In Quarantine – by Megan Clement
ISLAND | ISSUE 162
There is a BP petrol station stamped into the psyche of every person who lives in Melbourne. It sits, with its attached McDonald’s, on your left as you drive out of the airport and onto the freeway into town. For six million people, it is a symbol that our journeys – inevitably long ones if we have flown in from abroad – are over, and that we are home.
The station, the golden arches and three scarlet, kangaroo-emblazoned tailfins of grounded Qantas jumbo jets are what I see from the bolted-shut window of my room on the fifth floor of the Melbourne Airport Holiday Inn. I am in hotel quarantine. Quarantine is what they call it on the government websites, but the notice I was handed by border officials when I got off the plane from Doha made no secret of the fact that I am in detention.
The neon green BP sign across the road means the opposite of what it used to. It means I am stuck in this liminal space, with a guard at my door 24/7, squirrelled away to protect the health of Australians everywhere.
This would be fine except for the fact that I’m here for 14 days and my father is dying and I don’t know if he has 14 days left. My dad’s health is the only reason I would fly any distance at all during this pandemic and now I must spend my time in this hotel pleading with officials to grant me an exemption to see him on compassionate grounds.
When the plane landed late on a Monday evening, before we were allowed to disembark, passengers were threatened four times with imprisonment for breaking quarantine. We were then met by a conga line of border protection officers and told not to photograph them under further risk of prison. They shuffled us into socially distanced lines, took our forms, scanned our bags, barked directions.
After passing the gauntlet of border officials, I was handed a snack-pack by cheery airport staff in bright orange vests. It contained some iconic Australian biscuits and a small cup of water.
Welcome home. Have a Tim Tam. Don’t leave quarantine or you’ll go to jail.
“Welcome home. Have a Tim Tam. Don’t leave quarantine or you’ll go to jail.”
*
Tim Tams in hand, we are loaded onto a bus, driven past the out-of-commission planes that line the airport runways and onward to the Holiday Inn. For mystifying reasons, we are asked to get off the bus in pairs of smokers and non-smokers. There is, the woman who boards the bus to give instructions assures us, ‘a process’, and this process seems to involve knowing who is busting for a cigarette and who is not. A German couple carrying a four-month-old baby who has part-circumnavigated the globe are not impressed with this process at all.
By this point I have not yet been able to ask anyone if I can have compassionate leave from quarantine to see my father. I have two medical certificates in my inbox, forwarded to me by my mother, who apologised for the contents in advance. The one from our family GP is circumspect and says that my father is terminally ill and declining. The other one from the palliative care service is more direct – naming the cancer and stating that he has ‘days/week’ to go.
In the seven years since he was first diagnosed, this is the first time anyone has given me any kind of time frame on when the end will be. I am grateful for it. It’s a written, signed indication that 14 days will be too long, that I must, surely, get an exemption to see him.
But no one at the Melbourne Airport Holiday Inn wants to see my medical certificates. At the airport they promised me someone would look when I arrived but the first woman I see, who takes my credit card and gives me my room number, says she can’t deal with compassionate exemptions, and that the woman at the next desk will help me. This woman says she can’t help – her job is just to give me more pieces of paper about quarantine, not provide exemptions – but the next woman can. She says she can’t help either, and so it goes on.
The problem is that every time I have to explain the situation to a new person down the chain, I can’t get out the word ‘compassionate’ without bursting into tears, which slows the whole process down.
‘It’s really overwhelming, isn’t it?’ one staff member says to me as I approach her, referring to the overwrought check-in process.
‘No,’ I say, ‘it’s not that – my father …’ and the tears begin again.
The final person I am passed to is a mental health nurse, who probably would have saved everyone a lot of time if she’d been at the top of the chain.
‘How are you feeling?’ she asks.
The only word I can get out is ‘sad’.
She begins a spiel about how travelling during a pandemic can be stressful and I have to beg her to stop.
‘I’m sad because my dad … Please, let me just go to my room.’
She waves me along.
‘I’m sorry,’ I tell the woman whose job it is to take me up. I have just said the same to the German family, holding over my face the fistful of detention notices, privacy statements and mental wellbeing handbooks I am carrying so that I no longer have to look at another person who doesn’t know what to say to me, and they no longer have to look at the hot, red mess unfolding above my tear-soaked mask.
‘It’s okay,’ they say. My room chaperone does not tell me it’s okay. But in the lift, she asks me what’s wrong.
‘My father is dying,’ I say, and I have now had to say that enough times that I can get the whole sentence out in one go without sobbing.
‘Oh man, it’s terrible. I had a woman here the other day, come home ’cause her dad died. When we got her here, she got a phone call – her mum had gone too!’
I look at her blankly and try to find words. The ones that come out are these: ‘Why would you tell me that?’
The lift dings at my floor.
‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘It’s hard to know what to say.’
It is difficult to argue with that.
*
What follows are two hours of calling the Department of Health’s coronavirus hotline, being put on hold, being disconnected, calling reception and being told they’ll call me back, which they never do.
I finally get through to a woman on the coronavirus hotline who says brightly, ‘Sure! I can help you with that!’ when I tell her my father is dying, as if I were trying to return a defective vacuum cleaner. She directs me to an online form, which appears to be for diplomats and people who are terminally ill themselves who want to quarantine elsewhere. ‘It’s all the same form,’ she says, sounding dubious, before suggesting I call reception again.
“I finally get through to a woman on the coronavirus hotline who says brightly, ‘Sure! I can help you with that!’ when I tell her my father is dying, as if I were trying to return a defective vacuum cleaner. She directs me to an online form, which appears to be for diplomats and people who are terminally ill themselves who want to quarantine elsewhere. ‘It’s all the same form,’ she says, sounding dubious, before suggesting I call reception again.”
Everyone I speak to about my situation says I need permission from the Authorised Officer in order to leave the hotel, but no one will tell me who that is, or how to contact them. It is not apparent who the Authorised Officers even work for, and initially, no one will say. After a string of phone calls to the hotline and some further consultation of my various detention orders, it becomes clear that they are bureaucrats who have been handed wide-ranging emergency powers. And so, my fate lies entirely with these mysterious officers, who rotate through the hotel lobby throughout the day.
It is a tearful night and morning on the phone to more and more unhelpful people before a mental health nurse calls to check on me. I have been, until this point, avoiding the mental health nurses in case I somehow get a sign on my door that says ‘MENTALLY UNSTABLE’ next to the one that says ‘QUINOA ALLERGY’ (I know), and the one that says ‘VEGAN’ (I’m not). I am trying not to damage my case further.
But the nurse is the first person to tell me that yes of course I can go and see my dad. They arrange this for people all the time. It’s only fair. They just have to ask … the Authorised Officer.
The Authorised Officer turns out to be the same woman who denied any knowledge of compassionate exemptions the night before. But at 3 pm she says yes, I can go once, and now. She instructs me to don full PPE and tells me I have three hours, no matter how long it takes the cab to get from the airport to my parents’ home. Thankfully, they live nearby.
‘Sometimes we have to take people all the way to Ringwood, and it takes more than an hour to get there so they have to just turn back around – it’s just heartbreaking,’ she says. ‘So why not just give them longer?’ I think, but do not say.
*
The taxi takes me to my parents’ home without incident. My dad is thrilled, from the hospital bed installed in the spare bedroom, that the whole family is together – my mother, my brother, me and him. It makes everything worth it, of course it does. There is no hugging; social distance is kept. We talk about his favourite painting in the Prado, the sunny Melbourne winter, scrambled eggs. And I am here, when it matters, as I always told myself I would be.
After my visit, it is back to the Melbourne Airport Holiday Inn microstate, population 100, where I settle in for the long haul. One of the onsite mental health nurses calls me each morning. They are without exception kind, competent, and know how to talk to a person whose parent is dying. In the entire 207-room building, they are alone in this.
The nurse asks me to rate my mental state on a scale from zero to ten. I take a few moments to consider what the most strategic answer would be to describe my howling grief – the one that will give me the greatest chance of being allowed to see my father again, without raising enough red flags to land me in a different type of facility altogether. ‘Three? Four?’ I say, noncommittally. This seems to land nicely, which I note for next time.
My dad had to answer similar questions at various stages of his illness. When our family doctor asked how he was feeling after learning that there was no more treatment available for his cancer, he responded with a hearty eight out of ten. He later told my mother he was considering a nine but thought that would be a bit much.
Every time I have asked my father how he is feeling over the past seven years, no matter if in hospital hooked up to oxygen or drinking a coffee with brandy in a Paris café ‘like Maigret’, the answer has been some variation of ‘good’ or ‘great’. He has always been fond of saying he is an eternal optimist.
I had thought it might be confronting to see my dad in this hospital bed at home, frail and in the final stages of decline. But the reverse is true. I am thrilled to see him. It is an emotion that is clearly related to grief but one that also feels adjacent to joy.
He is very clearly still the same man who took me on union demonstrations as soon as I was old enough to march, who taught me to love jazz and yell at the England football team and identify different types of birds, who insisted we go on a boat wherever we went on holiday, no matter how landlocked our destination. The man so hopelessly terrible at DIY that he glued his feet to the floor while trying to repair a kitchen drawer. In this hospital bed, as anywhere, he still has his characteristic grin – the smile of the eternal optimist.
*
As I pass my days in the Holiday Inn, my campaign to see my dad continues. But my case is not helped by the fact that Melbourne is going through what at the time looks like a coronavirus flare-up and what will later become a second wave that engulfs the state.
Some of the new cases are reported to be among hotel quarantine security guards, one of whom sits outside my room in case I should try to make an unauthorised escape. It is abundantly clear how this happened. The guards I see at the Holiday Inn are universally lovely people who are clearly woefully untrained for a public health emergency and underprepared to operate in what should be hospital-like conditions. When nurses turn up at my door, they are in full HAZMAT suits. When security guards do, they have hastily tied single-use masks, and sometimes gloves.
“When nurses turn up at my door, they are in full HAZMAT suits. When security guards do, they have hastily tied single-use masks, and sometimes gloves.”
In my trip out to spend time with my dad, I see them trying to disinfect lifts and find absent bins for used PPE with little support or guidance. When I ask what to do with my own used PPE, I am instructed to simply put it into the empty hands of the guard escorting me to my room.
*
Diagonally opposite the BP station is a multistorey carpark that briefly became world-famous in 2013 when a kangaroo got loose in there, in one great bounce doing great damage to po-faced urbanites’ insistence that we don’t just have marsupials hopping all over the place in our globally important, sophisticated cities. The kangaroo was eventually captured by animal control, who noted that its rather endearing habit of licking its paws was in fact a sign of great distress.
Looking at the carpark, I briefly consider telling the mental health nurses on my next call that I have been licking my paws, but I fear this will not ultimately help my cause.
Anyway, I am trying to get my heating fixed.
When the maintenance team arrives, I am instructed to lock myself in the bathroom, and I comply. I am happy to hide in the bathroom. I am happy to receive an inedible lunch at my door at 11.30 am before my jetlag-riddled brain has even reconciled itself to the idea of breakfast. I am happy to be allowed a single ‘fresh-air break’ each week.
I am happy to stare out of my window for hours at the BP and the kangaroo carpark and the planes that never take off. I am happy to receive the ‘daily puzzle page’ that is pushed under my door each morning (Question One: What is the world’s largest island? Hint: You are on it). I will be as good and compliant and bathroom-concealed as I can be if it will help me get permission to see my dad again.
Unfortunately, the phone rings when I am still sequestered in the shower; the Authorised Officer is calling to give me an update on my situation and though I dash to the ringing phone as soon as the maintenance men leave, I miss it by seconds. When I call back, I am scolded. I must make myself available to the Authorised Officer at all times, the Authorised Officer tells me.
He is calling to inform me that I may go to see my dad again, now, but not again afterwards. I am not given any PPE this time, and I do not ask why, quickly donning the personal mask that I brought with me from Paris before I leave my room. There is no nurse on hand as there was before, just another kind and poorly equipped guard to take me to the taxi. I stay as far away from him as I can.
When I arrive, I sit with Dad again. He mostly sleeps and I mostly read. My brother has bought me a blanket for my chilly room and some coffee to help fight the jetlag. My dad wants to know when I’m moving. Eleven days, I tell him.
*
Here is the thing. I was supposed to have been prepared for this. I have had seven years to plan this journey. We had cleared with my partner’s boss for him to come with me when the time came. I had warned various employers over the years of the possibility that I would have to drop everything and fly to Australia; I had rehearsed taking the trip many times over in my head.
At no point in all those years of imagining this scenario did the Melbourne Airport Holiday Inn with its view of the BP make an appearance. At no point did begging Authorised Officers for compassion come to mind. At no point did hiding in the bathroom from maintenance men under orders from the government feature in my plans.
“At no point in all those years of imagining this scenario did the Melbourne Airport Holiday Inn with its view of the BP make an appearance. At no point did begging Authorised Officers for compassion come to mind. At no point did hiding in the bathroom from maintenance men under orders from the government feature in my plans.”
Since March 2020, the planet has been full of people who cannot get home to see a dying parent. There are people who cannot say goodbye to loved ones who die in their own town or suburb. Yet those of us who feasibly could, still boarded near-empty planes to try. This is one of the most exquisitely painful realities of this baffling, exhausting pandemic and my hard-fought ability to sit with my father will be something I hold onto for the rest of my life. I am one of the lucky ones.
So, I am not angry at most of the people involved in quarantine, which I understand I must undertake. The only exceptions are some of the Authorised Officers who, when I ask for permission to see my father, tell me I may only leave to witness his actual moment of death, as if there is a way to book a taxi in advance to be ready for such a thing, before threatening me with jail one more time for good measure.
*
If Australia’s default to obsessive border control is one part of its coronavirus response, the other, much more laudable, part is its health system.
This is the machinery that not only kept my dad alive for seven years after a very serious cancer diagnosis – one that I believe would have killed him quickly in other countries – but, with well-timed, low-impact chemotherapy treatment, also allowed him to spend much of those seven years having fun. He visited me in Europe, ate lobster on the beach on the Australian coast, looked out on the Flinders Ranges and walked the Alhambra. He did charity work for survivors of asbestosis and was a rabble-rouser at his local branch of the Labor Party.
His treatment was in world-class cancer facilities, carried out with expertise and empathy by a peerless team of surgeons, oncologists, nurses, GPs, physiotherapists and palliative care specialists. Virtually all of it was completely free.
When I talk to people about his illness, they are prepared for me to talk about my sadness, and the intense difficulty of living many thousands of miles away from him while he was in treatment. What they are not prepared for is my gratitude.
Australia never clapped for health staff, as we did in France, and others did in the UK and the USA during the height of the COVID-19 crisis. But the people who gave me these years with my father are the people who dug Victoria out of the mire during the second wave, just as much as the politicians who closed the borders.
*
I am one of the last arrivals to pass through the doors of the Melbourne Airport Holiday Inn before the second wave shuts down Victoria’s hotel quarantine entirely. During my stay, the Skybus will stop coming to the carpark below my window, disgorging its befuddled passengers one by one into 14 days of solitude, smoker by non-smoker.
The fresh-air breaks I am given at the start of my stay will be withdrawn. The daily quiz will stop. From my window, I will watch the tiny German baby press its sticky hands to the glass on another floor. The planes parked, the skies empty.
We will be talked about in parliament, this German baby, its parents and me. Our experiences will be tabled in inquiries. We will be excoriated on Twitter by those who think we Our experiences will be tabled in inquiries. We will be excoriated on Twitter by those who think we should have stayed away. ‘Why are they here?’ people will ask of us. ‘Why didn’t they come home earlier when they had the chance?’
“Our experiences will be tabled in inquiries. We will be excoriated on Twitter by those who think we should have stayed away. ‘Why are they here?’ people will ask of us. ‘Why didn’t they come home earlier when they had the chance?’”
I want to tell these people what it’s like to be in a race between an aggressive cancer in someone else’s body and the incubation period for the virus that might inhabit mine. I want to tell them how much I don’t want to be here, how much I don’t want to be losing my father, how prepared I was supposed to be.
They do not care. They are seduced by their concept of Australia-as-fortress. The island prison founded on dispossession and kept ‘lucky’ by the brutal enforcement of its external borders.
*
On my 12th day in quarantine, the Victorian government locks down the public housing towers in Flemington.
The residents of the towers have many fewer rights than the residents of the Melbourne Airport Holiday Inn and had none of the same opportunities to make their own choices. They have boarded no plane, they have not brought any viruses in from anywhere. All they have done is to be part of a community that has been under-served and over-policed by their government for decades, and now they are in the world’s strictest lockdown with 30 minutes’ advance notice as a result. They too will be the subject of an inquiry. It will find that their human rights have been violated.
‘How can they do this?’ my mum says to me down the phone. I am sitting on the hotel bed watching the news, huddled beneath my brother’s blanket. We both know how. It has been 20 years and we understand this place well enough by now.
My dad has stayed alive for longer than anyone expected. I talk to him down the phone every night. ‘Hiya, Meg,’ he says, each time a bit weaker. Two more days, I tell myself. Two more days. In his bed, he theorises through a morphine haze about how to get the Greens and the ALP to get along. He drinks Gatorade. He surprises us all. I need him to keep surprising us for two more days.
*
My exit from the Melbourne Airport Holiday Inn is delayed. I have upset the Authorised Officer by tweeting about what is going on here – the lack of PPE, the untrained, unsupported guards, the stream of external guests checking in and out. He thought we were mates. I’m worried he’s punishing me.
The rooms around me empty out one by one as I wait and wait and will my dad to keep going. I am so close.
At 3 pm, I climb into the back of a taxi. The driver pulls out of the carpark and onto the slip-road to the freeway. We pass the BP, leaving it in the rear-view mirror, growing smaller and smaller as we speed into Melbourne. We leave behind the Holiday Inn and its last handful of guests. We leave behind the political mess and drive into the heart of the second wave and a coming four-month lockdown. But we do not know that yet. For now, I am home, I am lucky, and for one more day, my father is alive. ▼
This essay won the Island Nonfiction Prize, which was supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.
Image: Chris McLay
This story appeared in Island 162 in 2021. Order a print issue here.
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