. You look like.... Yes? A koala.
Son #2 belches a belch that shakes the foundations of the house and shocks even himself. I’m huuuungry! Can we get takeaway curry for dinner? Do you think that guy out the back has any grass left to mow, any hedge left to trim, any leaves left to blow? Can’t he just do some hosing?
Hey everybody, did you know there’s an annual Sardine Festival held in Greece? Listen to this: “Around the first weekend in August they celebrate the Skala Kallonis Sardine Festival in the village square featuring free ouzo and sardines, a live band and traditional dancers.” Imagine that, a band, and dancing. Just imagine. No answer from anybody.
Who wants to play a board game!?! The children roll their eyes. “They don’t call them BORED games for nothing, Dad,” says my teenager. “Where’s Mum?” She’s meditating. She’s mumbling something in another language.
“Did you get any more toilet paper?” my mother asks on the phone. “If not, I have plenty. Do you want an eight-pack?” We talk seriously about me driving over and her dropping the eight-pack to me in the street below her 23rd floor apartment.
One quiet evening, just as he is about to take himself off to bed, my little tawny-haired seven-year-old, with a big cheesy grin on his face, asks: “Dad, what’s the point of life?”
Speechless, I turn out the lights.