Mine is quiet. I melt into myself and feel miserable and inside out. I cannot bring myself to meet anybody’s eyes, and I feel disinclined to smile. I am grumpy about the usual tedious most ordinary unreasonable things – toilet paper and rubbish bags; dishes being washed but left to drain in the bathroom, blankets and sheets being too big and too small and too uncomfortable, the lack of privacy and the way the children monopolize my devices and my heart.
Yet we have running water, toilets, showers, comfortable beds, windows, space, cool air, food, healthcare, computers, mobile phones, coloured pencils, paper, scissors, tape, games, toys… I remind myself that two rooms like this are unimaginable luxuries for families squeezed 20 in a three-bedroom house in remote Australia, a tent at Kakuma, cardboard boxes and plastic bags in the slums of other places.
Brown Owl has several short, sharp meltdowns where she yells “OW!” and tells off one or the other of us for hurting her. Her toes get trodden on and bey blades crash into her knees. She savagely beats me at Song Birds over and over.
Jack has the kind of meltdown where he accuses us of blaming him for stuff that isn’t his responsibility. He slams the door quietly and retreats to his room, appearing twenty-five minutes later with a smile on his face, asking what we are up to, whether he can join in, and whether we have heard him jumping from bed to bed in the other room. We haven’t.
Paperwork arrives on the stools outside our door: a congratulatory letter from our “Pullman Adelaide Family” about our pending departure on Saturday 9th January 2021 (pending our last negative test result). The nurses are going to come and swab us again any time in the next couple of days, but they are busy, as the hotel has had another influx of guests arriving in the night. Accompanying the letter is a form for us to complete, advising SA Health of who we are and where we are going.
I feel just a little ambivalent about getting out of here. Yes, I want to get out, but the process of gathering together all of our gear and getting it from up here to down there and into cars driven by my mother and my brother makes me catch my breath a little.
Every time someone asks me what’s the first thing I’ll do upon arriving home, I lose myself completely. There is so much to do! So many trees to greet, so much uncertainty about where everything will be and how to sort it out. I want to reintroduce myself to our washing machine, hang out clothes to dry in the sunshine. Can you imagine? I haven’t hung clothes outside for a year.
It’s OK.
January 4 is the anniversary of our moving into The Little House of Colours in 2009. That’s such a long time ago! I think of my daughter LabCat, still at school at the time, and her brother Guitar Hero, who stormed off a couple of months into our new altogetherness, angry at our expectations that he wash dishes on a roster. There was no Jack of Hearts yet, nor Wizard.
There’s fish for lunch. Wizard squeals and heads for the other room. He cannot abide the smell. I make him vegemite sandwiches. Brown Owl attempts to feed him some vegetables. We hope dinner will be more to his taste.
I post to the quarantine guests group the protocol we followed in Alberta when the schools reopened. Anything brought from home could only be touched by the child who brought it. Nothing could be shared. If something arrived from home for a teacher, it had to be quarantined for 3 days before the teacher could touch it. Might such a protocol be implemented here, to be able to pass on some of our stuff to others with less?
A recently arrived guest replies. She could do with some sensory supplies for her teenage son who functions on an emotional level of 4-6. I offer her some ideas, not knowing at all whether they are appropriate, but no one else responds. It's been "seen" by 40+ people.
She messages me later, asking whether I would leave a “care package” for them when we leave the hotel on Saturday. The idea takes hold in my mind. I begin plotting to leave care packages for as many people as I can. I do not want to take all this stuff home and have to deal with it on top of all the stuff I left at home before we headed to Canada.
Wizard has the most spectacular meltdown of all, late in the day, after dinner and before our night-time viewing. He and Jack are playing bey blades, with Jack commentating rather beautifully. Brown Owl and I are sitting in the other room chatting and enjoying listening to the flow of their play.
I get up to answer the phone in the other room. It’s my Mum, calling back. Out of the blue, Wizard leaps up, screaming and shouting and attacking Jack. Brown Owl brings him into the other room, where I can still hear him for at least twenty minutes, until Brown Owl settles him in front of the screen, allows Jack to enter the room with them. It takes that long for Wiz to stop wanting to kill his brother.
Evidently, the commentating had taken a turn. Wizard was incensed at the nasty things Jack had started saying about his (lack of) bey blading skills.
The four of us settle down in front of the screen. Then I read with Wizard. We read one of his birthday books Hidden Underground. He and Jack go to sleep.
I read on into the night. As my novel moves from the early twentieth century and the 1940s approach with their unforgivable inexorable foreboding, I grow simultaneously more reluctant to put the book down, and to stop reading on. Spinoza’s life bewilders me. I wonder who he would have been, layered within the intersecting possibilities of our time? How would he have conducted his life?
No comments:
Post a Comment