In their little cube of space, nothing big happened. All the big things happened out there, at a remove. Here it was the small changes, the variations on a theme. By herself, these ephemeral moments made her pause, made her feel in awe of existence. With these people who were her world, she felt a rightness and gratitude.
Now gloom hid the ball, leaving only its glowing white patches for them to track. Oscar ducked and weaved, an invisible motion in the failing light, threatening to trip them. Sean tried to kick at the ball, missed completely and just pulled himself up when he realised he was about to connect with Oscar. He twisted, tried to recover and, with something approaching grace, landed square on his back. Oscar was in awe. ‘Cool, Dad. Do it again.’ Zac was laughing hard and even Daniel was politely smirking.
‘Hey, we could turn on the lights.’ Zac moved towards the house.
‘Ow.’ Sean laughed and gasped from the grass. ‘I think it’s dinnertime.’
‘Yep.’ Hannah picked up the ball. ‘Past dinnertime.’ She looked at the fence, Ella had gone without her noticing.
‘Hey.’ Zac called from the patio door. ‘The light’s broken.’
‘Here.’ Sean flicked the switch a couple of times. He tried the switch just inside the kitchen, up and down. Nothing.
‘The fridge’s not working.’ Zac leant on its white door and stared into its dark void.
Hannah lurched forward. ‘Then keep the door closed, you’ll let out the cold.’
‘You can’t let out cold. It’s not a thing. You can let out cold air but you’re not letting out cold.’ Zac said with all the force of two years of high school science.
‘Shut the door!’
Oscar came running back from the hallway. ‘And the TV’s not working.’
‘Never mind,’ she said with forced gusto, ‘it’s an adventure. We don’t need electricity.’
She rummaged on the bottom shelf of the pantry with Oscar hovering behind her like a foreshortened ghost, looking for her emergency candles. ‘Here you go, you can take those to Daddy.’
Zac stood in the passage from the kitchen, arms crossed cockily, Daniel slightly behind. ‘How are we going to cook dinner, on candles?’
‘We can use the barbecue. It’ll be like camping.’ Zac gave her the world-weary teenage look of someone burdened with lame parents. ‘Or we could break up the furniture and burn it in the backyard. I’m starting with your bed.’ She got a bit of a smirk.
It was a toss-up whether to eat everything out of the fridge first or the freezer, but it was late and anything in the freezer was going to take too much time to defrost without the microwave. The trick was to picture the contents of the fridge like a memory puzzle, open the door and pull out everything she needed in one fluid move. She was never very good at puzzles. With the door open, it took her a few seconds to orient herself to what she needed, but the cold creeping along her hand forced her to take what was in easy reach as quickly as possible. A carrot, a couple of sticks of celery, the end of a cabbage, some spring onions, the tail of an old chunk of ham. She slammed the door and looked at the spoils. In her mind she tried to reconstruct where she had seen the things she needed, then opened door again to scoop up leftover roast chicken and a couple of eggs to fill it out.
The door opening from the hallway took her by surprise, unaccompanied by the usual light that announced Sean’s entrance. ‘They’re playing cards by torch light in the living room. Oscar begged for candles but I can see that ending in disaster.’ Sean leant back against the kitchen bench, watching her work. ‘Did you know children can function without electricity? I don’t think they knew. At least without the TV we can be sure they won’t see the news. We can hope we’ve seen the worst, that tomorrow the numbers will go down.’
‘Do you think so?’
‘No.’ He fished a wine bottle out of the recycling, jammed a candle in the neck and handed it to her. ‘I think for you something more romantic than a torch.’
It cast a warm light around her hands and the chopping board as she diced the vegetables. When she looked out the back window, she could see Sean, standing over the barbecue, cooking rice. His face glowed orange, the rest of him invisible in the darkness. Their warm pools of light connected, working together but separated.
He came back once he had the rice started. ‘So what are we cooking?’
‘Impromptu Fried Rice Leftovers.’
‘Yum.’ He nuzzled up to her neck.
She mixed soy sauce and fish sauce into the beaten eggs, put each of the ingredients in a bowl and all the bowls on a tray, a patchwork of food, to take them out to the patio table. Sean carried the candle for her like a butler. Its small light disappeared into the voluminous darkness. Each bowl looked meagre but fried up together they made a huge mound. The leftovers would in turn be more leftovers, someone’s breakfast.
Hannah portioned out the fried rice onto six plates, putting aside one for Gwen, and scraped the rest into a bowl. She called the boys. Oscar skipped into the room, Zac pushed in after him but Daniel followed sedately and seated himself at the far end of the table. He picked up his knife and fork, then awkwardly put them down when he noticed no one else was yet ready.
‘Can I help?’ His hands were in clenched his lap.
There had to be something she could give him to do, to make him feel less like a guest. ‘You could carry some things over for me. What about the salad?’ The salad was leftovers as well, the last of the fresh, leafy greens. If the power came back, she should look on the internet to see if you could eat any of the weeds in the garden. Anything to be able to stay out of the world a bit longer. Not that two square metres of weedy lawn would keep even a caterpillar going for more than a day or two.
Daniel watched his hands while he ate, as if keeping himself in check. She wished he wasn’t quite so well-behaved. But this was his first meal out of his room. Candles on the table. For all he knew, they always ate this way. ‘Would you like some salad, Daniel?’
‘Thanks.’ He handled the salad servers awkwardly, scooping a mound of salad between the two spoons. She could see a look of anxiety on his face as he held it suspended over his plate. He tried to put it back into the bowl but a few leaves fell on the table. His hands held the servers so tightly he had trouble releasing them. ‘I think I took more than my share,’ he mumbled.
‘Dig in Daniel, if you wait for everyone to be ready, you’re never going to eat.’ Daniel inhaled his food, she had only looked away for a moment and it was gone. ‘Help yourself to some more.’ This time she didn’t need to urge him.
‘Thanks, Hannah, it’s really good.’ The second plate vanished nearly as fast.
Zac scraped everything remaining in the bowl onto his plate then stopped to watch Oscar pushing his food around, eating it half a spoonful at a time. ‘Are you going to finish that?’
‘Mum, Zac’s telling me what to do.’
‘I asked you a question, I didn’t tell you anything. If you’re not going to eat it, I might as well have it.’ Not that long ago Zac would have died rather than eat someone else’s food.
‘Oscar’s food is Oscar’s and he’s going to eat it. You had two helpings, you can’t still be hungry.’
‘Well, not hungry...’
‘Zac, you’ve had your fair share.’ Hannah injected a warning tone into her voice.
‘Dad! He’s going to waste it. What good will that do?’
‘What about Daniel, have you considered if he wants more?’ Sean was uncommonly stern.
‘He had seconds. And he doesn’t want Oscar’s leftovers. That’s gross.’
‘Well, your mum hasn’t had seconds, what about her? I’m surprised at you, Zac, you’re usually more considerate than this.’
‘I’m fine,’ Hannah jumped in. If it came to feeding herself or Zac and Oscar, she’d go without. And Daniel, of course, she should be ready to give up her food for Daniel, too.
So much for the leftovers. Her recalculations had assumed six people ate one and a
half times as much as four. But she’d never realised how much of their food was consumed by Zac. Gwen added very little, but another teenage boy... All her plans for making biscuits and cakes to keep their spirits up were naive if she couldn’t keep enough bread and meat on the table.
Daniel had reverted to sitting up straight with his hands neatly folded. When it became clear there would be nothing left on Oscar’s plate, Zac slouched back. Daniel shifted a little. ‘Could I be excused from the table?’
Sean looked at him with surprise and awe. ‘Did you hear that, Zac? Daniel has manners. He asks if he can leave the table.’
‘That’s only because he’s a guest. He doesn’t do it at his place.’
‘Is that true Daniel? Because if it is, you shouldn’t be a guest, behave as badly as you would at home. But if you’re just well-mannered, try to influence my son.’
‘I wonder whose job it was to teach me?’ Zac grinned.
Daniel was still looking politely at Sean.
‘Of course you can go.’
Hannah cut in. ‘Stack your dishes in the dishwasher. We can live in hope that the power comes back on.’
Zac’s shoulders dropped, so much responsibility was placed on him. ‘But if it doesn’t, you’ll have to take them out again and we wasted our time.’
‘If it doesn’t you’ll get to do the washing up, so why don’t we assume it will?’
Despite the grumbles, the boys threw themselves into the stacking with vigour, and Hannah bit her tongue. They were doing what she asked, so if plates got broken, it was no one’s fault but her own.
‘Great job.’ Sean stood sentry as they finished up. ‘Go run around for a bit, burn off some energy. You could play murder in the dark or something.’
Oscar and Zac were gone but Daniel held back at the door. ‘I’d like to ring my mum, if that’s okay.’ Sean, behind him, shook his head at Hannah slightly.
‘Sorry, Daniel, I don’t think any of the phones work without power. Because they’re all cordless, you know.’ An excuse with so many holes in it, she could only imagine that Daniel was too polite to point out all the mobile phones they had.
‘And, you know mate, it’s getting late,’ Sean jumped in, ‘and we don’t want to wake your mum up. She needs all the rest she can get just now. We’ll ring tomorrow. That’ll be better. That’s what we’ll do.’
Hannah held the words in until Daniel had followed the other boys out. ‘And we’re not ringing, why?’
‘She’s pretty sick. I got an email from his dad today. Maybe tomorrow she’ll be on the mend. There’s no need for him to worry until he has to.’
They watched the boys from the kitchen door. Oscar had endless energy, pent up from so many days with only his feeble parents for company and Daniel was a new playmate. An unknown quantity to be tested to destruction. As Daniel sat in the middle of the lawn, pulling strands out of the grass, Oscar threw himself at Daniel’s back, as if to climb it. Daniel gently rolled himself sideways, depositing Oscar on the grass. Oscar took another leap and held on tight. Daniel patiently prised Oscar’s hands from his shoulders, and once he had himself free, moved to the wall of the garden bed, out of the field of play. Hannah wished for something in the pantry that could distract him from whatever inner conversation he was engaged in.
In one of the kitchen drawers, she unearthed a scrunched box of bent sparklers, left over from Oscar’s last birthday. ‘Hey guys,’ Hannah called from the doorway, ‘look what I’ve got.’
Sean helped Oscar hold his steady in the flickering flame of the candle. Zac and Oscar leapt and whooped, made afterimage circles and wrote their names with light. Zac challenged Daniel to a sparkler duel and the two boys danced around each other, thrusting and parrying, Daniel without much enthusiasm, for the few seconds the sparklers spat.
The transitory joy was broken by a wail from Oscar. ‘I stubbed my toe. I (sob) stubbed (sob) my (sob) toe.’
‘Hey mate, I think you’ve had too much fun. You haven’t cried like this since you started school with the big kids. It’s nothing.’ Sean held out his hand to stop Hannah rushing to comfort Oscar. ‘It’s nothing. He’ll be fine.’
But as his sobs subsided, Oscar crept into Hannah’s arms. She didn’t think his tears were for his sore toe, rather for the strange and unpredictable world he was in and the ideas that were beyond his understanding, threatening his peace of mind, threatening his body.
‘Right, time for bed.’
‘Oh, what? It’s too early. Come on, Dad.’ Zac was filled with moral outrage at having his new freedom arbitrarily removed. When it was barely dark.
‘Okay then, not you two, but definitely you.’ Sean picked up Oscar from Hannah’s lap and tossed him over his shoulder. ‘Time to wash this sack of potatoes. You can’t eat dirty potatoes.’ Oscar was grinning again.
Zac and Daniel were company for each other and she could use the moment of freedom to find out what was happening about the electricity. At least the battery in her laptop had power. She set herself up at the kitchen table, by the light of a candle. The hum as she turned the laptop on was reassuring but she couldn’t get any further than opening a browser. The phone line, and hence the internet, was still connected but the router needed power. The bits and bytes she needed were right there, in the wires behind the wall, she just couldn’t tap into them.
People got information before there was an internet. There must have been—must still be—information lines. Except that she no longer had a phone book because any number she needed was on the internet and she wasn’t prepared to use her mobile if there was a chance she couldn’t charge it.
She stood outside Oscar’s door, listening to the end of the story. The lights came back on as dramatically as they’d gone off. She pushed open the door to let Sean know he didn’t have to strain his eyes. He blew out the candle, Oscar burst into tears again.
‘What’s wrong now?’
‘I liked it dark. It was so much fun. We’ll never have a night like this again, and it was so good.’
‘The lights will go off again, I can just about guarantee that.’ Sean tucked the sheets tight around Oscar and slipped teddy into the bed even though Oscar had left him on the floor for months. ‘We don’t need to wait for fun, we can make it ourselves.’ Oscar suspended his tears as he gave this proposition careful consideration.
Sean’s arm lay along the back of the sofa, his hand resting on Hannah’s shoulder, a small patch of body warmth. He held her tighter, pulling her in. The two of them looked out of the cave of their house through the small portal of the TV screen at the strange world they had left.
The minister made a statement trying to paint the outage as just one of those things that happen, even at the best of times. An unfortunate coincidence. His image gave way to the opposition spokesman, wearing an equally audience-tested costume of sober suit and dependable tie, declaiming that the day’s events only served to demonstrate how woefully underprepared this government really was.
Images of tired men and women at a power plant. The face of a woman, searching for the invisible presence at the other end of the camera. The grainy picture froze and jumped, presumably an interview by webcam.
‘Do you resent your colleagues who didn’t volunteer?’
The dark shadows under her eyes gave her a look of exhausted desperation. ‘The people here, we’re mostly the ones who don’t have family depending on us. We all agreed to be locked in. I don’t resent the others. I know them, I’ve been to their houses, I know their kids. We get food brought to us, we’re being looked after. In some ways it’s easier. Everyone has to make hard decisions now, do what’s important to them. Here, we’re working hard now but we can catch up on sleep when this is over. My friends are on their own, I only hope they are all right.’
Sean had the remote in his hand, finger resting on the channel button. ‘She should go home.’
‘The power plant’s probably safer than her home.’
‘The newsreader. Look
at her eyes. She’s been on every news report this week. She needs to sleep.’
The mayor stood on the empty steps of the Town Hall and cheerfully declared, ‘I can tell you that today the council has unanimously voted to remain here, in the city, until this crisis is over. This city, our city, has the best hospitals, the best infrastructure in the world.’ Footage of the mayor glad-handing smiling patients in hospital beds. No footage of her being doused in antiseptic the second the cameras were turned off. ‘And I challenge the Prime Minister to join us here to show his support for the citizens of this, the most vibrant city in the world.’
‘I’ve had enough.’ Sean kissed Hannah’s hair and smoothed it down with his hand. ‘You look done.’
‘I miss going to work. No, I miss having downtime when the kids are at school, even if it’s at work.’
‘I know. They’re so... there. All the time. I ended up bribing Oscar to stay quiet this morning. A biscuit for every five minutes he didn’t talk to me.’
‘You are the worst parent.’
His eyes softened as he smiled at her. ‘I am.’
‘How many biscuits did he get?’ From my pantry.
‘One. And that was an incentive, he didn’t last two minutes.’ Sean stretched as he stood. ‘Come on. Bed.’ He pulled her up from the sofa, snaked his arm around her hip and rubbed his face into her neck. It sent a shiver down her side and made her laugh.
She tilted her head in the direction of Zac’s room. ‘We’ll disturb them.’
‘God forbid his mother should laugh.’ He was still smiling. ‘Come on, bed.’ With his arm still wrapped around her, he guided her to the hallway.
She liked being so close to him, feeling him through her clothing, smelling him. The time they spent the last few days wasn’t together, it was side by side. It was mum and dad, always monitoring what she said in case small ears were overhearing.
She looked closely at him, wondering if some remnant of this morning’s bad mood still hid in his face. ‘Is everything okay?’
‘In the whole wide world?’
An Ordinary Epidemic Page 13