Page 29 of Where Do We Go From Here?
Something else is strange, too, and it takes her a moment to work out what.
The light in the cabin is peculiar, she realises. It’s both brighter than usual but also whiter – like when an incandescent bulb gets swapped out for an LED one. It must be a bright, grey day out there, she decides.
The cabin is deathly quiet, too. Of course, it’s always fairly quiet, but this morning the wood burner isn’t clicking or crackling, which would explain why the place is so cold. The refrigerator is unusually silent, too. This is the first time it has shut up since she moved in.
She sits up and glances again over at Jill, who murmurs butdoes not wake. She swings her feet to the floor and, still struggling to focus properly, stands.
Halfway down the staircase she understands that it has snowed overnight – hence the strange piercing light filling the room.
She crosses to the window. Outside, a thin layer of whiteness has covered everything. It’s pretty like a postcard but the brightness of the landscape hurts her eyes. ‘Wow!’ she murmurs, out loud.
‘Snow?’
She turns to see Jill, up on the mezzanine, peering out from the foot of the bed. ‘Crazy, huh?’ she replies. She crosses to the kitchen, located beneath the mezzanine, and fills and plugs in the kettle but when she switches it on, nothing happens. She tries a light switch but that’s the same. ‘There’s no electricity,’ she calls out.
‘I know! Don’t you remember?’ her friend replies through a yawn. ‘That’s why I came in with you. I was freezing.’
Wendy frowns and looks around the room, trying to understand how the one might lead to the other. ‘Oh, the blow heater, you mean?’ she says, when her eyes settle on it. ‘Did we use that?’
‘I plugged it in because I was cold,’ Jill calls out. ‘But then it stopped in the middle of the night. That’s why I climbed in with you. To avoid freezing to death.’
Wendy rolls her eyes and does not say,All you needed to do was throw a bloody log on the fire.
She crouches down and relights the fire, pulling kindling from the package she bought at the supermarket. ‘It must have blown a fuse or something,’ she mutters, thinking back to the owner’s comment about heating using too much electricity for the house. Perhaps this is exactly what she meant.
She hunts amongst the detritus of last night’s meal for herphone and finds it plugged in to a no-longer functioning wall socket. Thankfully it’s fully charged.
She sends a message to the owner.No electricity this morning. Where is fuse box please? Urgent.And then for want of a better option, she returns upstairs to bed while she waits for the place to warm up. She elbows Jill to move over, perhaps a little more vigorously than she needs to. But she isn’t particularly keen on sharing her bed, no matter how cold it is downstairs. Plus she’s fairly sure that Jill’s decision to plug in the heater instead of throwing a log on the fire is the reason she can’t now have a cup of tea. And boy, does she need a cup of tea.
But Jill doesn’t seem to notice her subtle violence. She merely snuffles and rolls away.
The owner replies an hour later that ‘a man is coming quickly’.
‘Let’s hope he doesn’t come too quickly,’ Jill jokes. ‘I hate it when they do that.’
By the time he arrives they have cleared up the mess, washed up (miraculously, there’s still hot water) and eaten an omelette, cooked (read: burned) on the stove top.
The man, Enzo, who’s too young to really to be called a ‘man’, has acne, a shaved head, and an unkempt straggly beard.
He fiddles in the electrical cupboard at the rear of the cabin for a while, plugging his laptop into a panel adorned with flashing lights, before returning to give them the good news. ‘It’s all OK,’ he says, in perfect, accent-free English. If anything he sounds American.
Wendy tries one of the light switches and when nothing happens she pulls a face. ‘Or maybenotOK,’ she deadpans.
The young man laughs. ‘It will be OK,’ he says. ‘Soon.’
‘OK…’ Wendy says, doubtfully. ‘When?’
‘When the batteryfills up.’
‘The battery?’
‘Yes, you must wait for the battery to fill. It’s empty. You have emptied it. Completely.’
Wendy glances at Jill in case she has understood something Wendy herself is missing, but Jill is simultaneously pouting, shrugging and shaking her head.
Enzo glances between them, then breaks into a broad grin. ‘You know it’s solar, here, right?’
‘Solar…’ Wendy repeats. ‘Oh, like solar panels, you mean?’
