The news was on full blast in the morning.

‘Good, you’re up!’ yelled Lolly over the noise. Then she muted the TV. ‘Looks like we’re going to be stuck with each other even more now.’

Lolly was always funny like that, but Harper knew deep down that Lolly liked her being around.

‘How come?’ said Harper.

‘They’ve closed all the schools, pet. You’re not going back for the rest of term. We’re in proper lockdown now. Playgrounds, beaches—everything’s off limits. You can only have five people to your wedding and ten to your funeral, so it’s a good thing I don’t plan on getting married or dying just yet.’ Lolly laughed at her own joke but Harper struggled to join in. The thought of Lolly dying was anything but funny. And maybe once she wouldn’t have minded time off school, but this was Harper’s last year at Riverlark. It was meant to be the best year.

‘Well!’ Lolly clapped, getting up from the sofa and unmuting the news. ‘That leaves me plenty of time to educate you myself, starting with tea. I’d love a cup, thanks, love.’

Harper managed to smile. ‘I’ve been making you tea for weeks, Lolly.’

‘And you’re almost perfect. Keep practising. I’ll have mine down by the ute, I’ve got a few things to tinker with.’ Lolly left the back door wide open, and Annie and Murph followed her down the back stairs.

Harper kept the news on. In a way, she didn’t want to know anything more, but it was addictive too because if she missed something important, the consequences could be terrible. It didn’t feel like the old days when all the news was boring to her and didn’t seem to make any difference to her life.

This was serious enough to close all the schools in the state.

As the kettle boiled, she learnt that school would be online instead. That could be a problem. One of Lolly’s ‘crackpot ideas’, as Liz called them, was that she didn’t believe in wi-fi. As in, she believed it existed but she didn’t trust it. There was no wi-fi in the flat.

Harper knew Ro’s mobile number so she called him on the landline while Lolly was down with the ute. As she waited for him to pick up, she fed Hector tiny blobs of porridge from Lolly’s breakfast bowl. His tail wagged faster each time. She could picture Ro in his bedroom: he had two monitors on the desk, and when he wore his headphones with the mouthpiece and typed without watching his hands, he looked as if he worked in a control room.

Harper told him why online school was going to be impossible for her.

‘Let your Uncle Ro sort it,’ he said.

‘That’s super weird, but go ahead.’

‘First things first, you need a good device because you’re going to be on it all day. What about the computer at your old house?’

‘Nope, there’s a family from America renting it and the computer was part of the deal, so Mum asked the school to give me an iPad. Greg in IT set it up for me weeks ago but I’ve hardly touched it.’

‘It physically hurts me to think of you using a substandard piece of technology, but let’s move on: what about the internet?’

‘Lolly won’t have it. She doesn’t trust wi-fi.’

‘Why? What does she think it will do to her?’

Harper sighed. ‘She thinks it worms into your brain and turns it into scrambled eggs.’

Ro sounded like a cartoon character when he laughed.

‘Shush, Lolly’s lovely apart from that.’

‘Sorry, I get it. There are weird ideas in my family too. So why don’t you just tell your mum and dad and they can make Lolly get wi-fi?’

‘Definitely not. It seems like something that my mum and Lolly would have an argument about and I don’t want that.’

‘Fair enough. So you’re in an apartment block, right?’

‘Six flats.’

‘You could try to log onto someone else’s wi-fi.’

‘Won’t they have a password?’

‘Maybe, maybe not. You’d be surprised how many people leave their network’s front door wide open. The other day I—’

‘Ro, wait, don’t tell me about things you’ve hacked into again, I’ll just worry about it and feel guilty.’

‘Only you could feel guilty about something you’d never do!’ He laughed that cartoon laugh again.

After that Harper phoned Cleo.

‘Harps, Mum’s put a total ban on me going out the front door since the virus numbers went up this morning. I’m not allowed to see anyone. My nonna’s high-risk so it’s family only from now on. Both my sisters have come back home and their boyfriends and the baby too. My life is over, basically.’

It sounded so lively in the background. Harper wasn’t straight-up jealous of Cleo’s bigger, louder family, but she was definitely curious about what it would be like. Maybe less room and less quiet meant less worry.

‘I had a test,’ Cleo continued. ‘I’m pretty sure the thing touched my brain. But it’s already come back negative. Have you had one?’

‘Not yet.’

‘What about Lolly? Has she got any medical conditions?’

‘I don’t know. She’s really private. She says age is all in the mind. She’s always lifting heavy stuff even though she’s seventy. She squints to read the paper instead of wearing glasses and she has the TV up so loud that I can hear every word, even when I’m in the shower. But if I said anything she wouldn’t like it.’

‘Look in the bathroom cupboard for pills and stuff, you might find a clue. Hopefully this will be over soon and we can go back to normal. And there’s always the chat forum Ro’s setting up.’

‘But I haven’t even got the internet. Lolly doesn’t trust it.’

She heard Cleo sigh. ‘My gran thinks throwing salt over your shoulder brings good luck.’

‘That doesn’t sound so bad.’

‘You haven’t seen how much she throws.’

Harper searched the bathroom cupboard like Cleo said. The radio was on in that room as usual: more talk about the virus. There were a lot of creams and tablets in the cupboard but none of them looked serious. Serious would be something with a prescription label on it. The funniest thing she found was a jar of vapour rub that had an expiry date of 1985. Liz would have been about Harper’s age then. She took a sniff, and for some reason it made her feel happy, though she was definitely not going to use it.

She went into Lolly’s room, which was surprisingly messy. There was jazz on the radio, and it was fast and sounded a bit disorganised. Lolly’s clothes were piled up on the armchair; there were two old teacups on her dressing table and another one beside her unmade bed. Harper pressed a big lump under the sheet, which turned out to be one of the cats.

She opened the little cabinet that Lolly used as a bedside table. Inside there were hundreds of old letters, bills, bits of ribbon and string, pens, a toilet roll, and an open packet of wine gums. Harper took an orange one. She lifted up the papers and reached her hand in to see if there was anything at the back. She felt a box-shaped thing and carefully drew it out. It was cigarettes! There were only four left.

Her parents talked about smoking as if it was only a bit less bad than cold-blooded murder. She’d bet her life that they’d made Lolly promise to give up while Harper was staying here.

Harper pushed Lolly’s secret back where it belonged, and left the room to the bright, bold notes of a saxophone.

‘Nearly done, good girl,’ said Lolly. She was in the living room trimming Annie’s nails. It was funny to watch. Annie and Murph looked at the clippers intently while Lolly was doing it. Hector had been done first and had taken himself off somewhere to sulk, according to Lolly. She’d had to hold him under her arm like a football because he was nowhere near as cooperative as the bigger dogs.

Harper had watched from the kitchen, where she was making dinner. They shared the cooking and she’d become quite good. Or at least not bad. She was making salty-skinned baked potatoes and sour cream, with chives fresh from the balcony and corn on the cob smothered in butter. Lolly had a box of unpaired sweetcorn holders dug up from gardens she’d worked in. Harper imagined they’d rolled off people’s plates at barbecues and were trodden into the ground, never to be thought of again. Then they had a second life with Lolly.

The news was on, as usual. Politicians were arguing about what to do. Some kept saying that thousands of people would die if they didn’t do certain things, and others were saying that wasn’t true. It was like listening to Liz and Larry argue. They didn’t do it very often, but when they did it made Harper feel like she wasn’t as safe as she’d thought.

‘Here’s dinner. Hope it’s nice,’ said Harper, putting the plates on the table.

‘I could murder this, love. Just been listening to them talk about remote school, all the kids on computers for hours at a time. Lucky your school is posting all the work to you, that’s much better. Did you check the mailbox to see if it’s arrived yet?’

‘Yep, got it all, Lolly. Don’t worry, I always get on with my schoolwork.’

‘Oh I’m not worried, pet. I trust you. This is delicious, by the way. We’ll call your mum straight after.’ Lolly always said your mum, as if Liz belonged to Harper but not to her.

Ten minutes later there was a knock on the back door.

‘Who on earth’s that?’ Lolly seemed very put out as she got up, though she had finished her dinner.

Harper turned in her chair to see.

‘Charlotte, sorry to disturb,’ said a bald man in a green jumper and perfectly round glasses.

‘Angus.’ That was all Lolly said in reply. Not Don’t worry, Angus, we’d just finished eating, or anything like that to make the man feel welcome.

‘I wondered if I could be of any assistance to you,’ he went on, sounding nervous. ‘With this blasted lockdown. I could walk the dogs if you get stuck.’

‘Get stuck?’ said Lolly.

‘Well, this virus sounds pretty nasty.’

‘It does, so if you don’t mind I’ll shut the door now.’

Angus put his hand out to stop it. ‘Oh, is this your granddaughter? We’ve not been introduced.’

‘Yes, this is Harper. Goodbye, Angus!’ And Lolly closed the door.

Harper heard his footsteps retreating. She felt terrible for the man. ‘That was a bit weird, Lolly,’ she said.

‘I know. Always bothering me, silly old fool. He lives next door.’

Harper had meant that Lolly had been weirdly rude to him. ‘It was nice of him to offer to walk the dogs,’ she said in his defence.

‘Was it? No it wasn’t. What does he think I am? Old? I’m fitter then he is!’

Harper said no more. But she wondered if Angus had wi-fi.

For once the call got through first time. Lolly told Liz in a loud voice that Harper was as good as gold. Her phone voice was equal to someone yelling in a storm. She passed the phone to Harper and collected the plates from the table.

Liz said, ‘Harper, sweetheart, tell us everything you’ve been up to.’

The question made Harper’s brain feel like a black hole. And they had this annoying phone habit of passing the phone between them without telling her so that one minute she’d be talking to her mum and the next her dad would speak.

Somehow she came up with enough to satisfy them, and the rest of the time they talked about the children they’d saved. Then Harper felt bad for feeling so hard towards them. But these calls were so much pressure, not like the way things were meant to be with your mum and dad.

She went to bed early, curled up with Hector.