​Cynthia and her family live in the lee of Mt Atkinson, the first hill you meet as you approach the Waitakere Ranges from Auckland. The sides of the hill are clad in the olive greens of kauri, rimu and tall kanaka with a spattering of houses set in amidst the trees, whose warm lights shine out from the mists which wrap around the peak in winter. There is a clearing at the top and from there you can see all of Auckland, out to the seas and to the horizons, beyond which lie Chile on one side and Australia on the other.
 
The kitchen of our house was where I ministered to others during lockdown. I over-filled my family and the freezer with the results of slow, time laden cooking; with red wine reductions, miso butter, Lebanese garlic pastes, pâtés, soups, elaborate meals, fragrant loaves of warm ciabatta and baking fresh from the oven. And, despite what was happening to us all, I was happy. I was serving up care for those I loved.
 
If being confined to this space was a restriction, a yoke, then it inexplicably sat lightly upon my shoulders. I had a contribution to make.
 
Those sunny lockdown weeks seem an age ago now. For some time, as winter approached, we have gone about our lives at alert level 1. The risks of the virus here are very low. Restrictions on domestic movement and interactions have been relaxed.
 
And yet I am not.
 
I have become hypervigilant. Over alert. It turns out that, for me, lockdown has a long, restless tail. I am unable to relax, perpetually aware that, as we go about our unfettered lives, our islands sit in a blessed, calm pool, while the rest of the world is battened down in the midst of a hurricane. Below the horizon, life looks normal, yet illness has touched the lives of us all, and uncaged, is frantically beating her dirty wings in the storm, spreading droplets and fear.
 
Even in my sleep I mine the minutiae of my days for any anomaly which indicates something hidden, something buried just beneath the surface. I have developed a crepuscular habit of wide-awake worry. My ears are pinned back, and my tail is tucked between my legs. This is not my way. But the virus is a threat I don’t know how to fight.
 
So, as there is nothing I can contribute now, I am trying to be still and to breathe slowly as life gets busy and demanding again. I seek a pause, a moment, an opportunity to rub balm on a perpetual itch, a subcutaneous state of concern for our world. 
 
I find these moments in the eyes of my dog; in the shine on the back of an emerald ladybird resting briefly on the leaves of the rhododendron; in bird song from high in the trees; and in the tilt of a blackbird’s head as she listens intently to the industry of worms beneath her feet. The winter snowdrops, little silent white bells rung by the breeze, bring quiet moments of delight.
 
It is to the lessons of nature, not escitalopram that I turn to calm myself. I want to be able to look our new future in the face without fear, allow myself to contribute again and help build something different and better after the storm passes. And it will. That is one of nature’s lessons.

Faith Cleverley is a journalist in Tamaki Makaurau. She graduated from the AUT Postgraduate Journalism course in 2019 with the top journalism diploma and the deans award in communications.  She has a Bachelor of Arts from Victoria University in Criminology and Social Policy. Faith is invested in diversifying the types of stories we see and read in Aotearoa. She lives above the Zoo with her sister and friend. 

The days of quarantine are now a faint recollection. The constant assimilation required to survive these massive changes in our lives has dulled my memory.
 
I have been thinking about Covid-19 and the tragedy it has inflicted on our global community. The scale of this my mind cannot make sense of, particularly as we live in a haven that has (so far) avoided the suffering seen in other countries. Lives are becoming the collateral of greedy leadership.  
 
I have been thinking about the Black Lives Matter movement. It is from this abundance of time as people stay indoors that a grass roots political movement could take hold in the USA and worldwide. Capitalism has consistently insured against revolt through monopolising our time. The social revolution happening now has been made possible because people have had time to organise, protest and imagine. The speed in which our lives have drastically changed is hopeful, we are capable of rapid transformation when needs must…  and needs must.
 
I see empathy seeping into our collective consciousness. Most of my friends are receiving government support; job seekers benefits, unemployment cheques and artist’s subsidies, perhaps nurturing a generation of people who see no shame in needing. 
 
Coronavirus has exposed the innate neediness of being human. I see true freedom in knowing how much we need each other; to feel loved, to experience joy, to survive and succeed. To embrace needing completely is to know how to give and to love. 
 
I spent ‘lockdown’ at my home in Tamaki Makaurau. Our neighbour’s cat became part of our unit as we took joy in caring for her. We don’t know what her real name is but we called her Esthy. She is waiting outside my door when I come home from work most days. I imagine she wonders where we have gone. The hours of lounging on our front porch are over as “free” time leaks away into “productivity”. I am grateful I live now without fear of Covid-19. I feel lucky to spend more time with friends and family. I miss having time laid out endlessly before me.

​Eva de Jong is in her second year of studying for a Bachelor of Arts at Victoria University and completed a Creative Writing Course at the Institute of Modern Letters in 2020. Eva’s story ‘Islands’ was short-listed for the 2020 National Flash Fiction Youth Competition. Eva is passionate about writing and won the Prize for Poetry at Epsom Girls Grammar School in her senior year.
 
Over a socially-distanced morning tea break, Max tells Mary he loves her. Mary is looking into her coffee when he confesses:

“I love you, Mary.”

Mary pulls her dark hair behind her ear and removes a single Air-pod.
 
“I’m good Max, how are you?” 

“What?” he gasps, and then, “I-I’m good.” 

Two metres of hollow space separates their tables. It is a government-ordered chasm, a distance that sets everybody apart for their own good. It could have been an ocean.
 
“Lousy isn’t it?” Mary holds up a limp mask between her fingers. Max thinks again about how she has the most beautiful pale hands he has ever seen. 

“Lot of good it’ll do me; I can barely breathe in the bloody thing,” she sighs and Max gulps back the last of his coffee.

“It’s hard - it makes it hard, you know, to in some ways...breathe,” he agrees. Mary looks at him blankly.

“Yeah,” she says, “You alright mate?”

The curved points of Max’s ears are shiny and red, and he runs his hand over his glistening forehead.

“Yeah. Fine.” He drops his hand into his lap, eyes staying fixed on the wall ahead. 

“I think the extra shifts are getting to everyone,” she says gently. 

Max can feel her green eyes on him, soft and blinking.
 
“I better get back to work Mary,” he whispers hoarsely. Then he leaps up from his seat and yanks his mask back over his mouth.
 
“Oh. See you soon then, Max!” She calls.
 
Max turns from his table and walks quickly away. There is a single moment, between turning and walking, when he could reach her table across the two-metre gap.  He could touch the hand that rests there, wrist upturned and the palm glowing white, like light pulsing from a bacteria-ridden angel. 
 

Keith Woodley has been resident manager at the Pūkorokoro Miranda Shorebird Centre for 27 years. He is the author of Godwits: Long-haul champions and Shorebirds of New Zealand: Sharing the margins.
 
What pandemic? The weather was benign. Across the paddocks to the north west, the bulky Hunua Ranges under a cloudless sky: across the bay to the east, the ridges of the Coromandel. A wheeling harrier overhead, and above the shoreline flocks of oystercatchers commuting to their high tide roost on the shell bank. Hard to countenance that, away from this idyll, the world was plunging into turmoil. 
My bubble was a big one: the Shorebird Centre and its grounds and the long strip of coastal reserve opposite. On one of my walks there were two figures in the landscape, about half a kilometre away. Just two weeks earlier, it had been common enough as people used the trail system between the bird hides. Now the first thought, though fleeting: who are these intruders into my space?

Familiar features were encountered in a new context. The pukekos normally resident around the pond and wider centre grounds, were now fossicking at the front steps. A white-faced heron took to standing on the deck peering in through the ranch slider. This I took to be neighbourhood watch.
Quite new was the scene at the eastern end of the Kopu bridge outside Thames. Trips to the supermarket were once routine, almost unthinking exercises. Three weeks into Level Four my return home was interrupted by a police checkpoint. The middle-aged constable leaning in through the window asking the purpose of my journey was certainly novel.

On Thursday April 2, a friend called.  ‘Commiserations’, she said. “For what?’ “The Listener, it is gone.’ I was a long-time subscriber but said I would only miss some of it. In recent months I was probably reading only one in four cover stories. There were, however, columnists I would certainly miss: Jane Clifton and anything by Paul Thomas. But it was a sudden death in the age of Covid. So was losing songwriter John Prine who had been part of my soundtrack since the 1970s. The concert in Auckland early last year now assumed enormous significance.

There was also a question of latitude. Diurnal cues – changing day-length – trigger hormonal changes that prompt a migratory bird to complete its moult, store fuel, and migrate. By the second half of April birds from New Zealand, bound for the Arctic, are refuelling along the coasts of China and Korea. Since 2015 that is where I have been at this time, counting shorebirds in North Korea. Now I am on the wrong side of the equator: thus, Anzac Day at home for the first time in five years.
​
But there was uplifting news of normal systems still functioning. Several of the godwits that had been fitted with GPS tags at Pūkorokoro in November, were now refuelling on the shores of the Yellow Sea. By Level Two, they were at breeding sites in Alaska. Even better was news of some particularly special red knots. These small shorebirds specialise in eating tiny shellfish. A few dozen birds had been affected by a suspected toxic algal bloom in February.  After two weeks recovery at rehabilitation centres, they were fitted with coded leg flags and released. That this happened on the eve of their normal migration departure for eastern Russia suggested they would be behind in their preparations and would remain here for the winter. But there was to be no lockdown for them. They too were seen in China.

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Based in Wellington, Gregory O'Brien is a poet, artist, essayist and art curator. His most recent books are 'Always song in the water' (AUP 2019) and Melvin Day--Painter (VUP 2019). An exhibition of his paintings, 'The wading birds of Drybread' opens at the Ashburton Art Gallery in August 2020. His art is also included in the group exhibition 'Wai--the water project' at Pataka Art Museum, Porirua.
 
Janet Frame’s The Carpathians will be the last of the novels published during her lifetime to be translated into French. Esperluete will be releasing the book early in 2021 (a few months later than planned) in a translation by Pierre Furlan. It was Pierre who contacted me in March this year to see if I was interested in doing cover artwork for the French edition. The last time I provided cover art for Esperluete had been a few years earlier—for John Mulgan’s Man Alone (‘Seul’), also translated by Pierre.
​
During the course of my correspondence with Pierre concerning the cover, he asked me a few questions about Janet Frame and some minor linguistic details of the book which were perplexing him. After what must have been a useful exchange of emails, he mentioned to the publisher the fact that I had visited Janet Frame a number of times while she was drafting the novel. As a result, they asked if I would be interested in writing an ‘Afterword’ for the forthcoming edition, offering a personal response to the book and possibly a way-in for French readers who, they suspected, might struggle with the strangeness of the novel and the unfamiliarity of its setting.

So it was that, during the Covid-19 lockdown, I found Janet Frame was very much in my bubble. I re-read Michael King’s biography, and I spent many hours mulling over two novels in particular--The Carpathians (‘Les Carpates’ in the French edition) and A State of Siege— both of which felt disarmingly attuned to the present global crisis. To be honest, both novels felt darker—and, certainly, more real—than when I last read them. Janet’s accustomed themes of social disintegration, dysfunction, toxicity, sanity, health and states of well-being had never felt more relevant. She remains, inarguably, the New Zealand writer most attuned to individual and societal manifestations of fragmentation and collapse. Towards the end of The Carpathians, the residents of Kowhai St in Puamahara (a thinly veiled Levin) are swept up in an apocalyptic course of events. It’s easy to start thinking that Janet Frame’s Memory Star, which is to blame for the empty streets and the altered ‘reality’ later in the book, is a precursor of the coronavirus: Covid-19 reconfigured as a satellite or asteroid. Her prescient novel has much to say of our current predicament and how we might eventually come to terms with it: ‘The inner tempests of a street, a town, a country, a world may be sensed, perhaps measured and recorded by poets and other artists, and later by historians, but it is certain they are not announced at the time of their happening.’
 
Gregory O’Brien