I wondered how many others were sick. It was easy to forget that anyone else in the world still existed. Was Mrs White sick? Had she died? I wanted to go and see her, but Mr White…
What about her dogs?
Oh God.
‘Max, I’m going to go and find more food. Then we’re going to go find Mum.’
‘What if Dad comes back?’
‘We’ll leave a note.’
I pushed the key into the ignition and started the car. I reversed it carefully onto the road and turned the wheel so the car was facing up the hill. I pressed the accelerator and it moved forward a little before the tyres started to spin on the ice.
‘Shit.’ I hit the steering wheel. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’
Mick hadn’t put chains on the tyres. And even if we did have some in the garage I wouldn’t know what the hell to do with them.
The walk took so long. Every step was merciless. I used to be a good long-distance runner. Reasonably good. I did regionals. The running was good but I really liked the end. I liked the moment when you let your body fall onto the grass and you open up your lungs and your head thuds and you know you’ve really done something. It’s like a free pass to sit on your arse for the rest of the week. I loved that first gulp of cool water in my throat. I loved the relief when it was over.
The walk up the hill felt like the last two hundred metres of a race, after every step I felt that I couldn’t do any more. I stopped halfway up and dry wretched. My guts were protesting, screaming for food
I made it up the hill. I wanted to sit down, but I’d only have to get up again. There were tyre tracks in the snow along Arnold’s street. People must have started to get out, chains or no chains.
There was a small cluster of people standing out in the snow. Men. One saw me and approached. He was about my dad’s age. Beard. But then didn’t everyone have a beard now? Everyone but me, it seemed.
‘You got food, buddy?’
‘No.’
‘Where you going?’
‘A mate’s.’
‘He got food?’
‘No.’ I passed him and somehow found the energy to quicken my pace. He followed me. I went up Arnold Wong’s drive.
‘You sure about that, buddy?’ said the man. I ignored him. I knocked on Arnold’s door.
‘’Cause I got a family,’ he said.
Everyone’s got a family. The door opened, Arnold looked at me and then at the bearded bloke. I didn’t wait for an invitation. I went in and shut the door behind me.
‘Sorry,’ I said to Arnold. ‘That guy’s hassling me for food.’
Arnold regarded me sceptically. Suddenly I felt like I was on a boat, the ground shifted. I held the wall to steady myself.
‘You need to sit down,’ Arnold observed. I was going to aim to do so in a chair, but it appeared I didn’t have time for that. My arse found the floor.
‘Put your head between your legs,’ Arnold said. He went into the kitchen and I took his advice. Soon he was back next to me and there was the peel of a can opening. I could smell it. I could taste the baked beans before they were in my mouth. He put the can in one of my hands and a spoon in the other.
‘Eat.’
I did. I ate half, then I breathed and looked up at Arnold who was leaning on the doorframe of the living room. I held the can out to him. He shook his head.
‘Finish it.’
Arnold’s couch was green with brown stripes, the kind of green that lives on the surface of a pond. It was ugly as hell but when I sat down it welcomed me the way the modular thing that Kara chose for our place never did. The whole room was like something out of a museum. The television was one of those ones from the sixties that are encased in wood and stand on little legs. There were walls of books – lots of titles I didn’t recognise – books about Romans and Hebrews and lots of philosophy-type things. A slow-combustion fire glowed in the corner of the room. There was a gap where a dining suite should have been.
Arnold handed me a mug of tea and sat opposite me. He watched me drink it.
‘Were your parents there long, before…?’ I didn’t know where to go with the question.
‘Four months. They were advised to come back home two months before the missiles, but they chose to stay.’
‘Yeah. Right. They leave you on your own?’
‘My uncle was here. He went into the city after the attacks to try and find more information about my mum and dad.’ Arnold smiled. ‘Not a lot of point when you’re talking nuclear missiles. He was supposed to come back, but like your father, he hasn’t.’
It’s a strange reaction, but I felt myself relax a bit when Arnold told me that. There was something in the fact that we both knew close to exactly what the other was feeling.
‘A cop came to my house and tried to take our food,’ I said, after a while. ‘When we still had some.’
‘Really?’ He sounded polite, not surprised.
‘Have you seen anyone from the army or the SES, anyone?’
‘Not for weeks.’
I felt like I was at a therapist’s, the kind who says very little to get you to fill in the silence. Not that I’d been to a therapist. If we survived this I’d probably need to, everyone would. It would be a boon for therapists.
I told him about the army truck in my street. He did seem surprised about that.
‘I thought they were bringing more food, but they just went to a family up the street and took them away. I tried to ask them when they would bring more food but they ignored me, nearly ran me over.’
‘Which family?’
‘The Ketterleys. They live in that big-arse place.’
‘Why would the army take them?’
‘Dunno. The bloke’s some top-notch surgeon. Don’t know if that’s got anything to do with it.’
‘We’ve been left behind,’ Arnold said, matter-of-factly.
‘Do you really think they’re just going to let people starve to death? I mean, I know it’s starting to look that way, but…’
‘Think about it. The world has fallen into a nuclear winter. There is no sunlight, no food production. The radiation in the northern hemisphere would have wiped heaps of people out. There’s not going to be any more food imported. There is a finite amount left. The government, the authorities, would have a plan for this.’
‘Exactly.’
‘A plan that would involve preserving certain people and letting others perish. They can’t feed everyone.’
I sighed. ‘Do you have much left?’ I asked him.
He shook his head.
I had an overwhelming urge to consume a vast amount of alcohol again and looked around to see if the Wongs had a liquor cabinet. I never expected to spend my last days getting drunk with Arnold Wong.
I put my empty mug down. I saw Death come and sit in the room with us. Just like the dude from The Mighty Boosh: black robes, skeleton hands. How did it feel to starve to death? Did I already know?
‘I think me and my brother are going to leave, go to the city. My mum might still be there, she works with the government, disaster response management. I think she’ll know what to do… You should come with us… More people, more heat, more furniture to burn. There’s safety in numbers.’
‘There’s still the problem of food.’
I tilted my head back against the headrest and closed my eyes. Then the idea came to me.
‘I know where we can get some.’
Twenty-one
Max wasn’t moving. The house was in near-darkness with only the smoulder of cinders lighting the room. There was a smell, a sweet chemical sort of smell a little like when I was ten and tried to bake Mum a cake using a Tupperware container instead of a tin. Mum had to scrape the blue goop off the bottom of the oven with a butter knife while I stood behind her and watched because I felt too guilty to do anything else.