When morning came the sky was like a shadow. It had snowed again, more this time, the same colour as the sky. There were cars missing from driveways, cars that hadn’t returned from the night before. That made me feel a bit better, it meant the roads must have been closed. Dad wasn’t the only one who hadn’t come home. I imagined him in a community hall somewhere drinking weak tea and eating Milk Arrowroot biscuits.
Max was quiet and didn’t ask about going outside. We spent most of the day playing cards or Trivial Pursuit. I told him to pretend we were camping. We had tomato and cheese sandwiches for lunch. We even ate Kara’s tahini and hummus. When evening came around again I lit some candles and put the torch on. We ate more sandwiches for dinner. (I wanted to use the perishable food first.) After dinner Max read comics and I worked on my drawings. I drew Starvos at the store, counting the money in the till with a cigarette behind his ear.
Days passed. Still, long days. Time bled into itself. Snow started falling during the day as well as at night. I didn’t see any cars drive past. We didn’t have any dry firewood because we’d hardly used the fire that winter, it had been too mild. Now the cold settled into the house, filling it out. We started to wear more layers of clothing and the cold was made worse because there was nothing much to do, nothing to keep us warm. The boredom and waiting hung over us and made us snap at each other. Most of the time we were quiet, though. There was nothing to say. We ate to punctuate the time. The living-room window with its view of the street became our television. Occasionally a neighbour would walk past. I saw Mr and Mrs White from two doors up walking their labradors.
My mind whirred with useless imagined scenarios: Dad decomposing on the side of the highway having crashed his car; Lokey slowly dying of radiation poisoning; Lucy starving to death because I didn’t encourage her to buy more food; My mother… who knew what had happened to her. I couldn’t even form a picture of her to worry about. How were we supposed to know if ‘things changed’ and she was coming for us? How long were we supposed to wait? And how was she planning on getting here with the roads iced over? Was she going to borrow an army truck? Fly a chopper? The only way I could quieten the endless worry was to draw. I drew Dad in the car. I drew my mother in a chopper. I drew Lucy.
One afternoon, about four days in, Mrs White came to our front door. It was pathetically exciting to have a visitor. Max was asleep on the couch and I half wanted to wake him up so he wouldn’t miss out. When I opened the door Mrs White’s dogs whined and strained on their leashes, pawing my legs and nosing my feet.
‘Oh boys! Stop it! Heel!’ she said in a voice that was less than authoritative. They panted and looked up at me with big lolling grins.
‘Hello Fin. Is your dad here?’ Mrs White asked, craning to look past me into the house. She had a kind of plump homeliness about her that made me think of freshly baked Anzac biscuits. You could practically smell the golden syrup.
‘No. He’s not.’
‘No?! Where is he?’
‘Um, I don’t really know. I haven’t seen him since Wednesday.’ I almost choked up when I said that.
‘Wednesday! My goodness! You should have come around, Fin. I had no idea. I thought I saw him come home from work on Wednesday night?’
‘Yeah, he and, um, Kara went out again that night. They didn’t come back, probably because of the roads. I hoped they would be back by now but I guess it’s just got colder – more icy.’
‘Oh my goodness, Fin. You poor love. You know he’s probably perfectly safe, they’ve got no way of clearing the roads, I suppose. It’s not like we’re used to dealing with snow down here!’ She laughed but her eyes darted around nervously. ‘I was just calling in to see if you’d had any luck with the internet, if you’d managed to get any news. It’s like we’ve fallen into a black hole.’ She laughed again and shook her head. One of the dogs yawned and put its head on her foot. ‘It’s just awful, isn’t it? But I suppose they’ll sort it out soon enough, get the electricity back up. I just want to know how long this cold’s going to stick around. You know we’ve got our daughter’s wedding next month, we thought it’d be a lovely spring wedding.’ She motioned out to the street. ‘But instead we’ve got the next ice age!’
‘Yeah, sorry, no luck with the net.’
‘Oh dear. Have you got enough food, love? We’re always well stocked up, you let me know if you need anything.’
I nodded. ‘We’ve got a fair bit. Mum was really worried about shortages.’
‘Okay. You know where we are. Try not to worry about your dad.’
I said goodbye to Mrs White and watched her dogs pull her up the driveway. I took off my socks. I put them out on the porch beside the tracksuit pants I had worn the other day and closed the door.
Our house started to show symptoms of neglect – the grotty kind that comes from having only male occupants under the age of twenty. The kitchen had become a festering dump and precarious towers of dishes had grown over the bench tops. There might have been a time when you could joke about it being a toxic-waste hazard, but now comments like that didn’t seem funny.
This is embarrassing and I really don’t want to admit it, but neither of us had washed since the power went off. The thought of stripping off and washing in freezing and possibly radioactive water wasn’t exactly enticing. But it wasn’t until after I had been exposed to the fresh air when I was talking to Mrs White that I noticed the putrid, stale smell mulling in our house; one part body odour, two parts Rexona and one part vanilla-scented candles. I’m also ashamed to say that I didn’t really notice the neglected state of the kitchen either until we ran out of clean plates. I couldn’t remember the last time I had done washing-up. Before we got a dishwasher Max and I used to whine about having to do the washing-up and beg for a dishwasher. Mum would say that if we had a dishwasher we’d just whine about unpacking it and we were like ‘No way!’ But she was right, we did. Spoilt brats.
I cleared everything out of the sink – piling dishes on the floor when I ran out of bench space – and located the plug underneath a damp dishcloth that smelled like a rotting carcass. I opened one of the bottles of water and sloshed the bare minimum into the sink. It would be the dodgiest washing-up job of all time, but I didn’t want to waste water that could be drunk. I woke Max to help wipe up, something which would normally cause a fair amount of pre-teen wrath, but this time didn’t get much response. He silently trudged into the kitchen and began wiping the dishes. His fingers were bone white. Max doesn’t have the kind of surface area to volume ratio that lends itself to heat retention. (Thank you biology class.) He never did. When we used to go to swimming lessons he would last a maximum of twenty minutes in the water before the instructors started to worry about public liability and let him get out.
He told me quietly that he was really cold.
‘How many layers you got on?’ I asked him.
‘Five. Can hardly move.’
‘I’m sorry, dude… It’ll be over soon.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘No. I don’t… but…’
He put down the tea towel and looked up at me. ‘What’s going to happen, Fin?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s really cold. We have to light the fire.’
‘We don’t have any dry wood.’
‘We have to find some. Have to try and dry it out. Fin, I’m really cold.’
Where the hell was I going to find dry firewood? The furniture? After we’d done the washing-up I told Max to stay inside and find some newspaper. I went out the front door, put the tracksuit pants and hoodie on over my clothes and nudged my feet into my sneakers without touching them.
Dad kept the firewood stacked down the side of the house, against the wall, under the eaves. He used to keep it covered with a heavy tarp, but we hadn’t been near the pile that winter. I had actually noticed the tarp lying on the ground once when I was putting the bins out and hadn’t even bothered to put it back on. Surely someone, somewhere, was getting a laugh out of that.
The logs were piled to about waist height. Wedges of turpentine: the kind of thick stringy bark that flints away and gets wedged under your fingernails. I brushed the ice off them and lifted the logs from the pile one by
