by Claire Zorn
‘I am!’
‘No, Max.’
Max threw the esky lid on the floor and stormed to his room, slamming the door theatrically. Lokey was pissing himself with laughter.
‘You are hilarious,’ he said. ‘As if it’s poisonous.’
‘I saw an anti-terrorism website once. It went through the dangers of radiation.’
‘Dude, who the hell looks at anti-terrorism websites? Anyway, someone would have told us. It was on the other side of the world.’
‘I’m telling you. I have to look after Max, otherwise I wouldn’t care.’
‘Hey, where’s Kara?’
‘You’re obsessed.’
‘Admit it, Fin, she’s totally hot.’
‘You’re mentally disturbed.’
‘Where is she?’
‘I don’t know. She and Dad didn’t come home last night. Maybe they stayed at Kara’s mum’s. Maybe there’s ice on the road. I don’t know.’
‘Shit.’
‘Yeah.’ We both stood there in the space left for some sort of meaningful exchange. We didn’t fill it.
‘Heard you had a little study date with Lucy Tenningworth yesterday.’
‘Yeah. I dunno if I’d call it a date . . . Was kind of interrupted by the whole nuclear disaster thing.’
‘She is way out of your league, man.’
‘Thanks for your vote of confidence.’
He grinned. ‘I mean, are you sure she’s not using you to get to me? I am pretty popular these days.’
‘Again, your belief in me is amazing.’
‘Well, dude, I’m going to go ride your lawn. Watch from the window, you don’t wanna get poisoned.’
I watched Lokey do about five runs down our steep front lawn, each time bailing at the last moment before he hit our house. Then he threw his board in the back of the car and gave me a wave, off to find bigger slopes. The car fish-tailed as he took off up the hill.
I bummed around for a bit, had four slices of bread with jam for breakfast, did some drawing and tried to ignore the worry that was sitting in my gut. Max didn’t come out of his room till after lunch. He pretended it was because he was really pissed off but I think he probably just fell asleep. We meandered through the afternoon, waiting, but not sure what for. It’s amazing how slowly time goes when you have no electricity. Several times I reached for the TV controller, forgetting we had no power. Kara had given Dad a plasma for his birthday. (She said she had bought him a plasma as if she used her own money.) It’s funny how without something as simple as electricity it was completely useless – just a gaping, blank stare of black. Without electricity our house was a box of useless bits of moulded plastic and wiring. I was tempted to listen to my iPod, but figured the power could be down for ages. I wanted to save the batteries.
I thought about Lucy.
By five it was dark and any heat in the house had leached out. I put on an extra jumper and two pairs of socks, found an old Dolphin torch in the garage and set it up on the dining table as a lamp. It turned out Kara’s scented candles were useful after all. I lit a few in the kitchen and lounge room and pretty soon the place smelt sickly sweet with vanilla. Max and I played cards and listened for the sound of a car in the driveway.
Around six-thirty I got us some dinner, leftovers that were in the fridge: chickpea curry, cold sausages, slices of cheese. At least the cold would stop it from going off.
‘This sucks,’ said Max as he picked up a sausage, dunked it in tomato sauce and bit the end.
‘I know.’
‘Where’s Dad, Fin?’ There was a waver in his voice.
I swallowed. ‘They’re probably staying at Kara’s mum’s.’
‘But you don’t know, do you?’
‘No, Max. I don’t know.’
‘What if he’s dead?’
‘He’s not dead, Max. Why would he be dead?’
‘Radiation poisoning.’
‘Too soon, takes a while for radiation to kill a person.’
Max’s eyes widened.
‘I’m kidding, Max. He won’t have radiation poisoning.’
‘But you said . . .’
‘Look, I know, but . . . Max, look at me.’
He turned his face to me. He has one of those faces that never really grows up. Big rosy cheeks and eyebrows that tilt up slightly in the centre, giving him an expression of permanent bemusement. At twelve he looked pretty much the same as he did when he was three and I reckon he won’t have changed much by the time he’s thirty.
‘Max,’ I said. ‘I need you to stay with me, man. Whatever happens. We can do it but we have to do it together.’
‘Do what?’ His lip quivered.
‘See this out. Can you do that for me, Maximum? Trust me. Okay?’
He nodded soberly. The torch threw a stark pool of white light onto the wall, like a spotlight. Max and I ate the rest of our dinner in silence.
Four
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 one. I dropped them each by my feet where they landed with a dull thud. I thought maybe the ones right at the bottom of the pile would be the driest and I was right. With heavy lugs of the axe I split them into smaller wedges. Then I carried all the wood, dry and damp, up to the porch. I took off my shoes, hoodie and tracksuit pants and took each damp piece of wood in, stacking them against the kitchen wall. It took an age. When I was done I gathered up the smaller dry pieces and took them into the living room.
Max had found a few old newspapers in the garage. We scrunched the sheets into balls and stuffed them into the fireplace. I made a little tepee over the top with the thinnest strips of wood, my substitute for kindling. Max lit a match and threw it in. The newspaper caught fire and the room lit up with the sudden glow. Max and I watched the fire intently as it devoured the newspaper and flames shot and rumbled up the chimney. The tongues of flame lapped and curled around the shards of wood. I waited until the fire built before carefully placing a larger log inside. We didn’t breathe, waiting to see if the wood would catch. Finally, just as the fire ran out of kindling and started to die away, the turpentine bark flared and a long thin flame quivered and reached up. Max and I exhaled. We rocked back onto our bums and hugged our knees, gazing at the flame.
The knock at the door startled us, like a teacher shouting from the front of the classroom when you didn’t know you were doing anything wrong. Max and I looked at each other. The knock sounded again. Dad wouldn’t knock. I got to my feet and went to the door, Max at my heels. I looked through the peephole: cops – one guy and one girl. Hot worry rushed thick and black through me. I swallowed and opened the door. The girl beamed at me.
‘Hi there, I’m Constable Lund, this is Senior Constable Palmer. We’re just doing a whip around the neighbourhood to see how everyone’s doing with the power out. Your mum or dad home?’
‘No.’
‘No?’
She was young with a kindergarten-teacher smile. The guy was putting on a serious ‘I’m a cop, you’re not’ face. He was older than her but not by much.
‘Our dad went out Wednesday night. Hasn’t come back. I reckon he must be stuck because of the ice.’
Practice was making it easier to say, almost. Constable Lund nodded.
‘There’s been road closures. We’ve got a lot of people stuck on the freeway, they’ve been taken to shelter until we can open the roads again. I’m guessing you haven’t had any phone contact with your dad? Most of the servers are down.’
‘No.’
‘Hmm.’ She took out a notebook. ‘What�
�s your dad’s name?’
‘Greg Heath.’
The guy turned away and said something into his radio. I heard Dad’s name.
‘Why is the power down? When will it be on again?’
‘Apparently it’s because of the amount of carbon in the air. We really don’t know when it will be back up. I’m sorry we can’t give you better news. Are there any adults in the house?’
‘Just me and my brother.’
‘How old are you?’
‘Eighteen,’ I lied.
Constable Lund looked concerned. It suited her. Her partner was clearly trying to come over all CSI. It wasn’t really working out for him. He finished talking on his radio and joined us again.
‘I’ve put a call out to try and get some info on the whereabouts of your dad,’ he said.
‘Okay.’
‘Is there a neighbour you can stay with, so you’re not on your own?’ Constable Lund asked.
‘We’re doing okay.’
‘Do you have enough food for the moment?’
‘Yeah, we’re pretty stocked up.’
‘Good. We’re advising people to stay inside as much as possible.’
‘Is the snow radioactive?’
She glanced at CSI. ‘We really don’t know yet. We don’t have that equipment; the defence force is taking care of those investigations. Just try to stay inside, okay? Do you have bottled water?’
‘Some.’
‘Good. Probably best to stick to drinking that for now. Maybe ration it and only drink what you need to. We’ll pop back in if we get any news on your dad. Try not to worry. Either way, we’ll be back in a few days to check up on how you’re doing.’
‘Okay, thanks.’
‘Take care.’ Constable Lund smiled and her partner gave me a curt nod. They trudged up the driveway and I closed the wooden door, resenting the warm air that had escaped.
Five
I continued to send failing text messages to Mum, Dad and Lokey. And Lucy. I couldn’t help but wonder what would have happened with us that afternoon if it hadn’t been for the missiles. Having so much time on my hands only intensified my endless conjecture about the whole thing. So I decided to go see her. Don’t get me wrong, my purpose wasn’t to go to her house and jump her, I just wanted to see how she was doing. Maybe it was because she was the only person I cared about who I could go and physically find, Lokey lived too far away to walk.
