An Ordinary Epidemic (22 page)

‘Oscar's not that easy to fool anymore and teenagers, well you know, teenagers.' Zac had that peculiar teenage sensibility to loss, the sad sinking in of bad news, the awful new awareness of permanence, the knowledge that some things don't
get better.

‘You can't seriously think a cat is worth the risk.'

‘What makes you think that cats spread it? Did Natalie say so? It's bats, that's what I read, they think it's bats.'

He gave a condescending laugh. ‘Maybe they're wrong about how long it lasts outside the body or how it's transmitted but somehow it's spreading. You can pin your hopes on it being the bats but are you sure your cat doesn't catch them? When this is over there's a PhD in there for someone.'

There were so many rumours on the internet, more or less outrageous or ignorant. Just contemplating all the possibilities was enough raise an anxious need for information. This was just another one—and an old one at that. They killed cats during the plague even though rats spread it. Random shots in the dark, hoping to hit an undefined target.

He made her uncomfortable. She was preparing a departing sentence in her mind, something along the lines of
Well, nice to have seen you, hope Natalie comes home soon
when Stuart spoke again. ‘Not everything you read online is the truth.'

‘Well, that's no surprise.'

‘I mean the official stuff. There's no point getting people into a panic about things they can't change. I don't think Natalie tells me the truth, either. I know she doesn't tell me the truth. What could “being careful” possibly mean when you're standing at the epicentre of the end of the world?' Stuart leant down and picked up a coffee cup from beside his chair. ‘Back to it.'

The street was too big, the distance from the door to the car much further than it used to be. Walking across her own front yard was the strangest thing she'd done in a week. The pools of light under the telegraph poles were large and sinister, their presence made the shadows and crevices more likely to harbour harm.

She pushed the petrol cap back into place as she passed. Had they left it open last time they filled?

The sound of the car door reverberated indiscreetly, the sound of the engine filled the street. She looked around for the twitch of curtains, or shadows at the front doors of her neighbours' houses. The needle on the petrol gauge still hovered around a quarter of a tank. That didn't tell her much, it had never been very reliable and she could drive for several days without it moving before it precipitously dropped below empty. She should have listened to Sean and filled up on the way back from Canberra.

On the main road, she was surprised by how many people were about. The pedestrians were sparser than usual but she didn't think it was right that anyone at all was out. They spilled off a bus that had stopped in front of her, heads down, masks over faces, repelling each other like magnetic poles. Each one that tumbled onto the pavement stepped sharply to one side to avoid a knot of four men, leaning against a shop front. Their lack of masks shocked her and they were passing cans of beer, pulled from the carton that lay between them, from hand to gloveless hand. The pedestrians kept their eyes to the ground,
avoiding them but from the safety of her car she stared and pushed down the door lock button. One looked straight at her and laughed.

For long stretches, the only signs of habitation were lights in the houses, punctuated by thin clusters of people near the sets of shops. Those areas could pass for a quiet but normal evening if the shops and cafes weren't almost all shut. The further she got from home the more, irrationally, she felt threatened by these islands of activity. She ran the orange at a couple of intersections rather than stop. The second time, she put her foot down, stomping on her guilt.

On an unlit, deserted stretch of road, she pulled over to memorise the cross streets leading up to the one she wanted. She needn't have bothered, the street was obvious, the biggest road, with streetlights and a row of shops running in both directions away from the main street, empty of people. The storefronts were lit, but dimly, as if the shopkeepers had left one light on only. Up on the left she could see a store that glowed more brightly. She drove along the empty kerb and pulled up in front of it.

Although the pharmacy had all its fluorescent lights blazing, there was no sign of anyone inside. She put on disposable gloves, one pink, one yellow, fished her wallet out from under the passenger seat, took out thirty-five dollars in notes as she'd been instructed, and hid her wallet again. The script lay on the passenger's seat.

She rapped on the shop window and pressed the script against the glass. The door at the back opened a crack. Through it, she could see a young man talking to someone behind him. He came to the window to read the script. After he had examined it, he yelled through the glass, ‘Push it under the door, with the money.'

She folded the money and put it inside the script, scrunching it as she shoved it through the narrow gap. The young
man unfolded it with the toe of his shoe and squinted. ‘One minute.'

She was exposed, lit by the store like the leading lady of the footpath. But without an audience, she hoped. She should have parked facing the wrong way. As it was, she was going to have to walk all the way around the car to get to the driver's side. Further than she would like in an emergency.

One of the hospital pharmacies might have been a better idea, less isolated. But they would have been crowded by all the people who needed heart medicine, antibiotics, antidepressants, insulin. The very reason they were kept open was for sick people. Here, alone, the dangers were more obvious but less likely.

She must have rung half the pharmacies in Sydney. Less than one in ten answered and only after she'd let the phone ring and ring. She should have filled the script two weeks ago. Sean thought she should leave it. He said that cancer doesn't come back because you miss a few pills, but who knows what triggers one little bastard cell to start dividing. Who knows how you tell.

When one of the calls finally answered, the man on the other end was tired and suspicious and asked for her name. He was only open for regular customers but Hannah had talked fast and eventually, reluctantly, the man had admitted he could fill the script.

And here he was, the voice on the phone, coming back out to the glass front, much younger than she'd expected. He came right up to the window to yell again and she instinctively moved back, even though the glass between them blocked everything but the sound. ‘There's a planter around the corner, it's in that.' He scurried to the anonymous safety of the back room.

No matter how profligate it was to drive ten metres, she couldn't muster the courage to walk around the corner alone. She did a U-turn, took the corner and pulled up next to the
planter. One hand on the car door, she felt under the plants for the package, threw it on the passenger seat and took off, her heart pounding.

She was suddenly a very long way from Sean. Ahead, all she could see was the dark street. She fumbled to plug her phone into the hands-free kit. The ringing of the phone on the other end sounded thin in the metal box of the car.

‘Hello?' He sounded like himself. Warmly, comfortingly like him. She should record him saying just that word,
hello
, and carry it around with her.

‘It all went fine, I'm on my way back.'

‘Oscar's asleep. Zac and Daniel are in Zac's room. They're ready for bed.' Everything he said, the way he said it, was strangely, inexplicably normal.

‘I won't be long.'

‘I'll be here.' She could picture him in the light of their living room, watching TV. The whole house would be lit up. She saw it before her, an island of light in the vast threatening dark, and she set her course towards it. She imagined this was how firefighters felt. Lots of nothing happening, waiting for something unlikely but catastrophic. She was twitchy and bored at the same time.

When she'd been diagnosed with cancer she'd sat in the specialist's consultation room nodding knowingly,
yes, yes, I understand
. Her doctor had explained what would happen next, who she would see, what the procedures were, what the outcomes were and Hannah had listened carefully, academically. The doctor had watched her, Hannah assumed looking for a reaction but his words had no more weight than air. To react required something solid to react to.

On the way home from the doctor's it struck her. So this is what I get, it's not what I was expecting. How had she not noticed that all her life she'd been waiting for the one thing to happen, the one thing that you can't recover from?
She was still expecting something, she always expected something. This virus wasn't it, either. Whatever it was wouldn't be long and drawn out, it would be a sharp axe. A call from school telling her to go to the hospital. A work colleague of Sean's on the phone with a catch in his voice. She'd spent all her time mentally preparing for things she couldn't bring herself to think about. If one of the boys died, if Sean died... she couldn't think beyond that point. It was unthinkable. This wasn't it yet, and whatever it was, it was still out there waiting.

The bright bubble of cleansing light kept them safe for the time being. She couldn't control school, she couldn't control Sean's work, she couldn't control other drivers on the road, she couldn't be there when Zac was out with his friends. She could only hope to be in their heads, telling them to take care, not to take risks, that the most important thing was coming home at night, nothing else came close. As she turned into their street, she could almost see a radiance around the house.

She took the steps in one jump, afraid of the darkness nipping at her heels. Nothing behind her but the oppressively silent shadows of her neighbours' houses as she put the key in the lock.

The gloves from her hands joined the pile of discarded contamination from the outside world, growing next to the mat. She shut the door on it all.

There he was, lit by the TV just as she pictured. He shifted over to give her room on the sofa. She didn't say anything, he didn't look up from the news. The images were sickeningly familiar. People with facemasks walking past bodies in the street.

‘Manchester?'

‘Somewhere in America.'

‘I didn't realise.'

Piles of corpses being burned by figures in hazmat suits. One of the spacemen tossing a body on the pyre. The discarded shell of a life. That ‘infection risk' had been going about its business only days before, having breakfast, worrying about paying the rent, complaining it was too hot to sleep. The effort we expend on the minutiae of life when we don't know it's too late to matter.

The scale precluded emotional comprehension. One person had a story. A thousand people, ten thousand people, were a bonfire to prevent contamination.

Another city, another pile of bodies. Children, old people, driven into the streets by necessity. The well carrying the sick, looking for medical help that in some countries wasn't there even under normal circumstances. But she had to witness this. It was the penance she did for being safe, for now, with Sean and her children. It was the payment for still being alive.

The same newsreader. The dark circles under her eyes, grown too deep to be hidden by her makeup, were highlighted by the mask she hadn't been wearing a moment ago. On the other side of the desk sat a similarly masked man.

‘...while it appears that for the first time today the number of fatalities in Sydney may top three hundred, I think that needs to be taken in a context where...'

‘Aaaaaagggh.' Sean was on his feet. The remote made a pinging noise as it hit the screen. ‘Tell the dead about context you fucking liar. Tell them how to put hundreds of thousands into perspective.' He grabbed a handful of Lego bricks and hurled each one, machine gun rapid, at the man on the screen.

‘Sean.' She tried to pull him down to the couch.

‘Tell my sister that. Tell her to take a historical view. Half the people she works with are dead. Her neighbours are dead and rotting. But put it in perspective and it's not as bad as the Black Plague or the Second World War.'