An Ordinary Epidemic

by Amanda Hickie

  Although the pharmacy had all its fluorescent lights blazing, there was no sign of anyone inside. She put on disposable gloves, one pink, one yellow, fished her wallet out from under the passenger seat, took out thirty-five dollars in notes as she’d been instructed, and hid her wallet again. The script lay on the passenger’s seat.

  She rapped on the shop window and pressed the script against the glass. The door at the back opened a crack. Through it, she could see a young man talking to someone behind him. He came to the window to read the script. After he had examined it, he yelled through the glass, ‘Push it under the door, with the money.’

  She folded the money and put it inside the script, scrunching it as she shoved it through the narrow gap. The young man unfolded it with the toe of his shoe and squinted. ‘One minute.’

  She was exposed, lit by the store like the leading lady of the footpath. But without an audience, she hoped. She should have parked facing the wrong way. As it was, she was going to have to walk all the way around the car to get to the driver’s side. Further than she would like in an emergency.

  One of the hospital pharmacies might have been a better idea, less isolated. But they would have been crowded by all the people who needed heart medicine, antibiotics, antidepressants, insulin. The very reason they were kept open was for sick people. Here, alone, the dangers were more obvious but less likely.

  She must have rung half the pharmacies in Sydney. Less than one in ten answered and only after she’d let the phone ring and ring. She should have filled the script two weeks ago. Sean thought she should leave it. He said that cancer doesn’t come back because you miss a few pills, but who knows what triggers one little bastard cell to start dividing. Who knows how you tell.

  When one of the calls finally answered, the man on the other end was tired and suspicious and asked for her name. He was only open for regular customers but Hannah had talked fast and eventually, reluctantly, the man had admitted he could fill the script.

  And here he was, the voice on the phone, coming back out to the glass front, much younger than she’d expected. He came right up to the window to yell again and she instinctively moved back, even though the glass between them blocked everything but the sound. ‘There’s a planter around the corner, it’s in that.’ He scurried to the anonymous safety of the back room.

  No matter how profligate it was to drive ten metres, she couldn’t muster the courage to walk around the corner alone. She did a U-turn, took the corner and pulled up next to the planter. One hand on the car door, she felt under the plants for the package, threw it on the passenger seat and took off, her heart pounding.

  She was suddenly a very long way from Sean. Ahead, all she could see was the dark street. She fumbled to plug her phone into the hands-free kit. The ringing of the phone on the other end sounded thin in the metal box of the car.

  ‘Hello?’ He sounded like himself. Warmly, comfortingly like him. She should record him saying just that word, hello, and carry it around with her.

  ‘It all went fine, I’m on my way back.’

  ‘Oscar’s asleep. Zac and Daniel are in Zac’s room. They’re ready for bed.’ Everything he said, the way he said it, was strangely, inexplicably normal.

  ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘I’ll be here.’ She could picture him in the light of their living room, watching TV. The whole house would be lit up. She saw it before her, an island of light in the vast threatening dark, and she set her course towards it. She imagined this was how firefighters felt. Lots of nothing happening, waiting for something unlikely but catastrophic. She was twitchy and bored at the same time.

  When she’d been diagnosed with cancer she’d sat in the specialist’s consultation room nodding knowingly, yes, yes, I understand. Her doctor had explained what would happen next, who she would see, what the procedures were, what the outcomes were and Hannah had listened carefully, academically. The doctor had watched her, Hannah assumed looking for a reaction but his words had no more weight than air. To react required something solid to react to.

  On the way home from the doctor’s it struck her. So this is what I get, it’s not what I was expecting. How had she not noticed that all her life she’d been waiting for the one thing to happen, the one thing that you can’t recover from? She was still expecting something, she always expected something. This virus wasn’t it, either. Whatever it was wouldn’t be long and drawn out, it would be a sharp axe. A call from school telling her to go to the hospital. A work colleague of Sean’s on the phone with a catch in his voice. She’d spent all her time mentally preparing for things she couldn’t bring herself to think about. If one of the boys died, if Sean died... she couldn’t think beyond that point. It was unthinkable. This wasn’t it yet, and whatever it was, it was still out there waiting.

  The bright bubble of cleansing light kept them safe for the time being. She couldn’t control school, she couldn’t control Sean’s work, she couldn’t control other drivers on the road, she couldn’t be there when Zac was out with his friends. She could only hope to be in their heads, telling them to take care, not to take risks, that the most important thing was coming home at night, nothing else came close. As she turned into their street, she could almost see a radiance around the house.

  She took the steps in one jump, afraid of the darkness nipping at her heels. Nothing behind her but the oppressively silent shadows of her neighbours’ houses as she put the key in the lock.

  The gloves from her hands joined the pile of discarded contamination from the outside world, growing next to the mat. She shut the door on it all.

  There he was, lit by the TV just as she pictured. He shifted over to give her room on the sofa. She didn’t say anything, he didn’t look up from the news. The images were sickeningly familiar. People with facemasks walking past bodies in the street.

  ‘Manchester?’

  ‘Somewhere in America.’

  ‘I didn’t realise.’

  Piles of corpses being burned by figures in hazmat suits. One of the spacemen tossing a body on the pyre. The discarded shell of a life. That ‘infection risk’ had been going about its business only days before, having breakfast, worrying about paying the rent, complaining it was too hot to sleep. The effort we expend on the minutiae of life when we don’t know it’s too late to matter.

  The scale precluded emotional comprehension. One person had a story. A thousand people, ten thousand people, were a bonfire to prevent contamination.

  Another city, another pile of bodies. Children, old people, driven into the streets by necessity. The well carrying the sick, looking for medical help that in some countries wasn’t there even under normal circumstances. But she had to witness this. It was the penance she did for being safe, for now, with Sean and her children. It was the payment for still being alive.

  The same newsreader. The dark circles under her eyes, grown too deep to be hidden by her makeup, were highlighted by the mask she hadn’t been wearing a moment ago. On the other side of the desk sat a similarly masked man.

  ‘...while it appears that for the first time today the number of fatalities in Sydney may top three hundred, I think that needs to be taken in a context where...’

  ‘Aaaaaagggh.’ Sean was on his feet. The remote made a pinging noise as it hit the screen. ‘Tell the dead about context you fucking liar. Tell them how to put hundreds of thousands into perspective.’ He grabbed a handful of Lego bricks and hurled each one, machine gun rapid, at the man on the screen.

  ‘Sean.’ She tried to pull him down to the couch.

  ‘Tell my sister that. Tell her to take a historical view. Half the people she works with are dead. Her neighbours are dead and rotting. But put it in perspective and it’s not as bad as the Black Plague or the Second World War.’

  ‘Is she all right?’

  Sean collapsed back onto the couch. ‘She emailed today. She’s all right, she’s surviving.’ Hannah curled into him, wanting to make it better.

  Now the televi
sion framed a photo of the two boys who were in isolation. ‘ORPHANS DIE’. She waited for the emotion to hit her, the grief, the fear. Nothing came. She didn’t know these boys any more than she knew the remains being thrown on the fire. They lived in the same town, spoke the same language, wore the same kinds of clothes, played the same computer games as her kids. That didn’t make them any more real than the thousands. The thousands were not less loved by their families, the friends of each of the thousands felt their grief just as deeply. She couldn’t stay on the couch, not without seeing for herself that the boys were safe.

  ‘There’s a poo.’

  No, no, it was too early. If she didn’t move, she wasn’t awake.

  ‘It’s floating.’

  All she had to do was out-sleep Sean.

  ‘It’s really big.’

  Not my turn, not my turn.

  ‘In the toilet.’

  ‘Flush it Mouse, just flush.’ She lost, she gave herself away.

  ‘It won’t work.’

  ‘Jiggle the button.’ Sean still hadn’t moved.

  ‘I did. I jiggled, it won’t flush.’

  She fell out of bed and followed Oscar to the bathroom. There it was, floating. She pumped the handle few times and listened for the cistern to kick in. Nothing. The sink tap spluttered and spewed a teaspoon of rust water, no help there. Sooner or later the sensitive eyes of teenagers would be up so, to protect them, she respectfully concealed the offending sight with a few squares of toilet paper.

  Sean peered around the door as she was contemplating her handiwork. ‘This could be a problem. No water in the kitchen.’

  The internet was full of people tweeting about lack of water, it looked like the whole city. The water website had no specific information, only an emergency number, and Sean waited on the line for half an hour before he reluctantly hung up. ‘The water will come back or it won’t. Knowing when won’t change anything.’

  ‘I haven’t run the laundry tap but at most there’ll be a cup of rusty water in the pipes. But even if you boiled it, I wouldn’t drink it. There’s bottled water in the pantry, that should get us through a couple of days but not if we flush the toilet.’

  ‘If the water doesn’t come back by tomorrow, we might have to drink our own urine.’

  ‘That won’t be popular.’

  ‘It would solve the flushing problem.’ Sean smiled like an idea had gone off in his head. ‘What about the rainwater tank?’ He looked pleased with himself. ‘You haven’t been using it to water the garden or anything useful have you?’

  Sean filled the kettle from the tank, to prove he could, scooped out the coffee grounds carefully, levelling off the top with a knife. He sniffed at the dregs in the milk carton. There was just enough that they could pretend they were drinking macchiatos but it left an oily slick on top. They hadn’t had anything fresh delivered for a week but she put that thought out of her mind. One problem at a time.

  Sean made a salad for lunch. The last few cherry tomatoes, a couple of papery spring onions, a handful of olives, a half a small tin of salmon and some left-over pasta. He stared at the tomatoes.

  ‘Do they need to be washed? Is it worth the water or does wiping them with a damp cloth get them clean?’

  He served out onto six plates, five for them and one for Gwen. For six days they had taken her lunch and dinner, knocking on her door, leaving cling-wrapped plate on the step and listening, hidden on their porch, for her to collect it. What a bad neighbour Hannah was, a bad human being, making Gwen live all alone. But she was alone before the lock-in too, so if Hannah was failing her, she’d been doing it for a long time.

  In the living room, Zac, Daniel and Oscar were playing cards. They sprawled out on the floor, Zac leaning against the sofa leg. Oscar sat upright, cross-legged, staring at his hand of cards, examining each one. The pack was sitting in the middle, the top card face up. Each boy had a messy pile next to him, the won tricks, Hannah guessed.

  ‘Come on Oscar, put something down.’ Daniel’s legs splayed out in front of him, his cards in a fan by his side. Oscar screwed up his face, his hand hovered over one card then another.

  ‘Give him a chance,’ said Zac, ‘He’s littler than us. Hey, Oz, take your time.’ That was her Zac, the one that didn’t admit to enjoying his brother but at least tolerated and looked out for him.

  ‘Zac, I’ve got lunch for Gwen, do you want to take it round?’

  Oscar played a card triumphantly. From the surprise on Daniel’s face, it was a good move.

  ‘It’s my turn and this is the last hand.’

  She was already holding the plate and the boys had been so well-behaved, it wouldn’t hurt to take it herself.

  As she walked up the hallway, the diffuse sunlight through the security grill hit the glass in their front door, forming a golden geometric glow. She balanced the lunch in her left hand to grab the doorknob with her right, her eyes on the plate, trying not to let it tip. The light unfolding around the edges as it opened, dazzled her for a moment and she smiled, thinking how nice it was to really pay attention to the small things. Just as she took hold of the grill handle, it jerked away, pulling her with it. Her hand pivoted to keep the plate flat, and she landed heavily on her right foot, just on the edge of the step.

  By instinct, she grasped the handle harder as it juddered. A high-pitched voice, chattering in distress or anger, issued from the silhouette of a person. Hannah couldn’t integrate the unformed sensations. They moved around then snapped, without changing, into Gwen. On their doorstep. Tugging at the grill. Screaming at her. And the grill was unlocked. How the hell had she left the grill unlocked?

  Hannah grabbed the handle tighter and tried to wrestle the grill back to the frame. Gwen’s practical clothes were clean and well-presented. Her hair was in its usual grey bob. Hannah couldn’t reconcile the navy canvas lace up shoes, their white rubber soles pristine as always, with the rage in Gwen’s face. Inexplicable rage.

  Gwen tugged at the grill in anger. At the end of each tug, the steady pressure of Hannah’s weight brought the grill nearer to being closed. Hannah tried not to hear the stream of abuse and accusations, tried not to think that this was Gwen, her pleasant neighbour, Gwen whose garbage bin she’d put away as a neighbourly gesture. That wasn’t Gwen on the other side of the grill.

  Gwen yanked, the grill banged, hitting the frame and jumping away again. Hannah considered shouting but Sean was out the back and she didn’t want the kids to come running. She didn’t want them to see this, to be part of this.

  The keys were in the door and the door had swung all the way open but she couldn’t let go of the grill until it was locked. Her free hand was holding the plate and the plate held the salad. If she dropped it, one whole meal was gone. How dare Gwen, after all they had done for her.

  She gave the handle an almighty shake and sent Gwen flying back. Hannah was shocked that someone could treat an old woman like that. She had an impulse to look around for the culprit. Surely it couldn’t be her.

  Gwen spun around and grabbed at the verandah wall to stop herself falling. She was on one knee, bloodied from hitting the bricks.

  Hannah considered only for a split second letting go of the handle. She swung her body around in hope of finding help in the seconds before Gwen stood up, a solution, some form of twister that would let her hold the handle, the plate and keys. But the only thing she saw was Zac, halfway down the hall, quiet and still.

  ‘Take the plate,’ she screamed at him. He darted forward, eyes down, and took it with both hands. She twisted back, threw herself at the keys, still holding the handle fast. The key turned with a metallic snap just as Gwen got to her feet.

  Hannah pushed down on the lever, hard, and when the lock held, she forced herself to let go. She took a step back, a metre’s distance between her and the grill. Her hand was cramped, her knees were weak. She put her hand to her face to stop it from shaking. Her face was cold and clammy. She turned her back on Gwen and there was Zac, still
standing there, still quiet, still looking down, still holding the salad. ‘Take it to the kitchen.’ He took a step backwards. ‘Everything’s fine.’ She forced herself to speak slowly and calmly. ‘Thanks, you were a great help. Everything’s fine now.’ Zac took off.

  Gwen pressed against the grill. ‘I know what’s happening. I know.’

  Hannah took a breath before speaking, she struggled to keep her voice down. ‘Do you? I have no idea.’

  ‘They’ve turned off my water. They’ve turned off my water and you’re happy to let them.’

  ‘Everybody’s water’s off. It’ll be on again by dinner, like the power.’

  ‘I went over and talked to Roger Henderson. His water is off too. It’s not an accident. They’ll help people like you. But you won’t help me or Roger Henderson because it doesn’t suit you.’

  ‘You have to go two days, two days, without seeing anyone. How hard is that? How can you not do that? Who else have you talked to? And who else has Mr Henderson talked to? And who have those people talked to? My kids’ lives are more important than a chat with Mr Henderson.’ She couldn’t stop. ‘And what difference does it make which side of the wall you’re on. We’re full up, we’re not a bloody hotel. We’ve given you food, we’ll give you water. Stay inside your bloody house if you want to live.’

  Gwen shook a finger at her. ‘And who’ll look after Roger Henderson? There won’t be enough to go around, not enough medicine, not enough food, so let’s get rid of the old people, let’s turn off their water. You know and you don’t care what the government’s doing. More for you.’

  Hannah gently closed the door on Gwen so she didn’t have to see the hatred directed at her. It shut with a soft click. She felt herself being submerged by exhaustion. Her legs and arms felt heavy and spent. Gwen’s shape was still behind the glass, still yelling at the door.

  The extra meal sat on the bench, covered with a tea towel, accusing Hannah of heartlessness.

  ‘I’ll take it around later, we can put it in a container. I can jump the fence and put it at her back door.’ Sean kept his voice low even though the boys were sitting at the table with them.