‘Vaccines take months, not weeks. Plan for that. It won’t be fine, no kidding. There is no fine. There will never be fine for Ella.’
‘What do you want me to do, Sean? I can count packets of pasta. I can organise the kids into games. I can keep six people alive for three weeks. That makes me a fucking hero. The rest is up to someone else.’
The house was still. In their rooms, the kids were listening to every word.
There wasn’t much to do in the evenings except for the nightly ritual of wash time. A saucepan of water on the edge of the barbecue while they cooked dinner didn’t get direct heat but it was better than iced water straight from the tank and was just enough for a sponge bath. Somehow in the unspoken division of chores, the act of washing had fallen to her. While it felt natural to wrap Oscar in a towel and rub him dry, somehow the act was too intimate when it came to Ella, something only a parent should do.
The two little kids led the procession to their bedroom with the candle, leaving her to clean up in the bathroom before she followed them. A moment of privacy away from the cocoon of light and family. She was getting used to feeling her way around the house at night, aware of the presence of the walls. Not by touch, more knowing than feeling.
Sean’s voice jumped from the darkness as she stepped out of the bathroom. She hadn’t sensed him there. ‘You could try.’
‘What?’ Her voice was too loud for the small space.
‘You could try to make her feel welcome.’
‘I am. That’s what I’m doing.’
‘You don’t like her.’
‘I don’t know her. She’s the little girl who happens to live next door and up to a couple of weeks ago, I’d barely said two words to her.’
‘And don’t you think she picks up on that?’
‘On what? I’m being kind. What more do you want?’
‘Show her a little affection. She needs a mother.’
‘But I’m not her mother and you’re not her father. I think she knows that.’
‘You treat her differently from the boys.’
‘They are our children.’
‘If you can’t dredge up a little maternal feeling, you could fake it.’
‘That’s easy to say, Sean. You feel a special connection with her, well bully for you. I can’t just turn it on, so unless you have something practical and constructive to say, I will do my best to make sure she is fed, clothed and kept warm. I’m good at that.’ He was asking her to be someone she wasn’t.
In the flicker of the stubby remains of a candle, the yellow walls of Oscar’s room had an illusory warmth. She had painted this room in a nesting frenzy a few weeks before his birth and chosen yellow as the international colour of I don’t care if it’s a boy or a girl. Oscar had added the dirty hand marks and crayon drawings.
Ella and Oscar couldn’t keep quiet. They tumbled and squealed on the bed, interspersed with chatter. It was as if their brains were locked into constant activity, passing every thought straight to their mouths or their bodies. But she was relieved to be shut in here with the noisy warmth and the candle’s bubble of light. It was a break from the cold, and now dark, silence on the other side of the door.
‘Okay, okay, that’s it. No more monkeys jumping on the bed. Where’s the book?’ Ella and Oscar flapped about the room, peeking under the bed, nudging the toys on the floor with great seriousness. They wouldn’t find it unless it happened to be in exactly the place they looked. Ella turned to her and said earnestly, ‘Well, I don’t know.’
Hannah joined the search. She gave Oscar the candle and made him stand still, holding it upright. Dripped wax was a few minutes light wasted and a nuisance to get out of the carpet. She took apart Oscar’s bed, the last place she had seen the book, while the kids stood sentry. She found it tucked between his sheet and his doona, down at the foot.
‘Where were we up to? I know, we were up to “I don’t read anything until you are in your beds”.’ They both scrambled between their sheets, Oscar pulling the disarrayed bedclothes so they approximately covered him. Hannah sat on the edge of Oscar’s bed, like she had every night since he was big enough for a bed. Like she had every night since Ella had come.
‘Hey, Ella, can I sit on your bed tonight?’
Ella beamed and curled herself away from the edge, leaving Hannah most of the mattress.
Hannah twisted herself down, moving about the pivot of the candle, awkwardly supporting herself on one hand while she found the edge of Ella’s mattress. As she shuffled herself onto it, the foam compressed until she was sitting on the floor. There was nowhere for her legs to go but straight out, under Oscar.
As she read, Ella gradually came closer, whether moving herself or being pulled by the force of gravity into the well caused by Hannah, Hannah didn’t know. But there she was, with her body curled around Hannah’s back and her head peeking around Hannah’s side, following along with the story, looking at the pictures. Hannah tentatively put a comforting hand on Ella. It wasn’t hard with Oscar, she had had his whole life to be in love with him, in fact, she sometimes had to remind herself to pull back, give him the space to grow. She knew from experience that eventually boys grew out of cuddles.
Oscar was asleep with his eyes open but he came to life whenever she was tardy in turning the book around for him to see the pictures, holding the candle up to the illustrations. As she closed the book on the last page and slid it onto his bed, she leant forward to give Oscar a goodnight kiss and a hug. She stiffly turned herself around to face Ella and tried to replicate exactly what she had just done with Oscar, the kiss first and then the hug. She felt Ella relax into her.
Hannah picked the book up from Oscar’s bed and put it back on the shelf, flicked the curtain open a little to let in the moonlight in lieu of a nightlight, looked at their tight shut eyes in its blue wash. A few more serene moments.
On the other side of the door, she waited for the wailing to start. She was in no hurry to go back to Sean and Zac’s cold company. If Hannah was in the kitchen when Ella started crying, which had happened every night for the last few nights, Sean would insist on dealing with it.
She pressed her ear to the door. A rustle of bedclothes as one of them turned over. A quiet murmur from Ella and an answer from Oscar, her chance to tell them to go to sleep. She hesitated, missed the moment, would have to wait for another infraction. Only silence.
Ella and Oscar were asleep, so she had no excuse to linger. She felt her way back through the house. Hannah was relieved not to hear Ella choking on her sobs but was that it at three? Her boys had been high energy drama queens, every setback was death of all hope, every achievement needing a parade. Ella was more phlegmatic. Maybe in the early weeks, when Natalie was working crazy hours, she’d got used to Mummy being gone. And she was here because Daddy sent her, so maybe her world made sense.
In the kitchen, Zac and Sean were playing chess at the table by the window, making the best of the thin silver light. The white piece in Zac’s hand hovered over the board. It shone like neon but the black defensive lines disappeared, cloaked by the night. Zac settled his piece onto a square, held it for a moment and then let go. Even in the dark, Hannah could tell by the way Sean hunched into the board that Zac was giving him a run for his money. If she watched carefully, she could head off to bed when the game was too close to the end to abandon but with enough time to pretend to be asleep, or even actually be asleep, when he came to bed. It was cowardly and childish, but she didn’t need another lecture about Ella.
‘Hey Mum, give us some of the light.’ Zac took the candle from her and pushed it into a minimalist candelabra that had been, up ’til now, a purely decorative birthday present. With her candle commandeered, Hannah had to move closer to the table to read. Further into the light and further into the circle of conversation.
The letters bled into the shadowed texture of the paper. As she tried to construct shapes into letters, letters into words and words into meaning, her mind kept returning
to Ella not crying. At least she would be asleep by now. Unless she was lying awake in the dark, not crying.
Her mother’s watch sat loose on Hannah’s wrist. The thin leather band was dry and friable and she couldn’t risk pulling the strap beyond the first hole. Gravity worked the small circular face around during the day. She twisted it gently to look at the hands. The nerves on her wrist registered its weight against her skin, like a small alarm that she hadn’t yet learnt to ignore. It had taken an unmeasured hour of delicate tinkering to get it wound again before she set it from Oscar’s alarm clock, an arbitrary assignment of time. By their agreed convention, it was barely nine. In half an hour, she could make an excuse, go to bed and check Ella on her way.
She watched Zac deep in thought and, although he was staring at the chessboard, he wasn’t looking at it so much as staring into the distance with his face pointed in its direction.
‘Your move. I’ll start counting you down soon.’ Sean’s concession to Zac’s skill.
Zac opened his mouth but his arms stayed wrapped across his chest, hands pinned under his armpits. She looked where he looked on the board, trying to see where Sean had trapped him.
‘Three thousand, five hundred and thirteen people died yesterday.’ Zac still stared at the board.
‘How the hell do you know that?’ Sean voice was full of the anger of parental concern.
‘You didn’t turn on the phone did you? Oh, Zac, we can’t waste the battery, you know that. Every time you turn it on, that’s one time gone.’
‘What are you doing sneaking around in our room? If you want to know something, ask. There are things you don’t need to know about. How can we trust you if you go behind our backs?’
‘I knew what was on there. Why else wouldn’t you let me see all the texts in the morning? I’m not stupid, I know. Lots of people are dead. Ella’s parents are dead.’
‘We don’t know about Natalie.’
‘You don’t have to lie to me, I’m not about to tell Ella, she’s a little kid.’
‘Look Zac,’ Sean used his serious grown-up voice, ‘things happen that we can’t influence. We can’t help what’s out there but if we stay inside we can control what happens to us.’
‘We didn’t show you because there’s no point you worrying. That’s what we’re here for. Terrible things have happened...’
‘But you don’t get it. Three thousand, five hundred and thirteen people died yesterday.’ Zac’s eyes were on the table, he was turning over a black pawn in his hand. ‘And I get that’s terrible, but it’s a good thing. It’s going down.’ He made an uncertain grimace still looking at the pawn.
‘That would be nice, if it were true,’ Sean produced an imitation of a reassuring and reasonable tone, ‘and maybe there were days last week when the toll was higher but it doesn’t work like that. Statistics are not that clear, they go up and down from day to day and it doesn’t mean anything.’
‘I wrote down every number for the last three weeks.’ Zac’s voice was a little shaky.
‘Zac! You’ve been taking the phone every day?’ All this time she had been trying to firewall him, he had been methodically informing himself.
‘Just look.’ Zac darted into the dark and was back seconds later. ‘See.’ He held out his school maths book, open at a graph. The book shook but the candle light shone in his eyes. In them, she saw the look of power that he had when he was two years old and learnt that he could change the world with a simple word like ‘no’.
‘You have to find a line of best fit, even if the points go all over the page, and they do a bit. There are a couple of dots from last week that kind of mess it up but the thing is you don’t look at them. Look, it went up and look here, there’s one really high day, and then it starts coming down.’ He smiled. ‘It’s a bell curve. Kind of. Well, it looks like it’s supposed to be a bell curve but they don’t look quite right in real life. But that doesn’t matter because it’s coming down.’ Zac smiled at her again.
The world had changed. He had changed it with information and thought.
Sean took the book from his hands and held it to the candle. He studied it carefully. ‘You know, life doesn’t always fit a nice curve. There are other factors involved, complicating factors.’
Zac snatched the book back. ‘I know, it’s amazing. Look, you can see right here. That’s when the water went off. And then, see, a few days later, the number starts going up again, that’s because of all the people who left their houses. And then it levels off and it’s higher than it was but look, if you moved it all down a bit, the curve would keep going.’
And there it was, a line that meant so many different things. If you integrated the line, maths Zac hadn’t got to yet, it would tell you how many people had died. You could extrapolate how many more would die before it reached zero. But it was also hope, a road map to the way out, a promise that this would end.
Zac looked at his handwork with pride. ‘If they gave us examples like this at school, I’d see the point.’
‘If there are three zombies and each zombie takes two minutes to eat one brain, and five minutes to find its next victim, how long before a school of a thousand kids are all zombies?’ Sean chuckled, and Zac joined in. Her planning was not for naught. There was an end.
They celebrated Zac’s insight by stealing some of Oscar and Ella’s milk powder and cocoa and wasting gas on making hot chocolate. Zac did the making and she turned away when he spooned out the powders, easier not to know than be obliged to spoil the fun. Sean lined up three mugs on the outside table and Zac carefully lifted the saucepan to pour.
Sean, a little out of the circle of light, was fumbling in a cupboard. Zac picked the biggest mug and took it back to the kitchen table. While his back was turned, Sean produced a bottle of Kahlua and spiked their drinks. He gave her a furtive smile.
It was easy and reassuring to slip into bed at the same time as Sean but the cold of the sheets was a shock to her system. Couldn’t the epidemic have waited until summer? Sean inched across the bed until his body rested against hers. He was warm with life. His breath heated the side of her neck, raising goosebumps.
He sighed heavily, it rustled her hair. ‘I’m glad you’re here.’
She turned her head to look at him, nose to nose. ‘I’m glad I’m here too. Of all the places to be stuck for weeks on end, this would be my pick.’
He smoothed down the fine, loose hairs at her temple. ‘You did all that planning. I don’t know how we’d cope without you.’
She sat up on one arm. ‘You would. You’d cope.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You’d have to and you would. If I’m ever not here, if that’s the way the odds flow, promise me you’d cope.’
‘I wouldn’t want to. I wouldn’t choose to be without you.’
‘Ah,’ she kissed him lightly, ‘I wouldn’t want you to choose to cope, but for Zac and Oscar, you’d have to.’
‘One crisis at a time. We did that one, it’s over.’
‘Unless it comes back.’
He ran his hand down her arm. ‘Or it doesn’t. And we don’t think about it until it does.’
And right now, right here, in the warmth, she took a night off from planning a life that didn’t include her.
Sitting in the winter morning sunshine on the back patio, making breakfast, the water got to lukewarm and no more. Sean shook the gas bottle but it and the gas burners made no noise.
‘No problem.’ He scrambled over the fence and passed her the gas bottle from Stuart and Natalie’s barbecue, shaking it as he did. It was at most a third full.
‘That’s from my house.’ Ella’s assertion took Hannah by surprise. She realised that even if she didn’t think of Ella as one of them, she had stopped thinking of her as belonging on the other side of the fence. ‘My mum will be cross.’
‘No, sweetie, she won’t mind. We’ll buy a new one when she comes back. But we should have asked you first, shouldn’t we, because it is your
s. That would be polite. We’re using it to make breakfast for you too, so it’s okay isn’t it?’ It was a careless error. They had worked hard to avoid mentioning her mum or dad, or the house next door.
After they had restored themselves with rice porridge cooked on pilfered gas, Hannah cleared away the breakfast things. The warmth of the sunshine and the rest of the pot of coffee, bought at too high a price, enticed her. She collected her book and her mug, but Sean and Zac had pulled the table off the patio into the middle of the lawn. Sean was standing on it, surveying the neighbouring gardens while Zac steadied it.
‘What on earth are you doing?’
‘Dad’s counted three that he can see and plenty of them will be under a deck or in a shed. I guess we can’t get the ones in the sheds. Unless we break in.’ Zac looked thoughtful. ‘Dad, are we going to break in?’
Sean did an unconvincing splutter. ‘No, of course not. I’d never break into someone’s property.’
‘Except...’ Zac jerked his head in the direction of Stuart and Natalie’s.
‘That’s different. We know them and they left us implicit permission.’ Sean tilted his head towards Ella.
‘I still have no idea what you’re doing up there.’ Hannah’s outrage was tempered by curiosity. ‘Can you see anyone? Is there anyone else around?’
‘Nope, not a person. Not that I can see. Three gas bottles, at least, for the taking.’
‘They’re probably not all full, Dad.’ Zac corrected him, in a serious teenage way. ‘On average, they’re probably half full, so that would be one and a half bottles.’
‘You are not stealing gas bottles from our neighbours.’
Sean looked down at her.
‘What about Gwen? She’s home but you don’t see her. Just because you can’t see people doesn’t mean they’re not there.’
‘Why don’t you stand here and have this conversation again while I secure our energy supplies. It’ll save time.’
‘And last time, if you remember, I was right and you were wrong, so the conversation is in fact over. You stay.’
An Ordinary Epidemic Page 30