Open the booking website of any airline and you will see motion graphics of lines criss-crossing the planet between hundreds of destinations to boast of the wondrous possibilities of international travel, representing journeys which until recently came and went in their hundreds of thousands every day. These arcs describe the high-speed routes along which the virus since late November hijacked its way from one unsuspecting community to another all over the globe.
Seven weeks ago I stepped out of an Airbus 380 with my husband onto a jet bridge at Heathrow airport. It was noon on Tuesday 11th March 2020, the day the World Health Organisation declared coronavirus a pandemic and said its epicentre had moved from China to Europe, the day President Trump stopped denying it was even an issue and banned all flights from Europe. Repeating these facts feels a bit like reciting a creed. The ideas seem too incongruous and significant to grasp, yet landing in the UK that March morning at the end of a journey of nearly 12,000 miles at over 500 miles per hour, we walked out into a world that had shifted further and faster.
Strangely, it wasn’t the idea of a global crisis that was new. Before we flew out from Heathrow at the end of January, via my sister in Sydney things had been so serious we even thought twice about going. For weeks news channels had been streaming footage from eastern Australia: a slideshow of charred ruins, blackened tree stumps, ash landing on snow in New Zealand, and stories of bravery as fires ripped across farmland and through villages, and trapped families on beaches – all testifying to the onset of a Judgement Day, while Extinction Rebellion shook their heads at the man-made cause of destruction. Nor was a conflagration the only apocalypse for which we braced ourselves as we plodded on with plans long since made and paid. Less than a fortnight earlier, in response to an American drone strike which assassinated a key general, Iran had shot down a Boeing 737 passenger jet by mistake, killing hundreds of civilians, and it seemed possible a Trump world war might break out in the Hormuz Strait region where we switched flights.
In the same news cycle a super virus popped up, of the kind which sometimes crosses the species barrier, but though we had been fed a diet of alarm over many years about how we were ‘due for a pandemic’ we had taken too many shots of this stuff. BSE, Sars, swine flu, bird flu and more had each whipped up a lizard dread of end-of-days pestilence then dropped from the headlines. Vast fatality figures were predicted, but gruesome scenes in foreign countries dried up without the microbes reaching anyone we knew, so although isolated cases of the new virus had begun to emerge outside China a week before we left the hype felt overblown. Australia’s bushfires, on the other hand, were real. My sister’s cat was coming into her house coughing, we sweltered in the heat, worried about a brown cast to the sky and left her with four respiratory masks in case.
The virus was the story that did not go away. In the concourse in Sydney airport a Chinese New Year dragon danced to drums and in the queue for our plane we joked about a Chinese family coughing in front of us. A few days after we landed, New Zealand closed its borders to flights from China, bringing the tourist economy to a standstill in a country too far from anywhere else to fill the hole this measure would leave in its GDP. Fortunately, the problem still seemed confined for the most part to China, and for us the effect was all benefit: we drove along sunny roads among New Zealand’s blond plains and brown mountains – all more empty, more ours to enjoy than we had ever seen them. We had finally escaped the climate of bilious sanctimony which coloured the years after the Brexit vote and left us feeling like aliens at home. We had been edging towards spending more time in New Zealand – or moving there – for over a decade. Now with our son in his first job and our daughter about to leave university a new chapter in our lives looked possible. We fished, wrote, walked and explored. We asked ourselves: could we live here, for months or years? We waited to not like the idea. We liked the idea. It was going to take a lot of work, change, time and discussion with the family.
We stayed glued to the news, waking up to the end of a British day and a flurry of comments. I like to think that keeping abreast of current affairs is about being informed, that it’s socially responsible to keep alert to what’s coming and engage before it’s too late. But news consumption is about other things too: fear makes us feel alive, and there’s an ancient full-throated thrill about an apocalypse. When fed up with the turgid nasty misery of life and unable to get motivated, it helps to try imagining you are about to lose everything you know.
On Friday 6th March when we drove back to Christchurch to hand back our hire car the first British coronavirus death was announced. In a sunny cafe overlooking a rose garden my husband said, ‘We could stay here and fly the children out.’ There was no longer any doubt we would be crossing a Rubicon by going home. In thirty years none of his intuitions about where things are heading has been wrong. I knew I would probably look back and wish we had done what he suggested, but it seemed too extreme, too soon. I couldn’t see past the present reality. We could not comfortably persuade our son to sacrifice his first job after six months of trying everything to get one, or advise our daughter to give up on her final term of university. For how long and where and how would we live? By Sunday when we left my cousin’s house for the airport two more elderly Brits had died, and we were in train. We swapped funny videos of non-manual greetings from France and hand-washing jingles from South Korea. Our Prime Minister urged us to sing happy birthday twice while lathering. Cheered by his upbeat practicality we took off for Sydney – just as the Italian Premier declared a lockdown of his entire country.
We knew before we walked into the terminal building to begin our homeward journey that we were entering an artery which was pumping invisible microbes in and out of every international city. Intensely aware of every touch, cough or sneeze we subsumed ourselves into the problem. Cocooned in tubes, buses and glass buildings we had sat, walked, queued and sat half way round the world from Sydney via Brisbane and Abu Dhabi to London, switching between planes and terminals through a single night that lasted 24 hours. The cabin crew brought supper followed by breakfast followed by supper followed by breakfast. At each destination we wound our watches back to match the time on the ground, incrementally wiping from recorded existence thirteen hours we had whiled away watching films and sleeping. At Abu Dhabi airport a man followed us down the steps from the plane onto the tarmac wearing a face mask. He slid his hand right along the rail, and grabbed another to swing himself onto the bus. Tired and hot, he unhooked the straps, sat and wiped his face with his palms. In the terminal, screens flashed up pages of arrival and departure cities. We filtered along corridors towards our transfer, past shops, departure gates and smoking rooms. We paused to wash our hands, and wash them again, and weaved between hundreds more travellers to and from Asia, Europe, the Middle East, the Americas and Australasia, all of us breathing one another’s air.
Even before we woke up near Heathrow we suspected that in spite of our best efforts we might be bringing more than just our luggage home. In the grey light of a London noon we said polite thanks to the politely smiling cabin staff and braced ourselves for winter outside, in anticipation of which I had scaled up inadequately with a cardigan and a pair of tights. Near the door an official asked our stewardess if she had noticed anyone with symptoms on board. I wondered if she would mention the man diagonally opposite who had been coughing all night. She said no.
Our Romanian Uber driver threw our cases in the boot, smothered his hands with sanitiser and showed us videos like the ones we’d seen in Australia of people fighting over loo rolls in supermarkets, but this time the scenes were taking place in the UK. He told us how much his parents missed the old days of empty shelves in shops under communist rule – scenes we were about to relive thanks to panic-buying of pasta and cleaning products.
Four days later we came down with symptoms of something respiratory viral. which hamstrung us for a fortnight, left us oddly exhausted, and never quite seems to go away. Meanwhile events have continued to escalate as if tracking the exponential curve of Covid 19-related deaths. Within a week of our return New Zealand and Australia closed their borders and a few days after that the foreign office ordered all British citizens home. The gate clanged shut behind us.
We were already self-isolating when the PM called for a lockdown for which no end is currently in sight. Our son is working from his bedroom at half the minimum wage; our daughter’s last term has been cancelled. Each had a sore throat and headache for an hour or two, and a slight fatigue for a day. People we know of have died – a friend’s mother in a care home, the neighbour of a woman I spoke to standing at ta distance outside the surgery. The hospital turned him away at first without a test, insisting he didn’t have the virus, then took him in to die of it three days later. His widow was left to grieve for a week in isolation.
My mother who is 84, is taking lockdown in her stride. She has a strong faith, has shaken off diverse tropical afflictions during her years and remembers hiding under the kitchen table during the Blitz. Many other people seem properly frightened – as the death numbers roll in at 5pm every day, unimaginable quantities made real by personal stories of the young who have succumbed and the smiling faces of medics who died as they lived, looking after patients for the health service; leaving their loved ones to eulogise bravely or sob with unmanageable grief. No one held the hands of these fathers, sisters, children as they slipped away. What do we do with the feelings all this information generates? For the sake of such people, we stay at home and try not to catch Covid.
Until this crisis we were unaware that more than a thousand die every day in our country, were never invited to watch the tally climb or feel responsible, to feel like we or our loved ones might be next in line, that something unstoppable is causing this to happen and someone we mistrust must be doing something wrong. The cataclysm we seemed so keen to find and fear a few months ago appears to be getting worse as political measures to limit the spread bite down. Quietly the virus keeps on turning the mechanical tricks for which it evolved. Meanwhile we watch the horror film, gripped by numbers, paralysed with dread and transfixed by a kind of thrill that the relentless rush has finally been halted, and that our days have shrunk into narrow monastic cells and acquired dramatic - perhaps even historic - significance.