Repeat After Me

Chapter 55

One evening, I came out of my room after doing English homework and found mum sitting on the couch crying.

'What's wrong mum?' She opened her palm and showed me her fingers were bleeding.

'What happened?'

'I was trying to change the globe in that lamp. It was stuck and I tried twisting it, but it accidentally smashed in my hand. I can't even change a light globe. I need your dad back. He's better at this stuff than I am.' She sobbed, louder, her eyes puffy and her nose red. She'd been wearing the same outfit of black lounge pants and a black jumper for what seemed like days now. 'I'm sick of it. I want things to go back to how they were.'

I was witnessing the disintegration of my mother's stoicism. Her mask was off and I was seeing her as lonely and vulnerable and frightened. 'Ignore me, I'm tired,' she said, trying to pull herself together. 'Your dad is in a hotel and eating every meal in a hotel restaurant. He's got room service and someone doing his washing. And I'm here being a full time carer. I'm changing soiled bed sheets and trying to remember mum's medication. Not that I resent it. But yeah.' She paused, wiping her middle finger across her eyelid. 'At least it's teaching us resilience, yeah? Like we'll look back on this time ...'

'Mum, it sucks. It's okay for you to say this sucks. You don't need to put a positive spin on this for our benefit.'

'This sucks. I hate it. I want things to go back to normal,' she said. I realised she was suffering more than us – that the burden of having a husband away and caring for her dying mother in the middle of a global pandemic was becoming too great to bear. 'Sorry darling, I'm just having a bad day. It sucks being an adult sometimes. You and Josh, you're doing amazingly. I'm in awe of you both.'

The dread was back in my stomach. We were living in the sock drawer of the country. Melbourne was a mess. Other states had closed their borders to us. The rest of the country was out partying while metropolitan Melbourne was back on the couch watching Netflix, getting takeaway coffees or going on illicit walks with one friend wearing a facemask and fogging up their sunglasses. It was no longer we are all in this together. We were the stay at home underdogs, jealous of anyone outside of metropolitan Melbourne. We couldn't even get proper care for our elderly relatives.

Uncertainty was the only certainty. Mum's despair was as contagious as COVID. I went to my room and rested my head against the wall, closed my eyes and cried. This virus had screwed the world. I still hadn't heard from Asten. His couple of days 'checking in on Alicia' had turned into over a week. I was cut off from him. My heart was cut open. I realised how much I missed him. I'd been pretending for long enough that I was fine with this 'just friends' thing, pretending that I could do this. But I couldn't. I needed him. I needed him when my family was disintegrating, when my mother was crying and in despair, when my grandmother was dying and my father was away, when the news reports were like listening to a body count, when my school was half empty and the teachers looked grief-stricken, when doom seemed to be stretching out her claws and saying 'beware of infection'.