An Ordinary Epidemic (44 page)

Ella got to the gauge first and in her excitement blurted out, ‘It's on the one with a five.'

‘Hey, Mum, it's my turn. Tell her it's my turn.'

Hannah tossed up between she's a guest and she's younger than you.

‘And she's wrong. It's fourteen, the wheels aren't touching the fifteen.' Oscar turned sternly to Ella. ‘It only counts when the wheels are touching.'

Yesterday they had twelve days' worth. Her heart gave a little jump. Rain overnight had given them two extra days.

She spaced the rituals out to fill the day, and mid morning's
task was the pantry. Each tin of beans, tomatoes or tuna was half a meal. As was fifty grams of dried beans. Three hundred grams of rice or a packet of pasta was the other half of the meal. You could get away with less for breakfast.

‘Ella,' Hannah wanted Ella to feel included, ‘you can do the weighing for me.' She handed down the partially empty bag of rice. ‘First you have to make sure the scale says zero, remember, we did that yesterday.'

Oscar's hurt tone said it all. ‘I want to weigh.'

‘You can do the counting. You know way more numbers than Ella.' Ella was still limited by the fingers she could access.

Ella pressed the buttons carefully, gently placed the bag on the scale. ‘Three. Six. Four. Three. Another one?'

‘We don't have to weigh that one, see, we haven't opened it. So we know it's five kilos.' Ella nodded seriously. Hannah couldn't read this self-possessed little girl.

‘You can count the packets of pasta, Oscar.' He had wandered off down the hall. ‘Oscar, you could count the tins.'

Six packets of pasta and a kilo of rice that came from Stuart's house—that made nine meals. Plus, just shy of nine kilos of their own rice, another twenty-nine meals. Thirty-eight meals divided by two and a half a day made fifteen, maybe sixteen days' worth. Two unopened kilo bags of Stuart's flour, maybe another four days. Twenty days. If she measured parsimoniously, she could maybe make that stretch a couple more. Three weeks in all. Three weeks. She had a third of a bag of powdered milk and half a packet of stolen cocoa. And then there were the other little luxuries from Stuart's pantry, like gourmet meals, rationed out as small and occasional indulgences. Stuart had provided enough jars of olives, jam and anchovies to make three weeks' worth of beans and rice palatable.

Every bag of pasta and tin of baked beans was an extra reason to be happy. The world was balanced and, having
verified it, she was free to be carefree.

Sean squeezed past her. She wanted to make him say something, they had become too used to silence.

‘It's Thursday, right?'

‘I think it's Wednesday.'

‘Are you sure? It can't be Wednesday. If it's Wednesday we have one less days' worth.'

‘How many days do we have?'

‘Three weeks, twenty days.'

‘Then we have three weeks, whether it's Wednesday or Thursday.'

‘It's Thursday.'

Sean shrugged and continued through the hall.

‘It's Thursday, I know it's Thursday.'

‘Then it's Thursday for you.'

‘Don't you care?'

‘What does it matter what you call the day? Call it Thursday if you have to, it doesn't change how much food we have.'

‘It matters. It matters because we need to know.'

‘You see every skerrick of food that comes out of that cupboard, you count it every bloody morning, where do you think the food is going? In twenty days there will be no more food. So the name of the day is clearly the important thing to worry about here.'

‘This is how we get through this, Sean, by knowing how much food we have and what day it is.'

‘And you think that within next twenty days they'll vaccinate everyone, we'll open the front door, it will be over and everything will be fine?' Sean's voice was low and controlled.

‘It won't be fine but there's a good chance it will be over.'

‘Vaccines take months, not weeks. Plan for that. It won't be fine, no kidding. There is no fine. There will never be fine for Ella.'

‘What do you want me to do, Sean? I can count packets of
pasta. I can organise the kids into games. I can keep six people alive for three weeks. That makes me a fucking hero. The rest is up to someone else.'

The house was still. In their rooms, the kids were listening to every word.

There wasn't much to do in the evenings except for the nightly ritual of wash time. A saucepan of water on the edge of the barbecue while they cooked dinner didn't get direct heat but it was better than iced water straight from the tank and was just enough for a sponge bath. Somehow in the unspoken division of chores, the act of washing had fallen to her. While it felt natural to wrap Oscar in a towel and rub him dry, somehow the act was too intimate when it came to Ella, something only a parent should do.

The two little kids led the procession to their bedroom with the candle, leaving her to clean up in the bathroom before she followed them. A moment of privacy away from the cocoon of light and family. She was getting used to feeling her way around the house at night, aware of the presence of the walls. Not by touch, more knowing than feeling.

Sean's voice jumped from the darkness as she stepped out of the bathroom. She hadn't sensed him there. ‘You could try.'

‘What?' Her voice was too loud for the small space.

‘You could try to make her feel welcome.'

‘I am. That's what I'm doing.'

‘You don't like her.'

‘I don't know her. She's the little girl who happens to live next door and up to a couple of weeks ago, I'd barely said two words to her.'

‘And don't you think she picks up on that?'

‘On what? I'm being kind. What more do you want?'

‘Show her a little affection. She needs a mother.'

‘But I'm not her mother and you're not her father. I think she knows that.'

‘You treat her differently from the boys.'

‘They are
our
children.'

‘If you can't dredge up a little maternal feeling, you could fake it.'

‘That's easy to say, Sean. You feel a special connection with her, well bully for you. I can't just turn it on, so unless you have something practical and constructive to say, I will do my best to make sure she is fed, clothed and kept warm. I'm good at that.' He was asking her to be someone she wasn't.

In the flicker of the stubby remains of a candle, the yellow walls of Oscar's room had an illusory warmth. She had painted this room in a nesting frenzy a few weeks before his birth and chosen yellow as the international colour of
I don't care if it's a boy or a girl
. Oscar had added the dirty hand marks and crayon drawings.

Ella and Oscar couldn't keep quiet. They tumbled and squealed on the bed, interspersed with chatter. It was as if their brains were locked into constant activity, passing every thought straight to their mouths or their bodies. But she was relieved to be shut in here with the noisy warmth and the candle's bubble of light. It was a break from the cold, and now dark, silence on the other side of the door.

‘Okay, okay, that's it. No more monkeys jumping on the bed. Where's the book?' Ella and Oscar flapped about the room, peeking under the bed, nudging the toys on the floor with great seriousness. They wouldn't find it unless it happened to be in exactly the place they looked. Ella turned to her and said earnestly, ‘Well, I don't know.'

Hannah joined the search. She gave Oscar the candle and made him stand still, holding it upright. Dripped wax was a few minutes light wasted and a nuisance to get out of the carpet. She took apart Oscar's bed, the last place she had seen the book, while the kids stood sentry. She found it tucked between his sheet and his doona, down at the foot.

‘Where were we up to? I know, we were up to “I don't read anything until you are in your beds”.' They both scrambled between their sheets, Oscar pulling the disarrayed bedclothes so they approximately covered him. Hannah sat on the edge of Oscar's bed, like she had every night since he was big enough for a bed. Like she had every night since Ella had come.

‘Hey, Ella, can I sit on your bed tonight?'

Ella beamed and curled herself away from the edge, leaving Hannah most of the mattress.

Hannah twisted herself down, moving about the pivot of the candle, awkwardly supporting herself on one hand while she found the edge of Ella's mattress. As she shuffled herself onto it, the foam compressed until she was sitting on the floor. There was nowhere for her legs to go but straight out, under Oscar.

As she read, Ella gradually came closer, whether moving herself or being pulled by the force of gravity into the well caused by Hannah, Hannah didn't know. But there she was, with her body curled around Hannah's back and her head peeking around Hannah's side, following along with the story, looking at the pictures. Hannah tentatively put a comforting hand on Ella. It wasn't hard with Oscar, she had had his whole life to be in love with him, in fact, she sometimes had to remind herself to pull back, give him the space to grow. She knew from experience that eventually boys grew out of cuddles.

Oscar was asleep with his eyes open but he came to life whenever she was tardy in turning the book around for him
to see the pictures, holding the candle up to the illustrations. As she closed the book on the last page and slid it onto his bed, she leant forward to give Oscar a goodnight kiss and a hug. She stiffly turned herself around to face Ella and tried to replicate exactly what she had just done with Oscar, the kiss first and then the hug. She felt Ella relax into her.

Hannah picked the book up from Oscar's bed and put it back on the shelf, flicked the curtain open a little to let in the moonlight in lieu of a nightlight, looked at their tight shut eyes in its blue wash. A few more serene moments.

On the other side of the door, she waited for the wailing to start. She was in no hurry to go back to Sean and Zac's cold company. If Hannah was in the kitchen when Ella started crying, which had happened every night for the last few nights, Sean would insist on dealing with it.

She pressed her ear to the door. A rustle of bedclothes as one of them turned over. A quiet murmur from Ella and an answer from Oscar, her chance to tell them to go to sleep. She hesitated, missed the moment, would have to wait for another infraction. Only silence.

Ella and Oscar were asleep, so she had no excuse to linger. She felt her way back through the house. Hannah was relieved not to hear Ella choking on her sobs but was that it at three? Her boys had been high energy drama queens, every setback was death of all hope, every achievement needing a parade. Ella was more phlegmatic. Maybe in the early weeks, when Natalie was working crazy hours, she'd got used to Mummy being gone. And she was here because Daddy sent her, so maybe her world made sense.

In the kitchen, Zac and Sean were playing chess at the table by the window, making the best of the thin silver light. The white piece in Zac's hand hovered over the board. It shone like neon but the black defensive lines disappeared, cloaked by the night. Zac settled his piece onto a square, held it for a moment
and then let go. Even in the dark, Hannah could tell by the way Sean hunched into the board that Zac was giving him a run for his money. If she watched carefully, she could head off to bed when the game was too close to the end to abandon but with enough time to pretend to be asleep, or even actually be asleep, when he came to bed. It was cowardly and childish, but she didn't need another lecture about Ella.

‘Hey Mum, give us some of the light.' Zac took the candle from her and pushed it into a minimalist candelabra that had been, up 'til now, a purely decorative birthday present. With her candle commandeered, Hannah had to move closer to the table to read. Further into the light and further into the circle of conversation.

The letters bled into the shadowed texture of the paper. As she tried to construct shapes into letters, letters into words and words into meaning, her mind kept returning to Ella not crying. At least she would be asleep by now. Unless she was lying awake in the dark, not crying.