FRIDAY, 12.32 P.M.
Mike walked quickly out of the room. Down the corridor, past the lockers … he pulled his locker door open, grabbed his bag and the jumper he kept there in case he needed it and headed after the others. The hills shimmered in the distance, framed at the end of the corridor by the blue shadows hovering above the hot brown paddocks.
Past the Year Nine Maths class, the faces peering at him curiously, down the stairs, over the hot bitumen to the hall …
The door was open. Mike went inside.
It was a large hall, built when the school had had twice the number of students it had now. There was a stage at one end, with long black curtains pulled aside, and a piano just below it. On either side of the stage were toilets, male and female, then a long expanse of scratched brown floor till the stacked chairs at the end. Under the high windows the walls were pockmarked with years of posters and art competitions, each leaving a Blu-Tac stain or bit of yellowed tape to show where they’d been.
The class had spread around the hall. People were standing in twos or threes, or even alone. Mike wondered how many of them had realised that the person standing next to them might be infected, that if they stood too close, their best friend might infect them, too.
Jazz had dumped her bag on the stage. She came up to Mike. ‘I’m going to ring Mum,’ she said.
‘But won’t that just worry her? I mean, Mr Simpson might be sick with something else.’ He tried to think how his mother would react if she thought he might have been exposed to some virus, and shuddered. She’d insist on coming down and taking his temperature or something embarrassing … ‘How can you ring her, anyway?’
Jazz held up a mobile phone. ‘Mum’s a doctor,’ she said briefly.
‘I didn’t know,’ said Mike.
Jazz shook her head. ‘Mum said not to tell anyone. She wanted to take a year off. She’s not registered to practice in Australia, but she thought, since there’s no doctor in town, people might expect her to anyway. It just seemed simpler not to say anything.’
Mike nodded slowly. The regional Health Service had been advertising for a doctor for more than a year, and the Council was trying too. But no one seemed interested in coming way out to Elbow Creek. The nearest doctor was at the hospital at Gunyabah, and when he went on holiday or got sick there was no one at all.
‘Your mum’s Jamaican, isn’t she?’ he asked hesitantly.
‘Ugandan,’ said Jazz, swinging her dark hair behind her. ‘Mum and her family escaped from Idi Amin.’
Who was Idi Amin? wondered Mike. The name was sort of familiar. He wanted to ask what it was like in England if you had brown skin, but he couldn’t think of a way to do it.
‘Better duck into the girls toilets to make the call,’ he suggested instead. ‘Then they won’t all be listening or want to use the phone too.’
‘They can borrow it if they like,’ said Jazz. ‘I don’t mind.’ Then she shook her head. ‘Actually, I’d better save the batteries. We might need it later.’ She slipped the phone back into her pocket and headed towards the toilets.
Mike wandered over to the chairs. His feet echoed in the empty hall, clung, clung, clung. He grabbed a chair and set it upright, then dumped his bag on it as Budgie walked over to him.
‘Did the ambulance come?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ said Mike. ‘It hadn’t when I left.’
‘Loser couldn’t have done that to Mr Simpson, could he? Not really.’
‘I don’t know,’ said Mike slowly.
‘Nah. It’s impossible,’ said Budgie, a bit too firmly. ‘Guess what?’
‘What?’
‘Caitlin’s writing her will.’
‘Her will? What’s she got to leave in a will?’
Budgie snorted. ‘Her Barbie doll collection maybe. I dunno. It could just be a goodbye letter or something.’
Mike glanced over at Caitlin. She was sitting hunched on the floor, her back to the wall, with what looked like her English notebook on her knee. She wrote furiously for a moment, paused, frowned, chewed her pen, then made a face and went back to her writing.
‘There’s probably nothing at all to worry about,’ said Mike uncertainly. ‘He just got sick with something else …’
‘Sure,’ agreed Budgie. ‘I wonder how long they’ll keep us here for?’
Mike tried to think. ‘Well, if it was the stuff in the test tube that affected Mr Simpson, it worked pretty fast. So if any of us are going to get sick it probably won’t take long. But it’s all impossible!’
It had to be impossible, he thought. Death didn’t just seize you from an empty sky. Biological warfare and mass murder had no place in real life. It was just pretend. There was no way it could be real.
Budgie let out a long breath. He looked at his watch. ‘It’ll be lunchtime soon,’ he said. ‘I hope they remember to get us something to eat.’
‘I’ve got sandwiches and stuff in my bag,’ offered Mike. ‘You can share if you like.’
Budgie shook his head. ‘I want a hot dog and a packet of Cheezels,’ he said. ‘But thanks anyway.’
‘That’s okay. Come on, let’s grab some chairs. We may as well try to get comfy.’