The Deck

Here you are: a novel. From my fingers to your hand, from my eye to your eye, from the crevices of my crumpled brain to the crevices of yours.

The novelist is making a novel.

She is making it on an Apple Mac in a small room overlooking a small city on an island in the southern corner of a vast ocean.

Midsummer.

Sunlight glints on a harbour and a breeze bellies the curtains at an open window. An undifferentiated hum of traffic and machinery rises from the city. Someone is drilling something in the old Edwardian villa next door and across the road the children at the day-care centre are banging away on the big xylophone they bring outside on sunny days. Overlying the hum is a cheerful gamelan bing bang bong.

Beyond the harbour stretches the ocean, bordered as usual at the horizon by the mass of cloud that could be hills or snowcapped mountains. Air and vapour only but so seemingly solid that Captain Cook, sailing down this coast on his first voyage, detoured many miles to the east over three days in order to satisfy his lieutenant that this was no great continent. ‘In search of Mr Gore’s imaginary land,’ he wrote grumpily in his journal. He himself was ‘very certain we saw only clouds’.

The imaginary land has always been present. The novelist remembers it from earliest childhood when she sat crammed with her sister in the back seat of the Austin Standard on Sunday afternoons, her family parked up at Friendly Bay eating ice-creams and looking out to sea, as islanders do. The cool lick of Raspberry Ripple and the cloudy mountains that were the place called Overseas. People sometimes flew there and when they returned they brought pictures to project on the sitting-room wall of palm trees and palaces and skyscrapers and places where the streets were made of water and places where people rode on camels and elephants. Overseas. The bright colours of the cloud land overlaid the beige stripes of the sitting-room wallpaper.

But today the pictures are not so pretty. A plague is raging and the pictures of Overseas are the deserted boulevard, the crowded hospital ICU, the army trucks queuing in the piazza to collect the coffins, the city park crisscrossed with burial trenches. It is months now since the novelist looked up a place called ‘Wuhan’ and its dubious ‘wet market’. Months since she looked up ‘pangolins’, such sweet little vectors of catastrophe with their coats of armour-plating and their long snuffly noses. Months since she looked up a virus that appeared online as a soft little ball ornamented all over with tassels of red or blue. This past Christmas a woman in the novelist’s city crocheted Covid-shaped tree decorations. A dark joke but it proved popular. The novelist bought a few to hang among the tinsel.

Deadly viruses do not necessarily declare themselves by looking repellent. Tuberculosis, for example. When the microbiologist Robert Koch back in 1882 first discovered the tiny silvery rods of Mycobacterium tuberculosis, killer of millions for millennia, he thought them ‘beautiful’.

For months now, the news has been of global death and infection, the numbers reported daily like some hideous league table that implicitly pits nation against nation, leader against leader, health system against health system, political structure against political structure. Within the past 24 hours the novelist knows this plague has caused 563 deaths in the UK, 1807 in the US, 469 in Brazil, 361 in Italy and on and on, each death its own little individual horror of breathlessness, the lungs choking on dead cells, clots clumping in the blood vessels of the brain, confusion, seizure, stroke, liver failure, kidney collapse. Each number is a woman, a man, who was born into their own world of light and lived there until the virus and the moment where they lay face down on the gurney, going out naked into the dark, profoundly alone.

Today on the league table, the novelist’s country has scored zero. For months it has scored zero.

First there was the silence. The country shut down and silence fell. The CBDs emptied as workers retreated to work from home. The motorways emptied, and the airports where planes had roared in, bringing the tourists to see the tree in the lake, the chapel in the carpark, the casino with the pokies, the hotel room with the view of the mountains, and the bridge where it was possible to catch a curated glimpse of your own death from the end of a rubber bungy. The ports emptied where cruise ships had disgorged thousands onto the streets to buy jade carved into the shapes of kiwi and koru. They had bought woollen socks and were taken on the buses to see a sheep being shorn and a cathedral that had fallen down in an earthquake and a vineyard where they could buy pinot noir and sauvignon.

Then the silence. Tourist hotels were repurposed as quaran-tine facilities as the country threw up defences at speed, using whatever came to hand, like people tearing up the paving stones to erect barricades across a city street. Thirty-two hotels in five cities, Crown Plaza and Holiday Inn, Novotel and Chateau on the Park, with their dimly lit bars and luxury spas, their Superior Rooms and Business Centres, speedily adapted to accommodate a new trade. Wire cordons surrounded their peri-meter at street level.

The novelist has looked up at the concrete cliff as she walked past. She’s no scientist. She imagines a kind of burr, like a miniature biddy-bid, waiting up there, prepared to attach itself to any unwary passer-by. She imagines a tiny sequin floating on the air between strangers. She has read that it is not even properly alive, being unable to generate ATP, adenosine triphosphate, the fundamental source of the energy of life. Incapable of reproduction, except within a living host. She imagines it up there in the hotel, being sapped of its strange parasitic power in isolation in a room equipped with a super-king bed, Netflix on demand and a view of the CBD.

On this sunny day, the quarantine hotels have become familiar. Like face masks, and the 1pm press briefings where the prime minister stands at one podium and the director-general of health stands at the other and the sign-language interpreter stands between. On either side, the calm recital in the new language of detection, containment, contact tracing, genome sequencing, all of it translated at the centre into a dazzling flurry of flying hands and mobile face. The reports deliver reassurance and a graph of mortality that remains a flat line, while beyond the cloud barrier in the world of Overseas the graphs are jagged mountain ranges of spikes and sharp ascents.

The novelist receives messages from beyond the barrier. A friend in Italy has spent weeks in confinement in a city apartment, busying herself preparing radio programmes but unable to attend the concerts she loves, unable even to visit her son who lives nearby. ‘Is this to be my old age?’ she writes. ‘Is this how I will have to spend the rest of my life?’ A friend in New York writes that her father has died of the virus and her mother, too, is terribly ill and cannot be visited. ‘We are here in our apartment across town, feeling helpless and grief-stricken and trying to keep calm.’ The novelist hears from friends confined with rambunctious children in a small English terrace house. ‘We are going mad!’ they say. Their voices reach her like the cries of seabirds, plaintive and far away. Unbearably sad. She finds herself replying carefully, omitting mention of the family camping trip at Christmas, the concert in a crowded auditorium, cheerful ordinary things. She does not want to make friends for whom such things are impossible feel more unhappy.

Her room in the house is a sunlit citadel defended by thousands. Battalions of nurses and cleaners and cooks and drivers and security staff are holding the front line at the quarantine hotels. Scientists and laboratory technicians are tracking and tracing with a speed and precision that to the novelist seems completely miraculous. Battalions of IT experts, data analysts, designers of public information campaigns, the civil servants staffing government departments, the ministers and members of Parliament who volunteered for office and found themselves administering a crisis. The director-general of health. The prime minister, the gifted and remarkable Jacinda, the Joan of Arc who leads it all from the front, encouraging, cajoling, choosing the strategic direction.

It’s a citizens’ army, the greatest peacetime mobilisation in this country’s history. This calm sunny day, the children at their day-care centre, the flat line on the graph are its dazzling achievements. They should be celebrated, these cleaners and nurses and laboratory technicians and the rest. The novelist’s country has sent men off to do battle in some pointless war-to-end-all-wars with greater fanfare, and hailed them more effusively on their return with medals, trumpets and drums. Historians have pored over the most minute details of their engagements. Poets have lauded their courage, their readiness for self-sacrifice. And it is right of course that they should have done so.

But this force, engaged with an infinitely more potent invisible enemy, has remained largely unsung. Its slightest mishap has been greeted by howls of outrage from the parliamentary opposition — it’s politics, after all — and reported in the press in a barrage of alliteration: border bungle! border botchup! total systemic failure! a shambles! chaos!

But right here, right now on this sunlit morning, it is not a shambles. It is not chaos. Bing bang bong go the children on their xylophone. The city hums happily to itself as it goes about its customary business. It is a fragile calm, of course — the calm of a sunlit savannah in some wildlife documentary where animals peaceably browse, though their ears flicker. They are alert to the slightest rustling in the long grass, when they will rise as one, take flight, stampede from the predator that is seeking out their weakest members. The old, the infirm, the very young. They will scatter and run.

This day is like that. Its sunny calm could shatter in a second. The novelist in her room, the city below, all the people who live on these islands in this corner of the ocean are no more than a breath away from disaster, death, economic collapse. They are only a heartbeat away from a complete revisioning of their existence.

The novelist knows this.

And how does she know it?

Because it has happened before.

She has read about it.