An Ordinary Epidemic (43 page)

The table fell quiet. She didn't realise her mistake until Ella whispered, ‘I'm bad at hiding.'

‘No, sweetie, you don't have to worry. There were no bad people.'
Only good people doing a horrible thing
. She cursed herself
for reawakening one fearful possibility while trying to hide another. She sent the kids off to play and hoped Ella would forget while she stacked the dishes in the sink, ready to wash up.

‘Do you need a hand?' Sean had his hands in his pockets and didn't meet her eye.

‘No, you can do the next lot.' She didn't feel like talking.

‘I might go and read for a bit.'

They had painted a big jug with blackboard paint and left in the sun, filled with water. It warmed up a little, which helped to cut the grease. She was sparing with washing up liquid and water and it wasn't spent until she could see oily scum on top. It got the plates clean, at least clean enough, she assumed, since no one was getting sick.

She wanted, suddenly, to be with Oscar and Zac. And Ella, she thought, Ella too. She could hear Oscar's voice and, more distantly, Zac replying.

‘Cards.'

‘No.'

‘Let's build a train track.'

‘No.'

Oscar was standing on the threshold of Zac's room, his toes lined up along the invisible border between Zac's domain and the rest of the house. He leant ever so slightly forward. Behind him, Ella stood at random, blocking the middle of the hall, twisting one toe on the ground, facing the wall.

‘Come and play with us.'

‘Maybe.'

‘What about a board game?'

‘What board game?'

‘Whatever you want to play.'

‘I don't want to play a board game.'

Oscar's voice became high and whiney. ‘I want you to play with me.' He caught sight of Hannah. ‘Mum, make him play
with me.'

‘I can't make him play if he doesn't want to.'

‘He said he would play with me but then he keeps saying no. He says I have to think of what to play but anything I say he just keeps saying no.'

‘None of those things are fun.'

‘Well, not as fun as tormenting your brother.' She could see Zac had no intention of moving, he was lying on his bed, settled in. ‘Come on, let's go out.'

Zac sat up and looked at her as if she'd lost her mind. ‘Out? Where out?'

‘The backyard.'

‘That's not out.' He fell back on his bed.

It wasn't much of an ‘out', three steps and you were ‘outside', three back and you were ‘home'. No one was fooled. ‘You need vitamin D,' she told them, ‘or you'll get rickets. I think it's rickets you get from not having vitamin D.'

‘What's rickets?' Zac asked with genuine curiosity.

‘Something people used to get so long ago that I've never seen it.' If they had the net, she could check. ‘Anyway, you need vitamin D and for that you need sunlight. I know that for sure.' She put her hand on Ella's shoulder. The little girl was surprisingly stiff.

Once dragged out in the yard, the kids fell organically into a game of tag. Or a version of it. Their playing styles were determined by their size. Zac could reach out and tag the other two from any spot on the lawn. To avoid him, Oscar darted and weaved and Ella skirted the edges of the garden, standing still and closing her eyes whenever he moved in her direction. When Ella was in, she chased Oscar round and round Zac, who stood like a pole, twice their size, in the centre of the lawn. But Oscar preferred to pit himself against his brother. Zac taunted him by moving his feet only when Oscar came directly at him, instead twisting and contorting his body to
keep millimetres away from Oscar's hand. Ella squealed, Zac laughed so hard he couldn't breathe.

Hannah sat on the garden bed. The sun was warm on her skin but the air was cold. When they laughed, she laughed. It was a moment of sunshine. If she could get the camera fast enough, the moment would still be there. She rushed to the kitchen, fumbled around in the drawer, to find it. The moment was still there. She searched for the right angle, the exact place she had been sitting, to contain their carefree joy in its view screen. As she pressed the button, the camera shut down. Out of batteries. This emotion would evaporate and sometime in the future she wouldn't be here with these three bundles of spontaneity. The loss was contained in the moment. You couldn't press this in the pages of a book. It felt right that this was ephemeral.

Oscar made a break from the endless spiral around Zac and jumped up on the garden bed behind Hannah. Ella lunged left around her and Oscar veered right, when Ella leant right he went left. Ella's face darted in front of Hannah's, animated, puffing and laughing. Hannah wanted to reach her hands around her and comfort her in a hug but Ella didn't know she needed comfort. To her, Hannah was only an obstacle that stopped her tagging Oscar, like the clothesline or a tree.

‘Pause, pause.' Oscar knew he was trapped.

‘No pause.'

‘Mum's bar.'

‘No bar, no pause.' Ella's face began to set into a frown. ‘That's not fair. You can't change the rules. There's no bar.'

‘There's bar now, my mum's bar.'

Zac, who had been watching sprawled out on the lawn sat up. ‘You just don't want to be “it” Oz, that's not fair to Ella. She's littler than you.'

‘But she always chases me. I'm always “it”.'

‘Oscar,' Hannah reach around behind to catch hold of his
arm, ‘Oscar, I'm not a piece of furniture. I'm not part of this game, so go back on the grass.'

‘But then I'll be “it” and it's not fair.' He was full with the injustice of being, in every way, the middle.

‘Oscar, I asked you nicely.' He was trampling on the moment. ‘I don't want you running around me anymore.'

‘But it's not fair.'

‘Now I mean it.' She raised her voice, trying to pull him out from behind her by his arm. ‘I'm not going to say it again.' Oscar leant all his weight back. Ella stood in front of her, still, impassive but watchful. How could she not know that her world had disappeared? Hannah's voice was getting louder and shriller. ‘If you can't play nicely...'

‘What's going on?' Sean appeared silently and reasonably in the office doorway.

Hannah was sobbing, tears running down her face. Ella stood and stared, uncomprehending. Hannah wanted to shake her and make her understand what the world was like for her now. And here was Sean, all rationality and calm. Shouldn't she have some special ‘mother' knowledge that told her what to do?

She still had hold of Oscar's arm. He let himself be pulled around onto her lap. She had her arms wound tight around him and cried into the fabric of his t-shirt.

‘Mum, Mum,' he squirmed around, a bewildered expression on his face ‘you're getting me wet.' He wriggled out of her arms and stood in front of her, searching her tear-streaked face for the meaning.

Sean swung Ella up into his arms. ‘Come on kids, let's play a board game. Leave your mum alone.' As if she was Ella's mum, as if Ella was one of them now.

‘Finish your food, Ella. We don't want to waste it.' Not eating. Hannah worried that every change in behaviour could be a sign of a stomach bug, depression or something else she couldn't, at the moment, research on the net. And if she thought about it, she'd had to ask Ella twice to get her to finish her food yesterday. It was becoming harder to remember what normal behaviour was, or if indeed there was ever such a thing.

Zac ate every meal hidden behind a book, a mirror to Sean and his book at the other end of the table. That certainly had not been normal behaviour. Within a couple of days of the power going out Zac had finished all the books in his room. Through sheer boredom, he started on the bookshelf in the office. If nothing else, she might end up with a well-read son.

Ella was humming, turning the spoon over and looking at herself first in the bowl and then the back. ‘Can we turn the phone on?'

‘Finish your breakfast, then we'll check the phone.'

Ella took another mouthful and dutifully swallowed. ‘But what if my mum is ringing now?'

Hannah dreaded these conversations. She didn't know the right thing to say, instead stupid things came out, lies, prevarications, nothing honest, nothing that helped Ella. ‘But she might ring later.' It was the only thing that came into her head.

‘Oh no,' Ella wailed, ‘we can't turn it on now if Mummy rings later.'
Hannah looked to Sean for help but if he heard, he chose not to notice. ‘If she rings, she'll leave a message, then we can ring her back.' If she rings, if she rings. Hannah knew herself to be a coward, a clueless coward. Was there a website on how to tell your neighbour's child that she's probably never going to see her parents again? Normal people, competent people, didn't need to be told what to say.

From the contemptuous angle of his eyebrow, Hannah knew Zac was listening behind his book. He knew the truth, or enough of it to despise her for failing to make everything right. Oscar jumped down from the table and trotted across the kitchen.

‘Where are you going?' It was the first words Sean had spoken all morning.

‘I'm going to get the phone.'

‘Your mum said, when Ella is finished.'

Ella bolted her food. The instant her spoon hit the bowl both little kids streaked across the room.

Ella returned with the phone clutched in both hands, watching each foot as she put it deliberately in front of the other. Oscar hopped around her as if the extra air movement could push her faster. Even Zac looked up from his book. Like a Victorian family sharing the newspaper they gathered around Hannah as she scrolled down the list, the new texts redirected from all their phones and jumbled together, deciding what was worth opening on the basis of the randomly truncated first sentence.

‘Warning. Warning. Quarantines. Warning. Not us. Ah here, listen to this one. “
Europe reports some success with vaccine trials
”.' It was like a news ticker. ‘Patrols in your area.' She opened and read it quickly. ‘Just more of the same. Zac, I think this one is for you since it starts Hi Zac.' She held out the phone for him to read.

‘Thanks Mum.'

‘No problem.' She went back to scrolling down. Zac's was the only personal text. Kate texted every couple of days, composed of cryptic abbreviations and textspeak to fit into a single message, just to check they were still there. When anyone else messaged, she deliberately delayed replying. The fewer texts they received the longer the battery would last. ‘Maybe we should unsubscribe from the news service and just rely on the emergency alerts?'

‘And what exactly did they tell us today?' Sean looked sceptical.

‘That there will be patrols in our area, that somewhere that's not here had their quarantine lifted, that we should boil the water. Another list of symptoms to watch for, same as yesterday. Here's a news story, an earthquake in South America.' How incongruous that seemed. She thought of all the natural disasters she had witnessed remotely before. How important and terrible they had been and yet now it was just more people dead, statistical noise. She couldn't muster any more empathy for them just because they had been killed by the earth and not a virus. She reached the text she dreaded and looked for every day, opened it and held it in such a way that only she and Sean could see it. He read it over her shoulder, trying to look like he wasn't but Zac clearly knew. He had to. He watched them read it every day.

‘What does it say?'

‘Nothing you need to know.'

‘I think I need to.'

Sean inclined his head slightly in the direction of Ella and Oscar. Zac looked at them and back at Hannah. She fumbled on the keys in her hurry to switch the phone off again.

Six days with no information beyond what could be conveyed in a hundred and forty characters. No details to be dissected, considered, chased up on the internet. No breaking stories, nothing to be followed. Whatever was happening,
happened without her and was presented
fait accompli
, independent of her.

There were no more bills to pay. Inexplicably, the money in their bank account no longer held meaning for her, the money they had stashed around the house was just inedible plastic. For all she knew, their pay was still being deposited and the mortgage automatically paid. It was possible that in anonymous server farms, digits were being moved from one column to another but it made no sense to her anymore when stacked up against cups of water and rice.

The days now were filled with routines, in themselves meaningless but the act of carrying them out together gave them a sense of common purpose and broke up the otherwise aimless hours. The first task after breakfast was to check the level of the rainwater tank. Zac had made a simple gauge out of a piece of packing foam that floated on the top of the water. A long string attached to the float came out the top of the tank, down the side and was tied through the roof of a large toy truck to pull it taut. It hung above the spigot, which was tightly wrapped in a couple of layers of stocking to keep them from drinking mosquito larvae. Out of step with the corrugations of the tastefully eucalyptus coloured tank, Zac had marked off days' worth of water with an indelible marker.