The Lockdown Tales: Disobedience, Love, Patience and Other Stories

By Alan Whelan

Seven women and three men leave the city to avoid a pandemic. They isolate together in a local farm, where they pass the time working, flirting, eating, drinking, making music and above all telling stories. It happened in Florence in 1351, during the Plague, and gave us Boccaccio's Decameron.

Seven hundred years later, in Australia, it happens again. The stories are very different, but they're still bawdy, satirical, funny and sometimes sad, and they celebrate human cleverness, love, courage and imagination.

"Alan Whelan brings us a clever, sensual and sometimes poignant collection of stories that would make Boccaccio proud"
- Tangea Tansley, author of A Question of Belonging

"An old frame for a sharp new snapshot of contemporary Australia"
- Leigh Swinbourne, author of Shadow in the Forest

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Jan 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9780228840541

Alan Whelan

ALAN WHELAN is a novelist, poet and award-winning story-writer living in the Blue Mountains.

Book preview

Gail Haut, Sue Pullar, Stuart Pullar

Ayear ago I was selling real estate from an office in Glebe. Gail Haut Realty: Gail Haut is me. In the weekends I was renovating the abandoned farmhouse I’d bought. It’s in a place improbably called Roughit, NSW, not far from Singleton. It’s twenty-odd kilometres from a village called Broke. Roughit and Broke: I loved the names. At first I worked on that property as part of a long-term plan. I thought it might be a place to retire.

By the time people were starting to shut themselves in to slow the virus’s spread, I’d nearly finished replacing the floorboards. The roof still leaked, but it was a house again. I closed Gail Haut Realty and moved in. An old survey map showed the farm was originally called Milthorpe, so Milthorpe it is, once again.

When I left Sydney, my friends Sue and Stuart Pullar were living in an apartment that overlooks Sydney’s George and Market Streets. He’s an architect and she’s a pharmacist, and I won’t say much about them except that they are the calmest and by far the most sensible people I know, certainly including me.

Their balcony is above the George and Market Street intersection, and after I’d gone they sent me iPhone footage taken at quarter to nine on Monday morning. There should’ve been road-fixing machines on the move, and crowds of people hurrying from the trains to their offices and shops. Instead there were just two cops on horseback. Maybe they were looking for people out of doors with insufficient excuse, but they weren’t expecting to see any. It looked like a scene from some 1950s movie about the end of the world: The Black-and-White Death.

Alone on my farm, I found a stack of old paperbacks, mostly old science fiction and fantasy, in what had been the shearers’ cottage. I read books about the end of civilisation: The Day of the Triffids was much better than I remembered, making the first horror the panicked and selfish human reaction, with the triffids only taking over as the main threat about halfway through. Asimov’s The Caves of Steel, about a people who communicated virtually and could no longer bear each other’s physical presence: that gave me a kind of shiver, too.

But finally I became obsessed by Boccaccio’s Decameron. It tells how during the Black Death a group of people left their city for a villa on a hill, away from the crowds in the city and the churches, who were infecting each other and dying. In their new home above the world’s troubles they told each other stories for two weeks, until the plague had done its worst and moved on.

I said I liked the names Roughit and Broke. My dad even thought they were part of the reason I chose to buy here, in particular. I don’t think that’s completely true, but a name was part of the reason for my obsession with the Decameron. The Decameron is subtitled Prince Galehaut. That’s almost my name.

I take it, though Boccaccio doesn’t say so, that it’s Galehaut who provides the country places where the cast gathered to tell stories and wait out the plague. In Arthurian myth Galehaut was in love with Sir Lancelot but sacrificed his own chance of happiness when he realised that Lancelot wasn’t in love with him but with Guinevere, the wife of King Arthur. Instead, Galehaut invited the two of them to his lands, and it was there that Lancelot and Guinevere kissed for the first time.

I admired the man’s unselfish love, but I didn’t want his fate. I am, it will become plain, less inclined to sacrifice myself.

Still, the Decameron became a template for my actions as the pandemic dragged on. The other thing that spurred me was a phone call from my friend Margo, torn and needing time and healing. This is what happened to her.

Margo Colonna

Margo was Dr Colonna, and when she heard that her younger brother, Harry, had been caught by the virus she borrowed gowns, masks and gloves from her own practice, and came to watch over him. She used her contacts and credentials to enter the intensive care section at Nepean Hospital, where he lay. The hospital was having a spike in covid-19 patient numbers.

As her week wore on she realised that none of the many decision points, if we think of a virus as making decisions, were turning his way. His lungs were damaged; his chest was clenched tight. He had bouts of supraventricular tachycardia, with his heart beating three, four times its normal speed. He was in trouble.

Harry’s bed had wheels, cotton sheets and a blanket on a metal frame. His fever had never broken and sweat stood out on his forehead. There were two other men and two women in that room, their wrists connected to tubes and a glucose solution slowly dripping into their arms, wearing ventilators of differing strengths according to their condition and the hospital’s resources.

Harry wore a nasal mask that delivered warmed, humid air into his trachea. He should have been on a stronger model of ventilator, that pumped the air directly into his lungs, but those the hospital had were already being used. Apart from the drowsy sound of the ventilators the room was silent. The air smelled of disinfectant. Only one of the other patients was asleep that morning, Margo judged, but no one moved or spoke.

There was a vertical line etched between Harry’s brows, that hadn’t been there when they’d last spent time together, three months ago. Margo had his hand in her gloved hand, and a couple of hours ago he’d squeezed it lightly, as a kitten might.

She’d been talking to him, the last two days, though he never replied. She said, "Harry? You remember when we were kids, and the parents rented out that paddock at our place, to people who wanted to run sheep and horses on it? And the horses wouldn’t come near me, and so you ran off and came back with apples? I thought, Harry, you little shit. Those lovely ponies, they’re going to come and talk to you, not me. But you gave the apples to me so I could call them. After that I never thought you were a horrid little brother. Not really."

He was breathing too fast, too shallow, but she thought, or she imagined, that he had smiled a little. He’d pursed his lips, anyway. Or it might have been nothing.

"All right then. It feels weird, you not hogging the conversation. I’m not used to getting time to speak. Anyway, the registrar, Bill, he told me there was a girl, French girl, asking to see you yesterday. Aimée Mitterand. I don’t know if she’s one of those Mitterands, but Bill says she’s very posh. Anyway she seemed very concerned about you. It seemed to be personal. It’s about time you got just one girl after you."

She could see Harry breathing, shallow and quick, but there was no sign that he’d heard her. Anyway, because she’d been … hanging around with you, they tested her. You’ll be pleased to know she got a clean bill of health. They didn’t let her in when she was here yesterday, but I’ll see if they can let her in later today or tomorrow. Something caught in him. She frowned, but said, Being a quack has its privileges, little brother.

Something in his throat. He should have coughed, but he didn’t have the strength. Margo stared. He drew a breath. It was an effort. He released it, shallow, the air having barely reached his lungs. Her own breath caught while she watched, willing him to try again. But he didn’t take that other breath. Margo hit the Emergency button. She tilted his head sideways and back to open his trachea further, knowing it would make little difference. She began pressing on his chest, then releasing. Over and over. She said, Harry! Harry! Then she shouted it.

The registrar, Bill, arrived and pushed her out of his way. A nurse followed Bill and took the defibrillators from their place on the wall, switching on the current. He passed them to Bill, who tried again, and again, to counter-shock Harry’s heart and make him seize another breath. Harry’s body moved under the shocks, but that breath, the hard indrawn gasp they struggled for, pleaded for, never came.

Bill tried again, swearing under his breath and then aloud, for another eight minutes. At last he stopped and shook his head. He was exhausted, Margo saw. He checked the wall clock. Eleven twenty-seven, he said, and another nurse, a woman, noted it on a tablet. I’m sorry, Margo. I’m so sorry.

Margo looked at Bill, then Harry. No one close to her had died before, but she knew death. She said, I know you did your best. No one – Bill, can I – ?

Bill shook his head, but not to refuse her. Do what you – Say what you need to say. I’m sorry, Margo, I can’t begin to … Then he shook his head again. I’ll be back in thirty minutes. Please talk to me before you go.

She was alone in the room with her brother, dead at 11.27. At thirty-three. The four other patients in that four-person room had just lost the youngest, fittest of their number. But none of them made a sound, except the slight snore of the sleeping man.

Margo shook her head. Oh, little brother. I’m sorry you’re dead. I know you loved me, sort of, but I’m sorry it was only me here, and not that hot French girl. She probably loves you. She’d have to if she had any sense at all. I loved you too, little man. You should have –  She wanted to sob, but it couldn’t be done in a mask and gown. You’re a fit man, a strong man. You shouldn’t be dead. Harry, I’m sorry. This is fucked up. Harry, you shouldn’t be dead.

Harry’s eyes were open, apparently staring at the ceiling. She knew there was no consciousness without the brain, so there was no afterlife. Harry wasn’t looking down at her, listening. For now this body was still Harry, at least a symbol of Harry. Then in another day, it would not be. There’d be no Harry. Anywhere.

The tears flooded her vision, but she couldn’t wipe them away. She blinked furiously, then, after some thought, she took her right glove off. She could cleanse her hand later.

She kissed her bare fingers and laid them on his mouth. It was as close to a farewell kiss as she could risk. She said, Goodbye, my lovely Harry. I love you. Then she reached up and closed his eyes. She drew the sheet up, over his head.

She walked out, past a couple of patients in the corridor, until she came to a corridor reserved for hospital staff. There she took off her mask, gown and gloves, and dumped them into a waste bin. She used steriliser and washed her hands for nearly two minutes. She wiped her mouth as best she could.

Then she walked out to her Range Rover in the car park. She could talk to Bill another day. She felt desolate. She felt nothing.



Margo called me that evening. She’d slept, but she still needed to cry, and I let her cry on me. I listened to her until she could stop. She was exhausted. But I had a sudden sense, almost a vision, of blood and fear while she talked. It wasn’t anything she said, but I could feel she was thinking of killing herself. She frightened me. Her world just then was so bleak.

I said, You should come and stay on the farm. It’s relaxing. Perfect place to recuperate. I got bedrooms for Africa.

I can’t do that.

No. Can. Must.

Jesus, Gail, that’s a terrible idea. In the first place, if I got caught on the road I’d get arrested. Fined, whatever. And if I got to you I’d just drag you down. I’m not company.

You don’t have to be company. You can do as much or as little as you like. But it’s beautiful out here. And peaceful. You can’t starve on a farm. Or get bored. It’d be a long time till you’re ready for the world, even if the world wasn’t such a fiasco. Seriously, Margo, I’d love to have you. I promise you, you don’t have to be entertaining. You’d be an ornament to my couch.

I’ve got to arrange the funeral. And I’ve just been in. Excuse the melodrama, but I’ve been in the valley of death. I have a non-negligible chance of having caught the virus, in that ward. I’ll test myself. I’ll call soon. If I’m clear, then, tell you what, I’ll come out and bring you right down. OK?

I smiled, more relieved than I had any right to be. Good. I’ll slay a fatted calf. Or get something out of the freezer. And drag up some good things from the cellar. Just let me know when you know you can come.

After that call I realised that the offer I’d made to Margo was for me, too. I wanted to be bigger. The pandemic was making us small and cowering. That’s not comfortable for me, or for most of the people I knew and liked best.

I went to my computer and wrote an invitation.

Invitation

You are cordially invited to spend the coming days at Milthorpe Farmstead, starting on Monday two weeks out, and continuing as long as you like. If you haven’t been out here, it’s in Roughit, which is an area rather than a town. It’s not far from Singleton.

The farmhouse is huge, and the roof is nearly waterproof. It’s got more bedrooms than you could shake a stick at. And a cottage for shearing teams. I have flocks and a herd, gardens, and three freezers full of random food, I have literally no idea what. And a wine cellar, big one.

I don’t have company. You can help round the farm, as much as you like. There’s a lake, or at least I call the biggest pond that. But it’s still warm, so bring your togs.

There’s only one rule. I want you to read the Decameron. While you’re here we’re going to spend each Friday eating, drinking and telling each other stories. Don’t be shy. Everyone else has to tell stories too, so they’ll know how hard it is.

Two! Two rules. The other rule is that I’m coming to get you. If you want to be picked up you’ll have to tell me where you are at the moment.

Oh. Three rules. You’ll have to have self-isolated for two weeks and have tested negative for covid, the test to be no older than three days. Get that done, and get the result in writing. You can send it to me as an attachment. If you can’t do that you’ll have to hold it up to the van’s window before you get aboard, which would be awkward.

But bring clothes. If you like spirits or dope, bring them. I’m a wine girl, so there’s plenty of wine. If you can play an instrument bring it. There’s a ropy old piano here, but everything else is up to you.

RSVP > RIP. Peace is overrated. Ruckus is encouraged. Looking forward to seeing you here!

Gail xxx

I sent it to thirty people. In the end, only nine people said they could come. Sue and Stuart I’ve already mentioned. They were watching the world from their balcony. And you know about Margo. This is what was happening to the other six people, while Margo was losing her little brother and I was fixing the floor of my house, where the possums get in.

Jayleen Harcourt

Jayleen Harcourt put her hands back when the old man tried to give her his credit card. No, please. You just tap the reader, here. She waved in the direction of the reader, but didn’t touch it. Filthy lucre, she’d thought when cash became unpopular, but that hadn’t been funny for a long time.

At least she was working. Bob was at a school that was essentially providing baby-sitting services for parents whose work took them out of their homes. Bob was four but they’d made an exception for him. It was her second week’s work in seven months.

Seven months ago, Woolworths had called her in to do an evening shift without notice, and she’d told them she couldn’t do it because Bob was sick. It was a bad case of croup and he was still three. She knew she was right to have stayed to look after him, but they’d never offered her work again. Until the virus struck and workers again became scarce. Another pay packet and she’d be able to buy a washing machine.

The old man looked relieved when his payment was approved. He took his small collection, milk, lamb chops, rolling tobacco, rice papers and matches, potatoes and a lettuce. Thank you, love. Then suddenly, alarmingly, he coughed. Jaylene drew back but she felt the wind of it. Ah, heck, I’m sorry, he said. I promise, love, it’s just a smoker’s cough, came too fast to stop it. Not … you know.

She made herself smile. She believed him (her father had had that cough), but she’d been horrified. It’s all right. We’re all human.

And bloody – excuse my French, love – bloody terrified of each other. Anyway, thank you. Sorry. Have a good day. He gathered his two bags and hobbled out.

Despite the old man’s assurance, she took advantage of the fact that there’d been no one queuing behind him. She put up the Let us serve you at another counter sign and hurried to the hand cleanser dispenser just outside. She washed her gloves, face (using two tissues) and the front of her blue shop assistant coat.

Working meant she could feed Bob and buy him clothes. In a while she’d be able to wash them without dumping them in the bath and stirring them with the handle of a broom. But it also meant she spent most of her waking hours terrified that she’d collect something and take it home to him.

Making herself think of washing machines, she hurried back to her station.

Astrid Flagstad

Astrid Flagstad lay on her couch, ukulele in her lap. She had no work, but she didn’t have to worry about money. She’d been working for The Invisible Opera Company of Tibet, a company that organised parties in out-of-the-way parts of the world for rich men and women. The company paid well, and it’d be a while before she ran her savings account low enough to be eligible for the dole. So she was on holiday.

She watched the complete works of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, and read In Search of Lost Time, which was better than she expected. She also convinced herself once and for all she was never going to read past page 100 of War and Peace. Or Moby Dick.

She kept up with the world through Twitter (she had 47,000 followers, because she made jokes, posted travel photos and occasional pics of herself wearing only her knickers), and talking with friends onscreen.

So she strummed her uke, singing what she could remember of Walk on the Wild Side. Her voice and the strumming had no relation to each other, either in time or pitch. She was coming to accept that she hadn’t learned an instrument in twenty-eight years of life, not because she’d been too busy but because she had no talent. Mercifully her desktop made a noise at her like a revving motorcycle. Jayleen was calling. Her shift must be over.

Hey.

Hi.

How you? How’s Bob?

"For the time being Bob’s utterly fascinated by William Shatner. He can watch the original series and Wrath of Khan, over and over. So right now he’s happy. He’s watching – it’s the end of ‘Squire of Gothos.’ I think I know all the dialogue by heart now."

Yeah. Tell Bob love from me. I miss him. You too. Then Astrid leaned forward, looking closer at Jaylene’s image. You don’t look cheerful. Sucky day?

Work. Jayleen shook her head. It scares the fucking lights – whatever they are – out of me. I don’t think I want to talk about it.

I think the lights are the heart and, I don’t know, the kidneys, maybe the lungs. Everything that isn’t the liver.

Because ‘liver and lights’? I don’t think that’s it. Maybe it’s like ‘living daylights’. Eyes? Anyway, I got a message from Gail. She’s more your friend than mine, I thought. But she’s invited me and Bob to her place in the country. Have you heard anything? I mean, are you invited?

Astrid frowned. I’m being a lazy cow at the moment. I haven’t checked my mail since, oh, some time this morning. Do you mind?

Go ahead.

Astrid logged in to her mail. There were messages from pretty boys, and a rich man who’d been claiming he was smitten had messaged her again, and there was advertising from eBay, from Librairie L’amour qui bouquine, a company that sold stylish old erotica, and from Agent Provocateur, along with Twitter notifications and many other messages. And there was a message from me.

Yes. She sent me something. And it’s headed ‘Invitation’, so … I haven’t had time to read it. What’s yours say?

"She wants me to bring Bob to her place in the country. She says we’ll both have to produce tests, not more than three days old, that we don’t have the virus. And she’ll pay me to work on her roof. And do general chores. So it’s probably not exactly like your message."

Astrid and Jayleen had been friends at school, and then beyond. Their backgrounds were different, but they’d always recognised a kinship. They could both hear what was unsaid. Astrid said, I was never a country girl. You grew up around Orange, didn’t you?

Yeah. When I was a little girl I milked cows.

Like a milkmaid with a blue bonnet?

I just went along the line-up and put the cups on. The udders, you know? I’ve seen a man make a horseshoe and nail it on a horse’s hoof while it’s glowing red hot. And I can ride. Dad wasn’t, you know, grand, he didn’t own land or anything. But he was a farmer’s labourer for a while, and I helped out. Or I thought I did. Maybe they were being nice to a little girl. Jayleen’s voice went small at that thought. Like maybe Gail is being nice?

Astrid knew that Jayleen was probably right. So she said, Gail’s working on her house. There’s tons of stuff to do. She’s got four hundred hectares out there.

You said, maybe a bit under. It’s not big.

But it’s good land. Even I can see that. She’s got sheep, and a sheep dip that needs repair, and she’s got some cattle. It’s a lot of farm for one woman. Course she needs some help.

I cut the balls off some lambs once. They weren’t happy, but at least they didn’t know what they were missing out on.

God, Jayleen, you say something like that and you sound almost wistful! I couldn’t do that in a million years. I think Gail needs someone like you. She can teach you any skills you don’t have. But it’s more a cultural thing. She can say something farmer-y about the cost of feed or something, and you’ll know what she’s talking about. And you’ll be onside when she says Scomo’s an arsehole, or something city-ish. That matters, girl.

"Bob can’t stand that Smoko bastard, when he comes on TV! Says he’s that nasty man. And that he tells lies. I swear I didn’t coach him."

Yeah. Sensible boy. I hope you come, girl. I’ve got my invite, so I’m going. And I’d miss … him, if you weren’t there.

Make sure you come. Hope you’re good at public speaking.

What?

Read the invitation. After we’re done. Anyway you haven’t mentioned that little hot man you told me you met on the Hellfire site. How’s that going?

I don’t know. I guess he’s OK. But I haven’t followed him up yet. Today’s the third day, so I might call him.

Well. Hope it goes well. How’s your sister, then?

They talked until about eight, when Jayleen said a Gorn was chasing Captain Kirk and although Bob had seen it before he was getting worried. So they promised to talk again in three days.

Astrid called the number that little hot man had given her. It led to a tired, irritated woman who’d never heard of Hellfire, that man’s handle, or anything to do with social media. So either little hot guy didn’t know his own phone number, or he’d been wasting her time and his, possibly pursuing some depraved sociological experiment. Or that was his wife. Astrid shrugged, and opened my Invitation.

Bran O’Siodhachain

Bran O’Siodhachain shivered under two doonas in his bed in Ashfield. The bed didn’t have Kath in it, and he minded that. He still had flu, and he felt like death, and he minded that too. It was tiring. He didn’t bother willing himself to live. Or die.

Every night of her last ten years of life, his grandmother had gone to bed saying, I hope the good Lord takes me tonight. She’d seen and endured enough and she wanted to die. But Granny O’Meara was ninety-one when death finally found her. Bran had loved her, but he’d also learned that the will to live, or its absence, makes very little difference to life and death.

In any case, he knew, the hard, hardest way, that the flu is a walk beside a country stream compared to covid-19, which was like being pulled underwater and dragged and drowned along the rocks until that river plunges down a twenty-metre waterfall. Onto more rocks.

Last month he’d hitched up to Southport on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast to see his girlfriend Kath. There was a police roadblock at the New South Wales–Queensland border, but it was new, and Bran had beamed and bullshitted his way through.

He’d hoped to surprise Kath, but he’d been the one who took the shocks. Kath refused to see him. She had a new boyfriend, she was sorry, she still loved him but it was over and he should just go back to Sydney. Just eight days earlier she’d sent him an email full of sexual yearning and loving words, so whatever had happened had happened fast.

So, shocked and miserable and trying to feel numb, he hitched back to Sydney. The truck driver who picked him up at Miami said he wasn’t going to take him through the border; he was in enough trouble already for doing that sort of thing. So Bran had climbed down from the cabin in pouring rain, walked a kilometre to the west of the road until he was out of sight, and then walked back to the highway, re-joining it two kilometres south of the border. It was wretched, but at least the sky matched his mood.

Bran was walking again when night fell, and he found a shed on some farmland near the road that smelled, in intimate ways, of sheep. He slept there in his clothes and sleeping bag.

Back in Sydney he had work to do, selling kit-set furniture and organising its delivery, by phone from his two-bedroom flat in Ashfield. The other bedroom had been Kath’s. He packed her things and sent them to Brisbane in two giant packing cases. Then, a week and a half later, he noticed he had a fever.

He didn’t call a doctor. Too many worried idiots were wasting doctors’ time. And just two days later the fever went away. Bran thought that might have been covid-19, and, as he’d expected, being twenty-seven and fit, it had passed easily. He figured that despite his travels he’d most likely got it from someone in the factory. They were the only people he’d shared space and perhaps breath with in the last two weeks. Anyway, the fever had passed and he expected that that was that.

Then his lungs jammed shut. It became hard to force air into them, or to get it out again. Every breath was a little struggle, an act of will. A few hours later his chest seemed to knit tight, so that he couldn’t expand it to take in breath. He fought it, at home, getting sleep when he could, always a little scared that he wouldn’t wake up again.

On the fifth day the cough set in. It was a dry, hacking cough that seemed to want to take great gouts of air, tissue and blood out of his lungs and splat it onto his sheet. That cough and the tightness of his chest fought it out. He was a battlefield from his solar plexus to the back of his throat. He’d never known pain like it. His head burned. Painkillers made no difference. He coughed, his throat like sensitive sand, and his whole body would curl up to join in with the cough and he had no control over anything.

He was delirious on the sixth day, when he realised he’d never make it to Emergency at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital. He called for an ambulance. Once he’d done that, something in him decided he’d done all he could. The ambulance crew picked his lock and found him collapsed on his living room floor.

His room at RPA Hospital was crowded. It was full of people in hospital beds, and each had their own little forest of tubes. Sometimes there was a break from his coughing, but there was never a break from the struggle to get air into his lungs, or from the pain.

After five days the cough seemed to settle down. It was still there but there were longer gaps between the coughing fits. Bran wondered if he was getting better. RPA didn’t wonder. The registrar said they’d keep him for another week in an ideal world, but that wasn’t the world they were living in. They sent him home, with medication and painkillers.

But when he got home the cough returned in full force, and came with reinforcements: now he had diarrhoea and he felt like there was a creature, immensely strong, living inside him and wringing out his stomach like a towel. He didn’t have the energy to cook. He found that he also didn’t have the energy to eat and digest takeaways, nor to cope with the inevitable diarrhoea. He survived on glucose and sugary camomile tea. His head was throbbing and he felt that was a relief: throbbing was better than continuous pain.

After fifteen days he knew he was going to live through this, though it hadn’t finished with him yet. But there was a slow reduction in the force of his symptoms. He was starting to think that he really was a survivor.

That was when the flu he’d invited, on his trip back to Sydney, decided it had waited politely long enough. Covid-19 symptoms changed to flu symptoms, so Bran was in a position to tell anyone who thought there was any resemblance between the two that they were cretins. If he could have raised the energy. The flu was still severe.

At last, five weeks after his first touch of fever, he was in his bed, shivering and exhausted, feeling terrible but human. He called his boss from his bed and said he could get back to work. Probably only four hours a day at first. But his boss said he was pleased to hear he was better, and they’d pay him for the time he was sick, and a few weeks more, but the warehouse had had to close and they’d lost their drivers, so … there was no more work. Sorry, mate.

Bran thought about the world, still sick in bed, and decided his last six weeks had been the worst in his life. He hoped that record would stand. He’d loved Kath, and been in love with her, but in a different sense he’d also loved the sex they’d had together. He counted on sex: it was the best thing in his life. But it looked like it might be a long time before he had sex that involved someone else’s body and mind, and as he returned to normal he found that that mattered, and hurt very much.

And, possibly worse, at some stage he’d have to get involved with Centrelink and register for the dole.

The next day he got out of bed and opened his email. There were over a thousand messages there, but most of them took no time to get rid of. He found one from me, headed, ‘Invitation’.

Grace Choi, Amelia Appelstein

Grace Choi and Amelia Appelstein were having dinner together, though Amelia was in Strawberry Hills and Grace was in Macdonaldtown. But they’d set up their screens and cameras so Grace could eat gyoza and bok choy and sip cola while Amelia had lamb cutlets with spinach and rice. And drank merlot.

They had talked for a while about Grace’s doctoral thesis, which concerned Western and Chinese ideas about time. Amelia, or Associate Professor Appelstein of the University of Sydney’s History Department, specialising in medieval culture, was Grace’s supervisor. There was intimacy between them which the rules couldn’t prevent, because those rules largely concerned themselves with sex.

Grace and Amelia had never had sex, though that was no fault of Amelia’s. Amelia