Repeat After Me

Chapter 46

'So my test was negative,' I said to dad on FaceTime. 'I knew it would be. See, there wasn't an outbreak after the protest. You were wrong.'

Dad was in a better mood, now that the football was restarting. The team had purpose once again. He was working six days a week, as they were now understaffed, and the footballers were in worse shape than ever.

'When are you coming home?' I asked.

'There's talk of us travelling in a bubble,' dad said.

'What does that mean?'

'I'm not sure of the details yet, but it means that certain teams will travel together interstate and live in hotels, without seeing the outside world.'

'But Coronavirus is practically over, isn't it?'

'Not yet, Ivy.'

And so, the football started up again to great fanfare. At first, they had the teams playing to empty stadiums, with a crowd soundtrack, just to give the game 'atmosphere'. But as the condensed season went on, and certain states had less cases than other, the gauge of how well a state government was doing could be seen by how many spectators they had at the football.

The Australian cultural obsession with the AFL encouraged football days at primary school, where we had to dress in our favourite team's colours. It gave Victorians a public holiday for the grand final. The kids at school had always been in awe of my dad working for the Geelong Football team. It was like it gave him some sort of celebrity status, and gave me social clout by association. Boys in grade five would say to me, 'so do you go to the games?' and I'd shrug and say 'not if I can help it.' And they'd look at me as if I was simple.

I was happy for dad that the football was back. And life could get back to a new kind of normal for us all.