The spasm in her stomach urged her to get to the sink, the bath, the toilet, anywhere. Now. Oscar made another attempt to hug her and she pushed him aside as she stumbled through the doorway. Oscar tugged at her fleece—nothing registered but the taste in her mouth and the knot in her gut. She was nearly there, she was at the bathroom doorway.
“But, Mum.”
Turning to look at Oscar was enough. She was on her knees, retching. The remains of lunch spread across the timber floor in front of the pantry, a fishiness behind the acid.
“Oz!” Oscar fell back like he was on an elastic, pulled roughly by a horrified Zac. “Get away, Oz, don’t touch her.”
Oscar looked at her with wide, confused eyes. “I’ll get Dad.”
“No.” It took everything she had to talk. “You can’t get Sean.” She coughed and spat. Zac wrapped his arms around Oscar’s shoulders, holding him away from her. Her two boys looked down on her, like a formal portrait, as she knelt on the floor. Zac’s hug was comfort and restraint. Oscar couldn’t see the panic on Zac’s face, but she could—the way he was afraid of his own mother and afraid for her.
“I’m feeling a bit better.” Her head was clearing, her stomach settling, but trying to stand made the world start to turn. She collapsed back to the floor and rolled away from the mess she’d made, until her back rested against the cool pantry door.
Zac stepped farther away, pulling Oscar with him. “Oscar, go to the living room, stay there until I tell you.” He guided Oscar around her legs, around the edge of the pool of vomit, making sure not to touch anything. He was too young, only fourteen. He had always been too young. Too young at six to understand what cancer meant. Too young now to have to protect his little brother from her, from Sean. He skirted around her with a businesslike manner that brought her failure home to her. “I’ll get you a towel.”
“Can I come in yet?” Oscar’s light voice carried from the living room.
“Stay where you are, Oz.”
“I want to help.” His voice was high and uncertain.
“I’ll look after Mum. You stay there.”
She wanted to pull him into a hug, like he had hugged Oscar, but even the thought of sitting up was a challenge, and she was the danger.
“I’m all right.” She tried to look reassuring from her position on the floor. “Really, I’m fine. It’s something dodgy I ate.”
Her stomach spasmed again. She stumbled at last into the bathroom and threw up into the toilet. The tile floor was cold, cleansing, and smoothed away her nausea. She shivered. Zac gingerly stepped over her and put a towel on the side of the bath. She closed her eyes but she could hear him sloshing water from the bucket into the toilet.
“Could you get me a glass of water?” She could lie here forever. Until the epidemic was over, until Sean came back. Zac put a plastic cup next to her head. “Thanks.” She tried to smile.
She felt better again, a trick her stomach played on her, lulling her into believing she could sit up. Safer on the floor. Zac looked down at her, considering. He went away and returned with an old grubby blanket that lived in the car. The woman lying on a bathroom floor that hadn’t been cleaned in weeks couldn’t afford to be picky. Gently, he laid it over her, careful not to touch her.
“I don’t need it, I’m too hot.”
“You’ll get cold, Mum.”
She tried to push it off and he jumped two feet back.
“You have to stay warm.” He leaned over her to straighten the blanket. The distress on his face was visceral. He was afraid and determined, and if she struggled, she risked touching him, so she let him finish covering her.
She closed her eyes and tried to let the nausea happen to the woman on the floor. It was a trick she learned during treatment, a way of enduring time without experiencing it. She concentrated on the senses that weren’t ambushing her, that she could dissociate from the suffering body. The random play of light on the inside of her eyelids, the banging of pots and utensils in the kitchen.
After a stretch of time, short or long, she couldn’t measure, she heard a quiet voice at the door. “Mum, where’s the recipe?”
Zac didn’t know that there are no recipe books for whatever’s in the pantry when the world stops making sense.
“Fry up the onion. Put in a cup of lentils.” Saying it made her gag. “Some spices…”
“What spices?”
“Smell them, whatever smells good. Two cups of rice.” She stopped to breathe and regain control. “Twice as much water. Boil twenty minutes.” She spat the words out so she could go back to trying not to exist.
More banging. Even muffled by the walls, it went through her. The soft voice at the door again. “Twice as much water as the rice or the rice and lentils?” She couldn’t think, she didn’t want to think. “Mum?”
“Both, twice as much as both.”
She could hear them talking to each other and could tell by Zac’s tone that he was bossing Oscar around. His voice was deeper and stronger than it had been a few weeks ago. He was becoming the thing he pretended to be for Oscar’s sake. Oscar’s childlike voice answered back, happier the more Zac bossed him.
There was a change in Zac’s tone. A hidden concern, more dictatorial. She pulled herself along the floor, closer to the door to catch the words.
“You can’t go to the bathroom.”
“But I have to pee.”
“Well, you can’t do it in the bathroom.”
Oscar sounded desperate. “I need to pee. Where am I going to pee?”
“Just hold on.”
Oscar’s voice rose to a wail. “I can’t hold on.”
The back door opened and sent a shock through her. What would Zac do now—where would he go if he didn’t know what to do? Sean? She tried to get to her feet, but her stomach rebelled. She could hear the emptiness of the house. It was beyond her control.
The sound of the door again, followed by Zac’s voice. “That’s gross. You can’t do that.”
“You said to water the plants.”
“Not the pots. We eat the herbs, Oz. If you pee on them, we’d be eating your pee.”
“Oh.” The word carried all the disappointment of a little boy who had let down his big brother.
“It’s okay, I stopped you, but you have to think.”
“Okay.” The disappointment was gone.
She fell asleep and woke up cold. Not feverish cold, just cold. The blanket lay to the side, thrown off while she slept. Her stomach felt like she’d been punched, but it wasn’t mutinous. The clatter from the kitchen had been replaced by the white noise of the television. She took a swig from the tumbler of water to wash the bitter taste from her mouth and crouched to spit in the toilet. Her head hurt, her bones felt like they were made of lead, and her muscles barely worked, but she wasn’t going to throw up.
More than anything, she wanted a shower to wash away the rancid sweat, the smell of sick. She pulled herself up to sit on the side of the bath and turned the tap on. It sputtered. She’d forgotten about the water.
She wiped up the floor outside the bathroom with the towel Zac had left. The smell made her dry retch. She splashed the floor with disinfectant and pulled Daniel’s towel off the rail to spread it around. The towels were two heaps of potential infection she couldn’t leave in the bathroom for Zac and Oscar. She opened the window and heaved them into the side passage. The effort made her sweat. With toilet paper dipped in the little water that was left in the tumbler, she wiped her face.
She ached all over.
She dragged herself down the hall and through the living room. Zac and Oscar were side by side on the sofa, watching some cartoon only Oscar would be interested in. Zac sat closer to the hallway, his arm around Oscar, a barrier between his brother and the door. The way he braked Oscar’s attempt to get up as she came through…it wasn’t by accident.
One foot in front of the other, she kept walking. Halfway up the hall, thinking of nothing but the need to get to bed, she heard
Zac’s voice behind her. “Mum.” She turned around—he was deliberately closing the door to the living room.
“I need to lie down, Zac. Talk to me later.”
“You have to stay in your room. You can’t come out.” He was grave and strange. “I can’t keep my eyes on Oz all the time. You have to put something behind your door so he can’t come in.” He must have been working this out, thinking of all the possibilities while the bright colors of the cartoon passed over his eyes.
She nodded. “Did you have dinner?”
“I had to take Oz with me to Gwen’s. I didn’t tell Dad.” She nodded again. All she had to do was follow instructions. “There’s some food left if you want it.”
“Maybe tomorrow.”
She was nearly at the bedroom door when Zac’s voice came again, this time with a note of desperation and doubt. “I’m going to make him sleep in my room tonight.”
“Good idea.”
“He’s good. We’re both good.”
“I know you are. You’re doing a good job. You’re a good boy.” She meant it, but she would have said anything to get to bed.
She closed her eyes and tried not to feel the pounding in her head, the furriness in her mouth. She slept and woke and slept. In her dreams, she was awake, hearing Oscar’s and Zac’s voices. And when she woke, she heard them still. They should be in bed—she was the one who should tell them, but she remembered what Zac said, to stay away. He was right and her muscles ached and just turning in bed made her head throb.
It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t right. She had done everything, everything asked of her, everything she had asked of herself. Taken every precaution. It should count, that she had already done the looking death in the face. All the chemo, all the radiation, the shots and the pills and the side effects. All done. The people with cheery faces telling her that cancer was an opportunity. Not one of them had she smacked. So why had she bothered to survive only to die now, from a bug she should have been able to avoid?
She went through all that for Zac—made a bargain with the empty air around her that she would do what was asked in return for enough life to see him through to adulthood. That was the very least she was owed. Staying alive long enough to infect her boys wasn’t the deal. All those times, she had told herself that anything could be endured, that she just had to get through it. But this was too much. Her anger and despair could muster nothing more than tears. If this bug was going to kill her, she didn’t have the energy left to go through the actual dying. All she wanted to do was sleep until it was over.
And yet she woke, eyes gummed, salty crust around her nose and mouth. It was dark and quiet, sometime in the early morning, she guessed. The room was cold from the night, but the bone-chilling shivers had gone. The thought still hung in her head that she didn’t have the energy to die. And it struck her—she wasn’t going to die. She was going to puke and feel like the insides of a drain, but she hadn’t coughed or sneezed, she had no diarrhea. Her nose had only been running because she’d been crying and throwing up. Her temperature was normal.
The stomach cramps and vomiting were hours ago now. That wasn’t Manba. Ella hadn’t turned up until yesterday, and Daniel’s father this morning, so it was too soon to show symptoms if it came from them. And the taste of fish. Because there hadn’t been quite enough to go around for yesterday’s lunch, she had given the boys more and taken for herself the last two unappealing sardines from a tin she found at the back of the fridge. The sardines were now in a towel in the side passage. She felt weak and alive and very tired.
The morning was jarringly ordinary. She followed Sean through the front door, right on his heels. It was open and airy outside, bright after being in the house so long. Her eyes took a couple of seconds to adjust. Sean had disappeared from sight. Where he should be, a man stood on the porch. He said, “Sean’s dead.”
She could see he was telling the truth. “When?”
“Just as he came through the door.”
“Then we go back.” She felt a rising wave of desperation. “We go back, back before we came out, and we stay inside.”
The man shook his head.
A storm of panic and grief broke out in her chest. Her head could only look on, fight to keep herself from drowning in it. She looked at the street, empty of Sean like every other part of the world now. She knew the man was right. Sean was dead and there was no undoing it.
There was shouting but no one in sight. An angry, frightening screech. She woke with a start. The room was barely lit and the dread from the dream still lay heavy on her. It felt more real than the voices coming from the street. Her legs held steady, if weak, as she tentatively tried her weight on them. She lifted the corner of the curtain slowly, inconspicuously.
Three burly men, maskless and gloveless, stood around Mr. Henderson’s front door. The shrill, chattering sound came from Mr. Henderson, throwing himself at the back of one of the men like a demented lapdog. The front man delicately picked his way down the steps. He was older than the other two, midfifties, casually dressed in a baggy cream jacket that looked like it was meant to be worn crumpled, and dark gray slacks. His silver hair was casually long, not unkempt. The middle man carried a bedsheet tied like a large sack. He heaved it onto a pile in the back of a worse-for-wear white tradesman’s van. The last man tired of Mr. Henderson’s noise and pushed him backwards, like he was flicking off a fly. Mr. Henderson scurried up his stairs and slammed the front door behind him.
From beside the van, the older man pointed to the house next to Mr. Henderson’s. The front door was off its hinges, swinging open. One of the younger men disappeared inside. The older man’s gaze roamed the row of houses on Hannah’s side, passed the front of hers, then doubled back.
She jumped away from the window. The knife was on the bedside table—she grabbed the handle tight. A dumpy middle-aged woman in her pajamas waving a knife in their faces was no real threat. She ran down the hall to the living room and screamed at the empty space. “Get to the backyard.”
Zac appeared on the other side of the room, Oscar’s head poking out from behind him.
“Go to the backyard. If I scream, run.”
Oscar was startled by her wild appearance and shrill panic. “But Daddy’s in the backyard.”
Zac froze. He could only protect Oscar from their mother or from their father.
“Get Daddy. Get Daddy now.”
“But it’s not two o’clock.”
“I don’t care.” She tried to fill her voice with command, as she had when they were little and naughty. “Now.” She bolted back up the hall. All she wanted was to shepherd them to safety, but danger was at the front door and she was their only defense.
She moved her head back and forth across the gap between the curtains, trying to see as much of the street as she could. The younger man emerged from the house, hands empty, shrugged at the older man, and sauntered over to the third man, the one who had pushed Mr. Henderson. They stood next to the van, talking. Relaxed, prepared, in work clothes and sturdy boots. The older man ambled diagonally across the road. She willed him to choose Stuart’s house. Stuart was fastidious in his tastes and never parsimonious in satisfying them. His house had better pickings and no one was home to resist.
Gwen. She was a bit deaf, probably heard none of the ruckus from the street. She would be even more of a pushover than Mr. Henderson. The only thing standing, obliquely, between Gwen and these men was Hannah and her chef’s knife. For a stomach-lurching second, Hannah feared that yesterday’s lunch was going to bring her down again, but this was adrenaline, not food poisoning.
There could be no doubt, the man’s path ended at their front door. He was followed, a step behind, by the man who had carried the swag, a sheet billowing loose in his hand. From nowhere, Sean was next to her, puffing, child-sized cricket bat in hand. “What is it? What happened?” Hannah stood back to let him see through the curtains. “Is the security grille locked?” She nodded. “Then they can’t get in.”<
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“They could smash the window, they could come down the side passage.” Her stomach dropped. “I sent the kids to the backyard.”
The rattling metallic sound of the grille was followed by a man’s voice, “Hey. Open up.”
Hannah and Sean waited. Now there was banging. Hannah stole a sideways peek down the porch.
The younger man was kicking the grille. The older one supervised him with indifference. “There’s no one home. I’ll take out a window. Let me get the hammer.”
She whispered. “We have to answer.” Sean nodded.
The bedsheet man lost interest in the grille and backed down the stairs to survey the whole house. “Boss, there’s a side gate.” The one across the road looked on with amused boredom.
The side gate was only bolted, with a cutout to let it be opened from the street side. “We have to do it now,” Hannah whispered.
Sean flung the front door open and they were face-to-face with the older man, separated only by the mesh of the metal grille. Up close, his jacket was more than fashionably wrinkled, and his face had a puffy wash-and-wear look. Under the jacket was a crumpled open-necked business shirt palely checked in blue. His expression snapped into exaggerated conviviality. “Hi. Sorry my colleague made so much noise. We weren’t sure if anyone was in. We don’t mean to bother you, but our van broke down and we need to ring a friend to pick us up. Wouldn’t you know it, the mobile’s battery is flat.” He smiled, which would have been convincing if she hadn’t witnessed him robbing Mr. Henderson’s. “Could I come in and use your phone?” He was leaning into the grille companionably. Both Hannah and Sean pulled back.
“All the phones are out around here.” She answered a little too quickly and spoke too fast. She could feel the muscles around her mouth pulling down and trembling, giving her away.
“Oh, yes. You don’t have a mobile?”
Sean broke in. “Tell us your friend’s number, we’ll ring him for you. Quarantine, you understand.”
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