by Fiona Scott-Norman @fscottnorman
Dance With Death
PHOTOS BY JAMES BRAUND
I posted a photo of my partner – The Lovely Greg™ – sitting alone in his dressing-gown, eating his dinner alfresco in the backyard, next to the open kitchen door. He cuts a distant figure, seemingly banished like a naughty dog, since I’m clearly eating inside. But the distance is deliberate. It means we eat “together”, and can both watch Mad As Hell. He has COVID, I do not; we’re trying to keep it that way. One of my friends, concerned by the optics, frets in the Facebook comments: “Shouldn’t he be inside? He’s the sick one.” Ahaha no. COVID is an aerosol. COVID is airborne. Greg is huffing pathogens 24/7 like an automatic, plug-in, frangipani-scented air-freshener. Greg – who reported appreciating the cool breeze on his fevered brow, what with some COVID symptoms being menopause adjacent – absolutely sat outside. We waved, and settled in to watch Tosh Greenslade inhabit the skin of Peter Dutton. There is, it transpires, a dance afoot. The dance of dodging COVID, even though it’s officially Behind Us. Doneski. “It’s over!” shouted one middle-aged white guy at a mate of mine outside Melbourne’s Arts Centre. “Take the fucking mask off.” Define “over”. Australia is crawling with virus right now; it’s like ants on a dropped chunk of picnic chicken. Today’s time-of-writing
snapshot is 35 deaths, 43,000 infections, and the third-highest daily per 100,000 infection rate in the world – go us – and my socials are awash with photos of RATs with two lines and sad face emojis. We are trying to ghost COVID by telling ourselves it’s over, but girlfriend, you’re fooling yourself – we are very much still dating. And sure, COVID feels inevitable now – it’s more everywhere than Eddie McGuire in his heyday – but why are we framing it as equivalent to a cold or the flu? It’s… not. Omicron is labelled “mild”, but it’s not mild mild. It’s not “the cheese you give your four‑year-old because it has no flavour”. Omicron mild is measured against how likely it is to collapse the health system. “Mild” translates to “a manageable percentage of cases will need admission to ICU, intubation, and the phone number of a funeral home”. There’s no immunity with COVID; you can catch it multiple times. There’s a dumpster of reasons to not dismiss it as a cold, but the biggie is that it makes us underestimate recovery. Regular COVID – not even long COVID – can come with a side order of fatigue and brain fog that can last for months. It’s your body siphoning energy to deal with the viral damage. This is the new normal. Remember the Codral “Soldier On” ads? Everyone popping some tabs and back on deck to service capitalism? Do not do this; you will hurt yourself. It took 12 days for Greg to test negative. Bog standard. I dodged it this time. We’d kept the doors and windows open, I slept in the front room, and we had one masked outdoor “date” dusting chicken cloacae with anti-mite powder. Still dancing. A lot of us are. You will know us by our N95s. And the trail in our wake of people screaming for us to take our effing masks off.
Fiona is a writer and comedian, who could well be The Masked Avenger.
13 MAY 2022
L
ast year, during the great forgetting, I took an online solo jazz-dance class with Ramona, my favourite teacher, who moves like sunshine on water. It had been a year, more, away from swing dancing, and I creaked through it. Rusty? Shove me in the garden and call me a rustic sculpture. Lindy Hop is a joyous hyper-social partner dance that makes you sweat and puff like a buffalo, and was cancelled about 10 seconds after COVID announced itself as a thing. Ramona and I mourn the live scene. I miss…dancing.
We had one masked outdoor ‘date’ dusting chicken cloacae with anti-mite powder.
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Fiona
