Chapter 7 #2
By the time the spaghetti is on the boil, they’re halfway through their second glass, because when the first drink tastes that good, how could anyone ever resist another?
‘You won’t get it to work,’ Wendy tells Jill, who is trying to connect her phone to the Bluetooth speaker. ‘I tried for almost an hour the other day. It just beeps like that and nothing happens.’
‘Yeah, I think you might be right,’ Jill concedes. ‘I think it’s officially buggered.’ But no sooner has she said this than ‘Fastlove’ starts booming from the little speaker.
‘Excellent,’ Jill says, clapping her hands and starting to swing her hips. ‘Wow, it’s louder than I thought for such a little thing. You see, that’s why you’ve been feeling depressed. Not enough George Michael, hon.’
‘I’m not feeling depressed,’ Wendy calls back, having to speak loudly because of the music.
But as she says it she wonders if her friend might not be right.
Because two gin and tonics and George Michael sure feels like a recipe for happiness right now.
In fact, the only thing missing is… ‘Cigarette break?’ she asks.
‘We’ve got time, while the spaghetti cooks. ’
‘Perfect,’ Jill says, already grooving towards the front door.
They step outside and close the door on George Michael. The night is cold and damp after the rain and, other than a window which vibrates occasionally in time with the bass line of the music, utterly silent.
‘Christ, it’s freezing,’ Jill says.
‘I know, it’s a shocker, isn’t it?’ Wendy agrees as she lights up two cigarettes and hands one to Jill. ‘We’ve had frost a few times – like a proper hard, everything-white frost. I wasn’t expecting that at all in the south of France, but it does make everything pretty.’
‘Yes, I’m sure,’ Jill says.
‘So what do you think?’ Wendy asks. Jill, most uncharacteristically, hasn’t passed comment since they arrived.
Jill studies the view and then turns to Wendy wide-eyed. ‘I…’ she says. She takes a drag on her cigarette and pulls a face. ‘I think I might be speechless.’
‘That bad, huh?’
Jill shrugs and grins. ‘I’d go batshit crazy up here, hon. I mean, it’s lovely. I can see that the nature and everything is… appealing and what-have-you. But I’m at a loss, really, as to why you’re here. I think it’s all a bit nuts, to be honest.’
‘I know,’ Wendy agrees. ‘Sometimes I don’t get it either. And I’m the one who chose the place.’
‘Aren’t you… I don’t know… scared?’ Jill asks, looking around. ‘I think I would be.’
‘Scared?’
‘Yes. Out here in the middle of nowhere. I’d be terrified up here on my own!’
‘Of what, though? Lions, tigers? There aren’t that many of those in France. Though I suppose there may be the odd wolf.’
‘I was thinking more in terms of slipping and breaking a hip and not being able to get to a hospital, actually. Or French rapists, tapping on your windows in the night.’
Wendy laughs. ‘You know I haven’t seen a single man since I arrived.
The post is delivered by a woman. The baker is a woman.
Even the owner of this place is a woman.
Actually, that reminds me. A guy was supposed to come and pick the letters up – the owner’s friend – but he never came.
I was quite looking forward to it, actually.
I was hoping he might be sexy. The rapist aspect didn’t cross my mind. ’
‘Too cold,’ Jill says, an audible quiver to her voice. She stubs her cigarette out on a rock. ‘I’m going back indoors.’
‘Me, too. It’s freezing.’
Back indoors, George has moved on to ‘Freedom! ’90’.
Jill moves to stand in front of the stove and, when she knows the words, sings along, while Wendy returns to the kitchen area. It’s then Wendy notices that the letters she’d left on the counter are gone. ‘God, he’s been in,’ she says. ‘Someone’s been in here without me knowing.’
‘What do you mean, someone’s been in?!’ Jill asks.
‘The post,’ Wendy explains. ‘There were three letters here for the owner. The friend must have been in while I was out one day. I’m not sure how I feel about that.’
‘Perhaps he came while you were sleeping.’
‘Well, if he did, I can’t say I noticed,’ Wendy laughs. ‘But I am a very heavy sleeper.’
When she wakes up the next morning, everything seems off-kilter.
She has a headache and a foot is digging into her thigh – those are the first things she notices. She has to raise herself onto one elbow and look to confirm that the foot belongs to Jill. Jill is in her bed. She can’t remember how that happened.
She lies back down and stares at the ceiling, listening to Jill’s breathing which is on the quiet side of a snore.
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 but does 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 her phone 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 maybe not OK,’ she deadpans.
The young man laughs. ‘It will be OK,’ he says. ‘Soon.’
‘OK…’ Wendy says, doubtfully. ‘When?’
‘When the battery fills 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?’
‘Yes. Exactly like solar panels,’ he says in a mocking tone. ‘It’s off grid here. There’s no… you know…? I don’t know the word.’
‘No mains?’ Jill offers. ‘No grid, I suppose you could say.’
‘Yes. Exactly! No grid. Off grid,’ Enzo says. ‘Just panels on the…’ He points to the ceiling. ‘And batteries. I think maybe you used a lot of electricity last night?’ He looks around the room as if searching for proof of the crime, but the blow heater has been hidden in a cupboard.
‘No,’ Jill says, reflexively, habitually denying everything. ‘We didn’t do anything except cook dinner, did we, Wendy?’
The man raises one eyebrow disbelievingly, then flips open his laptop and frowns at the screen. ‘Thirteen point three kilowatts in one night. From twenty hours yesterday to four this morning. That’s a lot.’