My brother on the Gold Coast hasn’t said anything in the whānau Messenger group set up by my other brother from Masterton so that we can keep in touch during the Covid-19 pandemic. The writer from Algeria took over his hotel room, happy to be home, in the hotel by the river, with the rest of us. When mask-wearing protesters started rallying in the streets of Hong Kong, the writer from Hong Kong left early to be with his girlfriend, drawn home by a crisis of a different kind. He envied us all living together in the hotel by the river. We walked over the bridge and up the hill and we saw deer walking through the trees.
We all envied him living in a well-appointed cottage all on his own, in the grounds of a luxurious house in a quiet wooded area. He arrived at the residency late, delayed by visa issues, the only one of us to stay in a place outside the hotel. The writer from Algeria expects a flood of dystopian fiction will follow, and he’s not happy about it. Buddies make contact from everywhere, like the friends I made on the writing residency in Iowa, writers from all over the world. But they’re all there, crowding in all day, every day. She forgot the Merlot.Īt night in bed, I think of all the people in the world asleep in their homes. Later, Pam and I distribute the food between our packs-cans of tomatoes, no-alcohol beer from Japan, chocolate, potatoes, dishwashing liquid, Vogel’s bread, butter. Everyone settles into a vigilant silence, the whites of their eyes flashing in sidelong glances. Do any of you have a baby? Don’t you understand? Keep two metres away.” Heads turn, people whisper to each other, and shuffle away from him. A man marches past me with a shopping bag scrunched in his hand. The plants are straggly now but it’s a sunny spot and I can wait there, alone, scrolling and reading the news on my phone.
I sit on a bare piece of dirt in the carpark that might once have been a landscaped garden. She wears a bright pink neck gaiter pulled up over her mouth and nose, and white vinyl disposable gloves from the box in the kitchen drawer. Pam joins the queue of people snaking out along the footpath and around the edge of the carpark. Pam and I plan our route to Pak n Save and walk there with daypacks on our backs. Dad is calling from the background: “Need more wine.” Going to the supermarket is like a military operation. He wants to go to the supermarket at the mall to buy a bottle of Merlot.
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