An Ordinary Epidemic (30 page)

‘Wait here, I'll ring him.'

Oscar reached up to the kitchen light switch and flicked it on and off rapidly. ‘Look. You don't have to ring.' Stretched out on his tippy-toes, she could see how he would grow into Zac.

Sean looked up at the pulsating of the lights.

‘Oscar, he's seen us.' Oscar went back to pogoing wildly with his arms waving. He was so revved up she thought he might never get to sleep.

Sean leant over to the sofa and said something. He slowly crossed the small patch of grass, watching where his feet fell. Fatigue draped over his shoulders and pulled like gravity. He stopped about a metre from the door and only then raised his eyes to them.

His mouthed moved, she couldn't hear him through the glass.

‘What?' She cracked the door open a little, making sure she held it firmly and that Oscar was behind her arm. ‘Oscar wants to say goodnight.' For a shocking second she thought Sean was going to cry.

She leant on the back door, watching the ghost of Sean's face lit by his computer screen. She could stand here in the dark all night, her face getting colder against the glass but she would still be here and he would still be there. What she needed was sleep.

Outside the bathroom, the floorboards were wet where Oscar's undried body had dripped. She threw a towel down
to soak it up.

The dry toothpaste was rough in her mouth. She poured a centimetre of boiled water into the tumbler and swirled it around then spat. She could still feel the grit in her teeth.

The hallway was dark and silent but Zac and Daniel were, surprisingly, already asleep and she wasn't going to risk reanimating the house by turning on a light. Something snagged at her foot. She tripped forward, flailing her arms to keep herself upright. The towel wrapped itself around her leg and she stepped heavily sideways, slamming into the door of the pantry. The handle thrust itself into her ribs. She gasped, the air knocked out of her. She held in the pain that she wanted to howl out, waiting for a sound from Zac's room. She hugged at her side, pulling the towel free. The pain stabbed as she stumbled down the hall and fell into bed.

The cold of the sheets clung to her. She curled, trying to minimise contact with them. The thin layer of air around her slowly warmed but the bottom of the bed stayed icy, her feet numb. If Sean was here... If Sean was here... to hold her for warmth, to take the ache away. She tried to lift herself out of the pain, inhabit a spot just above her body. Her mind drifted, dimly aware of the pulsing heat of the bruise in the cold body below. It moved around the house, aware of the boys breathing rhythmically in their rooms, the books strewn on the living room floor, the clean plates in the drying rack. Her thoughts snagged on the back door. She couldn't conjure the memory of locking it and if she hadn't, no one had. There was no other adult.

Surely she had, the door was locked.

Unless it wasn't.

Someone in the backyard only had to turn the handle to let themselves in. She could almost picture them, an indeterminate shadow, all threat. And here she was, at the far end of the house, a useless first and last defence. The room contracted
but the house echoed its vast emptiness.

This is what Sean had done—left her with the hard, ordinary job of carrying on while he, dramatically, took the easier route of acting on principle. Heroic gestures didn't ensure the back door was locked, that there was enough food and water.

She felt her way by proprioception and memory through the darkness, jumped at the figure of a person sitting on the sofa—a cushion and its shadow.

The handle of the back door channelled the cold of the night from outside. A slight pressure told her it was locked. On the far side of the short garden, she could see Sean in profile, hunched forward towards his monitor. She raised her hand to him but he didn't look in her direction.

The glass of the door was thin and the shadows in the garden deep. The slow movement of the wind and moonlight on the lemon tree reminded her of ghost stories. She turned back to the kitchen, looking for something to anchor herself, armour herself with. Her eye lighted on the knife block, the large wooden handled chef 's knife. Its heft was familiar in her hand.

She needed to calm herself, to convince herself everything and everyone was secure, that it would be safe to sleep. Through the door, Zac's room was still. She put her head far enough into Oscar's to hear his slow breathing. Although she remembered locking the front door, she couldn't let go of the thought that the grill could be unlocked, even though she knew it wasn't. The cold air from the street flooded in the moment she opened the front door. A movement caught her eye. A few doors up on the other side someone was coming out of a house, leaving the door ajar. He stepped off the porch and into the moonlight, the man with the daughter, coming out of the wrong house, carrying something—a white plastic shopping bag overfull with what looked like groceries. His hand splayed, trying to hold both handles over the boxes that stuck
out the top. Except that the plastic was ripped down one side, he could have been stepping out of a supermarket.

She slipped the knife under her pillow as she slid back into bed. Her head lay gingerly on top and her hand rested against the handle. Sean's empty side radiated cold and she closed her eyes to try to conjure his presence while her body balled for warmth. As her muscles relaxed and sleep overcame her, she twitched back to alertness. An alarm sounded deep in her brain, fear of rolling onto the knife. She moved it under a book on the bedside table and touched the handle for comfort.

Small noises came from Oscar through the wall—his bed creaking as he rolled over, the faint sound of murmuring. She touched the handle again.

She thought about the cold, she thought about the empty space beside her. She listened to the restless boy, she touched the knife handle. She didn't remember falling asleep.

She woke to the gentle white noise of rain on the roof. Cold seeped into the house, the air and her bones, the kind of cold that her body mistook for damp. The light that oozed through the curtain was grey, no sun to burn off the chill. The bottom of the bed had been sucking the heat out of her feet all night and as they hit the icy wood of the floor, she felt the chill shiver up through her.

She dragged her body down the hall, as if piloting an automaton, a broken down clapped out automaton. Here at the controls, she was disconnected from the machinery. This body had no sentimental value, she hadn't forgotten that it had tried to kill her.

Oscar leapt at her as she came through the living room. ‘Can we have breakfast now?'

‘Give me a chance. You can see I just got up.' In the kitchen, the unwashed dishes from yesterday were still in the sink and there were more than there had been last night. Could it be possible that Zac had tidied his room and added to the heap? The stack overflowed the sink and out onto the kitchen bench. She pushed aside one of the plates and only just caught the glass that, Rube Goldberg-like, teetered over the edge. It was a mess. A big horrible pile.

She banged on Zac's door.

‘What?'

‘Are you guys up?'

Zac opened the door a crack. ‘Yeah, we're up.'

‘Wash the dishes.' She put in the polite word to make up for
the tone of demand in her voice. ‘Please.'

‘What, now?'

‘I'm not making breakfast 'til it's done.'

Zac muttered to Daniel as she walked away but, nevertheless, the door opened and she heard them stomp to the kitchen. She threw herself on the sofa next to Oscar, watching television again.

‘Haven't you seen this one already?'

‘Yes.'

‘Do something else then.'

‘What?'

‘Something else.' He kept watching. She picked up the novel she was reading and tried to concentrate. ‘Turn the volume down, it's too loud.'

Oscar turned it down a little. She nestled in the corner of the sofa, trying to pretend that reading was like sleeping.

Oscar crawled across from the other end. ‘Can we have breakfast?'

‘You already asked me that.'

‘Can I have toast?'

‘We don't have any bread. We still don't have any bread. So we can't make toast. We had this conversation yesterday.'

‘We could make bread, like last week, that's fun.'

‘We don't have any bread flour.'

‘What are we going to have?'

‘I don't know, Oscar. I don't know what's for breakfast. When the boys have finished the washing up, I'll go make it. Then I'll know what we're having and you won't miss out. But right now I want to read, okay? I just want a little bit of quiet.'

Zac slouched into the room. ‘Yeah, done.' He slouched away again.

The little packets of cereal were long gone. As were the big ones. Most of what they had left was grains. By trial and error, she had discovered that powdered milk tasted better if
it was cooked into some sort of porridge but they'd used up the oats as a makeshift muesli while they still had tinned fruit and UHT milk.

Rice would do, or couscous. With spices, she still had plenty of spices, all boiled up with some water and the powdered milk. A little bit of dried fruit, rationed out.

Breakfast couscous, it sounded like something from a cafe. With fresh milk and toasted slivered almond. Fresh berries on top. Sitting in a cafe in the morning sun, someone else doing the cooking. That would be good. Sean would take the boys for a walk and she would linger over a second coffee, reading the paper. And at the end, she could get up and walk away, no washing up.

As she spooned the coffee grounds into the pot, she could see the bottom of the tin. One more really good pot or three very weak ones. She'd based her plans on feeding four not six. Seven now. As she drank, she watched the saucepan bubble like hot mud.

Oscar was at her elbow again. ‘I don't like that.'

‘You don't know if you like it, you haven't tried it.'

‘I'm not going to eat that.'

She put out one take-away container and a couple of plastic bowls, searched out a thermal cup hiding in the back of the cupboard and put a spoon of powdered milk in the bottom of the cup, dissolving it with the coffee. It looked grey and unappealing, only half full. If he wanted a whole cup, he could have stayed here. She didn't pour one for Gwen, there wasn't enough. And Gwen got a big bag of tea and a few litres of long life milk in the last load of shopping, all to herself. Gwen didn't have to share with anyone. Hannah spooned the mush into the container and the bowls. No berries, no slivered almonds, no sun.

‘Hey, Zac.' She yelled out. ‘Zac.' She yelled louder.

He appeared at the kitchen door, Daniel, his shadow, behind
him. She held out a tray with the mug and bowls. ‘Take this to the office for Dad and Ella.'

Zac looked her square on. He didn't hide his disdain. ‘You take it.'

For an instant, anger overtook her. Not at Zac, at Sean. If she took the food to him, she could give him not just the tray but all the words she was trying so hard not to say, that she was trying not to unleash on an undeserving Zac.

‘I will, I can.' Oscar bounced. ‘I'll take it.'

She looked at his enthusiastic face and knew he wouldn't be able to resist stealing a hug. ‘Daniel will have to take it.'

‘Why?' His face changed from puppy eagerness to crushed disappointment in a blink. ‘Why can't I?'

‘It's too hard for you to balance the tray.'

‘But I...'

‘I said no. Zac, you can take Gwen's.' She handed the container to Zac.

‘Yeah, whatever.'

‘Pick a different door.'

Zac flicked his eyes and stomped away.

‘Wait.'

Zac turned stiffly back to her. ‘Yes?' He spoke the word cleanly and crisply.

‘If there are containers there, don't touch them, okay? Leave them there.'

‘Why did you ask her for them if you're not going to use them.' He had a snarky smile, pleased he'd caught her in an error.