Chapter 36 #3
And by day she was pretty much her old, industrious self, tending her adopted vegetable patches in the adjoining crofts, swimming, sketching, painting, reading in the sun, almost never stopping to check the horizon for threats, and maintaining her boat.
She fretted about the small wind turbine at the end of the field that still provided power for the house, and wondered how long the photovoltaics would survive the challenge of year after year of winter storms. She couldn’t find any manuals for either and resigned herself to not being able to fix them once they failed and decided to enjoy the luxury of the electric Aga cooker while she could.
Meanwhile she made plans to rip out the electrics once they stopped and turn it into a wood or even maybe even a peat burner.
She practically worked out how to fix a stovepipe to what would become the firebox, and the best way to hack a hole for it in the stone wall.
She was proud of her practicality. Practical wasn’t just useful.
It was planning the campaign against dangerously idle hands, and so future-proofing her hold on reality.
By day she was, she told herself, crushing it.
It was only at night she changed. She ate according to the light, rising with the dawn and cooking her evening meal while there was still just enough brightness left in the sky to see her way around the kitchen before darkness rendered it a no-go area.
She spent the evenings in the light-proof safety of the billiard room and come the onset of colder weather decided it made more sense to sleep there too.
So she pulled a mattress down and put it under the billiard table and made a bedroom-within-a-room.
She thought of it as a low-slung box-bed.
Because in happier days when the house had been a holiday house it was full of books that people had brought to enjoy as a vacation read and then left for others.
She was in no fear of running out of reading material, especially if she developed a liking for detective fiction.
In fact, she began reading sci-fi, a genre she had never had much time for when the future was assured and more or less predictable.
Perhaps because she was so painfully aware from personal experience that it was in fact now a protean and unguaranteed thing, she became fascinated with what visions of tomorrow other people had imagined for themselves and their readers.
She wasn’t looking for clues. She was looking for escape routes, if only for the passage of time she could lose herself in the stories.
There was a vinyl record player and there was a radio.
The photovoltaics on the roof and the wind turbine kept the lights on and the music flowing to keep her company when she forgot to worry about being overheard.
The holiday house had become a repository for two generations of vinyl LPs, which split pretty starkly between cheesy pop and rock and serious classical.
She tried to remember to listen to the former when she felt low, and to the latter when she needed to calm herself and let her worries drift away from her for a while.
She listened to a lot of albums from her mother and her grandmother’s youth.
They both seemed to have liked women singers, from Janis Joplin and Aretha Franklin on one hand, all the way up to Kate Bush and Annie Lennox.
There seemed to be a cut-off at about the time LPs had been replaced by CDs, but she didn’t mind the absence of the songs of her own youth and found the analogue hisses, crackles and pops of the vinyl somehow comforting, like old friends.
Then it was her third Christmas and he had still not come.
She found a string of fairy-lights under the stairs and decided to cheer herself up by decorating her now book-lined bedspace with them.
Strangely, it only made her sadder. As did her decision to tape a picture of him to the slate underside of the table so it would be the first thing she saw in the morning, and the last one at night.
It was the picture she took of him happy and jumping in mid-air with the much-loved dog, that gravity-defying frozen moment that marked G-Day, the day the future was put on notice, the moment the end of the world began.
It didn’t work the magic she intended. The first morning she woke and turned on her reading light to look at him was the first time she heard a terrible despairing noise that shook her to the bone, and then realised it was sobbing and it was coming from her mouth.
In all the time since she’d made her escape, that long passage of increasing loneliness and inexorably diminishing hope, nothing had made her cry because she had made the decision not to let it, and so had dammed it up inside her.
And as the months had turned into a year, and then years, the pressure behind the barricade had just built and built.
And, absent a safety valve, at the sight of him and the dog hanging so happily above her, it just broke.
And so did she.