Crocodile Farm

18.

  Lucy has told the truth, or some of it, in dribs and drabs. She has told him enough, she hopes, that he will come with her. After his initial incredulity, he did not demand to be let out, which she takes as a good sign. He sits in the back seat, looking at his injured hands, avoiding Sofia's anxious glances, his brow furrowed as though this is a puzzle he can unravel. Her instincts tell her that he will come round, he just needs time – and time is something that they have. It will take four days to drive to Crocodile Farm, and that isn't allowing for the overnight stops she knows Benji will need.

Her mind is quick, running through the possibilities, now that they have unexpectedly picked up the journalists. She thinks Dimitri is on board with her idea, that he will want to bring the truth of the quarantine facilities to national attention. She is beginning to feel that it was a stroke of luck, him and Sofia showing up like that, although, Sofia is not the journalist she would have chosen. She is too nervy, too volatile. Lucy is not sure whether to trust her. But she is the one who is here, and Dimitri, by his own admission, is no journalist. Still, Lucy is glad that she destroyed Sofia's phone.

The sun beats through the windscreen and the air turns stale; she winds down the windows to let in the breeze. It is shaping up to be another scorcher. She does not want to turn on the ancient air conditioning system: it will use too much fuel and the fewer stops, the better.

Her mind wanders as they relax into the drive. Elliott was right about dreams. It is the feeling which stays with you, not the events. On waking, dreams often seem bizarre: but while they are happening, the strangeness seems entirely in context.

After she first left Crocodile Farm, she would often dream of it. The setting held an eerie relevance for her; she would find herself wandering its deserted corridors, late at night, or administering treatments to patients – something routine, normal - and then she would turn to find someone standing behind her with a gun to her head. She woke up in a sweat. At the time she was pregnant with Benji; after he was born, the dreams ceased, until now. She is sure this pregnancy is a trigger, muscle memory kicking in, some kind of psyhco-somatic response. She just has to wait it out, survive the birth, and then she will go back to a dreamless existence.

She can not imagine embracing her dreams the way Elliott has; seeing in them an opportunity for narrative, for art. She wants nothing to do with that place. She wants to bury all her memories.

She was so full of hope, when she first came to Crocodile Farm. She had taken her selection as unequivocal proof that she was the top of her class. All the other students, the people with whom she had spent the last six years, each driven by their own motivating engine, idealism or money or brains or morality or parental pressure or whatever it was, suddenly faded when she looked out of the car door at the facility.

The outbuildings were set back from the dirt road; the white grass had been shorn and it felt like the loneliest place in the world.

"Danger: Quarantine Facility" said a white sign as the boom gates let them in.

"You taken many people here?" she asked the driver.

He nodded. He was Indian, first gen: he had an accent, wore a turban. "Yep, but I haven't seen anyone come out," he said. It was a joke, and she laughed.

They glided through the boom gates, into the compound. The buildings were silver, new: made of lightweight, insulated aluminium. It felt almost military in its security processes – there were men at the entry towers, who scanned her bag and made her walk through the metal detector – but then, that made sense. It was, after all, a quarantine facility, housing potential incubators of the most dangerous virus the world had seen in years.

Lucy thought the hysteria surrounding American Flu to be predictable and misplaced: there had thus far been no recorded instances on Australian soil, and we had managed to control or avoid other diseases, all of which had caused similar panic: Ebola, Bird flu, SARS, AIDS. She knew her history, had specialised in Infectious Diseases at university, did not think this would be any different. She knew what precautions to take, and how to keep herself safe. And she could not have refused the job if she had wanted to, she was driven by a fascination which went beyond concern for her personal safety.

After making it through security, she sat on a plastic chair in the air-con comfort of a vast room, a canteen, set up to hold hundreds of diners. There was an empty bain-marie up one end; she chose a chair up the other, near the window. As she waited for her supervisor to arrive, she looked out at the rows and rows of dry paddocks, the wind turbines spinning on the crest of the hill; listened to the hum of a generator nearby. It seemed pleasingly sterile, to be sitting in a comfortable room, protected from the raging heat of outside.

There was a boy there, too, a boy named Andre. She was still young enough to call men her own age 'boys'. He had slicked-back hair and was wearing a collar necklace, the kind that were fashionable then. She assumed that it was his first day too, that he was also waiting to meet his supervisor, to be shown around; although he didn't look like medical staff - cleaning staff, maybe? He smiled at her and introduced himself. "Smooth", the girls in her med class would have called him. Confident. She didn't immediately like him, per se, but there was something about him which drew her: something charismatic.

She returned the smile.

"Doctor Obolowe?" said a female voice behind her. A tall Indian woman, her hair pulled off her face into a severe bun, was walking towards her. She wore scrubs and sneakers which squeaked on the floor as she walked.

Lucy held out her hand, and the woman shook it, talking all the time.

"I'm Doctor Singh, welcome, welcome. Lovely to have you here. Sorry to have kept you waiting; I just had to go over a few things in the office. Let's get you some scrubs and show you your quarters." Doctor Singh turned from the handshake to address the boy, who had been watching this interaction the way a child watches a teacher write out a complicated equation on the whiteboard. Taking it in, as though he would have to recall it later.

"Thank you, Andre," Doctor Singh said. "That will be all."

And she took Lucy's arm and led her down the hall.

It was not until later that night, when Lucy was getting ready for bed in her narrow, private room, that she realised that Andre had not been waiting to meet anyone at all, but had been tasked with keeping an eye on her.