Before This Is Over

by Amanda Hickie

  “Not a problem, Gwen.”

  Gwen stood as if waiting for something, her eyes focused on the grille.

  “I’m not opening the grille, Gwen. Sorry, we’re not letting anyone in or out.”

  Gwen looked surprised. “What a lot of fuss over nothing.” She talked fast, as if continuing a conversation already started. “No one’s come. Meals on Wheels didn’t turn up this week and I can’t get on to my daughter. She’s probably gone away.” That would be thoughtless, to leave town without telling your elderly mother. But thoughtless was better than the other possibilities. “I can’t get to the shopping center, and Lily’s is only a corner store—you wouldn’t expect her to have everything. So when you go to the shops I’ve got a list of things for you to pick up.”

  “I’m not going to the shops, but I’m getting some things delivered. If you give me the list, I’ll get them to put your things in too.”

  Gwen had her purse in her hand. “I don’t want much, a few tins. I’ll give you some money.” Money that had probably been through Lily’s till and the hands of Lily’s customers.

  “Later. We don’t know how much it will be.”

  “Fifty dollars should more than cover it.” She had the note out, one hand on the grille.

  “I’ll get it from you later. I’m not opening the door right now. Not until the epidemic’s over. It can wait until then.” Gwen looked affronted. “Gwen, do you cook for yourself?”

  “I manage. The Meals on Wheels man comes and my daughter brings me a casserole on the weekend. Or a salad.”

  “When did the Meals on Wheels man come last?”

  “I think it was Thursday. Maybe Friday.”

  “And your daughter?”

  “Oh, she’s always busy.” Gwen dismissed the thought with a wave of her hand. “She has a family of her own and everyone is making such a fuss about this illness.”

  “What have you eaten since Friday?”

  “I’m not incapable of looking after myself. I’ve been doing it for a long time and I haven’t starved.”

  Gwen moved closer to the grille as she became engrossed in the conversation. And each increment sent Hannah farther into the shadow of the hallway, until Gwen was an outline haloed by the light.

  “I can’t let you in, Gwen. People are dying.”

  “I hope you don’t think I’m one of them. Except from hunger if the Meals on Wheels man doesn’t come back.”

  In Hannah’s mind, the shelves of food in the pantry rearranged themselves, smaller somehow, clustered for six now when they had been designed for four. “I’ll make sure you have food.” She looked beyond Gwen to the street outside, willing the Meals on Wheels car or Gwen’s daughter to appear and make this not her problem. “Gwen, you can’t go out, especially not to Lily’s. It’s dangerous.”

  “Oh, I don’t go far and I’m right as rain.”

  “I’m serious. It takes two days to see symptoms. You could be sick, or Mr. Henderson could be, and not even know it. That’s why you have to stay home and not have contact with anyone.” Gwen looked unimpressed. Hannah continued, a little weakly, “Will you be all right at home, on your own?” All she was prepared to offer was food, nothing more. And yet even that made her anxious. Each meal she gave Gwen, gave Daniel, was a meal’s less protection for her boys. Offering too much and not enough.

  “Of course I will. I’ve been on my own for fifteen years now—I think I know how to stay put.” She fumbled around in her pocket and pulled out a torn envelope with florid handwriting. “Just a few things.” She gave the grille an offended look that traveled down to the gap at the bottom. “My knees aren’t what they were.”

  “Why don’t you leave it in the letterbox and I’ll get it out later.” It could stay there for a few hours.

  When Zac was little and she’d listened to just about as much Wiggles as she could stand, she made him a CD for the car. She’d spent a night going through their music collection, finding all the silliest songs that were still acceptable to her. He had loved that CD and only grown out of it when he realized that Oscar in his turn had come to love it. And now she needed something to cheer herself up, make her feel as if there was still fun in the world. As if she was five again and didn’t have to worry.

  Oscar only knew one dance, the Macarena—the Hokey Pokey of his generation, taught to him by the teachers at school who were just old enough to have learned it when it first came out. Whatever song she put on, he insisted they dance it, and she followed his lead. In unison, they swirled hips, clapped hands, flicked thumbs, and stamped feet. Ending with a quarter-turn jump in whichever direction Oscar chose.

  Oscar kept up a monologue the whole time, punctuated by giggles. “And Mrs. Gleeson stood on Mr. Turner’s foot when she jumped and Mr. Turner yelled but no one heard him ’cause the music was so loud and…” She could barely hear him over the stamping.

  A thumping came from somewhere other than their feet and Hannah paused the music to hear teenage fists pounding on Zac’s bedroom wall. “TURN THE MUSIC DOWN.”

  Oscar and Hannah looked at each other and laughed. “Stop being such killjoys,” she yelled back.

  “We’re trying to play a game here and every time you elephants jump on the floor everything goes everywhere. We have to yell at each other.”

  Hannah winked at Oscar. “We won’t jump so much.”

  “It’s two days! With no one sick.”

  “Two more hours.”

  Even without being able to see him, Hannah knew Zac’s eyes were rolling. “Two hours, I’ll be dead. From boredom, not from a cough.”

  “At least you’ll stop griping at me when you’re dead.” Too well brought up to bust out, she guessed. A tick in her column. “Hey, Oz, let’s do a dance that doesn’t use our feet so much.” She taught him to twist, lifting one heel and holding his weight on the other. She flapped her arms, like the Eagle Rock, waved them around above her head, any silly pose to get him to laugh.

  They were caught midtwist when Sean walked in, coffee cup dangling from one hand. “Can you turn the music down? It’s too loud.”

  Hannah smiled at him. “Across the yard in the office? No way.”

  Sean continued to frown. “I came in for a coffee. And you’re loud.”

  “You and Zac. The two of you can move into the garage when we let him out and never make a sound.”

  “You’re the one who’s always going on about not disturbing Gwen.” Sean waved at the party wall. Oscar had already engrossed himself in the pile of Lego bricks in the corner, shutting out the adult noises. “Serious things are happening. You might be having a good time, but out there”—he shook his hand in the direction of the street—“out there people are in trouble. Real people.”

  “Me being miserable won’t change that.” She had her hands on her hips, ready to defend herself. Oscar took apart and put back together the same set of bricks, but she knew he was listening, trying to pretend that somehow he wasn’t part of this. It wasn’t fair on Oscar, scaring him like this. “Why don’t you finish early today?”

  “I finish early every day now. I’ve still got stuff to do.” Sean turned to Oscar and said with all the force of his bad temper, “This place is a mess. Is that any way to treat your toys? Look at them, all piled up. They’ll get broken.” Oscar’s eyes started to well.

  “We’ll tidy it when we’re done, won’t we?” She tried to jolly Oscar.

  “The mess was here yesterday. It was here the day before. You shouldn’t be picking up after him, Oscar should be doing it.”

  “He did. Yesterday was a different mess. Every day we pick up the mess, then we make a new one.”

  Cancer makes you a better person. It must be true—people said it to her all the time. But Hannah couldn’t take in the whole neighborhood, she couldn’t feed everyone, and yet there would always be someone in need and more that she could have done. Wherever she drew the line, she would fail someone. If she was a better person now, she must have been a truly inade
quate one before.

  She’d lain in bed exhausted from throwing up, her whole body alien, fighting her. Modesty, privacy, were jettisoned. Any sense that her body was her own was abandoned, its sovereignty ceded to doctors and technicians.

  The sharp certainty that she was going to die still sometimes ambushed her, but it didn’t make life sweeter. It was a mosquito buzzing in her ear at night, no more creating happiness than a mosquito creates sleep. She’d suffered and not suffered and knew for certain that she preferred the not suffering. All that cancer had left her with was a fading anger that she’d wasted a year of her life on a posse of renegade cells.

  Her only task had been to make it to the other side, back to the life she already had, the person she had chosen to be. And here she was, eight years on, the same person, wishing that she didn’t feel responsible for Gwen.

  A little before dinner, just shy of two days since they’d arrived home, she changed out of her pajamas so as not to embarrass Zac in front of Daniel. With her finger to her lips, she got Oscar and Sean to follow her to Zac’s door and knocked quietly.

  “What? Go away.”

  She turned the knob and opened the door. “You think I’m not going to come in there and make you regret that?” She smiled at him and he looked back, bewildered.

  “It’s not time.”

  “It’s past time if you count from Canberra.”

  She had expected a champagne cork pop, but the two boys picked themselves up from where they were lying and sauntered out. Oscar bounded around them like a puppy. “Do you want to play outside? We could play soccer. I could be on Daniel’s team. I’m good at goalie.”

  “Tell you what, Oscar and me against you two.” Sean looked down at Oscar. “We’ll slaughter them. Your mum could play for our team too.”

  Zac snorted. “If you want to make it harder for yourselves.” Hannah gave him a look. “I’m joking. It’s a joke.” But he muttered to Daniel, “We’re set.”

  Zac and Daniel played to win. Sean played to let Oscar have fun. Hannah played to avoid looking like a wet blanket. Oscar just played. The older boys knew that five people on a couple of square meters of grass had to wing it, but Oscar stopped play for every infringement.

  “Hey, Oscar.” Sean bent down to Oscar’s height, to camouflage his puffing, Hannah suspected. “Let’s imagine that this isn’t soccer.” Oscar gave him a questioning smile. “Maybe this is a different game, one called lawn ball. It’s very simple. You kick the ball, you don’t touch the other people, and you don’t go off the grass.”

  “Who throws in when it goes off?”

  “You do.”

  “What about when we go off?”

  “The youngest player always throws in.”

  “What about when—”

  “Anything”—Sean took them all by surprise by belting the ball in front of him with his foot—“goes.” The ball slammed into the fence. “Goal. One, nil.”

  “Hey!” Zac turned from amusement to outrage in a second.

  “My rules.”

  “Hey, new rule—you don’t have to be nice to your dad.” Zac and Daniel pushed across the lawn, dancing around Sean.

  Oscar neatly stepped out to the ball and punted it to Sean, who kicked it across the grass and onto the fence. “Two, nil.”

  At first, Daniel steered away from her, too polite to crash into someone else’s mum, but after a few minutes the need to not be beaten by Zac’s little brother and mum took precedence. In between dodging the boys, Hannah noticed Ella’s head poking over the top of the opposite fence, big toddler eyes silently watching the game. She wondered if Natalie or Stuart knew where she was.

  As Daniel’s foot connected with the ball, aimed square on for a slam goal against Gwen’s fence, he jumped in triumph. His joy morphed, in seconds, to embarrassed shame as the ball curved too high, missed its mark, and sailed clear over to Gwen’s backyard.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to.”

  Four sets of eyes scanned Gwen’s garden. Oscar tried to scramble up the crossbeams of the fence to join in. Sean contemplated the mission. “The coast is clear. The rule is, if you sent it, you get it.” Sean locked his hands together to make a step and boosted Daniel to the other side.

  Hannah stood near Ella’s still-mute bobblehead. Caught in the passage between their houses, she could see a slice of sunset. Orange clouds with a purple underbelly.

  “Hey guys, look at this.”

  They gathered to watch the display in silence and she discreetly held Oscar away from the fence and Ella. The colors changed, now red, now purple—spectacular, gaudy, and baroque. The color drained, leaving the overly ornate clouds a steely lavender.

  Oscar said, “The clouds didn’t look like that yesterday. Yesterday they were pink and yellow. They’re different every day.”

  In their little cube of space, nothing big happened, only small changes, variations on a theme. These ephemeral moments gave her an awe of existence—the rightness and gratitude she felt with these people who were her world.

  Now gloom hid the ball, leaving only its glowing white patches for them to track. Oscar ducked and weaved, an invisible motion in the failing light. Sean kicked at the ball, missed, and just pulled himself up as he was about to connect with Oscar. He twisted, tried to recover, and, with something approaching grace, landed square on his back. Oscar was in awe. “Cool, Dad. Do it again.”

  “Hey, we could turn on the lights.” Zac moved towards the house.

  “Ow.” Sean laughed and gasped from the grass. “I think it’s dinnertime.”

  “Yep.” Hannah picked up the ball. “Past dinnertime.” She looked at the fence. Ella had gone without her noticing.

  “Hey,” Zac called from the patio door, “the light’s broken.”

  “Here.” Sean flicked the switch a couple of times. He tried the switch just inside the kitchen, up and down. Nothing.

  “The fridge’s not working.” Zac leaned on the white door and stared into its dark void.

  Hannah lurched forward. “Then keep the door closed, you’ll let out the cold.”

  “You can’t let out cold. It’s not a thing. You can let out cold air, but you’re not letting out cold.” Zac said with all the force of two years of high school science.

  “Shut the door!”

  Oscar came running back from the hallway. “And the TV’s not working.”

  “Never mind,” she said with forced gusto, “it’s an adventure. We don’t need electricity.”

  She rummaged on the bottom shelf of the pantry, looking for her emergency candles, with Oscar hovering behind her like a foreshortened ghost. “Here you go, you can take those to Daddy.”

  Zac stood in the passage from the kitchen, arms crossed cockily, Daniel slightly behind. “How are we going to cook dinner, on candles?”

  “We can use the barbecue. It’ll be like camping.” Zac gave her the world-weary teenage look of someone burdened with lame parents. “Or we could break up the furniture and burn it in the backyard. I’m starting with your bed.” In response, she got a bit of a smirk.

  The door opening from the hallway took her by surprise, unaccompanied by the usual light that announced Sean’s entrance. “They’re playing cards by torch light in the living room. Oscar begged for candles but I can see that ending in disaster.” Sean leaned back against the kitchen counter. “Did you know children can function without electricity? I don’t think they knew. At least without the TV we can be sure they won’t see the news. We can hope we’ve seen the worst, that tomorrow the numbers will go down.”

  “Do you think so?”

  “No.” He fished a wine bottle out of the recycling, jammed a candle in the neck, and handed it to her. “I think for you something more romantic than a torch.”

  They split the task of dinner. He took a candle out to the gas barbecue to cook some rice, she had the job of working out what to add to it. It was a toss-up whether to eat everything out of the fridge first or the freezer, but it wa
s late and anything in the freezer was going to take too much time to defrost without the microwave. The trick was to picture the contents of the fridge like a memory puzzle, open the door, and pull out everything she needed in one fluid move. It took her a few seconds to orient herself, but the cold creeping along her hand forced her to take what was in easy reach as quickly as possible. A carrot, a couple of sticks of celery, the end of a cabbage, some spring onions, the tail of an old chunk of ham. She slammed the door and looked at the spoils. In her mind she tried to reconstruct where she had seen the things she needed, then opened the door again to scoop up leftover roast chicken and a couple of eggs to fill it out.

  The candle cast a warm light around her hands and the chopping board as she diced the vegetables. When she looked out the back window, she could see Sean standing over the barbecue. His face glowed orange, the rest of him invisible in the darkness. Their warm pools of light connected, working together but separated.

  He came back once he had the rice started. “So what are we cooking?”

  “Impromptu Fried Rice Leftovers.”

  “Yum.” He nuzzled up to her neck, she leaned into him.

  She mixed soy sauce and fish sauce into the beaten eggs, put each of the ingredients in a bowl, and all the bowls on a tray, a patchwork of food, to take them out to the patio table. Sean carried the candle for her like a butler. Its small light disappeared into the voluminous darkness. Each bowl looked meager, but fried up together they made a huge mound. The leftovers would in turn be more leftovers, someone’s breakfast.

  Hannah portioned out the fried rice onto six plates, putting aside one for Gwen, and scraped the rest into a bowl. She called the boys. Oscar skipped into the room, Zac pushed in after him, but Daniel followed sedately and seated himself at the far end of the table. He picked up his knife and fork, then awkwardly put them down when he noticed no one else was yet ready.

  “Can I help?” His hands were clenched in his lap.