We sit, parked on the street, among the grid of what used to be suburbia: telegraph poles, letterboxes, Colorbond fences. But no lawns, just patches of brown grass among the snow. And no barking dogs. We eat dry Nutri-Grain, passing the box around like a packet of chips. Twice we see a figure emerge from a house about two hundred metres down the street. It looks like a woman. She stands on the driveway and looks in our direction, then goes back inside the house.
Max opens a packet of Fantales and passes them around. Lucy gets Nicole Kidman and I get Harrison Ford. Max gets Paul Newman, whom no one but Lucy has heard of. Noll doesn’t have a Fantale because he says he doesn’t like lollies, which is the weirdest thing I’ve ever heard.
The woman comes out onto the street for the third time and walks toward us. I don’t think anyone else has noticed. I start the car and begin to pull away from the kerb.
‘What are you doing?’ asks Noll.
‘Up front.’
‘Oh.’
The woman breaks into a run and yells out. As I pass her she rushes to the side of the car and thumps on the window. Her cheeks are concave, sunken, and again I can’t tell how old she is. Her eyes meet mine as we drive past. I see her in the rear-view mirror, standing there behind us. I stop the car and wind down the window. Nobody objects. In the mirror I see her jogging toward our car.
‘Thank you! Thank you!’ When she gets to my window she is breathless. ‘Do you… Do you have any food?’
‘Yes,’ answers Lucy.
The woman peers in at us, hugging herself in the cold. Her fingernails are all bitten, almost torn from her skin. Like she has started to eat herself.
Lucy gets out of the car, goes around and opens the boot. She gives the woman a box of cereal. The woman hugs it to her chest and watches as Lucy gets back in the car.
‘Are you going to try and get through the barrier into the city?’ she asks.
‘My mum is there,’ I tell her.
‘There must be a gap somewhere. My neighbours went and they must have got through because they didn’t come back.’
I think of the cars smashed up against the barricade.
‘We’re going to find a way through,’ Lucy says.
‘Well, take care,’ says the woman.
Noll passes me the bag of caramels from the backseat and I hold them out the window to her. ‘Go on. We’ve got enough.’
She hesitates then reaches out and accepts the packet. She rolls the top of it down tightly, sealing in the precious contents.
We pull away.
She is like a mum waving her kids off to school.
Thirty
In the light of day we can see that on the far left of the barrier that blocks the highway, there is a gate, just wide enough for a car. Two soldiers pace along the barricade. They each hold assault rifles and as we drive toward them they slow their pacing and watch. One of them stops as I roll down the window. His face is expressionless.
‘You can read the sign. Documents.’
‘Three bottles of whisky. One box of food.’
He looks at me with that same empty expression and I wonder what the penalty is for attempting to bribe military personnel.
‘Any smokes?’ he asks eventually.
I shake my head.
‘Two boxes.’
‘One.’
‘No deal.’
I call his bluff, start to wind up the window.
‘Wait.’ He looks through at Max, who smiles widely and displays a bottle of whisky like he’s a game-show assistant.
‘Show me the food.’
‘Put your gun down.’
He sighs, sets the rifle down at his feet. Next to me, Lucy opens the lid of the box that sits on her lap. We have put together a nice little hamper of canned soup, breakfast cereal, potato chips, rice, dried apricots, cheddar cheese, and toilet paper.
‘There’s no chocolate,’ says the soldier.
‘Jeez,’ says Lucy.
‘You wanna get through or what?’
‘Fine. Noll?’
Noll leans over the backseat and rummages through the boxes of food in the boot. He pulls out a Kit Kat and hands it to Lucy.
‘Alright, drive up to the gate. Pass the stuff out and I’ll open her up.’
‘You let us through, then we give you the food.’
He looks less than keen on the idea.
‘Come on, if we try and drive off you can just pepper the shit out of us, get the food anyway.’ I hope I haven’t just given him an idea.
‘Drive up to the gate.’
I follow his instructions. He opens the gate and as we are driving through I hear shouting behind us. In the rear-view mirror I see several people on bicycles riding toward the barricade. The other soldier has his rifle pointed at them and is shouting at them to stop. They keep pedalling toward the gate. I accelerate through, two of them right behind the car. The soldier shouts again. The sound of gunfire, like firecrackers, punches the air. I see both riders fall. Lucy screams and covers her eyes. Noll has his hand over Max’s eyes.
I stop the car as the first soldier closes the gate behind us. He comes up to my window.
‘Hand it over then,’ he says, as if nothing has happened. Lucy hands me the box and I pass it through the window to him, my hands shaking. Noll passes through the three bottles of whisky. I give them to the soldier.
‘Hope you got more of them,’ he says. ‘They’re doing random checks for documents on this side. You wanna hope they’re thirsty.’ He walks away from the car.
There are more people on the streets here than on the other side. They congregate on corners but don’t give us more than a glance. They mustn’t be as hungry. The streets are icy but drivable, walkable. My mother’s apartment is in Annandale, a suburb close to the centre of the city. I weave the car around blocks of houses and apartment buildings.
It is incredible how much things have degenerated after three months without proper infrastructure. The most noticeable thing is the rubbish, piled on the footpaths outside apartment buildings: discarded drink bottles and plastic food packaging spilling onto the street. The most elite inner-city suburbs have become swamps of rubbish, abandoned cars and mounds of grey slush. I count four half-starved dogs wandering the streets and three more lying dead on the side of the road – family pets turned away from homes where food is too scarce to feed them. I also start to notice bright yellow posters taped to the telegraph poles and glued to the side of buildings. I slow the car to look closer at one. It reads:
If you notice people sheltering in unusual places, like bus shelters, warehouses or in vehicles, you
