The girl breezed back into the house as if nothing had happened.
‘So, we’re agreed,’ she said, peering through Beeper’s bedroom doorway. ‘I’ll be sleeping in this room. No mattress on the bed, but I’m used to that.’
George didn’t reply. He went to the kitchen, opened the cupboard, and carried the eight remaining tins of food to his room. He returned for the biscuits, the noodles and four of the clearest jars of water.
‘Come on Beeper,’ he said. He grabbed two plates, some cutlery, the can-opener and the white mugs. The boys sat on their mattresses in silence as the afternoon wore on. Both were listening for the sound of a car, the click of the lock on the front door. Dad’s familiar footsteps in the hallway.
There was nothing.
Eventually, George selected a tin of Spaghetti in Tomato Sauce. He served it out into bowls and they ate it cold, straight off their knees, with dry noodles. They did so without exchanging a word. Then George rationed out three biscuits each.
Later, Beeper flicked through his favourite book, a copy of The Selfish Giant with a battered green cloth cover. Beeper couldn’t read all of it on his own, but he knew whole paragraphs off by heart. He loved the descriptions of the soft, green grass, the flowers like stars, the peach trees that in autumn bore rich fruit. He loved the full-page drawings that showed trees in blossom, covered with birds.
George drifted in and out of an unhappy sleep. He stared at the late-afternoon light slinking through the barred window. He heard the girl move up the hallway. There was a clunk as the door to Beeper’s room closed.
George rubbed his eyes and climbed to his feet. ‘Wait here, Beeps.’ He tiptoed into the day room and checked both locks on the back door. He sneaked up the hallway. The floorboards twisted and squeaked under his footsteps, but the door to Beeper’s room stayed shut.
George heard a muffled sound as he neared the front door. It sounded like the girl was crying. But when he stopped to listen, the sound stopped too.
George double-checked the front door was properly locked, then pulled out the security bar and slammed it back into its brackets. He clumped back to his room and flicked the light switch. Nothing happened. The power was out.
At least the house was locked properly. Even if she was inside, not out.
‘Hurry up, Beeper, let’s check for nasties before it’s completely dark.’
George tried to push the wardrobe across his bedroom door to block it. It was too heavy to move, even with Beeper’s help. He pulled out a loose shelf from the wardrobe and leaned that against the door instead. If she came into the bedroom to take their food, the shelf would fall and wake them.
‘Is Mum really out there somewhere?’ Beeper asked as they lay side by side in the darkness. ‘Living without us?’
‘No, Beeps. What the girl said about Mum was nonsense. She’s just trying to upset us.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. But Dad said lots of people disappeared in that big storm. That’s the sad truth. We had a memorial service.’
George listened for the sound of the girl crying again. All he heard was groans from the bedroom ceiling. Then Mr Carey’s piano.
‘Mum used to cry and yell at me,’ said Beeper. ‘Maybe she wanted to live somewhere else.’
‘No, no, no. She was just upset because … I don’t know … because things kept getting worse and worse.’ George wasn’t sure this was a conversation he should be having with a six-year-old. But Beeper had that tone in his voice. He wasn’t going to let it go.
‘Sometimes,’ George continued, ‘she couldn’t get out of bed for days. But Dad says she was the best mother …’
‘Where do they disappear to, Torgie? In a storm, I mean.’
‘They say in the really big ones, people … look, it doesn’t matter. Mum didn’t run away, she just walked out into … I mean, she didn’t leave us so she could make things easier for herself. She didn’t.’
George’s mind drifted away. He had lied about having a better way to find Dad. He didn’t have anything. He was a failure.
‘And some people come back, don’t they?’
‘Sorry?’
‘Some people come back, Torgie, don’t they? Because they go to the hospital and the hospital makes them better.’
‘Yes, Beep. Some people come back, they really do. Mum can’t, but Dad can. Dad will.’
It wasn’t long before Beeper was breathing his heavy fast-asleep breaths. George lay listening for a long time. There was no more noise from the front room, or from the ceiling. No wind, cars or sirens. Just the slow and gloomy chords of Mr Carey’s piano.
George hated that tune. His mother used to say it sounded like death. George rolled on to one side, then the other. Wiped the sweat off his neck. He couldn’t sleep. He tried to think of good things. The old days. When it wasn’t as hot. When the house had carpet, when the blasters weren’t as bad, or as frequent. When Mum and Dad were sure they were over the worst of the second big drought. When Mr and Mrs Carey held street parties to raise money for the farmers whose crops had failed, and to buy fruit for the neighbourhood children.
George thought of the night Mr Carey dressed up as a clown and walked around with a brass horn with a rubber bulb at the end. Every time he squeezed it, George’s baby brother Edward laughed. That night, he said his first word other than ‘Mumma’ and ‘Dadda’.
‘Beep!’ he said, and he followed it with ‘Beep! Beep! Beep!’
George wasn’t sure when people turned mean and hard. But they did. They stopped helping each other. They made their houses into fortresses. Even Dad bolted steel bars across the windows, and put barbed wire and metal bracing on the fence around the back yard.
There were no more street parties. Mr Carey had been a builder and he made his own house the strongest of all. The windows were double-thickness glass. The doors were steel.
When Mrs Carey died from the muck in the air — they called it ‘dust pneumonia’ — George’s mother tried to console Mr Carey. He sent her away. ‘What did we do to deserve a world like this?’ he said. And he slammed the front door.
From then on, Mr Carey locked himself inside, playing out his misery on the piano. He occasionally checked around the outside of his house, making sure it was secure, but he didn’t say a word, or make eye contact, or even return a ‘hello’. His only visitor was a man in an old van, who delivered two large cardboard boxes every few weeks.
The children made fun of Mr Carey, dared each other to throw rocks at his scary house. But one by one, the children left for other places, or became sick, or retreated inside their family fortresses. John, Josh, Ben … Hugo and Jacinta and Christopher across the road … every friend vanished suddenly or slowly. Mr Carey outlasted them all except George and Beeper.
George put his hand out to check that the shelf from the wardrobe was still propped against the door. He used his sleeve to wipe grime and sweat from his forehead. He wondered what anyone had done to deserve a world like this.
Most of all, he just wished Dad would come home.