Brilliant, You're Home

"No job only costs the person doing it. Somebody else always pays a share, and they don't get asked first."

I'd checked the grade, and that should have been the end of it. Instead I stayed where I was and started opening the mouth of the outlet a little wider, working the fines out with my hand because the trowel was too blunt an instrument for the last of it. My fingers had gone far enough that I was working off sound more than feel — the dry rustle of a hand moving through granular material against the dull nothing of a hand moving through the clay above it, which I could still tell apart when I couldn't have told you the temperature of my own knuckles.

The frost had thickened right across the grass while I was down there. Every blade had gone stiff and separate from the one beside it. My breath came back off the soil in small clouds that got about as far as my chin and then gave up. The floodlight sat on its brick and threw its beam flat along the footer and left everything past the footer to memory.

I didn't hear them coming.

Karen's voice, and close. Close enough that I came off the ground all at once, the whole body doing it before any part of me had worked out what for. My elbow went out from under me and my chin hit the dirt and I swore into the trench, and the trench took most of it.

Then the light. A phone torch, LED-white, swinging along the trench and finding me. I got a forearm up but the beam had already been in. I'd had hours of nothing but the floodlight's narrow wash and my pupils were open to the width of the night; the new light went through them and kept going, all the way to the back of my skull.

I pushed up onto an elbow and squinted into the glare.

Karen's outline first. Shoulders up and held there. She had been arriving at this for some while, and I could see her deciding whether to start it out here or take it inside.

Then Jane behind the torch, and everything about the last few hours arrived in one piece. Berriedale. The stop. Jane lived that end and Karen didn't, and there was only one reason Jane was standing in my back paddock at this hour with her keys still in her hand.

And Fern, already out of the group and coming across the frost at me, nose low, tail level, stepping over the mattock handle without appearing to look at it.

"Oh," I said. "Brilliant. You're home."

I meant it plainly. It was the only thing in my head, and the things that ought to have been in there instead came in about half a second behind it, in order. That there was no light in a single window of the house behind them. That I had no idea what the battery had left in it. That the frost had gone from patches to the whole paddock while I had my face in a hole in the ground.

Karen didn't move. Hands at her sides, fingers curled in a little. Twenty years I'd been reading that hand and it was not the angry one. It was the one that came after being frightened, when the fright had nowhere left to go, and I knew precisely what she had been frightened of, and I was not going to be the one to put it into words.

"What the hell are you doing?" she asked.

Low, and held down at that level on purpose. Fern's nose went into my left ear and stayed there.

"Fixing the runoff," I said. "Water keeps pooling under the shed. Thought I'd divert it."

"At seven o'clock at night?"

I looked up, as though the sky might revise itself on request. Cloud across the moon and the stars out past the edge of it, and nothing in any of it that was going to help me.

"Is it seven?"

Jane let a breath go beside her. Not a sigh, shorter than that, and she turned her head off toward the fence line while she did it.

"You've turned the whole house into a Hitchcock scene," Jane said.

Flat. She said everything flat, and it did the job.

"Power's off," I said. "Tripped the safety switch when I cut into the old conduit. Meant to fix it. Got sidetracked."

Which was near enough true to say out loud.

"By digging a trench in the dark?"

"Had the light," I said, and put a hand out toward the floodlight on its brick, which was the worst thing available to me, because all three of us then looked at it together and the indicator had dropped below half.

I'd offered it as information. It came out as a defence, and a defence was what it was.

Jane looked at Karen. Karen looked at Jane. A second and a half, and a whole conversation in it, and I wasn't in that conversation and didn't need to be.

"Mystery solved," Jane said.

"Yeah." Karen let a breath go, longer than Jane's, and her shoulders came down about an inch with it. "Solved by mud and mild electrocution."

I smiled, and the mud on my face cracked along the cheek and pulled at it, the way old render comes off a wall once the wall behind it has moved. I put the back of my hand through it, which relocated the mud without removing any of it.

"Didn't think you'd be home this early," I said.

"I'm actually far later than normal," Karen said.

I let that sit exactly where she'd put it. There was a bus in it, and a stop at Berriedale, and a car that had had to come all the way up here in the dark, and not one part of it needed saying by me. I put it on the shelf with the other things I had decided not to draw attention to, which was by that stage a reasonably full shelf, and I got on with the business of standing up.

Jane had been going along the trench with the torch — the whole length of it, the shovel on its side, the mattock, the stone up on the spoil, the tube of sealant lying where I'd set it down and forgotten about it. In her beam it looked like something I'd have had opinions about if I'd come across it on somebody else's property. "Lucky Val sent you home with that loaf," she said. "Looks like it might be dinner."

Karen made a sound that set out as resignation and got about a third of the way to a laugh. "If it's still warm, it'll be a miracle."

"Even cold it'll be better than what I've got waiting," Jane said, working her hands together against the cold. "We were doing freezer roulette tonight."

Getting upright was a negotiation. The knees put theirs in first and the back put in a longer one, and both of them had had hours down there to draft it. My feet had been out of the conversation since the dolerite stone and came back into it now, not as warmth but as a hot needling that worked up through the soles and into the ankles and kept going. The mud on my jeans had dried and then refrozen, and it cracked as I straightened and came away in pale flakes onto the frost.

"Well, come in," Karen said, turning for the house. "You may as well help me eat it. Even if we're doing it in the dark."

I reached for the floodlight.

"I'll just—"

"No." She came back round on her heel. "You don't get anything until you've fixed the bloody power."

I looked at her. Then at Jane, who had found something on the far side of the paddock to look at and was having no trouble at all continuing to look at it.

"Even a slice?"

"Especially not a slice." She was already walking. "You can eat the sealant if you're hungry."

Jane laughed, one short one, and the cold took it straight up and away over the fence line. Fern made a low sound somewhere against my knee, gave the tail a single wag, and went after Karen through the frost without once looking back at me.

I stood there a while with the trench lying open at my feet and the house behind me with nothing on in it anywhere, and listened to the three of them go up the grass to the back door. Then I picked up the floodlight and went in to have a look at the junction box.