Before This Is Over

by Amanda Hickie

  “I’m going to get the phone.”

  “Your mum said, when Ella is finished.”

  Ella bolted her food. The instant her spoon hit the bowl, both little kids streaked across the room.

  Ella returned with the phone clutched in both hands, watching each foot as she put it deliberately in front of the other. Oscar hopped around her as if the extra air movement could push her faster. Even Zac looked up from his book. Like a Victorian family sharing the newspaper, they gathered around Hannah as she scrolled down the list, the new texts redirected from all their phones and jumbled together, deciding what was worth opening on the basis of the randomly truncated first sentence.

  All the snippets of information that weren’t her city, her suburb, her street, she couldn’t do anything about, couldn’t use. “Ah, here, listen to this one. ‘Europe reports some success with vaccine trials.’” It was like a news ticker. “Conditions in Sydney.” She opened and read it quickly. “Just more of the same. Zac, I think this one is for you since it starts, ‘Hi Zac.’” She held out the phone for him to read.

  “Thanks, Mum.”

  “No problem.” She went back to scrolling down. Zac’s was the only personal text. At first there had been the normal number of messages from friends and colleagues, but she deliberately delayed replying. Only Kate persisted, texting every couple of days, using cryptic abbreviations and text-speak to fit into a single message, just to check they were still there. The fewer texts they received, the longer the battery would last. “Maybe we should unsubscribe from the news service and just rely on the emergency alerts?”

  “And what exactly did they tell us today?” Sean looked skeptical.

  “That there will be a patrol in our area, that somewhere that’s not here had their quarantine lifted, that we should boil the water. Which shelters are open, same as yesterday.” The news texts were more informative but no more useful or personal—tallies of the ill in cities a long away off, foreign governments mobilizing militaries, an earthquake in South America. How incongruous that seemed. She thought of all the natural disasters she had witnessed remotely before. How important and terrible they had been, and yet now it was just more people dead, statistical noise. She couldn’t muster any more empathy for them just because they had been killed by the earth and not a virus. She reached the text she always dreaded yet looked for, opened it, and held it in such a way that only she and Sean could see it. Three people short of four thousand dead yesterday. Sean read it over her shoulder, trying to look like he wasn’t, but Zac clearly knew. He had to. He watched them read it every day.

  “What does it say?”

  “Nothing you need to know.”

  “I think I need to.”

  Sean inclined his head slightly in the direction of Ella and Oscar. Zac looked at them and back at Hannah. She fumbled on the keys in her hurry to switch the phone off again.

  Six days with no information beyond what could be conveyed in one hundred and forty characters. No details to be dissected, considered, chased up on the Internet. No breaking stories, nothing to be followed. Whatever was happening happened and was presented fait accompli, without any need for her to watch it unfold.

  There were no more bills to pay. Inexplicably, the numbers in their bank account no longer held meaning for her, and the money they had stashed around the house was inedible notes. For all she knew, their pay was still being deposited and the mortgage automatically paid. It was possible that in anonymous server farms, digits were being moved from one column to another, but it made no sense to her anymore when stacked up against cups of water and rice.

  The days now were filled with routines, in themselves meaningless, but the act of carrying them out together gave them a sense of common purpose and broke up the otherwise aimless hours. The first task after breakfast was to check the level of the rainwater tank. Zac had made a simple gauge out of a piece of packing foam that floated on top of the water. A long string attached to the float came out the top of the tank and down the side, and was tied through the roof of a large toy truck to pull it taut. It hung above the spigot, which was tightly wrapped in a couple of layers of stocking to keep them from drinking mosquito larvae. Zac had marked off days’ worth of water with an indelible marker, out of step with the corrugations of the tastefully eucalyptus-colored tank.

  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 wavered 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 midmorning’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 from Stuart’s house—that made nine meals. Plus, just shy of nine kilos of their own rice, another twenty-nine meals. For each of the thirty-eight portions of staples, she counted out a portion of beans or fish. Three tins of fish shy of being even, but divided by two and a half a day, there was close enough to 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, almost 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 could let herself 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 day’s 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 y
ou 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 the next twenty days they’ll vaccinate everyone, we’ll open the front door, and 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. We don’t just pick up where we left off. There will never be fine for Ella.”

  “What do you want me to do, Sean? I can count packets of pasta. I can organize 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. Oscar firmly clasped the candle in both hands—now that they had burned through her stockpile, she was grateful for all the birthdays Sean and the boys had rushed up to the shops at the last minute and presented her with another fat cylinder in scrunched wrapping paper. She took a minute or two 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.

  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.”

  “Don’t say that. 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.”

  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 color 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 blanket, 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, either creeping forward or being pulled by the force of gravity into the well caused by Hannah. But there she was, with her body curled around Hannah’s back and her head peeking around her 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 and holding up the candle for him to see the pictures. As she closed the book on the last page and slid it onto his bed, she leaned forward to give Oscar a good night 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. 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. 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.

  “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 till now, a purely decorative birthday present.

  If she watched carefully, she could head off to bed when the game was close to the end but with enough time to pretend to be asleep, or even actually be asleep, when Sean came to bed. It was cowardly and childish, but she didn’t need another lecture about Ella.

  Her mother’s watch sat loose o
n Hannah’s wrist. The thin leather band was dry and friable, and she couldn’t risk pulling the strap beyond the first hole. Gravity had worked the small circular face around during the day. She twisted it gently to look at the hands. It had taken an unmeasured hour of delicate tinkering to get it wound again before she set it from Oscar’s alarm clock. It showed 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. He wasn’t looking at the chessboard so much as staring into the distance with his face pointed in its direction.

  “Your move. I’ll start counting you down soon.”

  Zac opened his mouth but his arms stayed wrapped across his chest, hands pinned under his armpits.

  “Three thousand, nine hundred and ninety-seven people died yesterday.” Zac still stared at the board.

  “How the hell do you know that?” Sean’s voice was both angry and concerned.

  “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? How can we trust you if you go behind our backs?”

  “I knew what was on there. 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 in you worrying. That’s what we’re here for. Terrible things have happened…”

  “But you don’t get it. Four thousand, eight hundred and forty-five people died the day before.” Zac’s eyes were on the table as he turned 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.