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 light 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, gloveless men, 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, mid-fifties, casually dressed in a baggy cream jacket, which looked like it was meant to be worn crumpled and dark grey slacks. His silver hair was casually long, not unkempt. The middle man carried a bed sheet tied like a large swag. He heaved it onto a pile in the back of a ute. The last man tired of Mr Henderson’s noise and pushed him backwards, like he was flicking off a fly.
From beside the ute, the older man pointed to the open door of the house next to Mr Henderson. 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 her house then doubled back.
She jumped away from the window. The knife on the bedside table—she grabbed the handle tight. A dumpy middle-aged woman in her pyjamas 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 defence.
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 other young man. They stood next to the ute, 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 line 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 grill locked?’ She nodded. ‘Then they can’t get in.’
‘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 grill was followed by a man’s voice, ‘Hey. Open up.’
Hannah and Sean waited. Now there was banging. Hannah stole a sideways peak down the porch.
The younger man was kicking the grill, the older man 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 younger man lost interest in the grill 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.
‘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 grill. Up close, his jacket was more than fashionably wrinkled, 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 truck 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 grill, 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.’
‘He’s a cautious man, like your good selves, I’ll need to talk to him. Just open the screen door and pass the phone out. You can see I’m not sick.’
Hannah turned very deliberately to Sean. ‘Darling, I told you last night, the phone’s dead, the battery won’t charge.’ She turned back to the man and forced a smile.
‘So we have a long walk in front of us,’ he gave a weary smile, ‘at least you could spare us a cup or two of water.’ She could see he was running through his lines.
Sean brought the cricket bat up sharply and banged it hard on the grill. ‘Bugger off and don’t come back.’ The young man pricked up his ears at the action. ‘We’ve called the police.’ The thug snorted with contempt, none of them believed this any more than they had the lie about the mobile.
She raised her knife firmly and held it in front of her. Her voice wavered. ‘You can bully an old man, can’t you. That’s all you’re good for.’
The young man threw himself bodily at the grill, Hannah and Sean jumped back. He threw his heft at the grill again but it didn’t move.
She froze, terrified that she would involuntarily glance at the bedroom window. All the men had to do was turn their heads to see it had no bars. If they fled, abandoned the house to these men, they protected the kids but lost the last of the food. All the time shut in would have been for nothing. That made her angry, more angry than she was about Mr Henderson, more angry than she had been last night at the thought of dying. These people were beneath contempt, added nothing to the human race, yet threatened her family, threatened her preparations.
But they were bigger than her and ruthless. When it came to the crunch, she didn’t think Sean could whack someone hard enough with that bat to do damage and she couldn’t sink a knife into human flesh, not even if it belonged to these thugs.
She held the knife more firmly, hoping she was doing a better job convincing them than herself. The younger man broke off his attack on the grill to stare. The older one watched, as if curious to find out what would happen next. Sean shifted his hold on the diminutive bat.
The man across the road called out, ‘What’s taking so long?’
The older man considered them, sizing up whether they were worth the bother. ‘We’re just chatting to the householders.’
‘Don’t waste your time, we’re full anyway.’
T
he young man on their doorstep smiled, a leer that made Hannah shiver, turned and lumbered back to the ute. The older man gave a slight nod of the head and said, ‘Catch you next time.’ They watched him saunter across the road. As the ute took off, Hannah and Sean scrambled to the bedroom window to watch. Once it was out of sight, they spilled onto the verandah and leant over the brick wall to check that it hadn’t stopped further up the road. It was gone.
They watched and waited, Sean checking both ways in case the ute circled the block. Across the road, Mr Henderson’s front yard was deserted, his door was closed. There was no sign of observers, no one on a porch, watching from a front door. Maybe they were behind curtains.
She looked at Sean and saw a ghost. She put her hand on his arm to make sure he was real. He smiled at her and slipped his arm around her shoulder.
‘You’re here.’
‘I wasn’t far away.’
It felt only like a reprieve. The men at the door, she surely must have dreamt them. They strained belief. But Sean dying? People died every day, that was easy to believe, that was real.
He kissed her head. She felt his touch indirectly though her hair, his hand was on the fabric of her pyjamas. She put her hand to his face, to feel the warmth and solidity.
‘It’s okay, they’re gone.’
‘You’re here,’ she kissed him on the cheek, ‘you’re here.’
‘That’s a problem, isn’t it. I can go back to the office. I haven’t touched the kids.’ He looked down the hall. ‘We better let them know it’s safe.’
‘Is it? Is it safe? The men might come back. If they break in the front we wouldn’t hear them from the yard.’
‘Then you stay here.’
‘And when they come over the fence and you’re on your own?’
‘What about the kids?’
She held onto him as they crossed the threshold, just to be sure, and only let go to lay the knife gingerly on the hallway table. The house was so quiet that she could follow the sound of Sean’s footfalls through the living room, down the hallway, into the kitchen. The back door opened and closed with a clatter, leaving the house filled with a smothering silence, the returned absence of Sean. She stood still, straining to hear anything. The quiet crushed in on her. It was lifted only by the back door banging. She listened to his footsteps make the return journey.
His face was clouded by a grim determination. ‘I can’t see them. So we search room by room.’
They moved through the house methodically, punctuated by calling out Zac and Oscar’s names. She looked in Oscar’s toy box, in his wardrobe, under his bed. Despite the camouflaging piles of clothes, books and games on the floor, they weren’t there. She went back to their bedroom, even though there was no way three kids could have got past them and she looked under the bed, opened the wardrobe.
She met up with Sean as he was coming out of Zac’s room. On their way through to the kitchen, she opened the pantry and pulled back the shower curtain, just in case. Zac wouldn’t take such a little kid’s hiding place unless he was desperate but there weren’t many places big enough to hide three.
She hesitated at the back door.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘They’ll unload the truck and come back.’
‘How many houses do you think they did? Somebody might have rung the police. That’s a risk they won’t want to take. They’ll move on, I would, if I were the kind to turn over other people’s houses.’
‘Or they’ve gone to get something to break down the door. How can you possibly know what those thugs have planned?’
‘As if they needed something to break down the door. If they wanted to take us, they would have. You can obsess about this but in the end it doesn’t matter. What matters is finding the kids.’
‘I had to stay at the front, you understand that. I couldn’t be with them.’
‘I’m sure you made the best choice and I’m sure they did whatever it was you told them to.’
‘I told Zac to run if I screamed. And it’s possible I screamed.’ They both stared at the empty garden.
Sean pulled her into a hug and spoke into her hair. ‘I wouldn’t have done different. Now let’s find them.’
Sean held her hand as they walked through the backyard, he stood on his toes to look over the fence to Ella’s house. ‘The door to Stuart’s is still shut. They could have gone anywhere.’
They wouldn’t go to Gwen, they wouldn’t go to anyone. She’d made them afraid of people. Danger at the front door, danger from their parents.
Sean got down on the office floor and pivoted on his stomach, looking under the desk and the second hand sofa, even though the spaces were too small for three. Hannah scanned the room looking for somewhere, anywhere they could be. Her eye caught on every possibility, however impossible. The filing cabinet drawers, the gap next to the bookshelf. All too small. Sean pushed himself slowly up on his elbows, then his knees. As he got to his feet, she could see a smeared circle of dirt on his t-shirt and a look of defeat in his eyes.
They had to be in the garage. She held her breath and instructed the universe—they will be in the garage. The roof made soft metallic clicks as the sun heated it. Behind the clicks, she heard a deeper silence than they had found anywhere in the house, as if the walls were holding their breath.
‘Zac? Zac? They’re gone. It’s safe.’ No sound, no movement. The garage was filled with old furniture and boxes. Things they had no use for but she couldn’t bear to throw out. Old toys, the kids’ old clothes, a shelf filled with tools and pieces of wood, ready for some DIY emergency. One wall was covered with a ziggurat of storage boxes, a neat aggregation of paperwork and castoffs, all labelled.
Sean grabbed the box at the nearest end and yanked it forward, then the next and the next. The fourth box sat slightly out of line and as Sean yanked, Hannah could see a dark gap, and Zac looking back, his body making a shield between the two little ones and the outside world.
In front of him, Zac grasped a hammer with both hands. He crouched, primed like a cat ready to pounce.
Ella burst into tears. ‘I breathed, I couldn’t help it.’ Even her sobs were muted. ‘I’m sorry Zac.’
‘You can come out, it’s safe.’
Zac looked warily at Sean. ‘What happened?’
‘Some...’ Sean was struggling to find words that would convince Zac without scaring the littlies. ‘Some people came to the front door. They’re gone now.’
‘What people?’ He held the hammer like a light sabre.
‘No one. No one we know.’
‘Mum chucked.’ Zac threw it out like a challenge. Sean didn’t look surprised, just spent. He looked to her for an answer.
‘I wouldn’t be better this morning if it was Manba. And I don’t have a cough.’ But what she was thinking was, too late now anyway.
Zac shook his hammer at Sean with less resolve. ‘You might be sick. It’s not two days.’
All three children were watching Sean. ‘It’s possible, but I don’t think so.’ The hammer wobbled in Zac’s hand as his grip loosened. ‘You’re standing next to Ella, you’re breathing her air, so there’s no point worrying about me.’ Zac twitched and his eyes were forced wide. He opened his mouth to speak, nothing came out. Sean put his hand on Zac’s shoulder. ‘You did a good job. You found a safe place for Oscar and Ella.’ The hammer fell to the ground. Zac wrapped his arms around Sean’s middle and buried his face in his clothes. ‘How did you keep them so quiet?’
‘We’re good at hiding. Zac said so.’ Ella’s voice was soft and solemn.
‘Is it two o’clock yet?’ Oscar looked for permission from Hannah. ‘Do Daddy and Ella have to go back in the office?’
‘It’s fine.’ She enfolded Oscar and Ella in a tight hug.
‘Mum, you’re squashing me.’ She let them go, reluctantly.
Zac, with relish, rigged up a trip wire along the front path, complete with a booby trap of empty cans salvaged from the recycling bin. Wh
en he had no choice but to move from the shadow of the house, he darted out and ran back. Only once the front was booby trapped could Hannah feel safe out of earshot of the front door.
They laid a blanket out in the backyard. The sun infused into her cold bones, it felt like days since any warmth had reached them. Ella and Oscar lay on either side of her. They spread their arms and legs, turned their tummies up to collect the sun’s rays.
Sean mixed some peanut butter and soy sauce with water, poured it over a mess of rice and leftovers and called it satay. Even when it was placed on the blanket in front of her and a fork was in her hand, Hannah didn’t feel like food. All she felt was exhausted and shaky. It was an unappetising mess but the need not to waste food overrode her instincts.
Ella prodded the mashed up pile on her plate. She swirled it around with her fork, and when she lost interest, she wandered over to the lemon tree and started pulling off the lower leaves, scrunching them and putting them to her nose.
‘Ella,’ Sean called over to her, ‘come back and eat lunch.’
‘I don’t like it.’
‘That’s fine, honey, I’ll make you something else.’
‘Hang on,’ Hannah made annoyed eyes at him, ‘she has to eat what everyone else eats.’
‘I can’t blame her,’ he pushed his own food around, ‘it’s slop.’
Zac stiffened slightly, listening more closely, and Oscar leant in, not bothering to disguise his interest.
‘She has to eat what everyone else eats. It’s only fair.’
‘She’s barely eaten anything in two days.’ Sean’s face was stony. ‘She didn’t like anything.’
‘None of us like it but it’s what we’ve got. She won’t starve.’
‘You think.’
‘She’ll eat when she’s hungry. For God’s sake, we don’t have anything else.’
Zac and Oscar both eyed Ella’s plate while they wolfed down their food. The instant the last forkful went in his mouth Zac leant over and scooped up some of Ella’s.
‘Hey.’ Sean pulled the plate away from him.
‘You’re making her something else. I’m hungry.’
An Ordinary Epidemic Page 23