Dunedin has been beleaguered by snivelling schoolchildren and bronchial babies as the flu season hits. David Loughrey follows the coughing to its illogical conclusion.
Listen.
It is winter in a small city.
Winter - in a small city beset by illness, cough hack, stiff-backed and shuffling like a dressing gown and slippers.
At suburban homes in the dawn light, fevered babies wheeze and cry, their parents stabbing the infected air with tiny thermometers, as red-eyed they wield tongue depressors and saline drops in a desperate attempt to have any effect on the progress of human affliction.
With curtains drawn tight against the malady that lurks the seasick suburbs, they push mercury sticks in the ears and under the arms of their suddenly mortal offspring, supine now on a bed of sodden tissues.
Broken lemons loll spent on kitchen benches in a sticky mix of honey, lemon and homemade chicken soup.
Every available element glows, and the temperature rises slowly, obstinately, towards equilibrium.
But come, look outside.
The frosted streets are littered with tissues and medicine bottle caps, and a film of mucus forms over the frost on cobbled byways choked with panting traffic.
Virulent human pathogens prowl behind hedges and settle in unpleasant milky puddles near dirty shop fronts.
They glint in the drool of sharp-toothed schoolchildren who scream and spit and smirk.
They whirl in dancing eddies; they can smell your fear of sickness, and they jostle and elbow as they force entry to nose, sinus and lung.
Look.
From hill suburbs and flatlands, the sick drag weary from their infected homes.
On bicycles, in small cars and hissing taxis they steam and puff to their doctors, a rattling, hacking procession of school teachers, bakery assistants, petty criminals, women of easy virtue, failed baristas, policemen, linguists and legal secretaries, all desperate to have their blood pressure checked and their temperature taken.
They stream in to breathe in that particular smell a doctor's waiting room has; a mixture of ether and antiseptics, detergents and the elderly, unhappy children and chronic illness.
They tread the grey ribbed carpet made of an incredibly long-wearing acrylic material.
Miss McGinty scuffs her heels in that carpet as she sits crammed in to one of 10 mismatching chairs (and one mismatching couch) in the waiting room of Dr Ballantyne's damp surgery near the Octagon.
Through snuffles and throat-clears, the be-scarfed and be-skirted veteran of 43 empty years awaits her turn.
Miss McGinty thinks.
Her thoughts follow labyrinthine stethoscope tubes, through beating hearts and arteries, across scarred livers to the well-travelled territory of death by common cold, of drowning in phlegm, of choking on dried mucus, of catastrophic nasal failure.
Old fears that were there when she was born have followed her through her life, and still nag as sharply as they ever have, paralysing her with anxiety.
The Grim Reaper stalks Miss McGinty's mind.
Her heart racing and her breathing shallow, she suddenly blinks open her eyes, and finds she is staring at an unprepossessing, yet kindly man, rocking slowly back and forth in his chair across the waiting room.
He smiles. Miss McGinty smiles back.
She closes her eyes for a full two minutes, then opens them again, with a distant but resolute look in her eye.
She stands, picks up her chair, and with a surprising level of both strength and dexterity, hurls it crashing through the first floor window of the waiting room in a shower of broken glass to the street below.
As the doctor's receptionist turns a page in her appointment book, before showing a small dark woman into the doctor's surgery, the man smiles at Miss McGinty again, encouragingly.
She looks around her, and her eyes light on a small wooden table covered with dog-eared copies of Time Magazine, Women's Day and House and Garden.
She sweeps the magazines on to the floor, holds the table out in front of her, then hurls it back and up, so it smashes a florescent tube on the ceiling before crashing, splintered, to the ground.
The man claps politely, as the receptionist smiles and swipes the eftpos card of an elderly woman, who has finished her doctor's appointment.
''Who's next?'' asks the receptionist, before ushering another patient through.
Miss McGinty spots a long metal water heater.
Planting her foot on the wall, she grips the heater top and bottom, and with a deep grunt of exertion, tears it from its brackets, and, as water spouts from its pipes through a cloud of plaster dust, launches the heavy object on to the street, where it smashes to the pavement on top of the chair.
''Bravo,'' says the man, who stands and bows courteously in Miss McGinty's direction.
''Next please,'' calls the receptionist.
''That's me,'' Miss McGinty said.
''But I think I'll be right.''
