An Ordinary Epidemic

by Amanda Hickie

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Getting some clothes for Ella.’

  ‘I don’t have girls’ clothes.’

  ‘She can wear boys’ clothes, she won’t mind.’ He eyed her disapprovingly. ‘Why don’t you play with Zac?’

  ‘He’s in his room. He told me to go away.’ Oscar wandered over to his bookshelf and started pulling things off. ‘Does Ella like colouring?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘I don’t think she would like this book, it has trucks. Girls don’t like trucks, they like fairies. The other book has fairies but that’s my favourite.’

  ‘Girls like all different things. If you want to give her the one with trucks, give her that one.’

  ‘It’s a really good one. I’ll give her that.’ He looked at Hannah seriously for a few seconds. ‘Does she have her teddy? She might not be able to sleep if she doesn’t have a teddy but I don’t need mine to sleep.’

  ‘I’m pretty sure Daddy found her a teddy.’

  ‘You could get her teddy from next door. And some clothes.’

  ‘I bet Stuart locked the house when he went out.’ She hoped. Oscar was making a small pile of toys in the middle of the floor. ‘That’s plenty, Mouse. She’s got the computer and I think Daddy got some toys from the garage.’

  Oscar unstacked and restacked the pile, turning the toys over and examining them. ‘Can I take these things out to Ella?’

  ‘I think it’s best not to. You can play with her tomorrow.’ Oscar shrugged and wandered off.

  The house was so much quieter with one less, or two if she counted Sean. Daniel had barely said a word but now Zac had no one to talk to. Except Oscar and Hannah. And today talking was only a snarl. When he eventually came out of his room, he lay on the sofa, his eyes sad and vacant.

  ‘Justin says the phones are out all over.’

  ‘Who’s Justin?’

  ‘A kid from school.’

  ‘You’ve never mentioned him before.’

  Zac looked blank. ‘There are a lot of kids at school.’

  ‘How did you talk to Justin?’

  ‘He texted me.’ Zac was being patient with his slow mother. ‘Everybody else has a smart phone and I don’t even have internet.’ The whole thing was clearly her fault for denying him a smart phone.

  ‘Zac, do me a favour, make sure you keep your phone charged.’

  ‘Sure.’ She could see the cogs turning over as he tried to process something. He stared at the turned off television and, as she was about to get up, he blurted out. ‘Daniel must be really happy to be home. It must be really great to be with his mum and dad.’

  She waited but he said nothing. ‘Yes.’ It was the most she could bring herself to say.

  Hannah opened her bedroom curtains to give herself a view of the street and a little weak sunlight, too insignificant to add more than psychological warmth to the room. Clouds built high into the sky above the houses on the other side of the road. Everything felt damp, everything felt cold, it had worked its way into the whole house. Down the intersection next to Mr Henderson’s she could see blue sky breaking through. The clouds were struck by the last of the day’s light. She crawled into bed. In the peace of her bedroom, enveloped tightly in the bedclothes, she watched the clouds turn from orange to pink to deep purple to steel blue. Gaudy artificial colours. Nature had no restraint.

  The street might be full of people silently watching the sunset, or it might be unobserved except by her. There was no way to know how many silent inhabitants filled the houses in the street, how many Gwens. The moment was ephemeral, she couldn’t even lock it in her memory. She hoped Sean was watching.

  Her feet were cold, her face hot. She shucked off the doona and the icy air hit the light sweat on her skin, sending a chill through her.

  Dinnertime soon. Lentils and rice. She used to enjoy food, the cooking and the eating, before it became an endless drudge of meal making. Dried beans were almost all that was left. And rice. A couple more cups of lentils, then they were down to the black beans and kidney beans that needed to be soaked but hadn’t been. When she had no choice but to think about food, the only thing that gave her any anticipation of pleasure was the thought of a meal she hadn’t cooked herself. So she fell back to necessities, trying to remember how much rice, exactly, they still had to bulk out the beans. She wanted warmth, sleep.

  The sky had faded to shades of purple grey, the light was almost gone. From Ken Done to sepia had taken no more than twenty minutes. She wrapped the doona around her like a turtle shell to get to the wardrobe and pull out big thick mountain socks and a fleece jacket to put over the jumper she was already wearing.

  She dragged herself to Zac’s door. He was swathed in his headphones.

  ‘Could you give me a hand with dinner?’

  He looked around surprised. ‘Sure.’

  Oscar was right behind her. ‘I can help too.’

  ‘You can’t help, Mouse.’ Zac used his older-brother tone, ‘Cooking is too dangerous for a little kid.’

  Oscar’s shoulders slumped, he dragged his feet away.

  ‘Zac, I know you can find something for Oscar to do.’

  She parked herself at the table and watched as Zac followed her instructions. Oscar snuggled up to her, leaning his head on her shoulder. He wriggled, his arms bumping and digging into her. Her stomach started to cramp, her mouth filled with saliva. The act of trying to swallow made her gag. She tried to stand but Oscar put his arms around her. She shoved him away.

  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 further 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 business-like 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.’ But he knew from experience that adults don’t always tell the whole story and he’d known for years now that she was
not immortal.

  Her stomach spasmed again. She stumbled at last into the bathroom and threw up into the toilet. The cold of the tile floor was clean, 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. The water came from the same bucket that they flushed the toilet with. The woman lying on a bathroom floor that hadn’t been cleaned in weeks couldn’t afford to be picky. ‘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 rug they usually kept in the car, and gently 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 leant over her to straighten the rug. 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 learnt 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 though 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. 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 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 bath. 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.’ He had worked this out in his mind, thinking of all the possibilities while the bright colours of the cartoon passed over his eyes.

  She nodded. ‘Did you have dinner?’

  ‘I had to take Oz with me to Gwen’s. You have to put something behind your door so he can’t come in.’ He had thought it through. ‘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 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. All reasons to stay where she was.

  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 hers
elf that anything could be endured, she just had to get to the other side. But this was too much, all she wanted to do was sleep until it was over.

  Her head buzzed and her sinuses blocked as she cried angry, despairing tears. Some things could not be endured. There would be a time when there would be no other side to get to. If this bug was going to kill her, she didn’t have the energy left to go through the actual dying. She felt like she would never feel the consoling nothingness of sleep again.

  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 diarrhoea. 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, so 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.’