‘Are many people still going into the Sydney office?’
‘It’s been closed.’ He looked away and shrugged, as if it was unimportant. ‘One of the guys from another department lives in that block of flats. So they closed the office, as a precaution. After he was quarantined, like that’s going to help.’ He rubbed a spot of dirt from his screen.
‘What flats?’
‘You haven’t looked at the paper yet? Ten people dead yesterday all in one block of flats. He was in yesterday. I was supposed to be in a meeting with him.’
‘Is he all right? Is he sick?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t really know him. An email went around earlier saying he was doing okay but... the whole block’s quarantined. There are soldiers standing outside the building. It’s all over the news. And it’s not like the ten knew each other, they just live in the same block. They say it could be getting through the sewerage system. Aerosolised when you turn on the tap too hard or flush the toilet.’
‘How the hell could that even be possible? It spread through the toilet?’
‘Who knows? Maybe it’s an old building with dodgy plumbing. Maybe they’re secretly partying together. They don’t know.’ He ran his hand through his hair. ‘But I’m safe and everyone who went in yesterday is going to spend today and tomorrow waiting for symptoms.’ He looked around the room, as if for a solution. ‘Eighty-one dead yesterday and someone I work with lives in the same block as ten of them. The guys in Melbourne keep telling us to forget about work. But what am I going to do?’ He put his arm around her waist and gave her a squeeze. ‘I’m okay and you’re okay and Zac and Oscar and Daniel are all okay. But I have to keep doing something, pretending that it matters, otherwise it’s not okay anymore.’ He looked into his mug. ‘Is there more? You’ll be rivalling the cafe in a few days. It’s good.’
It was good because they had the old espresso pot. Because the air was fresh and voices of people were in the distance. Because Zac was in his bedroom and Oscar was watching cartoons. So the coffee tasted good.
Hannah sat on the arm of the sofa, watching Oscar watch TV. Waiting for him to change position was almost a meditation. Just about the only way he didn’t sit was flat on the seat. Now he was lying with his legs draped up over the back, feet flat on the wall behind, his head hanging backwards over the front of the sofa. Two minutes earlier, he was on his front crouched like a mouse with his knees pulled up to his chin underneath him.
An ad came on for a ‘special’ meal with a movie tie-in toy. ‘Hey, Mum. I really want that. I really like that movie.’
‘Sorry Oscar, can’t go out the front door today.’ The perfect answer.
Now on the screen, a woman poured laundry powder into a washing machine. From the machine, a bubble squeezed, enveloping the woman and floating her into the air. Below her, a sea of animated germs, black and scowling, threatened to reach the bubble. One by one, the bubble enfolded the members of the family, protecting them from their own home. It was a simplistic ad, yet so appealing. To be in that bubble, with Oscar and Zac and Sean. She yearned for protection that was as easy as a soap powder.
She was jolted from the daydream by the sound of the doorbell. As she walked down the hall she realised no one had come to their door for a week, no one unexpected. She took a step back as she opened it, to keep a metre between her and whoever was outside. It took an instant to recognise Gwen, backlit by the sunlight from the street, peering in.
‘Oh, Hannah. I’m so sorry to interrupt you.’ Hannah was still wearing her pyjamas. It was not as if she was going anywhere today.
‘Not a problem, Gwen.’
Gwen stood as if waiting for something, her eyes focused on the grill.
‘I’m not opening the grill, Gwen. Sorry, we’re not letting anyone in or out.’
Gwen looked surprised. ‘What a lot of fuss over nothing.’ She talked fast, as if continuing a conversation already started. ‘No one’s come. Meals on wheels didn’t turn up this week and I can’t get on to my daughter. She’s probably gone away.’ That would be thoughtless, to leave town without telling your elderly mother. But thoughtless was better than the other possibilities. ‘I can’t get to the shopping centre and Lily’s is only a corner store, you wouldn’t expect her to have everything. So when you go to the shops I’ve got a list of things for you to pick up.’
‘I’m not going to the shops but I’m getting some things delivered. If you give me the list, I’ll get them to put your things in too.’
Gwen had her purse in her hand. ‘I don’t want much, a few tins. I’ll give you some money.’ Money that had probably been through Lily’s till and the hands of Lily’s customers.
‘Later. We don’t know how much it will be.’
‘Fifty dollars should more than cover it.’ She had the note out, one hand on the grill.
‘I’ll get it from you later. I’m not opening the door right now. Not until the epidemic’s over. It can wait until then.’ Gwen looked affronted. ‘Gwen, do you cook for yourself?’
‘I manage. The meals on wheels man comes and my daughter brings me a casserole on the weekend. Or a salad.’
‘When did the meals on wheels man come last?’
‘I think it was Thursday. Maybe Friday.’
‘And your daughter?’
‘Oh, she’s always busy.’ Gwen dismissed the thought with a wave of her hand. ‘She has a family of her own and everyone is making such a fuss about this illness.’
‘What have you eaten since Friday?’
‘I’m not incapable of looking after myself. I’ve been doing it for a long time and I haven’t starved.’
Gwen moved closer to the grill as she became engrossed in the conversation. And each increment sent Hannah further into the shadow of the hallway, until Gwen was an outline haloed by the light.
‘I can’t let you in Gwen, people are dying.’
‘I hope you don’t think I’m one of them. Except from hunger if meals on wheels man doesn’t come back.’
In her mind, the shelves of food in the pantry rearranged themselves, smaller somehow, clustered for six now, when they had been designed for four. ‘I’ll make sure you have food.’ She looked beyond Gwen to the street outside, willing the meals on wheels car or Gwen’s daughter to appear and make this not her problem. ‘Gwen, you can’t go out, especially not to Lily’s. It’s dangerous. That’s why I can’t let you in.’
‘Oh, I don’t go far and I’m right as rain.’
‘I’m serious, it takes two days to see symptoms. You could be sick, or Mr Henderson, and not even know it. That’s why you have to stay home and not have contact with anyone. People are dying. That’s why I can’t let you in.’ Gwen looked unimpressed. Hannah continued, a little weakly, ‘Will you be all right at home, on your own?’ All she was prepared to offer was food, nothing more. And yet even that made her anxious. Each meal she gave Gwen, gave Daniel, was a meal less protection for her boys. Offering too much and not enough.
‘Of course I will. I’ve been on my own for fifteen years now, I think I know how to stay put.’ She fumbled around in her pocket and pulled out a torn envelope with florid handwriting. ‘Just a few things.’ She gave the grill an offended look that travelled down to the gap at the bottom. ‘My knees aren’t what they were.’
‘Why don’t you leave it in the letterbox and I’ll get it out later.’ It could stay there for a few hours.
When Zac was little and she’d listened to just about as much Wiggles as she could stand, she made him a CD for the car. She’d spent a night going through their music collection, finding all the silliest songs that were still acceptable to her. He had loved that CD and only grown out of it when he realised that Oscar in his turn had grown to love it. And now she needed something to cheer herself up, make her feel as if there was fun in the world still. As if she was five again and didn’t have to worry.
Oscar only knew one dance, the ‘Macarena’—the ‘Hokey Pokey’ of his generation, taught to
him by the teachers at school who were just old enough to have learnt it when it first came out. Whatever song she put on, he insisted they dance it and she followed his lead. In unison, they swirled hips, clapped hands, flicked thumbs and stamped feet. Ending with a quarter turn jump in whichever direction Oscar chose.
Oscar kept up a monologue the whole time, punctuated by giggles. ‘And Mrs Gleeson stood on Mr Turner’s foot when she jumped and Mr Turner yelled but no one heard him ’cause the music was so loud and...’ She could barely hear him over the stamping.
A thumping came from somewhere other than their feet and Hannah paused the music to hear teenage fists pounding on Zac’s bedroom wall. ‘TURN THE MUSIC DOWN.’
Oscar and Hannah looked at each other and laughed. ‘Stop being such killjoys,’ she yelled back.
‘We’re trying to play a game here and every time you elephants jump on the floor everything goes everywhere. We have to yell at each other.’
Hannah winked at Oscar. ‘We won’t jump so much.’
‘It’s two days! With no one sick.’
‘Two more hours.’
Even without being able to see them, Hannah knew his eyes were flicking up. ‘Two hours I’ll be dead. From boredom, not from a cough.’
‘At least you’ll stop griping at me when you’re dead.’ Too well brought up to bust out, she guessed. Tick in her column. ‘Hey, Oz, let’s do a dance that doesn’t use our feet so much.’ She taught him to twist, lifting one heel and holding his weight on the other. She flapped her arms, like the ‘Eagle Rock’, waved them around above her head, any silly pose to get him to laugh.
They were caught mid twist when Sean walked in, coffee cup dangling from one hand. ‘Can you turn the music down. It’s too loud.’
Hannah smiled at him. ‘Across the yard in the office? No way.’
Sean continued to frown. ‘I came in for a coffee. And you’re loud.’
‘You and Zac. The two of you can move into the garage when we let him out and never make a sound.’
‘You’re the one who’s always going on about not disturbing Gwen.’ Sean waved at the party wall. Oscar had already engrossed himself in the pile of Lego in the corner, shutting out the adult noises. ‘Serious things are happening. You might be having a good time but out there,’ he shook his hand in the direction of the street, ‘out there people are in trouble. Real people.’
‘Me being miserable won’t change that.’ She had her hands on her hips, ready to defend herself. Oscar took apart and put back together the same set of bricks but she knew he was listening, trying to pretend that somehow he wasn’t part of this. It wasn’t fair on Oscar, scaring him like this. ‘Why don’t you finish early today?’
‘I finish early every day now. I’ve still got stuff to do.’ He turned to Oscar and said with all the force of his bad temper, ‘This place is a mess. Is that any way to treat your toys? Look at them, all piled up. They’ll get broken.’ Oscar’s eyes started to well.
‘We’ll tidy it when we’re done, won’t we?’ She tried to jolly Oscar.
‘The mess was here yesterday. It was here the day before. You shouldn’t be picking up after him, Oscar should be doing it.’
‘He did. Yesterday was a different mess. Every day we pick up the mess, then we make a new one.’
Cancer makes you a better person. It must be true, people said it to her all the time. But Hannah had enough people to take care of and Gwen had other people who could look after her. Hannah couldn’t take in the whole neighbourhood, she couldn’t feed everyone and yet there would always be someone in need and more that she could have done. Wherever she drew the line, she would fail someone. If she was a better person now, she must have been an inadequate one before.
Maybe it made it easier for people to allow themselves to coast along, convincing themselves they couldn’t be held responsible for not taking control. If you lived an unexamined life, if you were in a state of invincible ignorance, that wasn’t your fault. It was unavoidable, you hadn’t had cancer. Or maybe it was easier for the onlookers to reconcile themselves to what she had gone through if they believed she was compensated with a wisdom denied to them.
She’d lain in bed exhausted from throwing up, her whole body alien, fighting against her. Modesty, privacy were jettisoned. Any sense that her body was her own was abandoned, its sovereignty ceded to doctors and technicians.
The sharp certainty that she was going to die still sometimes ambushed her but it didn’t make life sweeter. It was a mosquito buzzing in her ear at night, no more creating happiness than a mosquito creates sleep. She’d suffered and not suffered and knew for certain that she preferred the not suffering. All cancer had left her was a fading anger that she’d wasted a year of her life on a posse of renegade cells.
Her only task had been to make it to the other side, back to the life she already had, the person she had chosen to be. Like the breakup of a bad relationship, living well was the best revenge. Here she was, eight years on, the same person, wishing that she didn’t feel responsible for Gwen.
A little before dinner, just shy of two days since they arrived home. She changed out of her pyjamas so as not to embarrass Zac in front of Daniel, although it made her a little sad to have so nearly made it through a whole day without getting dressed. Oscar was still in his, so maybe that counted. With her finger to her lips, she got Oscar and Sean to follow her to Zac’s door and knocked quietly.
‘What? Go away.’
She turned the knob and opened the door. ‘You think I’m not going to come in there and make you regret that?’ She smiled at him and he looked bewildered back at her.
‘It’s not time.’
‘It’s past time if you count from Canberra.’
She had expected a champagne cork pop but they just picked themselves up from where they were lying on the floor and sauntered out. Oscar bounded around them like a puppy. ‘Do you want to play outside? We could play soccer. I could be on Daniel’s team. I’m good at goalie.’
Daniel looked to Zac for a response.
‘Go on.’ Hannah said. ‘Dinner will be in an hour, why don’t you play soccer while there’s still light.’
Sean had been hanging back. ‘Tell you what, Oscar and me against you two.’ He looked down at Oscar. ‘We’ll slaughter them. Your mum could play for our team too.’
Zac snorted. ‘If you want to make it harder for yourselves.’ Hannah gave him a look. ‘I’m joking. It’s a joke.’ But he muttered to Daniel, ‘We’re set.’
Zac and Daniel played to win. Sean played to let Oscar have fun. Hannah played to not look like a wet blanket. Oscar just played. The older boys knew that five people on a couple of square metres of grass had to wing it but Oscar stopped play for every infringement.
‘Hey Oscar.’ Sean bent forward with his hands on his knees down to Oscar’s height, Hannah suspected he was camouflaging his puffed out breaths. ‘Let’s imagine that this isn’t soccer.’
Oscar gave him a questioning smile. ‘Maybe this is a different game, one called lawnball.’
‘There isn’t a game called lawnball.’
‘There is now.’
Zac was grinning widely, he was in on it, he’d had this kind of thing pulled on him when he was little.
‘Lawnball is very simple. You kick the ball, you don’t touch the other people and you don’t go off the grass.’
‘Who throws in when it goes off?’
‘You do.’
‘What about when we go off?’
‘Still you. That’s the rule, the youngest player gets to throw in.’
‘What about when...’
‘Anything,’ Sean took them all by surprise by belting the ball in front of him with his foot, ‘goes.’ The ball slammed into the fence. ‘Goal. One nil.’
‘Hey!’ Zac turned from amusement to outrage in a second.
‘My rules.’
‘Hey, new rule, you don’t have to be nice to your dad.’ Zac and Daniel pushed across the lawn
dancing around Sean.
Oscar neatly stepped out to the ball and punted it to Sean who kicked it across the grass and onto the fence. ‘Two nil.’
Hannah took a break to sit on the garden bed. She relished observing the boys’ fun more than she had the playing. She noticed Ella’s head poking over the top of the opposite fence, big toddler eyes silently watching the game. Ella must have been standing on the top bar to be visible. She wondered if Natalie or Stuart knew where she was.
Hannah rejoined the game, determined to be part of what the boys enjoyed, as much as an unathletic middle-aged woman could. At first, Daniel steered away from her, too polite to crash into someone else’s mum, but after a few minutes the need to not be beaten by Zac’s little brother and mum took precedence.
As his foot connected with the ball, aimed square on for a slam goal against Gwen’s fence, Daniel jumped in triumph. His joy morphed, in seconds, to embarrassed shame as the ball curved too high, missed its mark and sailed clear over to Gwen’s backyard.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.’
Four sets of eyes scanned Gwen’s garden. Oscar tried to scramble up the cross beams of the fence to join in. Sean contemplated the mission. ‘The coast is clear. The rule is, if you sent it, you get it.’ Sean locked his hands together to make a step and boosted Daniel to the other side. Zac and Oscar looked on impassively.
Hannah stood near Ella’s still mute bobblehead. As Sean hauled Daniel back up the smooth side of the fence, she could see a slice of sunset caught in the passage between their houses. Orange clouds with a purple underbelly.
‘Hey guys, look at this.’
They gathered to watch the display in silence and she discretely held Oscar to her, away from the fence and Ella. The colours changed, now red, now purple. It was spectacular, gaudy and baroque. The colour drained away, leaving the overly ornate clouds a steely lavender.
Oscar said, ‘The clouds didn’t look like that yesterday. Yesterday they were pink and yellow. They’re different every day.’
An Ordinary Epidemic Page 12