An Ordinary Epidemic (45 page)

Her mother's watch sat loose on Hannah's wrist. The thin leather band was dry and friable and she couldn't risk pulling the strap beyond the first hole. Gravity worked the small circular face around during the day. She twisted it gently to look at the hands. The nerves on her wrist registered its weight against her skin, like a small alarm that she hadn't yet learnt to ignore. It had taken an unmeasured hour of delicate tinkering to get it wound again before she set it from Oscar's alarm clock, an arbitrary assignment of time. By their agreed convention, it was barely nine. In half an hour, she could make an excuse, go to bed and check Ella on her way.

She watched Zac deep in thought and, although he was staring at the chessboard, he wasn't looking at it so much as staring into the distance with his face pointed in its direction.

‘Your move. I'll start counting you down soon.' Sean's concession to Zac's skill.

Zac opened his mouth but his arms stayed wrapped across his chest, hands pinned under his armpits. She looked where he looked on the board, trying to see where Sean had trapped him.

‘Three thousand, five hundred and thirteen people died yesterday.' Zac still stared at the board.

‘How the hell do you know that?' Sean voice was full of the anger of parental concern.

‘You didn't turn on the phone did you? Oh, Zac, we can't waste the battery, you know that. Every time you turn it on, that's one time gone.'

‘What are you doing sneaking around in our room? If you want to know something, ask. There are things you don't need to know about. How can we trust you if you go behind our backs?'

‘I knew what was on there. Why else wouldn't you let me see all the texts in the morning? I'm not stupid, I know. Lots of people are dead. Ella's parents are dead.'

‘We don't know about Natalie.'

‘You don't have to lie to me, I'm not about to tell Ella, she's a little kid.'

‘Look Zac,' Sean used his serious grown-up voice, ‘things happen that we can't influence. We can't help what's out there but if we stay inside we can control what happens to us.'

‘We didn't show you because there's no point you worrying. That's what we're here for. Terrible things have happened...'

‘But you don't get it. Three thousand, five hundred and thirteen people died yesterday.' Zac's eyes were on the table, he was turning over a black pawn in his hand. ‘And I get that's terrible, but it's a good thing. It's going down.' He made an uncertain grimace still looking at the pawn.

‘That would be nice, if it were true,' Sean produced an imitation of a reassuring and reasonable tone, ‘and maybe there were days last week when the toll was higher but it doesn't
work like that. Statistics are not that clear, they go up and down from day to day and it doesn't mean anything.'

‘I wrote down every number for the last three weeks.' Zac's voice was a little shaky.

‘Zac! You've been taking the phone every day?' All this time she had been trying to firewall him, he had been methodically informing himself.

‘Just look.' Zac darted into the dark and was back seconds later. ‘See.' He held out his school maths book, open at a graph. The book shook but the candle light shone in his eyes. In them, she saw the look of power that he had when he was two years old and learnt that he could change the world with a simple word like ‘no'.

‘You have to find a line of best fit, even if the points go all over the page, and they do a bit. There are a couple of dots from last week that kind of mess it up but the thing is you don't look at them. Look, it went up and look here, there's one really high day, and then it starts coming down.' He smiled. ‘It's a bell curve. Kind of. Well, it looks like it's supposed to be a bell curve but they don't look quite right in real life. But that doesn't matter because it's coming down.' Zac smiled at her again.

The world had changed. He had changed it with information and thought.

Sean took the book from his hands and held it to the candle. He studied it carefully. ‘You know, life doesn't always fit a nice curve. There are other factors involved, complicating factors.'

Zac snatched the book back. ‘I know, it's amazing. Look, you can see right here. That's when the water went off. And then, see, a few days later, the number starts going up again, that's because of all the people who left their houses. And then it levels off and it's higher than it was but look, if you moved it all down a bit, the curve would keep going.'

And there it was, a line that meant so many different things.
If you integrated the line, maths Zac hadn't got to yet, it would tell you how many people had died. You could extrapolate how many more would die before it reached zero. But it was also hope, a road map to the way out, a promise that this would end.

Zac looked at his handwork with pride. ‘If they gave us examples like this at school, I'd see the point.'

‘If there are three zombies and each zombie takes two minutes to eat one brain, and five minutes to find its next victim, how long before a school of a thousand kids are all zombies?' Sean chuckled, and Zac joined in. Her planning was not for naught. There was an end.

They celebrated Zac's insight by stealing some of Oscar and Ella's milk powder and cocoa and wasting gas on making hot chocolate. Zac did the making and she turned away when he spooned out the powders, easier not to know than be obliged to spoil the fun. Sean lined up three mugs on the outside table and Zac carefully lifted the saucepan to pour.

Sean, a little out of the circle of light, was fumbling in a cupboard. Zac picked the biggest mug and took it back to the kitchen table. While his back was turned, Sean produced a bottle of Kahlua and spiked their drinks. He gave her a furtive smile.

It was easy and reassuring to slip into bed at the same time as Sean but the cold of the sheets was a shock to her system. Couldn't the epidemic have waited until summer? Sean inched across the bed until his body rested against hers. He was warm with life. His breath heated the side of her neck, raising goosebumps.

He sighed heavily, it rustled her hair. ‘I'm glad you're here.'

She turned her head to look at him, nose to nose. ‘I'm glad
I'm here too. Of all the places to be stuck for weeks on end, this would be my pick.'

He smoothed down the fine, loose hairs at her temple. ‘You did all that planning. I don't know how we'd cope without you.'

She sat up on one arm. ‘You would. You'd cope.'

‘I don't know.'

‘You'd have to and you would. If I'm ever not here, if that's the way the odds flow, promise me you'd cope.'

‘I wouldn't want to. I wouldn't choose to be without you.'

‘Ah,' she kissed him lightly, ‘I wouldn't want you to choose to cope, but for Zac and Oscar, you'd have to.'

‘One crisis at a time. We did that one, it's over.'

‘Unless it comes back.'

He ran his hand down her arm. ‘Or it doesn't. And we don't think about it until it does.'

And right now, right here, in the warmth, she took a night off from planning a life that didn't include her.

Sitting in the winter morning sunshine on the back patio, making breakfast, the water got to lukewarm and no more. Sean shook the gas bottle but it and the gas burners made no noise.

‘No problem.' He scrambled over the fence and passed her the gas bottle from Stuart and Natalie's barbecue, shaking it as he did. It was at most a third full.

‘That's from my house.' Ella's assertion took Hannah by surprise. She realised that even if she didn't think of Ella as one of them, she had stopped thinking of her as belonging on the other side of the fence. ‘My mum will be cross.'

‘No, sweetie, she won't mind. We'll buy a new one when she comes back. But we should have asked you first, shouldn't we, because it is yours. That would be polite. We're using it to make breakfast for you too, so it's okay isn't it?' It was a careless error. They had worked hard to avoid mentioning her mum or dad, or the house next door.

After they had restored themselves with rice porridge cooked on pilfered gas, Hannah cleared away the breakfast things. The warmth of the sunshine and the rest of the pot of coffee, bought at too high a price, enticed her. She collected her book and her mug, but Sean and Zac had pulled the table off the patio into the middle of the lawn. Sean was standing on it, surveying the neighbouring gardens while Zac steadied it.

‘What on earth are you doing?'

‘Dad's counted three that he can see and plenty of them will be under a deck or in a shed. I guess we can't get the ones in the sheds. Unless we break in.' Zac looked thoughtful. ‘Dad, are we going to break in?'

Sean did an unconvincing splutter. ‘No, of course not. I'd never break into someone's property.'

‘Except...' Zac jerked his head in the direction of Stuart and Natalie's.

‘That's different. We know them and they left us implicit permission.' Sean tilted his head towards Ella.

‘I still have no idea what you're doing up there.' Hannah's outrage was tempered by curiosity. ‘Can you see anyone? Is there anyone else around?'

‘Nope, not a person. Not that I can see. Three gas bottles, at least, for the taking.'

‘They're probably not all full, Dad.' Zac corrected him, in a serious teenage way. ‘On average, they're probably half full, so that would be one and a half bottles.'

‘You are not stealing gas bottles from our neighbours.'

Sean looked down at her.

‘What about Gwen? She's home but you don't see her. Just because you can't see people doesn't mean they're not there.'

‘Why don't you stand here and have this conversation again while I secure our energy supplies. It'll save time.'

‘And last time, if you remember, I was right and you were wrong, so the conversation is in fact over. You stay.'

‘This is not the same at all. No risk because I won't be on the street, it's safe as houses. I admit, the need for coffee was frivolous but this is an actual necessity.' Sean stepped down from the table, using Zac's head to steady himself. ‘If it will make you feel better, you go put some cash in some envelopes and I'll leave them in place of the bottles. But that'll increase the risk. We need a surgical strike, in and out.' Zac was grinning at him. Too much fun was being had.

Sean jumped the fence to Gwen's, more graceful this time, even managing not to dislodge the fairy lights. Proficiency at breaking into your neighbours was not a skill developed in ordinary times. It couldn't be that he was fitter, the most exercise any of them got was a stroll from the front door to the back, but she noticed, as he vaulted himself over the top, that he was leaner.

Once Sean had given Gwen's house a quick look, he beckoned to Zac. In one fluid movement, Zac was over. She swore he was taller than yesterday. Sean kept going, over the next fence and passed a gas bottle across. Zac left it at the bottom of Gwen's fence and followed Sean into the next yard. Sean jumped the next fence on, handing another bottle to Zac, who lowered it into Gwen's garden.

Hannah had lost sight of Sean. She called out to Zac, ‘Isn't two enough?'

‘Dad says if we don't get them now they'll be taken by someone else.'

‘How many do we need?'

‘This one's almost empty.' He shook the one he was carrying.

There was an enraged yell and she saw the top of Sean's head streak across a backyard three houses down. Zac dropped to the ground and rolled into the shadow of Gwen's neighbour's fence, out of her sight, beyond her protection.

She fell on her knees and pressed herself into the fence.

‘Mum, what was that?' Oscar came trotting out of the kitchen.

‘Shhh. Shhhh. Go back inside.' She hissed at him. The battle cry came again. A man's scream. Oscar stared transfixed in the direction of the noise. She grabbed his arm and yanked him down.