Love in MIQ

There’s a sunlit square reflected at us through the new Christchurch Convention Centre windows.  It’s usually the hotel car park, but now it’s the MIQ exercise yard. We’re on the third floor, unlike some other lucky punters who have scored views from floors higher up. The online brochure depicts snow-capped mountains, a painted blue sky and that strange flatness that is the Canterbury Plains. Instead, we see the reflected shadows of people marching in a monotonous kind of circle.

It’s kind of flat in here too.  We arrived at 10 last Saturday morning in Auckland, fresh from Seoul via Singapore. I’d been following a spreadsheet created on a thread on an MIQ Facebook page that I’d joined.  It gave me very high odds of the Grand Mercure in Auckland for our stayover.  So, it was a shock when a fresh-faced army chap jumped on board our plane minutes after we’d landed to say we were heading to Christchurch

So here we are – my husband, John, and me – at the Crowne Plaza, Christchurch, on the third floor, with a view of the new Convention Centre.  We have two King single beds bedecked in fresh white linen, each single bed almost as big as my mum and dad’s double bed in the 50s. We’d requested single beds, realising 14 days in isolation might require moments of separation.

Arriving home to be greeted by the NZ Army took us back to travelling in the 70s. That moment when you landed and were told to stay seated, while one of the crew walked up and down the aisle fumigating the plane.  And then there was the ordeal with officious men at customs, mostly in shorts and long socks, who quizzed you as if you were part of an international crime spree and, hey, you’ve been caught. 

We learned the trick of over-declaring … acting like ingenue’s, so they rolled their eyes and ticked us through, while the extra alcohol or undeclared electronics stayed secreted in our bags.

So, it was a blast from the past when we disembarked from our flight at Christchurch airport and some kind woman from the Army, spotting John’s duty-free whisky purchased in Singapore, suggested he stop right there, open his bag and shove it in … or else, she warned, the hotel will take it off you.  

We are allowed one bottle of wine each a day in MIQ.  This to me sounds like a lot of wine.  John is finding it a perfect ration … you must leave the empty wine bottles outside your bedroom door before they replenish.  Currently, there are two empty bottles outside our room looking lonely on a dark and deserted hotel floor. 

Well, Friday I started drinking at lunchtime.  There’s a very sound reason for this. It was John’s birthday, and we had completed our 35 laps of the car park at 10am. 

One of our exercise call-ups was at 5am. We set the alarm, then promptly rolled over and went back to sleep. We were punished for this. The scheduled walkathon that evening at 10pm was cancelled.  Most of us are treading the well-worn rectangle, eyes down, sometimes overtaking slow walkers. There’s a certain courteous pattern to it all.  If someone is an extra slow walker, you take a wide berth and kind of overtake them without looking pushy. 

A newbie turns up, to enliven the sunlit square. She appears in golden sandals, shorts and a glowing tan, her long curling hair softly falling. She ambles, she wanders, she stops and reads the poems and artwork that decorate the enclosure. I mumble good morning through my mask and then wish I’d said, ‘Ata Mārie,’ or something more magical than good morning sounds. She beams back at me the way you do when your mouth is hidden and your eyes need to do all the work.

The nurses call at the door to do our nasal swab and they are delightful. Not the swabs, the nurses.  One nurse asks John if he still loves his wife. We are both standing masks on, in the doorway. All four of us, both nurses, John and I laughed so loudly, I can’t recall if he said yes.

While I am here in MIQ, I am working on the edits for my very first poetry collection, Formica. It will open with a poem that featured in the Friday Poem collection published by Luncheon Sausage Books and edited by er … the man the woman from Narrative Muse (the ones who got half a million) had to Google. Ah yes, Steve

Later it occurs to me that the nurse’s question was a secret code for a husband to say … no, help, help, or of course, vice versa.   The same nurse sang ‘Happy birthday to you’ to John through her surgical and Perspex masks.  We sang along.  She must have alerted the kitchen staff, because a birthday dessert treat arrived for John, iced with birthday wishes, plus a card signed by some of the staff.

There’s a rhythmic sound from the room next door each day at exactly the same time.  At first we cheer them on, but we come to realise, disappointingly, that it’s probably not the people next door at all but just a quirk of the building, a kind of tap-tap-tapping, but that’s how desperate things get in MIQ.  You look for signs of life everywhere.

I recall tut-tutting, early on in the first lockdowns, possibly in Australia, when lonely travellers forged relationships with the security guards. We were a wee bit outraged.  How dare they!  But look, I’m officially elderly, and after seven days in a four-star hotel with fresh white linen, if I didn’t have a companion I can see now how a nice man in uniform might go well with dessert. 

John and I live for the phone calls (they are automated) that advise us that food is at the door.  We sit with our headphones on watching separate Netflix series but always with one ear open for that telephone call.

The food is good. We were given a barcode that took us to an online form so we could complete our menu requests. Impressive. The meals have become tedious though. I’m not much of a salad girl, so the little pottles of salad are piling up on a shelf by the TV.

Today, our exercise slot is 6.30am. We’re up for it.  At first there are only three bubbles walking and this is doable. When it gets crowded with families, it becomes more challenging.  There are a number of people here with young children and toddlers have no understanding of two metres distance.

Watching a young couple early this morning trying to corral their two lively toddlers made me think with great sadness about the recent tragedy in Tīmaru, and the tragic loss of three young lives.. It’s not difficult to imagine the stress that family must have endured relocating to a new country through lockdowns and isolation in MIQ.  It’s both incomprehensible and yet not difficult to imagine the at times intolerable stresses.

It’s okay, we’re not seeking sympathy. We chose this. 

We had a brand-new grandson born in Seoul in May. He was rushed from the maternity hospital he was born in to ICU on the same day, due to a few breathing issues. This meant he was separated from both his mum and dad for the first ten days of his life.  We watched videos of him being caressed by nurses wearing plastic gloves.  So, you can imagine it was not something we dithered over when the South Korean government offered double-jabbed Kiwi parents or grandparents with family in Seoul a special three-month, quarantine-free ‘family sojourn’ visa. 

We did not wait to see if we could get a spot in MIQ.  It was an adventure.  We knew we could sit at home in our own wee bubble safely or grab the moment, so we grabbed it.

On arrival in Seoul, we had to download an app that would track us. Then we were whisked in a pre-booked taxi to our Airbnb via a Covid testing station. We had to remain in our Airbnb until we got our test results the next morning by text … negative. We had to report our daily temperature for a week via the app and have one more Covid test, and then we were able to delete the app and go free.

The highlight of that arrival, was standing on the sixth floor, looking out over a small balcony to the road below where our Seoul family stood waving to us. John swears that Oli, just four months at the time, raised his arm in a wave.  Such is the joy of seeing loved ones in the time of Covid.

We left New Zealand early August without a spot in MIQ, telling ourselves that surely by November double-jabbed people like ourselves would be allowed to self-isolate on return.  And then Delta broke out in Auckland, and we saw our chances fading, day by day.  Still, we consoled ourselves, here we are in Seoul with family.  We are safe.  We’ll get home eventually.  Our visa was a one-off, three-month visa, perhaps South Korea would kick us out – making us stateless and therefore NZ would have to let us in.  Turns out South Korea were happy to extend …  

None of this came to pass, just the first MIQ Lottery.  And we were successful.  I should leave a space here for the howls of outrage from those who missed out. I started reading them on Twitter and on FB and had to abandon that, as some of the cases are just so blatantly unfair

Here in MIQ, we’ve nearly made it. We’ve had our third negative nasal swab result and will have one more (day 12) before we are released.  Right now with the hotel at full capacity with 194 residents, it feels like leaving our room permanently could be the riskiest moment for us in terms of being exposed to Covid.

But, we know we are in safe hands. Today we got fresh linen and we danced to Jerusalema as we remade our own beds. We are grateful Kiwis…   and we’ll be home soon.

Maggie Rainey-Smith’s poetry collection Formica (The Cuba Press) will be released in March 2022.

Kia ora from Seoul.

Here I am reading a poem from my upcoming collection ‘Formica’ which is due out now next year (delay due to Covid and my being here in Seoul).

John looked at me just now and said ‘You’re wearing lipstick!’. Erhem, yes, I put on some lipstick for this poetry reading 🙂

At Stewart Dawson’s corner
was where I saw you, seated
all orange high-viz suiting, looking
tired and holding a sandwich

Like me, you look too old to still
be working. I can see the weariness
yet, I still have a spring in my step
at least that’s what I tell myself

Did I once kiss you at the cabaret?
down the lane by the old post office
Manners Street.  Was it the Sheridan?
Maybe you remember, maybe not.

You are a stranger in a high-viz suit
sitting on the pavement outside
what was once a flash jewellery shop
And who knows maybe we did once

Dance together at the cabaret back
in the day, when we Catholic girls
were cock teasers full of false promise
testing our allure against your erections

Then moving on to the next dance
partner with whom we might exchange
chaste kisses several if you please
flighty bright young things, even demure

At times not knowing what we would do
If the music stopped and there was just
you or some other bloke or someone new
who was prepared to… well, chance his arm

So it’s unlikely, but not impossible
we kissed one night at the cabaret
You look tired there on the pavement
as if waiting for a new song
I’m waiting for my bus to come

I talked to a man today who was here to
fix my house

He said he lived in an old maternity hospital
with double hung windows

We were talking about double glazing and
the cost of heating

He said, as he glued architraves to the inside
of my new bathroom door

His mother-in-law had been a nurse there, back
in the day when you could just don a uniform

His wife had been born in the same hospital
and I think his father-in-law

I can't be sure, as the fumes from the epoxy
might have muffled my memory

But I got the feeling this house that houses
him and his in-laws

where one or possibly two of them were born, 
might not need double glazing

It sounded like they were all keeping warm
on something modern building materials
in short supply, couldn't manufacture anyway

The Ever Given

Even Farmers wouldn’t give us credit
to buy a cutlery set because we owed
no one anything back then and friends
gave us shelter housing us and our Aiwa

That had come from London with us
through the newly opened Suez
all the way from Shepherds Bush
with Bohemian Rhapsody on vinyl

We saw King Tut in situ and a small boy
in Somalia, living in a Sony TV carton
A man with a gun patrolled The Sphinx
In Cairo, but there were very few tourists

In Auckland, my sister met our ship
which if you knew her was a bold and
beautiful moment for us all, but more in
retrospect as many things in life are

We were home with 50 cents between us
relying on friends with kids and a spare
bedroom, determined never to succumb
to suburbia, certain we knew better

When the ‘Ever Given’ blocked the Suez
recently, we marvelled at just how narrow
the canal really is and how tall the ship was
laden with who knows what, people

speculated, perhaps needles for our
vaccine roll-out, or fabric for front-line
workers… people worried because a
shipment of sex toys was stranded

not all happy endings can be bought
and paid for and we knew that
Like Freddy we’d tried to break free
Only to find a quiet beauty in domesticity

And now that we are officially elderly
we are grateful to the ‘Ever Given
reminding us we once sailed the Suez
homeward, filled with towering ambition
only to turn sideways and if not exactly
stuck, definitely frequently adrift

 

My first novel ‘About turns’ started life as a draft called Colonel Bogey. When it came time for publishing this book, Random House (2005) asked around their office if any of their staff knew what Colonel Bogey was… it seemed this old marching tune was unknown. I’m very grateful, as the new title which I decided on, is the best and a lovely play on words. But anyway, I’ve written a poem instead, called ‘Colonel Bogey’… a marching poem. I kind of like that my writing goes not highbrow but with the less literary to review our Kiwi lives.

Through the creaking turnstile

Like sheep for the dipping, guts

aflutter, hats askew, excitedly

busbies, chinstraps, multi-coloured

feathers, barely eaten breakfasts

onto the long-forgotten mudflat

home to the rugby, the cricket

and sometimes  marching girls

claimed the paddock, named

after the battle of Trafalgar, for

after all, this was Nelson in the

sixties and all things Colonial

Legs dressed in Coppertone, DHA

on dead skin cells, the smell of

every tournament, the orange of it

Kilted men with bags and chanters

juggling drones, cradling tartan

bags for music lovingly underarm

the skirl, the dying whine, the

underlying groan of it, a singular

drum, the thrum and thrill of it

Oh, how we loved the pipers

Their hairy be-skirted masculine legs

The seduction of their sporrans

But the kneel-down salute or pivot

wheels needed a brass band drumkit

precision in each beat to match our feet

The Pipers stirred our hearts, lifted

our spirits, but a Piper out of breath

could spell death to the display march

it began with the fall-in, serious stuff

with callipers measuring every inch

along the matching backs of boot heels

Marker, the Leader would call, and

as if summoned by God, she would

march precisely, the perfect steps

Landing squarely on that white disc

for to miss the disc was to upend

our chances of making the medals

By the end of the day, leg tan stained

the seats of the grandstand, hats sat

askew, spectators started to dwindle

All we wanted was the music to fill the

park, our hearts returned to the pipers

to the kilted drum major, his mace of silver

The maze march, our triumph, banners

aloft, tubas and drones, multiple drums

and who knows, perhaps Colonel Bogey

The girls who went to private schools

and learned to do a pirouette at bar

would secretly look and envy us from afar

….

But only now they dare to admit this.