‘Everyone’s missing bingo,’ Dad said forlornly. ‘It must be so lonely for a lot of them.’
Thoughtfully, I gave Mum some helpful projects to take her mind off things during lockdown. In her spare room was bag after bag of leftover wool so I requested a king size bed cover. It was one hundred and forty-four knitted squares in total, every colour under the sun (and then some) in whatever order Mum chose. I can’t say it matched any of Jeff’s cushions very well, but I love it all the same due to all those hours of work Mum put into it. And Leroy the cat took a particular liking to it over the following winter.
Because of Covid our parents were forced to more or less spend 24/7 with each other, with little reprieve or interaction with others. In the case of mine, Mum’s left eye developed a severe twitch every time my father spoke . . . or breathed. Dad’s deafness manifested so he could no longer hear anything my mother said, but was patently tuned into the sounds of her restless footsteps and the continual slamming of the back screen door as she invented another gardening chore that had to be completed faster than instantly.
I called Mum one day to check on her (in)sanity status. ‘Gidday love, how are you coping?’ I asked.
‘Was I sick last night,’ she said with a sigh.
‘Oh no, are you okay?’
‘I opened the mustard at dinner and there was this strange red liquid on top,’ she said. Most people would err on the side of caution when using the word ‘strange’ to describe an edible item – but not my mother. ‘And I thought it must have just been something dropped in there from last time I used it,’ she continued. ‘So I put it on my steak and boy did I pay the price! I was so sick. I woke up this morning and checked the use by date on the mustard and, you’re gonna love this, it was 2018.’
‘Yes, most people tend not to eat unidentified and unexplained liquids on top of solids,’ I said. We weren’t talking a couple of days. That was three years out of date!
‘What’s Rotten in Jude’s Kitchen’ is a game I’ve loved for years, though I hadn’t played a round for some time.
‘Sounds like I need to pop over and inspect the items in your fridge,’ I said. ‘The police will understand why I’m breaking lockdown. “My senile mother’s been eating rotten food and I need to throw it all away before she kills herself.”’
‘You wouldn’t be in such a hurry if I was feeding it all to Dad!’ she replied. For as long as we can recall, Dad’s been the butt of this joke. If a part of the meal drops on the ground, you pick it up quickly and pop it back in the pan proclaiming, ‘That’s Dad’s!’ If there’s something with mould on it in the fridge, you talk about how you’ll sneak it into Dad’s next meal.
Sure enough, next time I went to check on them (to make sure they hadn’t murdered each other), the very first thing I picked up in the pantry was a packet of crackers that was two months past its best-before date.
‘That’s only two months!’ Mum said with a laugh, because she knows how ruthless I can be when it comes to something as annoying and trivial as, you know, salmonella.
Mum’s mouldy condiments are maybe to thank for my boosted immune system. Without fail, any inspection of the food in their fridge or pantry will result in bins full of items being chucked out.
Begrudgingly, the crackers got donated to my goats’ dinner collection, which usually consists of soggy carrots and wilted lettuce from the bottom drawer of Mum’s fridge, and the occasional bunch of browning bananas whenever Dad has again forgotten about something as inconvenient as ‘blood sugar levels’.
* * *
Jeff and I called Jude another day to relay an exciting piece of news.
‘Guess what, Jude? We have good news and we have bad news, what do you want first?’
‘What? The good news.’
‘We’re out of lockdown! Woo-hoo!’ Singleton LGA had recently been granted release, though we only knew this because Jeff happened to have the radio on while building at the investment property he’s been toiling away at for a year or so.
‘Truly?’ Over the phone you could almost hear her packing her bag, heading out the door and on her way to the club. ‘And the bad news?’
‘By “we” we mean only us: Singleton Council. Sorry Jude, you’re still in lockdown!’
‘Oh you little . . . You’re joking, aren’t you?’
‘No, sorry, Jude.’
I heard Mum relaying the information to Dad in a mournful tone.
‘Guess where I’m heading right now, Mum?’
‘Where?’
‘Singleton Diggers. I’m going straight to the pokies!’
‘You little dags,’ Mum said, but we all laughed. ‘Throw fifty in for me.’
‘Sorry, Jude, just couldn’t help ourselves,’ Jeff said.
‘Oh you’ll keep, Jiffy, don’t you worry.’
A few minutes later, my phone rang. It was Mum. She had a tone of excitement in her voice now, as though she’d finally cracked the Covid code.
‘If the Diggers is allowed to open, can’t I go there because it’s out of lockdown?’
‘No, Mum, sorry. Our area is out of lockdown, people in your area are not. They’ll probably be checking addresses at the door. If you pop onto the Service NSW website, change your address to ours and get a new sticker for your licence it could arrive in a few days and you’ll be free to spend all your time in any of our glorious clubs,’ I offered.
‘Worth a shot,’ Mum said.
Among the sticky spider’s web of new and constantly shifting rules and regulations, none of us had the foggiest idea what any of us were allowed to do. If our property had been declared out of lockdown, and Mum and Dad were both double vaxxed, would they now be allowed to picnic for one hour at our property and see us? In those situations I informed my parents to sit glued to A Current Affair – I knew they’d provide all the answers required.
Then when lockdowns were finally lifted, a whole raft of new concerns emerged, most of them technology related.
Sometimes I prefer the brain-driven tasks requested by my parents over the back-breaking ones requiring several painkillers. But, then again, I suppose it depends on whether or not it involves dealing with bureaucracies. I would like to take a moment to slow-clap the total brainiacs in government who, with months of prior notice, still made coming out of lockdown the most frustrating, infuriating part of the entire Covid debacle. The designers of each respective app and website seem to have gone out of their way to make navigating each nearly impossible for every human being aside from maybe Alan Turing. Getting MyGov to talk to Medicare to talk back to MyGov to talk to Service NSW . . . haven’t we all been through enough? It was like trying to solve a hyper colour Rubik’s Cube. During the process I repeatedly hurled myself at a brick wall for light comic relief. Eventually I managed to crack the code and I’ve never felt so triumphant in all my life. I don’t think I’ve surmounted a higher hurdle in my near fifty-year existence.
Given that, and my previous experiences with parents and phones, you won’t need me to explicitly outline how I felt when Dad informed me his local club had rejected the paper copy of his Doctor’s Certificate Proof of Vaccination, and asked me to do it electronically for him. I would have preferred he’d asked me to gnaw off my own arm after not washing it for three years. Anyway, being the stellar son that I constantly remind my brothers that I am, I agreed to help. After all, it threatened his very essence – a possible ban from entering the club where he called bingo.
Like a good mini-series, we split the saga up over multiple visits. And, on day three of my attempt to get Dad sorted, I finally achieved what at the outset had felt was about as likely as winning three lotteries consecutively. At this point I just had to teach Dad how to locate the certificate on his phone.
