Lockdown – Day Twelve

Hi Readers. Hope your own version of lockdown is managing to keep you entertained and indeed employed. Hope this tale is helping with the first part of that statement too!

Here we go once more…day twelve…enjoy…

[image error]Photo by Gratisography on Pexels.com

DAY TWELVE

Sarah

I slept much better at Cliff’s house than here. Maybe it’s the deserted nature of this place or the feeling that we can’t stay here that is having a knock-on effect. I slept alone tonight. I assume Rebecca slept on the sofa, if she slept at all. She looks drawn this morning, like she has been crying quite a lot. I can empathise with her a bit, except for her it could be worse because she doesn’t know what has happened, at least I have the closure of knowing everyone in my family is dead.

“Would you like some fruit?” I ask, offering her an apple from yesterday.

She shakes her head and gives me a wry smile, “No thanks.”

I sit next to her and put my arm around her small shoulders. We sit in silence like that for a while. If I’ve learnt anything in recent months it is that the world used to be full of far too much noise and now is full of a lot of silence, but sometimes that is exactly what you need.

John

I decide not to intrude when I see Rebecca and Sarah together. Instead I figure I might as well prepare us to leave. In truth there isn’t much here for us to take. A few bits of dried or canned food that are left is about everything in addition to what we brought with us. I imagine Rebecca might like to take some sort of memento, maybe a photo, to help her remember but I don’t think now is the time to be talking about that kind of thing.

I search everywhere I can think of for keys to unlock the garage, through drawers, cupboards and hooks on the walls but keep drawing blanks each time. I decide I have to ask as it seems so important.

“Rebecca? Sorry to interrupt but I wondered if you know where your parents might have left a key for the garage?”

She looks at me like she resents my interruption and answers without really sounding like she is of this place, “Try my Dad’s coat pocket.”

“Thanks.”

Funny how you get to know the foibles of others. In a khaki parka hanging by the front door, there they are.

I try to temper my enthusiasm in the hope of finding a car in here. It feels like too much to hope for. When I open the door and lift it up my heart soars because there it is! A red Holden ute. A big smile creeps over my face. A break at last! The smell of oil and grease greets my nose, I’ve always liked the smell of garages.

“Yes!” I shout, rather loudly, now hoping for a full tank of petrol.

I then notice that something isn’t quite right. It’s partly the smell, and partly the sight. A hosepipe is going into one of the car windows and in amongst the shadows it is now clear that there are two bodies in the car. I stare at the scene for a while, I don’t know what to do.

“No!” Rebecca shouts from behind me.

I turn round and try to block her from seeing anything but it’s too late. She pushes past me to look into the car. I notice the wheelchair is in here. It would be hard to identify them but there seems little doubt that this must be her parents. They are holding hands. United in a death that seemed preferable to whatever life might have befallen. The virus claimed victims even without its own parasitic success.

“I’m sorry,” I offer, “I didn’t realise they were there.”

She doesn’t reply. She is pressed up to the window.

Sarah

How do you comfort someone in this situation? Nobody has ever told me. I have no real experience of such a thing. I don’t know what to say. John clearly feels that absence is the best policy as he has notably not been here since he found them. I don’t know where he is. I watched Rebecca for maybe half an hour before she announced that she wanted to bury them.

“Can I help?” I ask.

“Please,” is all she replies, grabbing shovels from hooks on the wall, passing one to me.

The ground is fairly tough to dig but we find somewhere close to a small stream that runs through the patch of land that seems softer. We make good progress but it still takes hours to get a hole that we consider to be deep enough, just a few feet, but wide enough for them both.

Dragging the bodies from the car is a harrowing experience. Rebecca has a grim determination which must be born of her job; her mind must be telling her it is just a body she has to deal with like any other. We end up dragging them on a tarpaulin, which also doubles as a way of wrapping them respectfully. She positions them so they are holding hands once more in the hole. She cries again as she does this.

I’m surprised when Rebecca declares that she would like to put up a cross to mark the grave. I didn’t think doctors tended to believe in God. We find some wood and nail a crude cross together to stand in the filled-in ground. She writes ‘Bill & Jennifer Potter’ in black marker pen on the wood. It won’t last forever but it’ll do.

“Would you mind leaving me here for a while?” she asks me once we’ve done.

I place my hand on her shoulder and say, “Sure.”

I take the shovels with me and place them back in the garage. John is in here. He has apparently been cleaning the inside of the car. It smells strongly of pine disinfectant mixed with an undertone of death in here. He smiles a half smile at me when I come in.

“There’s petrol!” he announces. “Half a tank. I guess they somehow switched the engine off once enough carbon monoxide was present.”

He seems to realise that what he has just said is insensitive beyond belief.

“I might only be young but you’re pretty sick, you know?”

He looks guilty and suitably admonished.

“Thank goodness Rebecca isn’t here with me, I don’t know how she’d react. Can we maybe go indoors and think about this tomorrow?”

He climbs out of the vehicle and says, “Sure. Sorry. I didn’t know what to do.”

“You could’ve just been there and helped.”

For a man of words he didn’t find any.