Load Shedding

The current went at twenty to seven, which on that street meant the fan first, then the fridge, then the small green light on the router, and then a silence so complete that you could hear a woman two houses down say oh, Lord, not tonight.

Novlette was standing at the stove.

She stood there for a second with the spoon in her hand the way you do, waiting to see if it would come back the way it sometimes does, one flicker and then everything. It did not. Somewhere behind the houses a generator started up, which meant the people with the shop had a generator now, which was news.

She put the lid on the pot. Rice would finish itself in the heat it had.

Then she did what everybody on that street did within about four minutes of each other, which was to take a chair out onto the verandah, because inside a concrete house with no fan in September is not a place a person stays.

· · ·

The street came out.

That was the thing about the light going that nobody who complains about it ever quite says. Mrs. Foster came out with her radio. The two Barrett boys came out with a football and started playing in the road, in the dark, with a streetlight that was not working and had not been working since March, and nobody stopped them. Somebody dragged a domino table out and the slapping started up almost immediately, which meant the table had been waiting.

Without television the whole street had one conversation, in sections, at a distance, up and down the road, and every so often somebody would say a thing loud enough that four verandahs laughed at once.

Novlette sat in her chair with her feet up on the wall and let it happen around her. Eight years on that street. Her son in Portmore with the grandchildren, her husband three years gone, and a job that started at half six in the morning which meant that most evenings she was inside by eight with the fan on and the television talking to nobody.

· · ·

Everton from across the road came over at about half past seven with a cooler.

“You want ice?”

“What?”

“Ice. I have a chest freezer and it hold the cold for about twelve hours but after that is water.” He set the cooler down on her step without being invited, which on that street is not rudeness but the opposite. “I am giving it away before it turn into nothing.”

“Everton, you can’t give away a chest freezer of ice.”

“I give some to Mrs. Foster and she take it like I was insulting her,” he said. “I give some to the domino table and they put it in something I am not going to ask about. You want or you don’t want?”

She wanted. She had a half tub of ice cream that was on its way to being soup, and she brought it out, and they sat on her steps and ate it out of the tub with two spoons because it was going to be liquid in an hour either way.

· · ·

What she knew about Everton, after eight years of living opposite him, was this: he drove a taxi, he was up early, his gate needed oil, his wife had left about two years ago and there had been a period of about three months when the house was very loud at night and then a longer period when it was very quiet.

What she learned that evening, in the dark, on a step, with the whole street talking around them:

That the taxi was not his and he was paying it off at a rate that would finish next August, and that he had a date in his head for that.

That his wife had not left, exactly. She had gone to her mother in Clarendon after the second miscarriage and had never quite come back, and they were not divorced, and they spoke sometimes, and he did not know what the arrangement was called.

That he had cooked exactly one thing well in his life, which was liver, which she hated.

That he had noticed she had stopped keeping the pots of thyme on the front wall after her husband died, and had wondered about it, and had never said anything because what do you say.

“Them dry out,” she said. “He was the one who water them.”

“Mm.”

“I don’t have the hand for it.”

“Is not a hand,” Everton said. “Is just water, regular.”

Novlette laughed at him. “That is what people with the hand always say.”

· · ·

By half past eight the boys had lost the football under a car and Mrs. Foster’s radio had gone to talk instead of music and the domino table had got to the stage of the evening where the arguing was the point.

They talked about Portmore, and the grandchildren, and the traffic on the Highway, and whether the shop people were going to keep the generator running all night, and then about nothing, and then they stopped talking altogether and it was all right. There was a while in there, maybe ten minutes, where the two of them sat on the step in the dark and listened to a whole street being a street, and neither of them said anything, and Novlette could not remember the last time she had been quiet next to another person and not minded it.

She was aware of his arm on the step behind her, not touching her. She was aware of being aware of it.

She did not move away and she did not move closer, and she thought, at fifty-three years of age, with an empty ice-cream tub between her feet: well. All right then.

· · ·

The light came back at fourteen minutes past nine.

It came the way it always does, all at once, the whole street lit up like something caught doing wrong: the streetlight that does not work staying not working, every verandah bulb, the small green light on the router, the television in Mrs. Foster’s front room, which she must have left on, saying something loud about a football match in England.

The street groaned and then cheered, which is what a street does.

And then it went in. That is the part Novlette always found sad. Ten minutes and the road was empty, the chairs gone, the domino table dragged back under the house, everybody inside with their own noise again, and the whole thing that had been happening out there for two and a half hours just switched off like it had been running on the same current all along.

Everton stood up and picked up his cooler.

“All right,” he said.

“All right.”

He got to the bottom of the steps and turned around. “Novlette.”

“Mm.”

“Is just water,” he said. “Regular. That is the whole secret of thyme.”

“Good night, Everton.”

“Good night.”

· · ·

The following evening the current stayed on and the street stayed inside, and at about seven there was a knock on her grille.

He had a plastic bag with two pots of thyme in it, the small kind from the man at the corner, and he stood there holding it and looking like a man who had thought about this for approximately twenty-four hours and had come up with nothing better to say than what he said, which was:

“I was passing.”

“You live across the road.”

“Yes,” Everton agreed. “I pass here plenty.”

Novlette opened the grille.

She put them on the front wall that night, where the old ones used to be, and she has watered them every morning since, regular, and they have not died yet.

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