An Ordinary Epidemic (25 page)

‘Sold, to the tipsy lady in the woolly socks.' Sean stared, defocused, into the garden with a contented smile. ‘I feel peckish, what do we have in the way of goodies?'

‘I will allow you to get a tin of smoked oysters from the pantry. The kids don't like them anyway.' Hannah lifted her feet to let him get out and held them suspended until he came back with a plate loaded with crackers and the oysters.

She slipped a cracker into her mouth and licked the oil off her fingers. ‘I never thought a natural disaster would be like this. I didn't think there would be parts I'd want to remember.' Sean refilled their glasses.

‘So how much water do we have in the tank?'

‘More than if we'd bought the tank you wanted.'

‘It's three quarters full.'

‘So it would have been three quarters of a thousand litres,
now it's three quarters of two thousand.'

‘You were right, I was wrong.' She smiled. ‘Which makes how much?'

‘A week and a half, if it doesn't rain, but it's going to rain.' He considered the glass, twirling it by the stem. ‘The water wouldn't do us any good without the pantry. That's all you.'

‘Ah, but I didn't think to buy a case of wine.'

‘One of us has to be about the fun.'

‘Do you think Zac's ever going to forgive me for this afternoon?'

Sean frowned.

‘I'm not even sure he should.' It was a confession and she hoped for absolution.

‘We'll survive this because of you.' Sean squeezed her hand. ‘After all that we've been through, together, we're practically indestructible. Zac will just have to learn that you can't solve the unsolvable but you can endure it. He'll forgive his mother for not being super human.'

‘I'd die for Oscar or Zac, if I had to, but I wouldn't die for Gwen. I hope I would for Daniel, but I don't know. Does that make me a bad person?'

Sean shrugged. ‘What about me?' He flashed her a smile. ‘Would you die for me?'

‘I assumed you'd die for me, boyo. That's the way I saw this relationship.' She slipped her feet back onto his lap.

He smiled. She sipped her wine. They listened to the silence.

Sean shifted in his chair. ‘There's a funeral tomorrow for one of the guys from work.'

‘How well did you know him?'

‘Not well. I know what he looked like.'

‘You can't go.'

‘Is that how we measure our compassion, by how well we know someone?'

Hannah considered the moonlight. ‘What if some of us
have smaller souls? What if I was just born with less?'

‘I imagine your soul is full-figured.'

‘Maybe no matter how hard I try, even if I expend all my energy, the most I'll ever be is a not completely crappy human being.'

‘Or maybe we never had to make decisions like this before. Maybe all over the city these kind of decisions are being made.'

‘By people who are better, more compassionate.'

Sean rested his hand on the foot that lay in his lap, staring at it as if it held an answer. ‘How do you measure compassion? Is it an unthinking reflex, even if that achieves nothing? Or is it careful and considered and planned? You can only do what you can do.'

‘What happens when we run low on water? How do we decide who gets what?'

Her leg was warm where Sean's hand rested on it. The branches of the lemon tree swayed, dappling the light falling on the kitchen table. She stretched out her toes, he pushed back against them.

He looked at her with gentle concern. ‘The water will go back on, it's a city, you need water. Lots of people don't have a tank, they'll have to bring the water back. Or we could leave the water to the kids and drink wine. But we do it together.'

She looked at the clock on the car dash. It was ten past twelve, later than she thought. She could see Sean drumming on the shelf of the ATM, waiting for it to spit out the cash. He had been calm so long as he was doing something but now he couldn't speed up the money counting and his head darted left and right.

She looked at her phone. Still ten past twelve. The boys were home alone. Every second spent here was another second they were not protected.

This was the second machine they'd hit tonight. They had waited until they were sure the kids were asleep, like Christmas Eve, then had driven up to the local shops and done a circuit around the block to make sure no one was there. The shops had looked strange, but only in the way they would on any Tuesday night around midnight. Vacant, shut up, waiting for people. Bright shores on a dark street.

Sean had taken out the daily limit. And how pleased he had been with himself as he had pointed out it was a
daily
limit, that midnight was the end of one day and the start of the next. Which is why they had sat in the car for another half hour, waiting for the day to end.

‘Are you sure this will work?'

‘No, but we're here now, where else do you have to be?'

‘Home.'

‘At home, we'd be asleep. How much protection would you be providing then?'

‘We were only going to be ten minutes. They're alone, we
got what we came for.'

‘When the banking system goes down and everything we need has to be paid for in cash...'

‘Fine, five minutes more.'

The machine was on a corner and she was parked diagonally, Parisian style, so they could see down both roads. She stayed in the car, watching all directions, jumpy, ready to yell. The idling engine was a magnet for anyone looking for trouble but if she turned it off, she would lose seconds starting it. They weren't teenagers, they were parents of a teenager. If they met trouble, a quick getaway was their best bet. The empty street made her uneasy, no one to threaten them but no one to rescue them either.

She saw Sean turn his attention from the street to the ATM, hand out, looking down to the money dispenser. She watched the shadows, hoping that any danger was here and not at home.

That afternoon they had spooked themselves with the thought that the ATMs might not always be refilled and that they had almost no cash in their wallets. Sean had spent half an hour going through the boys' things looking for a baseball bat.

‘Why would they have a baseball bat? They've never played baseball.'

‘It doesn't have to be baseball. Anything threatening and hard that you can wield like a bat.'

‘They play soccer. The soccer ball is in the garden.'

‘Someone gave one of them a cricket set, didn't they? I remember plastic stumps in the garden. Zac made me play with him. I'm sure.'

Zac and Daniel had watched, still and silent, as Sean had pulled everything out of Zac's cupboards. They had followed him to the garage as he emptied every box. They had looked on, Zac embarrassed and Daniel bewildered, as he had arisen triumphantly with the tiny plastic bat.

The ATM was in a well-lit recess in the glass front wall of the bank. Sean was clear as day to anyone in the street. The bat was in his left hand, dangling at his side. It barely made it to his knees. She wanted him to hurry up. Leaving the boys alone was a mistake.

As they drew up, the house gave nothing away, dark and silent in solidarity with every other house in the street. A light drizzle shimmered in the cones of the street lamps.

‘Hey,' Sean rubbed her knee, ‘we're safe. Even thieves stay home when it's wet.'

‘Your run of the mill career thief, maybe, but desperate people don't care about a few drops of rain.'

‘What are the chances that someone would pick our house, in the one hour in the middle of the one night we're not there?'

Worry was a talisman, it kept the evil at bay but it didn't make leaving the boys behind anything but a bad decision. As she put the key in the front door, she thought about how pointless the lock was, how flimsy the house's defences were. They were defences of convention, politeness. A general agreement to go in through the front door, not smash the window next to it.

Her first impulse was to place a hand on Oscar. By the light that seeped around his curtains, she could see his forehead forced into a little pucker that seemed out of place. Concern, Hannah thought, for a future he wasn't aware of yet. But he threw his arms wide, as if they lay where they fell and his body oriented itself without heeding the direction of the bed. He breathed heavily, a child's version of a snore, like a baby clone of Sean. She let herself watch him, felt a twinge of guilt for taking this liberty, for invading his incipient privacy.

She couldn't do more than take a step into Zac's room. The door opened only a fraction, wedged hard against Daniel's
mattress, which took up most of the floor. Even in sleep they defended their right to privacy. Two lumps in two beds, two sets of breathing and two mops poking out from the sheets. They were safe.

Her nerves jangled but she ached with tiredness. As Sean stuffed the wad of fifties into one of his weekend work boots, it bothered her that it looked like nothing more than a roll of paper. Hannah wrinkled her nose at him. ‘Couldn't you pick a nicer shoe?' As if that would make a difference. Any thief worth their salt already knew all the places amateurs like them hid their money. They were trying to second guess themselves.

‘We can go again tomorrow night.'

‘Getting home and finding the kids still safe is a reprieve, not licence to keep doing it.'

‘I'll go by myself.'

‘The petrol gauge dropped below empty, you'd have to walk.' She could picture the long walk, him standing alone at the ATM, everything that didn't happen tonight happening. She turned away from the thought, like a sharp wound.

‘Let's see how things are tomorrow.'

She slid into bed, hunkered down under the doona and turned towards the luminous numbers of the clock. Half past one, much chillier now than it had been when the kids went to bed.

Oscar would be up in five hours. Five possible hours of sleep. But her muscles were full of stored energy. She had an itch to get up, expend the tension, but she was pinned in place by the collective need to not wake everyone. Her mind was exhausted but her body felt ready to go, coiled tight. Tomorrow she should run up and down the hall like Oscar did.

A quarter past two. Four hours until Oscar woke. The streetlight through the curtains made patches on the ceiling, like a map. She traced paths between the islands of light.

The clock said five to three. Her mind presented her with all
the hiding places in all the heist movies she'd ever seen. In the freezer, inside a fish fingers box. The cistern. Images, connections, over which she had no control, came to her. The toilet flushing, all the money squeezing through the pipes, floating out to sea. Her mind grasped in passing at the idea that there was no water but was distracted by the thought of the sea only just down the hill. She tried to un-tense her body, let it sink into the bed.

She thought it was nearly four.

Hannah woke up to a gloom that felt like seven but the clock told her it was ten. A thin, steady hiss of rain fell, its low grey clouds scattering and attenuating the sunlight.