‘Dad, have you taken your medication today?’
‘It’s nothing to do with medication,’ I said.
‘But have you taken them?’
‘Yes.’ I could feel my voice rising. ‘The Gestapo nurse forced them down my throat before breakfast.’
‘Okay, then,’ she said.
‘I know this sounds unbelievable,’ I said. ‘But I mean it: I’m not your dad. He’s – somewhere else. Maybe he’s gone. Maybe he swapped bodies with me. Maybe he died, and I died, and God’s just using his body for me until he can find me another body, or a place in heaven. Jesus, I know how crazy this sounds, don’t think I don’t. But I’m not him. You gotta help me. I’m seventeen. I’ve got my whole life in front of me. I can’t just skip forward to age eighty-eight and miss all the good bits.’
‘You didn’t miss all the good bits,’ she said, crying openly now. ‘You were there. You’ve been a great dad.’
‘Look, Helen—’ I said, unsure how to continue, how to convince her.
‘No, Dad, you listen,’ she said. ‘Do you really not remember how you used to take us out in that wooden kayak that you built yourself?’
I smiled and shook my head.
‘You spent months making that thing. Curving the timber into shape, gluing it all together. And when I was little, I think about four or five, I wanted to go out like Ben and Ivor did, but Mum said I was too small, so you tied a rope to one end and let me go out anyway.’
She was watching me carefully for some sign of recognition, but how could there be any? I wasn’t that person.
‘Or how about your terrible dad jokes?’ She laughed.
I sighed. I needed to pee.
‘A policeman sees a man driving down the highway with a zebra in the back seat,’ she said. ‘He pulls him over and says, “Where are you taking that zebra?” “To the zoo,” the man says, so the cop just nods and lets him go. Next day the same cop is on the same road and he sees the same man drive past in the same car with the same zebra in the back seat. He pulls him over again. “I thought you said you were taking that zebra to the zoo,” the cop says. “I did,” the man protests. “Yesterday I took him to the zoo; today I’m taking him to the movies.” ’
I forced out a bit of a laugh.
‘You really have been a great father, you know.’
I took a deep breath. ‘Thanks, but I’m not that man,’ I said. ‘I hope one day to be like that man. I truly hope that when I’m your father’s age, someone will say such things about me. But first I have to get back into my own body. I have to live my own life.’
‘Dad—’
‘I’m not your dad,’ I said. ‘I’m still a virgin. I couldn’t be your father.’
That shocked her a bit, which had been my intention.
‘Will you please at least try to believe me?’ I said. ‘Humour me for just a few minutes.’
‘What do you want me to do?’
‘I was in a car accident,’ I said. ‘I hit a red car. I was on my way home from a party so I would have been taking Great Falls Road. If I’m right, then the accident probably happened at the intersection with First Avenue.’
‘So—’
‘So find out about the accident. See if there was a police report. If I’m right, then you’ll know I’m telling the truth. You’ll find there was a young man, seventeen, involved in that accident. Find out what happened to him. Is he still alive? If not, then I guess I’m stuck here.’
‘And if he is still alive? What then?’
‘I know this sounds crazy, but see if he recognises you. See if he knows your name when he sees you. Ask him some questions. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll turn out to be your father, in my body.’
‘Then what?’
She still didn’t believe me, but she was starting to soften, just a bit. That was all I needed.
‘Bring him here. At least ask him if he’ll come. That’s all I can think. I think we’ve swapped bodies. If we get the two of us together again, then maybe there’ll be a way to swap back. Of course he may not want to. I wouldn’t,’ I said.
She stared at me for a long time, thinking about that.
‘Please, Helen,’ I said. ‘I can’t – this can’t— It’s not fair.’
‘Great Falls Road,’ she said.
‘And First Avenue, or somewhere near there,’ I said. ‘I was heading home so it had to be around there. If there was no accident, then just assume I’m crazy and forget everything I said.’
‘Okay.’ She didn’t take notes, just memorised what I’d told her. ‘What else do you remember?’
‘I had a fight with my girlfriend. Her name’s Laura,’ I said. ‘It was over another girl. I was angry and in a hurry, and I’d had one or two beers.’
‘Let me see what I can find out,’ she said.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘Please see what you can do.’
‘I’ll see you later,’ she said, ‘Dad.’
‘Thank you,’ I whispered in that croaky, rattly voice.
Helen came back this afternoon. She told me – I don’t know what to think about what she told me. It doesn’t make any sense.
The moment I heard footsteps in the corridor my heart started beating so fast that I wasn’t sure I’d make it to the point where the door actually opened. Would there be someone else with her? Me? My body at least, with a different person in control of it? Please, please let there be two people, I prayed.
There was only one. Helen.
That was the first devastating piece of news.
She had checked with the police and there was no record of any accident. That was the second devastating piece of news.
The third was the kicker.
Helen said she had spoken to her mother, Vera, this old fella’s wife. She had asked Vera about the accident. Vera knew about the accident.
My first thought was, how could that be?
Maybe this old fella actually had been in the red car. Maybe he had escaped from this place and taken someone else’s car. He certainly shouldn’t have been driving. Or maybe he’d been on an outing. But at night?
‘The accident happened just as you described it,’ Helen said. ‘You remembered it well, even where it was.’
‘I thought you said there was no accident,’ I said. Had the news just got a bit better?
‘But it didn’t happen last night,’ she said.
‘Last week? Last month? When did it happen? And what happened to me, to the kid in the other car, I mean? To Robert?’
‘Dad, your name is Robert Powell-Sycamore.’ She was struggling to get the words out between tears. ‘That accident happened in 1946. That “other girl” you talked about was Mum. Vera. You broke up with Laura that night and married Mum in 1950.’
She said some other stuff, but I wasn’t really listening. I was still trying to make sense of what she had said. But it didn’t make sense. It was insane.
I asked her to leave. I’m afraid that I was quite rude about it. That hurt her, but I didn’t care. I didn’t want to hear her tell me that I was eighty-eight. I’m not eighty-eight. I’m seventeen.
I am seventeen.
I am writing this in a spiral-bound notebook I found on my nightstand when I woke up. There was an odd-looking pen on top of it, but it writes well enough.
My name is Robert Powell-Sycamore.
I am seventeen.
I don’t know where I am. I don’t know why I’m here.
The door is locked.
HOME
Samanthah Millah, with an extra ‘h’ on the end of both of her names, was sweet sixteen, soon to turn seventeen, and she had never been kissed. But there was a reason for that.
It wasn’t that boys weren’t interested in her, or that she lived by herself on a desert island (although it felt like that sometimes), or that she wen
t to an all-girls school or anything like that.
Nobody kissed anymore.
Not since Marburg.
Marburg was a virus, a cousin of the deadly Ebola virus. Like Ebola it had come out of Africa, Angola to be exact. Countries surrounding Angola had shut their borders, but Marburg was smarter than that. It didn’t try to cross the borders; it just flew out on an airliner in the body of a Canadian photojournalist who had been sent to the country to cover the original outbreak.
For days it slowly multiplied in his bloodstream, before revealing its presence. In that time the journalist infected over seventy-five people. Two weeks later he was dead.
From Canada the disease spread to the United States, and from there it spread to the entire world.
The medical authorities were always three steps behind in trying to contain the outbreak, which had swiftly become an epidemic, and then a pandemic.
Now it was worldwide and it wasn’t going away. ‘Marburg’: a pretty little name for a microscopic organism that loved nothing better than burrowing into human cells and making lots of little baby viruses.
There was no treatment and no cure. There was only prevention.
In a heartbeat, society changed. Kissing, hand-shaking, hugging had been the first to go.
Samanthah could live with that. She had never been much of a hugger anyway, and hand-shaking had always seemed a bit of a male thing, and also a bit dirty to her. Half the time boys at her school had their fingers up their noses, were scratching their butts, or picking at their teeth. Sometimes all three. Who’d want to touch those hands?
They probably didn’t wash them after using the toilet either.
Samanthah took off her medi-mask even before she had kicked the front door shut with a flick of her foot. She hung it on the peg with her name on it and gave it a spray from the disinfectant bottle on the table underneath. The stuff smelt revolting when wet, but it would dry quickly.
‘I’m home!’ she yelled, but got no answer. It was after 5. School had finished at 3 but she’d had chess club after that. She’d won two and lost one, which put her almost at the top of the leaderboard, second only to Jun Peng.
Her mother was in the TV room with the volume up loud, the sounds of some daytime soap foaming through the walls. Her sister had band practice and wouldn’t be home till later. Her father was still at work.
Samanthah went to the bathroom, peeled off her day-gloves and dropped them into the sanitisation unit.
She showered next, with the antiseptic soap and shampoo. Marburg was not airborne (God help the world if it ever learnt how to fly) but even so it was a sensible precaution to remove the crud of the world from your hair and skin. The atmosphere was a soup, and who knew what you were bringing into the house.
Clean, and feeling fresh, she went straight to her bedroom, opened her computer and filled out her logbook for the day. Everybody she had met, everybody she had talked to, every place she had been.
That was the law.
Not filling in your logbook correctly, or in full, was a criminal offence.
She could remember a time when it hadn’t been. When there was no logging. She was old enough to remember ‘BTV’, as the kids at school liked to say. Before The Virus. Before Marburg. But that seemed so long ago.
She finished and logged off. There would be more to do after the game tonight, but she’d do that when she got home.
‘What time’s dinner?’ she shouted, and when her voice failed to make an impression on The Bold and the Beautiful, she walked downstairs and into the TV room.
Her mother was a thin, rather severe looking woman in her forties, with blonde hair but grey roots.
‘What time is dinner?’
‘When your sister gets home,’ her mother said, smiling.
‘But the game starts at 6.30!’
‘Make yourself something,’ her mother said. ‘You’re quite capable.’
The ads finished and her mother turned the TV sound back on. On the screen a bold man standing behind a beautiful woman started an earnest conversation with the back of her head.
Samanthah shut the door.
Since Marburg the television had become her mother’s only friend. That was an epidemic every bit as real as Marburg. It was safer just to stay at home, so that was all a lot of people did. With phones and social media, who really needed to see anyone in person? Samanthah sighed and went into the kitchen. She would look after her own dinner. Again.
Jenny, younger by four years, was obviously her parents’ favourite. But there was no use crying about it. Samanthah’s boyfriend Darren was playing striker tonight and she didn’t want to miss it. If she wasn’t going to starve through the entire game, she’d have to feed herself.
She scanned the contents of the fridge. There was a packet of chicken thighs in a plastic tray at the back of the bottom shelf. She was halfway through slicing them, intending to fry them and make a wrap, when she remembered to check the expiry date.
The chicken went straight in the bin.
She still made the wrap, but replaced the chicken with a little lean ham. A brand new pack, well before its ‘Best By’ date.
Half an hour later her mask was back in place with new gloves, already disinfected, and she was wheeling her bicycle out of the garage, past the Audi, which her mother barely used now.
In the early days of Marburg her father had built a huge stone wall in front of their house, topped with broken glass. He had also strengthened the fence around their backyard and fortified that with barbed wire. Samanthah had joked that he was expecting The Attack of the Mutant Zombies. Her father just said it was best to be prepared.
Samanthah knew what the wall was really for. If Marburg got out of control there could be a complete breakdown of society. Anarchy. And if that happened it would be everyone for themselves.
The gate was a sturdy metal thing, with sharp spikes on the top. It slid open quickly, and she made sure it shut behind her before heading off to the hockey pitch.
THE GAME
Darren had been lucky. A winger in the school footy team, he had been one of those with the natural ability to make a switch when football, like all other full contact sports, was banned.
Darren’s speed and his hand-eye coordination had won him a place on the school hockey team, one of the sports that was still allowed, provided the players wore masks.
The hockey complex was sponsored by a freight removal company and their logo was imprinted on the artificial turf, as well as on the side of the main clubhouse. There were four fields, named after planets for some reason known only to those who had built it.
Darren was playing on Jupiter, the main ground, where they played the rep games on weekends. That was good, the seats were better. Samanthah made her way along the stands to where a group of her friends were sitting. Most of them had boyfriends or brothers in the game, or were in the girls’ team, which was playing next.
Hockey, in the age of Marburg, looked like a horror movie. The hockey masks were made of fibreglass with holes for the eyes, nostrils and smaller holes for breathing, and presumably sweating. There were built-in filters, to prevent infection. Although hockey was not a contact sport, nobody wanted to take any chances. But in the harsh glare of the pole-mounted floodlights, the game looked like a field full of psychotic killers trying to hack each other to death with scythes.
It was cold. It was always cold here, even in summer. Darren had a theory that the sprinklers they used to dampen the turf before games had an effect on the local atmosphere, creating a sub-climate where heat could not penetrate.
Samanthah thought it was just something to do with the way the surrounding hills and the nearby lake channelled the wind across the grounds. Whatever the reason, during night hockey games it was the coldest place in the universe.
But viruses didn’t like the cold either.
<
br /> The game was exciting, a real nail biter. Locked up with one minute to go, it was Darren who busted open the right wing with a long weaving run, leaving three opposition players in his wake. The defenders blocked him, but he flicked a pass off to Tom, in the centre, then looped around the defenders and received the ball back with only the goalkeeper to beat. He feinted to the right, then tapped to the left and the ball slipped past the keeper’s outstretched feet and hit the backboard with a harsh clack.
The buzzer sounded for the end of the game and the rest of the players were all over Darren, cheering and hugging him, forgetting all about the safety rules. The referee and the sideline umpires were immediately in there, blowing whistles, trying to break up the celebration. Viral Safety came first. Everybody knew that.
When Darren stood up, Samanthah was hardly concerned to see that his mask had come off. It wouldn’t be a problem. Every player was tested weekly. You wanted to play, you had to get tested – simple as that. And there hadn’t been a new case of Marburg in Australia in the past three months. Who cared about a slipped mask.
Darren walked her home, holding her hand, skipping beside her like a small child, full of adrenalin, endorphins and excitement. With her other hand Samanthah pushed her bike.
‘There were scouts at the game,’ he said. ‘National scouts. Of all the games to have a blinder, whoa, it’s just like, whoa.’
‘Did they speak to you when it was over?’
He shook his head. ‘No, but they were there, and I had one of the best games of my life. They have to have noticed.’
‘Yay you,’ Samanthah said. She was genuinely happy for him. Hockey was already shaping up as one of the major new television sports. Players were being recruited for outrageous sums of money, some straight out of high school for the big clubs’ development programs. No wonder Darren was excited.
She could feel his grip through the layers of protective rubber, although she couldn’t feel his skin. It would be nice to feel his skin. But nobody did that anymore. Well, almost nobody.
Was it love – what she felt for Darren? The other girls at school were always talking about love. For some of them that was all they talked about. How their love was pure and great. She wasn’t so sure. Maybe she was in love with him. She missed him when they weren’t together. Was that love? She sometimes saw his face in her dreams. Was that love? She strongly wanted to kiss him. Maybe that was love.
Stubborn Seed of Hope Page 2