An Ordinary Epidemic

by Amanda Hickie

  ‘And now you want me to let you back in. Tell me, when during your pleasant walk did you think about Oscar and Zac? When did you decide that the rest of us were happy to risk death so you could go for a stroll? Seven and a half thousand people died yesterday. In driving distance of this house and you think you’re bloody Superman.’

  An obstinance settled on his face. ‘A number doesn’t change what is happening in this street now.’

  ‘Then what does? What on the face of the earth would it take for you to know exactly what is outside our door? Because going out and looking is the most short-sighted, dumbest answer to that question.’ She unlocked the grill and stomped into the bedroom, threw herself down on the bed, the tension in her body spent.

  ‘I’m sorry I wanted to loot Lily’s.’

  ‘That means nothing. You didn’t because you couldn’t.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He sat down next to her on the crumpled bedclothes. ‘We’re still going to need more food. How many more weeks can we survive on nothing but beans and rice?’

  ‘Beans and rice will keep you alive. Why is this not clear to you? This isn’t the time to go out shopping. That time is over, I did that when it was safe. This is the time when you stay inside and shut up about the beans and rice.’ It was his fault that she had lost her resolve, his fault for being himself. ‘And don’t talk to me. I don’t even know why I let you back in. Don’t talk to me, don’t look at me. Just go away.’

  ‘I don’t have a present.’

  A few more steps and Hannah would have made it to the back door. She held the phone in front of her leg and cheated it behind her as she turned around. Trying to keep it out of both Zac and Oscar’s eye-line would be easier if they sat closer together. So much for brotherly companionship. ‘That’s the way it goes, Oscar.’

  ‘But you have presents on birthdays.’

  Ella looked up at the sound of the word.

  ‘We could make a cake, Oz.’ Zac really was trying to be helpful. Hannah caught Zac’s eye with a warning look, because she didn’t need that kind of help, and used the moment she held his gaze to slip the phone into the pocket of her jeans.

  ‘A cake?’ Oscar’s face lit up.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she glanced at the ceiling as if help might descend, ‘the stove doesn’t work and we don’t have any flour.’ A dark cloud was moving onto Oscar’s face. ‘You have to understand, Mouse,’ she looked to Zac to help undo what he had done, ‘we would make a cake and have presents but we can’t.’

  ‘Then it’s not a birthday. It’s just a day.’ Oscar turned his back on her.

  ‘Mum, there must be something in the pantry we could make into a cake.’

  ‘I’m not hiding packet mix and a generator behind the beans.’ Now Zac stared at her. ‘Daddy won’t mind. He understands.’ Their silence communicated how much she had let them down. ‘You could make him something for a present.’ Zac rolled his eyes. ‘You could try.’

  ‘And you could try to find something in the pantry.’

  Oscar turned around looking disappointed and angry. ‘We have to have presents and a cake and a special dinner. Not beans and rice.’

  She sighed and felt a headache coming on. ‘You’ve got a shelf full of craft books and materials. If you make something I promise I will try to find some way of making dinner different tonight. Agreed? Now go.’ She shooed them off.

  She looked across at Sean in the office, saw him pointedly not looking in their direction. Since the power went off its only purpose was as a refuge for the two of them. The children still respected its status as a workspace even now that there was no work to be done. She waited until they were all reabsorbed into their colouring books or reading and, with her hand in her pocket covering the bulging phone, nonchalantly strolled across the yard to the office.

  She closed the door behind her without looking back. ‘Are they watching?’

  ‘Zac keeps looking over.’

  The phone bit into her hip as she sat down. The denim folded tight across the top, sealing it in. ‘We weren’t at all planning your birthday but if we were, try to be surprised and delighted. It means a lot to Oscar.’ She slowly and awkwardly turned her head to look through the window to the glass kitchen door. ‘I can’t see him.’

  ‘His head is down, it’s safe. Give me the phone.’

  ‘I don’t think so, looty boy. I’m still mad at you.’ She stood up to free the phone, held the on button and put it on the table next to Sean.

  ‘Do you have the emails to send?’

  ‘Sure.’ He pulled out a scrap of paper from under a pile of books. She stood next to his chair and he sneaked his hand into hers, watching the start-up screen, impatient with its stylish and colourful animation. Finally the home screen came up. The battery only had a sliver of orange at the bottom. They stared at the signal strength icon, waiting for connection. There it was, five bars. The screen flashed bright, went to black blazoned with ‘No battery remains’ in white and shut off, all in a few seconds. Hannah felt a little sick. Sean squeezed her hand.

  ‘I’ll get my phone.’

  She sat anxious, waiting, playing with the dead phone. She prised off the back, re-seated the battery. There was a possibility, a very remote one, that it had worked itself loose. She stared at the blank screen, wondering if Sean’s battery might have run down even while it was turned off, wondering just how many days of connection they had left. Once his phone died, they were down to Zac’s and all it could do was text. She heard Sean’s voice from the house, booming and overly reassuring. That had to raise Zac’s curiosity but Sean came out alone, hand on phone in pocket. She pulled the battery out of her phone again to get at the SIM.

  The glass door and large window of the office didn’t give them much privacy from the house as Sean took apart his phone and slipped in Hannah’s SIM. He turned it on, cupped in his hands. She realised she was holding her breath, twitching with impatience.

  Less than half the battery icon. ‘You’ve been using it.’

  ‘Come on, I was an idiot the other day but I’m not an idiot. It was run down before I turned it off but I can’t remember exactly how much.’

  Five bars of signal. ‘Check the government site first.’

  He was staring at the phone.

  ‘What’s taking so long?’ The sun reflected off the screen, making it dark and unreadable from her angle.

  Sean still stared, transfixed. ‘It’s connected.’

  ‘What does it say? Has something happened?’

  ‘Twenty...’ He looked away and squinted, then back down at the phone, as if trying to focus his eyes.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Fourteen thousand and twenty thousand.’

  ‘Twenty thousand new cases?’

  ‘No, that’s the number dead.’

  ‘The number for the whole country, not just Sydney. That can’t just be in Sydney.’

  ‘That’s what it says, twenty thousand people died in Sydney yesterday. And there were fourteen thousand new cases.’

  ‘They’ve made a mistake, switched the figures. There was only ten thousand dead the day before. It can’t double in a day. That can’t be possible. Surely. And there can’t be more people die than the number who are sick, that makes no sense. It has to be the other way, there have to be more new cases than people dead.’

  ‘And that makes it better? If it were fourteen thousand dead people that would be acceptable to you?’

  ‘Check, check somewhere else, the paper or somewhere.’

  ‘I’m wasting battery. Knowing a number doesn’t matter.’

  Her voice was high and strained. ‘Just check.’

  He typed with his thumbs, paused for a minute.

  She held out her hand. ‘Let me see.’

  ‘It’s still loading.’ He handed her the phone. The page filled in, ten by five centimetres of information, a banner, headlines. The text jumped around as the ads loaded but it was there, twenty thousand dead in one day.

 
‘What are you doing?’ Zac stood in the doorway. It was a glass door for heaven’s sake, how did they not see him coming? ‘You said we could only turn on the phone once a day.’

  ‘Look, mate...’

  ‘Dad, that’s what you said. You don’t let me talk to my friends but you do whatever you want.’

  ‘There are things that it’s better we do without you, some things you don’t need to see.’

  ‘What am I, Oscar? I want to use the phone.’

  ‘Zac.’

  ‘Give me a turn.’

  Zac lunged at the phone. It shot out of Sean’s hand and, in slow motion, gracefully arced across the room. Zac leapt to catch it, grazed it with his fingertips, turning its arc into a chaotic tumble, head over tail, smack into the window. It ricocheted to the floor and skidded under the couch. Zac dived underneath and backed out slowly, cradling it in his hands like an injured bird. He was ashen, his hands trembled.

  ‘It’s still working.’ Zac looked shocked and relieved. He handed it gingerly to Sean. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You broke it, Zac.’

  ‘The colour’s a bit different but you can read it.’

  ‘Do you think I can’t see, Zac? I’m looking straight at the screen. It’s smashed.’

  There was a blue tinge over the right hand side and a crack running across one corner, but the headline ‘Twenty thousand dead in one day’ was still crystal clear. The blue leached across the screen, with a wave of green following behind it. As waves of colours slowly flowed across, the black text began to merge into them. Hannah almost willed the terrible words to be unreadable.

  ‘I didn’t mean to, it was an accident.’ He looked from Sean to Hannah and back. The screen was now nothing but the psychedelic rainbow refraction of an oil slick. ‘You can put the battery in Mum’s phone.’

  ‘They’re not the same. It’s done.’

  Hannah could see Sean physically swallow his anger.

  ‘I just wanted to look at the phone. I’m not a kid.’

  ‘If you’re not a kid, for fuck’s sake take responsibility for what you did. You broke the phone, Zac, it didn’t jump out of my hand.’ Sean was holding the darkening screen up in accusation. Zac looked to her to take his side.

  ‘Bring me your phone, Zac.’ She was as calm as she could make herself.

  ‘Oh what? But...’

  ‘Now, no buts. And you don’t get to touch it again.’

  Zac held still, the resentment and sense of injustice written clear on his face.

  ‘We have one battery left and no internet, we can text, that’s all. Bring me your phone now.’

  Zac pushed past her and out the door.

  The house was quiet when Hannah walked through. It wasn’t until she got to Oscar’s room that she heard the murmur of voices. She let her hand rest on the door, enjoying their independence, then pushed.

  ‘Stay out, stay out!’ Oscar was pushing back with all his strength.

  ‘It’s me, not Dad.’ Oscar let go and the door flung wide. All of Oscar’s pencils and Textas were spread about the floor. Zac stood over the two younger ones, supervising. Ella had a loose page of a colouring book in front of her, the outline of a princess half scribbled in, purple and red. ‘See, this is me.’ She pointed to the spikey lines haphazardly crossing the black borders.

  Oscar pushed himself in front, impatient for her to finish. ‘I’m writing a story for Daddy, it’s about when we can go out. Zac writes the words and I draw the pictures.’ He held out a large sheet of paper folded in half, on each face a small drawing. ‘And Zac made Daddy a notebook but he didn’t write anything in it.’ From his frown, she could tell Oscar didn’t think that was much of a present.

  ‘Where did you get the paper from?’

  The two smaller kids looked to Zac, who dropped his eyes and shifted uncomfortably. ‘Some of Oscar’s colouring books have an extra page at the back.’ He swallowed his words so she nearly couldn’t make out the next sentence. ‘I tore them out.’

  He was trying so hard to meet all their expectations. He’d come up with ideas, organised the younger ones but still he expected to be yelled at.

  ‘Good job, good thinking. You’ll make Sean’s day.’ Zac didn’t need her here, the best encouragement she could give him was to leave them alone.

  The only room she hadn’t looked in was their bedroom. She found Sean leaning against the window frame, one hand holding back the curtains, the other a resting place for his forehead against the glass.

  ‘Hey, happy birthday.’

  Sean replied with a weak smile but didn’t look away from the window.

  ‘What are you doing in here?’

  ‘If I come out into the hall they lose it because I might see through the solid door into Oscar’s room.’

  ‘What are you looking at?’

  ‘Nothing, the street, houses.’ He stared out as if he could see beyond the nothing, beyond the street, through the houses. ‘Another patrol came around. You must have heard them.’

  ‘I heard a truck.’

  Sean nodded. ‘They didn’t have a p.a. this time.’ He sighed and stared into the empty street as if he saw it now. ‘Most of the time you can’t even tell if they’re men or women. They were all masks and boilersuits, army caps and boots. And I can’t shake the feeling that they’re young.’ He rubbed at his weary eyes. ‘Who else are you going to send out? Young soldiers who have to do what they’re told. One of them came onto the porch. She had more of those leaflets, she put one on the wall where I could see it. It blew onto the porch just after she left. I’ve been trying to read it but I can’t get the right angle. All I can see is there are phone numbers, much good they would do us, and some sort of map.’

  ‘It will be the same things. Emergency numbers, directions to the nearest shelter.’

  ‘This must be the fourth one. Why do they keep sending them out?’ He turned to look at her, his eyes sad. ‘They don’t bring anything we can use. They don’t have any new information. They’re out there, at risk, for what? How many of them get sick?’

  ‘They keep the looters away.’

  Sean stared at the street again. She wondered if a leaf had moved, if there was anything to look at out there that he didn’t know by heart.

  ‘She asked about Gwen and Stuart. I told her Stuart was gone and we were helping Gwen. I told her we don’t need leaflets, we can’t drink leaflets, we can’t eat leaflets. She said all the things we need are at the shelter, they don’t have the resources to bring them to us. She said it would be safe. She’s the one walking the streets I guess. She said,’ he paused, ‘she suggested that Gwen should be in the shelter. That she would be better off where she could be looked after.’

  ‘It would make our food last longer.’

  ‘You think we should? We can call and they’ll send someone for her. She wrote the number for me.’ He pointed to the glass. Awkward digits had been written in the dust with a finger, one of the threes backwards. ‘Is that the right thing to do?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘And what if it kills her? What if we make the call and they take her to the shelter and she catches it? Is that our fault?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She moved over to the window and threaded her arms around him. ‘Not today. Nothing bad happens today.’ She gave him a soft kiss. ‘Happy birthday.’

  Six o’clock and the light was gone. Oscar’s face glowed expectantly with reflected candle light. Hannah found his excitement infectious. A little bundle of presents sat on the table, tied around with green garden string, its flat plastic strands picking up the flickering light.

  ‘What have we here?’ Sean was a bad pantomime act. ‘Could these possibly be for me?’

  ‘They’re presents, Dad.’ Oscar looked concerned at having to enlighten his father.

  ‘Tell me, tell me, which one should I open first?’

  ‘Mine!’ Ella held it out to him. ‘It’s a picture of me, I coloured it.’

  ‘Thank you swe
etie, that’s great.’ Sean unwrapped and examined it carefully. ‘So you’re a princess and a fairy.’ He looked her up and down. ‘Just so.’

  Oscar had taken hold of his, rolled up in a checked tea towel. He tentatively held it out. ‘I couldn’t get you a real present.’

  ‘This will be better.’ Sean unfurled it. He had to hold it close to the candle to make out anything. ‘I think I need my reading glasses. Maybe you could read it to me after dinner.’ Oscar nodded. ‘And Zac, my first born, what have you brought me?’

  ‘That one.’ Zac poked at a pocket-sized present, folded inside a geometric napkin. Sean pulled the string off one end and the cloth unwrapped itself. The booklet was surprisingly well-executed. Zac had taken the covers off a broken ‘boys’ own’ hard back and glued them on either side.

  ‘My God, paper, something to write on. I am blessed.’ Zac looked quizzically at him. ‘It’s great. I’m very impressed.’ He took the last present from Hannah. ‘So what did you make me?’

  ‘I’m afraid I bought you something. I’ve had it for a while. If I’d known, I would have got you a tin of coffee or a solar battery. It seems frivolous now.’

  The perfectly shop-wrapped present looked unreal, somehow ostentatious and foppish. She wished its execution was more rustic, more substantial. Inside, a clear plastic clamshell surrounded a pair of headphones that looked like they had rolled off a robotic production line without ever having interacted with anything organic.

  ‘They’re noise cancelling, for the bus to work, so you can be in your own world.’

  He squeezed her arm. ‘I look forward to using them. I look forward to the time when I can use them.’

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘Yes, soon.’