The staycation had its own calendar invite: from Andrew Mayfield, to Andrew Mayfield, noon to five, sent and accepted by the same person. Somewhere in the middle of a week of escape rooms and Weta Workshop, someone said the line that's stuck with me longer than anything else from that week: "let's stop calling them shitty jobs and just call them jobs." We were mid-puzzle, five of us in a locked room looking for a magic wand, and it landed like a small piece of family constitution nobody had voted on but everyone recognised.
That week had its own logic. We stood under a resin-cast cyclops head at Weta Workshop while rain drummed the roof. We built a Lego stormtrooper the size of a car and Lou climbed onto the kitchen bench for something cold, got caught, and announced from inside the fridge, unrepentant, "whoo, so good." And on the last Friday of it, the calendar just said staycation, noon to five, as if the holiday needed to be made official before it would count as one.
A week later Max threw up a night's worth of noodles, whole, un-chewed, like even swallowing had felt like too much effort. That's the kind of thing that fills a Saturday morning: a vet booked for 9:40, a bookshelf that wouldn't hang straight, a wall that wouldn't cooperate. And in the middle of all that small domestic worry, Dot said, out of nowhere, "Mummy, I'm sad. She would have liked him." Bowie had been gone since May. Max still doesn't know he's standing in a job someone else did for longer than any of the kids have been alive.
I'd walked six kilometres alone through a soaked, sealed-up city the Sunday before, the whole of Wellington indoors, the streets belonging to whoever showed up. Nobody was chasing me out there. I just wanted the hour.
Dad's heart came up hard over tea one evening this month, the way it does, and we talked it through the way we always do, back to the diet, the blood sugar, nothing acute, same pattern as before. The new couch, delivered in pieces through the front door weeks earlier, finally got its first proper sit-down on a grey Saturday when the whole family piled onto it and nobody moved for hours, the dog pressed against a leg, the toddler mid-topple into cushions.
And on the last Friday of the month, Fox was properly angry, the honest kind, not the performing kind, and I kept him home rather than send him into school carrying it. His own reasoning was better than mine: by Monday the teacher would already know. He's thirteen and he worked that out himself, and mostly what I felt standing in the kitchen with him wasn't worry, it was something closer to pride, watching him do the thing I try to do for a living and do it better than most adults in a boardroom.
The other thing July made was Hobbes, built in a week to help me hold the whole portfolio in one place: an assistant that reads what I'm doing and writes the strategy back to me. It got to work immediately, which was more disconcerting than I expected. Somewhere in there is the joke that I spent two years learning to work like this so I could hand it to something that already did.
That last night of July, eleven ideas turned up in the notebook at once, the way they do most months, most of them still just sitting there. I've stopped expecting that part to change, though for the first time there's something in the house whose job it is to.
