Before This Is Over

by Amanda Hickie

  A paper towel dispenser hung by the pump. Soaked in hand sanitizer, paper towel was at least something she could use to wipe down the seat and seat belt where their guest had been sitting. Oscar looked on as if his mum disinfected their car whenever they filled up.

  The rest of the trip was easy, fast, uncongested. On this side of the roadblock, their yellow license plates stood out like flashing signs of guilt among all the local blue-and-white plates. Hannah was afraid they would be stopped for that alone.

  Oscar grizzled from the back. “My legs hurt.”

  “We’re nearly there.” And it was enough truth to postpone the grumbling. There was no need to tell him that when they got there they’d be turning around and doing it all again.

  As they drove past the WELCOME TO THE ACT sign, she felt like they had made it. Each remaining step seemed trivial, a process that had to be gone through. There was nothing standing in the way but the doing of it. She ratted through her bag for her phone, the next step. It rang out to voicemail. Damn it.

  “Zac, we’re nearly there. Get your things and come out the front. Ring me back to let me know you got this message.”

  Hannah watched the phone for subtle signs of Zac that it couldn’t possibly convey. She held it until they pulled up across the road from the school gym. It looked just like any school day—behind the gym, the schoolyard was filled with kids, some of them playing soccer, some standing around in groups. Along the footpath in front, people walked, like they would on any day, so close she could touch them if she wound down the window. So strangely normal that it felt wrong. She pressed redial. “Zac, why do you have a phone if you don’t answer it? Get out here, we’re waiting outside.” She hung up and stared at the phone again.

  Sean started to open the door. “I guess I’ll have to go over. Why don’t you take Superboy for a run up and down the footpath while I’m gone.”

  “What, with all these people around? He can run all he wants when we stop for lunch, somewhere isolated. Give Zac another minute.”

  “A minute won’t make any difference.” Sean shook the wheel with exasperation. “He can’t hear his phone.”

  “Thanks to your detour, for which I am grateful, it took us more than four hours to get here. Five more minutes won’t hurt.”

  “Five minutes won’t make any difference either.” He pushed the car door all the way, and she put her hand on his arm, a gentle restraint.

  “You’re not going like that.” She held a pair of gloves out to him.

  “Look at all these people.” He pointed to the pedestrians, the soccer players. “Not a glove, not a mask between them. That’s how normal people behave.”

  “Not a chance. If they want to take a risk…”

  “They’re not taking a risk—there is no risk. There’s no panic because there is nothing to panic about. No disease here.”

  “Gloves and mask. Please.”

  “This is absurd.”

  “Humor me.”

  “When there is a reason, I accept it. But I refuse to give in to irrationality.” He got one leg out of the car but she gripped his arm tighter.

  “Let me try one more time.” She let it ring until it went to voicemail. And again. And again.

  “If he was going to answer, he would have.” Sean pushed the door open again. “Give me the damned gloves.” Hannah’s phone rang.

  “Yes. Zac.”

  “Hi, Mum. There are a bunch of missed calls on my phone.”

  “I’ve been ringing and ringing.”

  “It was still under my pillow and we were playing this board game.”

  “We’re here, out the front. Get your things together and meet us out here. You can tell me the rest then.”

  She watched the digits change on the dashboard clock. Ten minutes at most and then she would…and then she would…not get out of the car and get him.

  The double front doors of the gym bulged out. The left fell back, the right swung open, and for a moment they saw Zac’s outline in the doorway, before the door swung closed.

  “Where’s Zac?” Oscar’s light voice spoke for all of them.

  Sean pushed his door open and swung his leg onto the asphalt. Hannah squeezed his arm but he pulled away. “I’m only going to put his stuff in the boot.” He took the gloves, slipped them over his hands, but tossed the mask back to her.

  Both doors opened together this time. Zac came out of the right and another boy from the left. Behind them, slightly taller, was their teacher, Mr. Abrahamson. He had always looked young to Hannah, but today his face was overwritten with tiredness and a certain air of responsibility. Mr. Abrahamson stopped on the far side of the road, his arm out in front of the two boys, keeping them in place. A couple walking down the street hesitated, looked to Sean and back to the boys, then chose to make a wide arc around the group.

  “Mr. Halloran, Zac’s got all his things and he’s ready to go.” Mr. Abrahamson looked at Zac with genuine affection. “He’s been great. A real help with some of the other kids. I’ve told him how impressed I’ve been with his behavior.”

  “That’s good to hear.” The two men perched, leaning forward on opposite curbs. They looked courtly and ludicrous, as if observing some arcane etiquette.

  “If you want to leave him, the school here has offered to look after us. They’re going to try to find billets for the kids today.”

  “We’re here—we’ll take him back.”

  “Mr. Halloran, I’m thinking about the kids. It’s very safe here. I think maybe you should consider your options before Zac comes across the road. Do you have someone you can stay with in Canberra? I’ve made arrangements for the children that I think are in their best interest, and we don’t know what’s going to happen back in Sydney. You could try to get into a hotel if you don’t know anyone, but you’d better not say you came from Sydney.”

  Hannah put her head out the window. “We’re taking Zac home.”

  She could see how earnestly he believed what he was saying. He seemed to give her statement more consideration than it deserved. “Even if you can’t stay here, you should still consider leaving Zac. Sydney isn’t the best option for him now. And you might not have a choice. The story is they’re closing the highway. But once he’s crossed the road, the school is no longer responsible for him. If you can’t find anywhere to stay, I can’t ask any of the families here to take him in.”

  “From Sydney,” Sean said firmly. “It’s closed from Sydney. Unless you’ve heard of someone being turned back.”

  Mr. Abrahamson shifted on his feet. “One of the kids left here with their parents a couple of hours ago. They haven’t come back.”

  “So we’re going home and we’re taking him.” Sean spoke with firmness.

  “Dad, can we take Daniel? His folks aren’t coming.”

  “How do you know they’re not?”

  “He rang them this morning—he wants to go home but they said they couldn’t get here. He thinks his mum is sick and they don’t want him to be in the house. We have to take Daniel.”

  “I guess…”

  Hannah cut Sean off. “We’ll talk about it, Zac.”

  “When, Mum? If you leave him here, he’s stuck. You came all this way for me—how do you think his folks feel? We’re going now, so you have to tell me now.”

  Daniel’s mum had been so eager to come on Friday and had sounded fine. Hannah tried to read the boy’s face. He was staring at the ground, his eyes turned away from them, although there was nothing unusual about the patch of concrete he was studying. His hair flopped forward, hiding any expression that might give her a clue to his feelings.

  “Zac, we can’t just kidnap someone else’s child. It sounds like they want him to stay here.”

  “And I can’t let him go without his parents’ permission,” Mr. Abrahamson said to Zac. “You understand.”

  Sean cut in. “Daniel, what’s your parents’ number?”

  Hannah pulled Sean down so he could hear her whispers. “I thi
nk we should talk about this before we ring them.”

  “If they are happy for us to bring him back, why wouldn’t we? He’ll be better off with us than with strangers.” Sean stepped onto the road and held the phone out to Daniel.

  “Just hang on, no closer.” Hannah would have been out the door if she hadn’t been on the wrong side of the car. As it was, she was stretched across the seat. “He can ring them on his phone.”

  Daniel dialed, spoke a few words, then passed the phone to Mr. Abrahamson and stood with his arms crossed, quarter turned away from everyone. Zac, next to him, still faced forward, shuffling foot to foot. Mr. Abrahamson hung up the phone and nodded to Sean.

  “That’s settled. You’re coming with us, Daniel. Sling your bags in the boot. In you hop.” Sean hesitated a beat. “Your mum’ll be all right. I’m sure she’s only got a cold.”

  “Wait, wait, wait.” Hannah was almost falling out of the car with urgency. “There are masks and gloves for you both.”

  “Mum!” Zac rolled his eyes at her. “We’re not sick, no one’s sick here. We’ve been here all the time.”

  “Meanwhile we’ve been breathing all over the car. So, better to isolate you.”

  She put on her own gloves before getting two pairs out of the packaging, at arm’s length. Zac put them on self-consciously, looking to Daniel from time to time to see if he thought it was stupid too. “If it’s so dangerous, why did you even come?”

  As Zac slid into the backseat, Oscar tried to leap at him but was jerked back by the seat belt he forgot he was wearing.

  “Don’t touch him!”

  Oscar jumped, startled by the seat belt and Hannah’s screech. He looked to her with tear-filled eyes, not sure what he’d done wrong. She tried to calm her voice. “It’s okay. You just can’t touch him.” Oscar’s face was a mix of guilt, fear, and embarrassment.

  “Hey, Mouse.” Sean leaned into him. “Zac’s been away for a few days, so he’s got different germs from us. His germs are probably fine, and ours are too, but for a few days we have to keep our germs to ourselves.” Oscar unclenched a little.

  “I want to hug Zac.”

  “Not today, Mouse. Save your hugs for a few days.” Oscar drew himself in, trying to put space between himself and Zac.

  Half of Canberra seemed to consist of dusty tracts of land beside the road, dotted with gum trees. The best Hannah could find was a triangle between nowhere and nowhere else, with no houses or office buildings nearby. It wasn’t pretty but it was isolated.

  On a parched island of grass, Oscar waited for what would happen next on this strange day, cross-legged, a big smile on his face. As Hannah unpacked the eclectic assortment of food from the backpack, Zac stood looking down at it.

  “You can’t expect us to eat with masks on. So what are we supposed to do?”

  “Take your sandwiches over to the next tree. You can take off the mask and gloves there.”

  “I bet you made the sandwiches, didn’t you? So they have your germs, so that would be really dumb.” Zac rolled his eyes at her. “What’s the point of the stupid masks if we’re going to eat the germs anyway?”

  The sandwiches should be safe. She’d made them more than two hours ago. And eating germs was not the same as breathing them or rubbing them in your eyes. Her imperfect understanding was based only on snippets of information. She rummaged through the bag for anything in packets, in case she was wrong. “Here you go. Hygienically sealed in a factory.”

  “Muesli bars? Muesli bars aren’t lunch. And the masks are still stupid.”

  “There are cheese snacks in here too. Don’t take the gloves off and don’t touch the food before it goes in your mouth, hold it with the wrapper.”

  “Dad, she’s mad.”

  “Yes, she is. Do as she says.”

  Food eaten, detritus gathered, and back on their way, Zac and Daniel kept up a joint monologue, reliving the school trip in shared cryptic three-quarter sentences. “And then he,” “but Simon wanted to,” laughter. Oscar tried to join in by retelling the bits of stories that he thought he understood, but Zac would cut in halfway through. “You weren’t there, Oscar, you don’t know what happened.” And each time, Oscar would hug his wounded silence to himself for five or ten minutes until his infatuation for the older boys overcame him.

  Hannah let it all wash around her, concentrated on the driving and the mostly empty road in front of her. Even Zac’s snarkiness made her happy to have him back. Their only stop was for a toilet break at Zac’s request. Oscar took to the trees with enthusiasm, proud to show his brother that he was an expert at peeing by the side of the road. Zac wrinkled his nose and declared he’d hold on, but Daniel sheepishly admitted that he needed to go. Hannah took the break to stretch her legs behind the car. She listened in to the exchange between Sean and Zac in the al fresco men’s room.

  “We’re not going to stop again, so if you hold on, you’re holding on for two hours.”

  “I don’t need to go.”

  “You asked to stop. I mean it—we’re not stopping again, and if you think we’ll give in and stop at a proper toilet, you’re wrong.”

  When Daniel came back, Zac stomped up to the trees, engulfed in a cloud of resentment. Hannah accidentally glanced over and whipped her eyes away again, but all she’d seen was Zac struggling to work out how to juggle the gloves and the hand wash.

  The open road—they had made it, they’d escaped. Hannah relaxed her grip on the wheel, turned on the radio, and twiddled the dial until she found a classic hits station. The sounds of the seventies, the seventies, and the seventies from what she could hear. She stared straight ahead but out of the corner of her eye she could see Sean doing disco moves to stadium rock. He took a bow to the backseat. As the next song started, they made sideways eye contact—it was a gift—and in unison broke into “We Are the Champions.”

  Daniel’s face mask looked blankly at Hannah in the rearview mirror, but Zac had thrown himself back in his seat. “Stop the car, I want to kill myself.” Sean and Hannah launched into the second chorus with gusto.

  The spot where they had been turned around that morning came slowly into view, visible each time the hills rose and fell. It seemed different now, more organized, more structured, blocking a stream of cars stretching towards Sydney. It was surprising how solid a temporary barrier could look. Sean flicked off the music. “Not champions yet.” He put his hand over hers on the gear stick. “We were fine this morning, we’ll be fine now. At least we’re all together.”

  The important thing was to behave normally, which shouldn’t be hard. After all, they hadn’t really done anything wrong. But even the act of thinking about looking innocent made her feel guilty. They hadn’t put anyone in danger—except the farmer, and he knew they’d come from Sydney and still got in the car of his own accord. And it’s not as if they had broken through the barrier. They had just taken another route. But still, she felt her cheeks burn.

  The roadblock on this side of the highway, new since this morning, looked more ad hoc. A man with a light baton waved them over to the shoulder. She slowed into the line of cars waiting to be processed. A handful of police walked from car to car, poking their heads into the drivers’ windows. After a brief conversation, the car would peel off from the line to either wait for the emergency U-turn bay back to Canberra or, occasionally, continue straight on. As the police moved between cars, they called out to each other, “You taking a break now?” or “Save some coffee for me.” They didn’t look back to see where the drivers they had spoken to went.

  While Hannah waited to move forward, she watched the road ahead. On both sides, police cars obstructed the road before the U-turn bay. When a small line of cars had gathered, the two nearer police vehicles would move, leaving a clear path to the other half of the divided freeway, back to Canberra. Once they were through, the police moved back into place and the first few in the long line of Sydney-bound cars took their turn. She wondered if anyone else had found their cross-count
ry route and whether it had been barricaded off.

  The far roadblock looked very different from the makeshift checkpoint of this morning. Traffic cones had been replaced with an unbroken line of large orange-and-white plastic barriers. The four casual police from this morning were now a patrol, efficient and coordinated. And although the police officers lounging against the vehicles blocking the road looked bored, there was also a watchfulness under their feigned indifference as the Sydney traffic took the turn. As the last car reached the bay, a small white hatchback swerved out of the line waiting to be processed and roared towards the policemen. One touched his gun, the other waved his arms and yelled, a third pulled out a walkie-talkie as the car spun around them and on towards Canberra, disappearing in a cloud of dust. Hannah heard the detuned rev of its engine as it passed, followed by a squeal of tires and a siren. Through the clearing dust, blue and red lights flashed and she could just make out the back of the renegade and its pursuer.

  Sean gave her an impish look. “Maybe I should have tried that this morning.” He bumped her on the elbow and nodded forward. She hadn’t noticed that the line in front of her had cleared. In her haste to bring no attention to herself she clashed the gears and lurched forward.

  She turned to Sean. “Am I flushed?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t look red?”

  “Stop talking, here he comes.”

  She rolled down her window a little too eagerly, while the policeman was still several meters off. But not rolling it down might look aggressive. It was down now, she couldn’t change that. And they wouldn’t care, would they? Best to just say nothing and speak when spoken to. If she took the lead, she was afraid she’d blurt out something incriminating.

  “How’s it going?” He was young and walked awkwardly, as if the weight on his belt threw him off-balance.

  “Fine. It’s fine.”