An Ordinary Epidemic (28 page)

‘Sure.' She looked out at the deserted garden. ‘You could pick me some herbs. Anything you like the look of in the herb pots. Remember to break the leaves off, not pull them up.' She handed him a bowl and moved the chopping board to the kitchen table so she could keep an eye on him.

He came back with the bowl full, mostly of parsley. ‘What do we do now?'

‘Um,' if she let him chop veggies they would be eating lunch at dinner time, ‘you could get some water for the soup from the rainwater tank.' She searched out a clean soft drink bottle. ‘Fill it up, and remember to put the lid on.'

‘Okay.'

He walked across the garden, swinging his head from side to side, scanning for feline danger. It reassured her that he jumped when a bird lighted on the fence. She could trust him to be cautious, it was safe to look down at the sausage she was cutting up for a few moments.

She heard what could have been a wail of surprise from Oscar and on its heels the slam of the office door. She dropped the knife and bolted to the back door. Oscar lay splayed face forward on the grass, his t-shirt soaked with water, the bottle flattened underneath him. The glass transmitted clearly Sean's harsh tone.

‘You weren't looking where you were going, were you?'

‘Yes I was.'

‘I was watching you. And why wasn't the lid on tight?' Sean stood over Oscar.

‘It was.'

‘What were you even doing? That's a day's water for
someone and it's gone.'

‘It wasn't my fault,' his face streaked red with tears of resentment.

‘This isn't a game, we can't get more at the store. You want chocolate, you want another drink? There isn't any more when it's gone. Do you understand?'

‘I didn't mean to, it wasn't my fault.' Oscar's voice rose higher in proportion to the injustice of the situation.

Hannah ran to put herself between Oscar and Sean. ‘What do you think? He'll learn by being yelled at? I told him to do it. Yell at me.'

Sean turned away, and trudged back to the office. She helped Oscar up from the grass.

‘My (sob) pyjamas (sob) are wet.' He choked on his indignation.

She knelt down to pull him to her but he held himself stiff.

‘I'm wet.'

Sean's voice took her by surprise. Crouched next to them, he took Oscar's hand and looked him in the eye, modulated his voice to make it soft and calm. ‘I'm sorry, Oz, that was unfair of me. I didn't know Mum told you to get the water.' Sean didn't make eye contact with her. ‘It wasn't fair of me to get mad at you.'

‘Okay.' Oscar's sobs abated and his body softened.

Hannah shepherded Oscar inside and hung his wet pyjamas over the back of the kitchen chairs to dry. They weren't really dirty. Not bits of mud on them dirty. Not worth-wastingmore-water-on dirty.

The next task was to make up a container for Gwen. Daniel and Zac were taking turns to take her food. They changed which door they left it beside each time, knocking and running away like pranksters. Oscar wanted to take his turn as well but not after yesterday's incident. Against her better judgement, they had let him take it to the front but he thought he saw
the door opening and dropped the meal. When Sean dashed around there was no sign of the dropped container. She spent the afternoon listening for noises from Gwen's side of the hallway wall without hearing her. But then they never did.

There were only a couple of take-away containers left. She wrote a quick note.
Gwen, could you please leave the water bottles and food tubs outside so we can reuse them
. She couldn't bring herself to put
love
, and
cheers
was too jaunty under the circumstances. So she didn't put anything, it was obvious who it came from.

When Oscar came running into the living room, she jumped, barely catching her laptop as it slid off her knee. He was gone again before she registered what he said. She entered the kitchen prepared for bad news but all she saw was Zac and Daniel standing by the back door, ominously silent. Whatever the problem was, it was in the garden. Please, she thought, don't let it be Mr Moon dead or, worse, injured or sick.

But in the middle of the yard stood Ella, like a statue busker at the Quay, in pink from head to toe. Riotous, discordant shades of pink. One chubby foot was shod in a strappy, sparkly sandal, the other in a pale pink runner. Her legs were firmly planted on the ground, covered in long stripy fuchsia and mauve socks that nearly met her hot pink shorts. Over the shorts, a net fairy skirt stuck out like a shelf, covered in more sparkles. Her purple t-shirt sported a mass of flowers in pastel shades on the front and Hannah could just make out, peaking over her shoulders, fairy wings to match the skirt. A plastic tiara was pushed in among her tangled curls, set at a rakish angle. And around her face, elastic knotted through her hair, a white surgical mask covered her mouth, nose and chin. In the absence of the rest of her features, her eyes peeping out over the top appeared impassive.

Sean broke the trance by calling through the window. ‘Ella, sweetie, what are you doing here?' Hannah hadn't even heard him come into the room.

Ella shook her head.

‘Are you cold? Where's your dad?'

She shook her head again.

Sean looked to Hannah and shrugged. Hannah murmured so the boys wouldn't hear, ‘Is she crying?'

Sean called out to her again. ‘You have to go home, Ella, your dad will be worried.'

Next door might be further afield than she was prepared for any of them to venture, but it was only at the other end of a copper wire. Hannah dialled.

‘We finished our game and she was there. I'm sorry, I'm sorry. We weren't watching the garden. She might have been there for ages. I'm sorry. We didn't see.' Zac tripped over his words trying to explain.

The line connected and Hannah willed Stuart to pick up. Simultaneously, she could hear the phone ringing in the house next door. ‘Ella, did you leave the back door open?'

‘Yes.' At least she had said something.

‘Does Daddy know where you are? You should go home.'

Sean touched her on the elbow and said softly, ‘She can't climb the fence, there are no footholds on our side.'

‘You're not going out there to give her a boost.' She looked at Sean, at a loss as to how a grown-up would act in these circumstances.

Sean called out in a reassuring tone, ‘Honey, I'm going to open the side gate and you can run round to your front door. Your dad will let you in.'

‘Daddy's not home.'

Hannah tried again. ‘Where's Daddy gone?'

‘He went to Mummy.'

Hannah hoped that meant to the hospital.

‘Stay there, honey, just for a tick.' Sean sprinted, as much as his father-of-teenager's frame would allow him, down the hall. Hannah tried to gain some insight into the boys' thoughts through their faces. Faces that reminded her of the two boys that had died, who knew, before they died, that sometimes parents leave, sometimes you can't rely on them when you need them. But her boys already knew that, they'd known for years, no matter how much she explained in a neutral tone what cancer was, no matter how much she told herself that Oscar was too young to understand, really understand the implications of what she told him, no matter how much she hoped that Zac was so used to the words that they were meaningless to him. They knew what Daniel had learnt in the last two weeks—that sometimes parents fail in the worst possible way.

Sean jogged back in, puffing. ‘I think I can see the car in their garage.'

‘He could have walked.'

‘Maybe someone came for him, like an ambulance or Natalie,' Zac piped up.

‘Yeah, maybe.' Sean didn't sound convinced. ‘What do we do?'

Hannah took the phone into the living room for privacy. She dialled the hospital.

‘Hi, yes, I'm trying to find Dr Cope, Dr Natalie Cope. No, I don't know the extension, she doesn't normally work there but I know she's volunteering.' The receptionist transferred her to emergency, who transferred her to a ward and then another ward. Each of them was helpful but some things were clearly important—the status of the patients, how many beds were available, how much antibiotic they had on hand, the number of doctors they needed to staff the wards—keeping track of the names of the doctors who had turned up to help was not. Eventually, one woman transferred her to human resources.
She hung on until it rang out.

Back in the kitchen, everyone was still in the same place although now wet patches on Ella's mask traced her tears sinking in.

‘Her mobile rings out, his rings out. The home phone rings out too. But we know that, we can hear that.'

‘Ella, do you know your Grandma's phone number?' A tiny shake of the head. ‘What's her name, sweetie?'

‘Nanna?'

‘Does she have another name?' Head shake. ‘What about Mummy and Daddy's friends, what are they called?'

‘Sue?'

‘Sue who?' The head shake again.

There was no way out, there was no one to hand her to. If there was some way to make the little girl standing on their back lawn not their problem, they couldn't find it.

Oscar pushed at the back door but Zac took firm hold of his hand and called through the open crack. ‘Hey Ella, can you spell?'

‘She's not even at school, Zac.'

‘Ella, do you know how to play I spy?' Ella nodded. Oscar tucked himself into Zac's side, watching. ‘Well, I spy with my little eye something beginning with, I mean, something that's red.'

Ella looked around the garden with big eyes. It was clear to Hannah that Zac was thinking of the bright red wind vane on the garage. Ella, her feet rooted to the spot, was never going to turn around to see it.

‘I know, I know what it is.'

‘Give her a minute, Oz.'

‘Umm,' Ella looked around more frantically. ‘Ummm,' she looked harder at Zac, ‘umm, your shirt?'

‘Cool, you got it.' Hannah had to smile—Zac had learnt how to cheat like an adult. ‘Your turn.'
Sean leant into Hannah and murmured, ‘We need to talk where they can't hear us.'

She whispered back, ‘I'm not leaving them unsupervised.'

‘Zac's got it under control.'

They tiptoed to the other end of the kitchen, Hannah keeping her eyes on the boys, ready to jump if Oscar made a move.

‘So what do we do?' Although Sean whispered, from his stillness she thought it likely that Daniel was eavesdropping.

‘She can't come in. She's probably seen Natalie and who knows what's happened to Stuart. For all we know, she's infectious. She'll have to stay outside 'til we find someone to take her.'

‘There is no one.' Sean was firm.

‘She can go to a shelter.'

‘Are you kidding me? You won't let us walk around the block but a three year-old can go to a shelter?'

‘You can't have forgotten, one and a half thousand,' she noticed Daniel twitch and dropped her voice, ‘dead, yesterday. Nearly three times Monday.'

‘Out of five million. Less than a tenth of a percent. She's one little girl out of five million and you want to send her into that.'

‘Her mum's working at germ central and her dad ditched her. I guess Gwen could take her.'

‘Gwen's a crazy lady, I'm not knocking on her door and I wouldn't give Ella to her.'

‘So... what?'

Hannah waited for Sean to say something. And waited. And then she cracked. ‘So, she has to stay here.' Sean seemed relieved that she had said it. ‘She can sleep in the office for a couple of days. We'll have to work out some way of keeping her in there when we're delivering.' Sean looked at her with horror and she felt she had to explain. ‘Like Gwen, we'll have to take meals to her like Gwen.'
Sean was clearly struggling, trying to find the right words. ‘She's three. She's,' his eyes slid away as he shook his head in disbelief, ‘three. You can't seriously expect a three year-old, a three year-old, Ella for Christ's sake, Ella, not some stranger, to sleep all alone, to be all alone for the next two days out in the office. Can you imagine how terrifying, how mind-fuckingly,' Hannah glanced at the boys, ‘terrifying that would be. You can't treat her like the cat. Even if she wasn't someone we know, even then, she's a human being, a little girl whose parents have disappeared and
you
think it would be appropriate to incarcerate her in the garage?'

‘Why do you think Stuart dumped her here? He's not my favourite person but he wouldn't ditch his own kid without a good reason. And why do you think he put a surgical mask on her? Because he was sick and she's probably got it too. He's gone off to hospital and he hasn't taken her. Why would he? If there's any chance she's not sick, the hospital is more likely to kill her than save her. But we have three kids here, one of them not even ours, and we have a responsibility to them. To keep them safe. We
know
she's been exposed.' Sean looked at her coldly. ‘I'm not going to apologise for putting my kids first. I can't be responsible for everyone.'