An Ordinary Epidemic (34 page)

‘Good idea.'

‘He's good. We're both good.'

‘I know you are. You're doing a good job. You're a good boy.' She meant it but she would have said anything to get to bed.

She closed her eyes and tried not to feel the pounding in her head, the furriness in her mouth. She slept and woke and slept. In her dreams, she was awake, hearing Oscar and Zac's voices. And when she woke, she heard them still. They should be in
bed, she was the one who should tell them but she remembered what Zac said, to stay away. He was right and her muscles ached and just turning in bed made her head throb. All reasons to stay where she was.

It wasn't fair, it wasn't right. She had done everything, everything asked of her, everything she had asked of herself. Taken every precaution. It should count, that she had already done the looking death in the face. All the chemo, all the radiation, the shots and the pills and the side effects. All done. The people with cheery faces telling her that cancer was an opportunity. Not one of them had she smacked. So why had she bothered to survive only to die now, from a bug she should have been able to avoid?

She went through all that for Zac—made a bargain with the empty air around her that she would do what was asked in return for enough life to see him through to adulthood. That was the very least she was owed. Staying alive long enough to infect her boys wasn't the deal. All those times, she had told herself that anything could be endured, she just had to get to the other side. But this was too much, all she wanted to do was sleep until it was over.

Her head buzzed and her sinuses blocked as she cried angry, despairing tears. Some things could not be endured. There would be a time when there would be no other side to get to. If this bug was going to kill her, she didn't have the energy left to go through the actual dying. She felt like she would never feel the consoling nothingness of sleep again.

And yet she woke, eyes gummed, salty crust around her nose and mouth. It was dark and quiet, sometime in the early morning she guessed. The room was cold from the night but the bone chilling shivers had gone. The thought still hung in her head that she didn't have the energy to die. And it struck her, she wasn't going to die. She was going to puke and feel like the insides of a drain but she hadn't coughed or sneezed, she had
no diarrhoea. Her nose had only been running because she'd been crying and throwing up. Her temperature was normal.

The stomach cramps and vomiting were hours ago now. That wasn't Manba. Ella hadn't turned up until yesterday and Daniel's father this morning, so it was too soon to show symptoms if it came from them. And the taste of fish. Because there hadn't been quite enough to go around for yesterday's lunch, she had given the boys more and taken for herself the last two unappealing sardines from a tin she found at the back of the fridge. The sardines were now in a towel in the side passage. She felt weak and alive and very tired.

The morning was jarringly ordinary. She followed Sean through the front door, right on his heels. It was open and airy outside, so bright after being in the house so long. Her eyes took a couple of seconds to adjust. Sean had disappeared from sight. Where he should be, a man stood on the porch. He said, ‘Sean's dead.'

She could see he was telling the truth. ‘When?'

‘Just as he came through the door.'

‘Then we go back.' She felt a rising wave of desperation. ‘We go back, back before we came out and we stay inside.'

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.'

The 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.