An Ordinary Epidemic (6 page)

She sat, not reading, not thinking, waiting for something to happen. All she found was a small flame of fear for her family and sadness for the one on the screen. But the first was real, and the second was like the image of sadness. It had the same reality as celebrities on the news. Somehow the screen turned them into real life fiction. Her legs twitched. She had to stand up, to just move.

She was in front of the pantry, although she didn't remember deciding to walk there. The shelves were loaded with cans and vacuum-sealed bags but it didn't feel like enough, not enough to keep them safe.

Kate had turned up on her doorstep the day after Hannah had told her she had cancer, thrusting a grocery bag at her. ‘It's not the most exciting present you're going to get, but it's, you know, to get by. So you don't have to worry about the family not getting dinner or breakfast. I mean, some days you might not even feel like walking around the corner for takeaway. And Sean can't be here all the time. I know it's not gold standard parenting, but it's just to make it easier sometimes.' Tins of baked beans, a couple of packs of pasta, some jars of pasta sauce. ‘I should have brought a scarf.' Hannah had tried inconspicuously to head off the tear by rubbing her eye like it had something in it.

Down the bottom of the pantry, pushed in between some tins of fruit was a pamphlet she had downloaded a year ago from a government website. She hadn't gone out of her way to hide it, but she didn't mind that it wasn't visible. Sean already thought she was obsessed, but it was more like having insurance. The pamphlet said so. The whole back page was a table to calculate how much food, how many toiletries and other
groceries they would need for two weeks. Two weeks was a heartbeat, two weeks couldn't possibly cover any eventuality. Besides, it never hurt to have an extra tin of tomatoes or a packet of rice in the house, although if she looked hard it was ten tins of tomatoes and five kilos of rice. Just to be safe. No matter what happened, there would be food.

On the shelves, she saw only what was missing from the non-perishables mandated by the pamphlet. Making the pantry complete might only be a ritual, but it was better than waiting and doing nothing. There had to be food less utilitarian and more fun than tinned tuna and beans. It would be like the big shop before going on holidays, as if whatever small town they were staying in wouldn't have city conveniences like bread.

The pharmacist was losing patience with the woman in front of Hannah. ‘If you buy something else to take the total over ten dollars, then you can EFTPOS it.'

‘But I don't want anything else.'

‘Well, do you have exact change?'

‘I'm not quite sure, I didn't bring my glasses. Could you add it up for me, dear?' She held out a hand full of coins but the pharmacist kept her hands by her side.

‘We're not touching the money, Mrs Mac. You drop it in the disinfectant.' She gestured to a large fish bowl. At the bottom, a layer of assorted coins stood in place of the sand and halfway up the notes hung suspended like lazy tropical fish, their colours tinted blue by the antiseptic.

Mrs Mac looked at the collection of coins. ‘Well, I'm not sure...'

‘Hold out your hand.' The pharmacist peered, keeping her distance. ‘You've got enough change there. Why don't you drop the coins in one by one, and I'll tell you when to
stop. Start with the gold ones.' They counted out six dollars, each one making a small splash and falling surprisingly slowly through the liquid. ‘There you go, now you need fifteen cents.'

‘I've only got a twenty cent piece.'

‘Well, take the change from the bowl.'

Mrs Mac dropped the coin in and looked doubtfully at the liquid. ‘I think I'll leave it. I don't want my hands smelling like that all day.'

‘Best thing for them just now, Mrs Mac.'

Hannah hesitated to hand over the prescription she held in her bare fingers. ‘I don't know how you're going to disinfect this.' But the pharmacist reached out a gloved hand for it.

‘You have no idea how many hands money passes through. I imagine this script has only been touched by two people, at least one of whom should know something about asepsis. They say you can find cocaine on almost every note. Imagine what else gets on them. Not touching the money today.'

The pharmacist came back with Hannah's pills. ‘Do you need any hand sanitiser? For regulars I've still got a few bottles. Only two per person though. When they're gone, I'm out and I can't order any more. My supplier says the hospitals are taking everything they can make. So if you want some...'

The pharmacist pushed the EFTPOS machine at her, careful to touch only the back of the machine and with only the back of her gloved hand. Almost every person who'd been in here today must have touched that keypad and sick people went to pharmacies. Hannah knew she looked ridiculous but the pharmacist was wearing gloves and there was no one else in the store to see her. She pulled a wipe out from her bag and cleaned the machine.

The pharmacist rang up the script on the cash register. ‘Do you want cash out? I'm only giving what's in the jar.'

‘I'm fine.' As Hannah picked up the plastic bag with the pill bottle inside, she couldn't help but feel a vague contamination.
‘I need to fill another script in a couple of weeks. Will you still be getting things in?'

‘So long as it's not antivirals or vitamin C, you should be fine. Oh, and the hand wash is only for regulars. Don't tell people.'

As she left the pharmacy, she briefly considered going back for the hand wash. There was some in the pantry, as specified by the list, but she had no idea how much they might use. Either it would sit there taking up space or they wouldn't have enough.

A car honked its horn and she looked up. It swerved around two people walking down the middle of the road. A man and a woman, maybe late fifties. They were involved in their conversation, just as if they were walking on the footpath. When they came to the intersection, a mother and her two small children were on the crossing. The couple waited a few metres back until the family was on the other side. They carefully looked both ways before crossing directly through the middle of the roundabout.

She picked up Oscar from school, rushing him into the car. Her instinct was to get back online and check what had changed in the last couple of hours, but she had to resist that ever-present obsession. She ferried her bags of groceries from the car to the kitchen.

As she unpacked them, she made two piles, one for the kitchen cupboards and one to go back up the hall to the pantry. A cornucopia. Eggs, dried chorizos, some salami-like things that had been hanging at the deli and looked like they would keep well. Fresh meat, fresh fruit, fresh vegetables. She could throw into a shopping trolley a better life than almost everybody who had ever lived. Even the kings. You could rule
everything you saw but without polytunnels or airfreight, it wouldn't do you any good to demand out-of-season fruit.

The big block of cheddar would make sandwiches but she'd also bought fancy cheese, something they would relish. She imagined sitting around the kitchen table with Sean, Zac, Oscar, a glass of wine and some brie and crackers. That's what she wanted, for her kids to say to her years later, ‘Remember that time we shut the front door, and didn't go out for weeks, and we had cheese and crackers and played cards all day.'

With all this food, the only thing she hadn't thought about was tonight's dinner. It hurt to think of using any of the bounty in front of her. All this was for storing, not eating. She would rather make a meal of leftovers than start depleting their stock. In the freezer, she found a plastic bag of excess mince. A tin of tomatoes would make a bolognese sauce but that meant using a tin. Only one tin, but the pasta as well.

Oscar was watching her from the doorway where Zac had been standing yesterday. He took up so much less space. Where Zac had a boy's body stretched tall, Oscar still had a solidness and stood firmly in contact with the ground. Zac's movements were awkward but leisurely but when Oscar ran each foot hit the floor with a thud that reverberated along the floorboards throughout the house and under the party wall to Gwen's. Just as well she was a bit deaf.

‘Can we play a game? Can we play Cheat?'

‘You can see I'm putting away the shopping. Maybe we could do something when I'm done.'

‘I don't have anything to do.'

‘You've got a room full of stuff. Look on your shelves, there must be something there.' Oscar stomped away, joists shaking. ‘Try not to disturb Gwen.'

She put all the packets and tins back in the green shopping bag and carried it to her pantry. It took up one side of the small vestibule in front of the bathroom, presumably intended as a
linen closet before she co-opted it. The rows were soothingly neat. She took her time lining up the new tins, making sure the flour and sugar and oats were in one area, the different kinds of tinned vegetables in another. On a whim, she moved the packets of lentils and kidney beans from next to the dried fruit and put them next to the tinned beans. Satisfying, as if each tin was another brick in their defences.

There was an unusual lack of noise from Oscar while she finished. That often meant trouble but if she checked up on him, he'd instantly lose interest in whatever he was doing. Better to trust he was occupying himself well.

When she looked at the pantry, she saw meals. Large bags of rice and pasta, calculated out to be so many dinner, lunch and breakfast servings. She had allowed extra flour for making treats like biscuits or scones, to go with the jars of jam stashed away. She had jars of anchovies, olives, little things that could be added to the basics. Cubes of vacuum-packed coffee and long life milk calculated out at so many cups a day. With all these she had made her preparations, but she couldn't be sure that they were enough. There had to be flaws in her plans, if only she knew what they were. She needed confirmation, more information, another checklist. She needed to look on the net for new websites on emergency pantries, to find the thing she had missed.

But not yet.

On the way up the hall, she could hear Oscar talking to himself in two voices. She paused just outside his open door. In the middle of his floor was a big pile of playing cards. On one side, a neat hand of cards lay face down, on the other sat Oscar, holding his. He announced to the room in a high voice, ‘Two kings' and placed two cards on the top of the discard pile. He lay his hand face down and moved around to pick up the other hand. In a deep voice he said, ‘Three aces' and put three cards on the pile.

‘What are you playing, Mouse?'

‘I'm playing Cheat.'

‘How can you play Cheat by yourself?'

‘I play both sides.'

‘But you know if you put down kings or not.'

Oscar looked outraged. ‘But I can't say cheat just 'cause I know. That would be cheating.'

‘Maybe I could play?'

‘Okay.'

She allowed herself to become engrossed in trying to cheat obviously enough to get caught, but not obviously enough that he knew she wanted to be caught. It was harder still to pretend not to notice the grin on Oscar's face every time he sneaked six cards onto the pile saying it was three. Or when he put down his eighth queen. He didn't cheat by halves.