So you think your Covid story's weird ...

In which John goes slightly off-piste

Everyone has their COVID story. Mine began, quite naturally, with a trip to a Karangahape Road army surplus shop to buy a UK police-issue chemical, biological, and nuclear protection suit.

This occurred in the first week, when the news was still a rolling fog of Wuhan clips and ominous graphs. The suit was an all-in-one plastic cocoon designed for events involving sarin gas, smallpox, or other civilisational threats. I carried it to the counter with the earnest conviction of a man sensing the apocalypse.

My friend John Kingston, who happens to be a psychotherapist, laughed hysterically for several minutes when I told him. The kind of laughter therapists usually reserve for private rooms with soundproofing. I was a little wounded, but I understood his response. Perhaps it was a bit dramatic. But I had lived in King’s Cross, London for ten years, and if King’s Cross teaches anything, it’s that the world can kill you quite quickly. You don’t shrug in the face of a pandemic. You mobilise.

Which brings me to the masks.

The next week, the media reported that North Shore Hospital was short of N95 masks. That seemed extraordinary — the sort of logistical fumble that would have got you maimed in King’s Cross, where the supply chain for everything from methadone to mangoes, usually acquired through a back channel, never failed. I’d already managed to acquire a couple of N95s myself from a well-spoken young Chinese guy who lived in a sub-basement in Parnell. He was a model of courtesy and discretion; a sommelier of illicit PPE.

So when I heard the hospital was short, I did the obvious thing.

I rang him.

“Could you get me a thousand?”

There was a pause long enough for me to notice I’d slipped into my old London headspace — the part of me that spent ten years improvising solutions to unlikely problems. Back then, if top pimp Sparky was trying to stab an underling to death with a carving knife, or the English Collective of Prostitutes has squatted the Holy Cross Church on Cromer Street, or the Women's Centre on Argyle Walk has been Molotov cocktailed by visiting skin-heads from Hackney, the plan was always the same: act now, explain later. These were facts, not fancies. It was the ethos that allowed a slum to keep working, a community to survive, and my nervous system to stay one step ahead of collapse. One step.

My young Chinese supplier in the Parnell subbasement considered the matter, then nodded as if appraising a rare wine. A thousand masks was ambitious, but not impossible. He promised to get back to me.

I hung up and immediately contacted one of our graduates, Dr Eileen Merriman, who'd published a dozen novels with Penguin, and was Head of Haematology at North Shore Hospital. I told her I might be able to get my hands on a thousand N95 masks, no questions asked, and could drop them on her doorstep as early as the next day. Eileen is always scrupulously polite, and on this occasion she played a straight bat. 'Gee, thanks John.'

Reading that now, it sounds a bit eccentric. At the time, it felt necessary.

This was still the period when no one knew which way the virus would jump. For all we knew, we were on the threshold of the Green Death or a vaguely medieval reprise — bells tolling, carts with bodies rolling, half of Europe’s ghosts rising for an encore version of the rat-born plague of 1666. I wasn’t going to sit around hoping bureaucracy would suddenly discover efficiency. Also, not long before, I had spent a year writing a post-apocalyptic novel called Arena, about a young couple who move to a stadium where horrific games involving deadly competition between young combatants are taking place. A Roman coliseum in the 21st century. Sound familiar? It was years before that other book appeared.

The Sunday Times in London said: 'This haunting novel will give you nightmares for years after other novels have faded'. Well Arena was certainly on my mind when the maybe-apocalypse-now-we-can't-be-quite-sure broke.

To be clear, I wasn’t planning to sell the one thousand masks. I wasn’t planning anything, really, except to get masks to the people who needed them. Fast. It was an instinctive, almost unconscious shift into emergency mode — the same reflex that bought me the chemical suit, the same reflex that got me through King’s Cross without turning to dust.

Years later, looking back, these episodes amuse me. They form a small, private genre of pandemic behaviour: ethical improvisations that strut a little too close to the edges of the stage. Not quite respectable, not quite mad, but deeply characteristic of a certain type of person shaped by strange places.

In the end, the hospital resolved its supply issue before my sub-basement logistics chain came online. The chemical suit remains folded in a wardrobe, awaiting a day I sincerely hope never arrives. It's big, shining, impressive, and when Putin makes his deranged threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine, I occasionally put it on, to make sure it still fits. It's complex equipment, and takes me several minutes to get into and about ten minutes to get out. 

And my polite supplier drifted back into whatever quiet networks he operates, probably relieved not to be asked for 10,000 gloves or a hundred portable ventilators.

But every so often I think about those early days — especially when I walk into my basement and trip over the five litre flagons of ethyl alcohol I acquired the same week from an artificial fireplace shop on Barry's Point Road. I think of the mask negotiations, the sense that the ordinary rules were temporarily suspended — and I realise that, for all their absurdity, those actions were not random at all.

They were simply King’s Cross echoing through the decades.

A muscle memory for crisis.

A habit of stepping forward when systems threaten to fold.

A feral improvisation born from years in a place where hesitation could get you badly injured, and where people survived because someone decided, against all reason, to act fast.

Everyone has their COVID story.

Mine just happens to involve a hazmat suit, a sub-basement PPE dealer, and the ghost of King’s Cross whispering, “Move fast. People may die.”