Another man would have said, ‘What did you just say?’ and she wouldn’t have said it again. Another man would have tried to hug her or kiss her and she would have stood as stiff as a board in his arms, because right now she couldn’t be touched.
But Simon Barrington wasn’t another man.
He didn’t move or smile or try to make eye contact. He looked straight ahead at his laptop screen and said, formally and clearly and quite loudly, as if he were making a legally binding declaration to a government official: ‘I love you too, Amy.’
It wasn’t the first time she’d heard those words from a man, it was just the first time she believed them.
*
Minutes later the phones of the four Delaney children dinged simultaneously in locations across Sydney, and each phone was snatched up with fumbling, frightened fingers as they read a five-word text from an unknown number.
It said:
Your mother is home.
Dad.
Stan’s first ever text from his brand new phone turned out to be his most memorable.
chapter sixty-seven When Joy’s children saw her again they each hugged her in a way they hadn’t hugged her since childhood. They were the fierce, desperate hugs that once followed nightmares, when she could feel the rapid hammer of fragile hearts in tiny chests as they clung to her.
Both her sons lifted her clear off the floor, just like their father did.
Both her sons cried, just like their father did.
Neither of her daughters shed a tear. They scolded her, like frightened mothers scold lost children on their return. ‘You must promise to never ever do anything like that again, Mum! You must wear your glasses when you send a text! You must never leave the house without your phone!’
She enjoyed being told off by them. She could hear the rhythms of her own voice, her mother’s voice, her grandmother’s voice, every relieved cranky woman from the beginning of time.
*
It was nice to hold on to the memories of those fierce, desperate hugs when the hugging stopped.
chapter sixty-eight
Joy could remember people in late January talking about some kind of dreadful virus creeping across the world, but she was too distracted by her crumbling marriage to take much notice, and besides, she never caught colds. She had an excellent immune system.
By the time she was ‘back on the grid’ the world had spun off its axis, and it was hard not to feel personally responsible, as if the moment she stopped supervising, chaos was the consequence. It was just like when she took her eyes off Troy as a toddler: the mayhem and destruction that followed!
Suddenly, everyone was ‘social distancing’， especially around Stan and Joy, who were supposedly ‘elderly’ and ‘at risk’。 When they went for a walk, younger people leaped elaborately out of the way, off footpaths and into gutters.
‘If my time’s up, my time’s up,’ Stan told the children, and the children groaned and said all their friends’ parents were making similarly foolhardy comments, and Joy and Stan exchanged smiles and made solemn promises to behave.
Those first weeks after Joy returned home were like being on a honeymoon in the middle of an apocalypse.
They couldn’t stop touching each other or watching the news, which for the first time in Joy’s lifetime was global and enormous, yet personal and specific. You couldn’t shrug it off. You couldn’t say it was very sad but life goes on, because life didn’t go on.
They couldn’t stop saying they couldn’t believe it.
Prince Charles got the virus! No-one was safe. Not even royalty.
‘Lockdown’ took the pressure off retirement. Now their only responsibility was to stay home and stay safe, not to partake in a daily repertoire of wholesome, bracing activities. Now it wasn’t just their lives that had stopped, but everyone’s lives. Now it wasn’t just her formerly bustling home that had fallen silent but formerly bustling cities all around the world. People heard birdsong in places where they had once only heard traffic. Skies cleared. If only this beautiful global pause could have happened without the relentless suffering.
Joy kept thinking about her grandmother’s first husband, who had died of the Spanish flu a hundred years ago after he made the ‘silly decision to go meet his friend down at the docks’。 It had always sounded like a fairy tale to Joy, and a necessary piece of her history. Of course that first husband had to make the silly decision to meet his friend at the docks, so Joy’s grandmother could go on to marry Joy’s beautiful grandfather and Joy would then come to be Joy.