First Thing

"You can do the right work in the wrong order and have nothing to show for it. The order is the work."

I got as far as the junction box before I worked out that I couldn't touch it. The circuit was dead at the safety switch, and dead is not the same as isolated, and isolating it meant the board, and the board was on the side wall of the house, which was outside, which was where I had just come in from. So I went back out with the head torch and the floodlight, and then stood in the garden a moment, because the garden had changed while I wasn't in it.

Not quieter. The quiet had been out there all evening and I'd worked inside it and been glad of it. This was a different quiet. It had had people in it a minute ago and it hadn't finished adjusting.

I stood beside the trench and let the cold catch me up. It had been working through the jacket and the jeans and everything under them for hours, and I'd given it no attention at all, and now there was nothing else to give attention to. My hands had started shaking. Not from cold exactly — the fine useless tremor the body puts up when it has decided the work is over and the work is not over. I flexed my fingers and the joints came grudgingly. The knuckles were split and dark, soil right down into the grain of them where winter ground gets in and then stays for days. The wrist that had taken the stone had settled into a low throb about half a beat behind my pulse.

The switchboard cover stuck in cold weather and always had. I got the heel of my hand under it and knocked it up and open and put the torch across the rows.

The labels were mine, done in permanent marker on a warm Sunday some years back with the cover off and a cup of tea going cold on the bricks beside me. Permanent had turned out to be a claim rather than a specification. SHED was still legible. KITCHEN was most of the way there. The rest had ghosted down to a suggestion of letters, blue-grey, more shape than word. I read them anyway, which took longer than working it out from the layout would have.

I pulled the circuit and went back in to the box.

The work was fiddly, which was the word for it and didn't cover any of it. Stripping perished insulation back to sound rubber was a job for fingers, and mine had spent the evening in a frozen trench and were reporting almost nothing. You had to find the point where the rotten stuff ended and something you'd trust began, and then peel rather than pull, because pulling took good insulation away with it and then you were chasing the fault further down the wire and into a wall you'd rather not open. The terminal caps wanted a grip I'd left somewhere in the ground around the dolerite stone.

I dropped the wire strippers. They went down onto the concrete with a bright metal sound that carried a good deal further than it needed to. I picked them up, got the cap seated, copper making proper contact, the connection solid under my thumb.

Then I dropped them again.

I swore at them the second time, at length and with conviction, and it wasn't really at them. It was at the choice I'd made standing in this same hallway with the lid off and the whole afternoon still available to me.

Karen had been frightened. I'd had that out in the paddock and I'd had it again pulling the circuit at the board, and it hadn't got any smaller for being carried about. There had been a moment out there, after Jane laughed, when I could have said something short and plain and it would have cost me nothing at all. I'd got on with standing up instead.

Stripped back. Capped. Checked the cable sat properly in the box before I closed it, blocked the cavity off, ran a temporary lead off the kitchen circuit. Enough for tonight, and not enough that I could tell myself it was done. The proper job wanted daylight and hands that worked.

I flipped the switch.

The hallway came on first, low and warm through the side window. Then the kitchen behind it, brighter, laying its rectangle out across the paving by the back door. And then the security light over the door opened up and put the whole garden under flat white.

It showed me everything I'd been doing in the dark. The trench running the length of the footer, black and open. The spoil heaped along one side of it with none of it back where it had come from. The stone sitting up on the spoil where I'd set it down. The brick the floodlight had stood on, and around the brick a wet halo of turned earth reaching out further than I remembered making it. The mattock lying where I'd dropped it rather than where I'd put it.

I'd been in the middle of all that for hours and from the inside of it every part had made sense.

Through the kitchen window I could see them. Karen at the bench, still in her coat, cutting the loaf. Jane at the table with both hands round a mug, saying something I had no chance of hearing. Fern under Jane's chair, chin on her paws, eyes going. The kettle was on the gas and the window had begun to fog in from the corners the way it did once the room got ahead of the night outside.

I watched them for longer than I'd have admitted to. Karen's hands moving. Jane talking. The dog settled. Steam coming off the kettle. The whole of it held together, and nothing in it wanted anything from me, and nothing in it was any the worse for my not being in it.

The cold got into the standing still and made it untenable.

I took the tools to the shed. Trowel, shovel, mattock, and the tube of sealant that had come out with the rest of it after lunch and had never once had a job to do. I laid them on the bench in the order I'd want them in the morning — pipe, connectors, the small hacksaw for cutting to length — and the floodlight went back on its shelf on charge. I did all of it without hurrying. The body knew the routine and got on with it and left the rest of me where I was standing.

The gumboots were on the porch where I'd left them, one upright and one tipped over into a puddle that had frozen around it in the night. I looked at them for a while. They weren't going to get any wetter.

I didn't go in. I'd been moving since after lunch and the moving hadn't stopped when the work did, and my head had gone on ahead to the backfill, and from the backfill to the pipe, and from the pipe to the east face of the barn that wanted re-oiling before the wet came in properly, and from the barn to the strainer post on the northern boundary that had been on the list since August and had spent every day of that not being my problem. The list didn't finish. It came round on itself. Everything on it ran into something else on it, underground, out of sight, the way the beds did.

The morepork started up in the gums past the back fence. Two notes, a pause, two notes. It had no opinion about any of the evening. I still hadn't laid eyes on the thing all winter, and Karen still had it in the swamp gum on the boundary, and if I'd asked her she'd have told me what the fog creeping across the kitchen window meant about the dew point as well.

The security light did its arithmetic and concluded that nothing was happening, which was accurate, and clicked off. The garden came back as shapes. The shed. The rain tank. The compost bin with its lid askew where I'd left it. The bare trellises standing in the beds with nothing on them until spring. The frost going on across all of it, taking the grass a blade at a time.

Out on the front gravel Jane's car turned over and caught.

I came in through the back door.

The kitchen was ahead of the rest of the house. The fig loaf was in the air, warm and sweet with something spiced underneath it, over the top of the gas and the smell the old timber let go of whenever the temperature moved through the frame. The table had been cleared and wiped. Two settings' worth of crumbs gone. The cloth folded over the back of a chair.

Karen was at the sink, rinsing plates.

I went through to the laundry, because the mess belongs in the laundry and not in the kitchen sink, and I'd have said so to anybody else in this house doing what I was about to do. The water came off brown, then a paler brown, then something that would pass at a distance. I did the knuckles with the nail brush and got most of it. Winter ground gets into the grain and stays there for days and scrubbing doesn't hurry it along. The wrist didn't want to turn under the tap. It would be worse in the morning. They always were.

I came back through. There was a plate on the bench. Two slices off the end of the loaf, still holding some warmth in the middle where the crumb was dense. Beside it a mug of tea, made recently enough to still be hot, which meant she'd put the water on when she heard the laundry tap running.

I didn't say anything about it. Neither did she.

The fridge came back on behind me and got on with the business of being a fridge again after its evening off. The house made its small noises as the warmth went through the frame, the timber taking up and letting go the way it had done every winter since a long time before it was ours.

I ate the bread standing at the bench, because sitting down would have meant the day was finished and the day wasn't finished. The trench was open. The pipe wasn't cut. There was a list in my head that started at backfill and ended at a strainer post I'd been ignoring since August. Val's fig and walnut, dense and sweet, and it did what her cooking always did, which was tell me precisely how long it had been since I'd last eaten anything.

Karen dried her hands on the tea towel and came past me toward the hall. She stopped in the doorway with one hand on the frame.

"You're fixing that trench properly tomorrow," she said. Not a question.

"First thing."

She looked at me a moment longer than that needed — the mud still on my face, the jacket gone stiff across the left shoulder, the state of the jeans. Whatever she landed on, she kept.

Then she went down the hall.

I stood at the bench with the mug in both hands and let the heat work into the joints of my fingers. The window had fogged over completely and the garden had gone behind it. Somewhere out past that the morepork was sitting exactly where Karen said it was, or wasn't.

My feet were still cold.