After the Lights Go Out

by Lili Wilkinson

  I lay out a few rocks in a circle, then pull the newspaper from my bag and scrunch up a few sheets. Then I carefully layer the kindling over the top, making a teepee shape.

  Mateo looks at me expectantly. ‘Aren’t you going to rub two sticks together or something?’

  I grin, although I can absolutely start a fire that way, in under two minutes. ‘I thought I’d use this.’

  I pull a lighter from the front pocket of my backpack. It, like every other item in my bag, is sealed in its own ziplock bag, in case I get caught in a storm or have to wade through a river. Mateo raises his eyebrows, but says nothing. I carefully light the crumpled paper. I blow gently on the flames, and the kindling catches, smoke twirling up in a pale grey plume. I add some of the medium-sized sticks, and once they’ve caught, the bigger logs.

  A sudden bloodcurdling scream shatters the evening stillness. It sounds like a woman’s voice, long, sharp, high. Mateo leaps to his feet, his whole body vibrating with tension.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’

  I can’t help myself. I burst out laughing. Mateo stares at me, his expression outraged.

  ‘You’re a psychopath,’ he says, his voice shaking. ‘I’ve followed a psychopath out into the middle of nowhere.’

  The scream sounds again, closer now. Mateo spins around, and I can see his chest rise and fall.

  ‘It’s a bush stone-curlew,’ I tell him. ‘A bird.’

  ‘A…a bird?’

  ‘It has an unusual call.’

  ‘I hate this place.’

  We eat chocolate biscuits, pretzels and apples for dinner as darkness falls and the air grows cold. It’s amazing how quickly the temperature falls in the desert. I build the fire up so it provides enough light and heat for us.

  I wait until Mateo has gone off into the bushes to answer a call of nature before I open the main compartment of my bug-out bag to check I have everything I need. If he’s watched Doomsday Preppers or any of those other survivalist TV shows, he’ll start getting suspicious when he sees the contents.

  It’s a fairly standard survival collection – a space blanket, toilet paper, hand sanitiser, gaffer tape, glow sticks, aluminium foil, some basic first-aid supplies, two more lighters, matches, candles and cable ties. A week’s worth of MREs – Meals Ready to Eat. And several vacuum-sealed foil bags containing activated charcoal, salt, bicarb soda, Epsom salts and heirloom veggie seeds.

  Mateo returns and I zip the bag up again.

  ‘I wish we had s’mores,’ he says, sitting down beside me.

  ‘You’re such an American,’ I tell him.

  ‘You don’t have s’mores here?’

  I shake my head. ‘We just put a marshmallow on a stick and poke it into the fire.’

  ‘Unacceptable.’

  We stare into the fire for a while.

  ‘What do you think we’ll find at the mine?’ Mateo asks at last.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I tell him. ‘Hopefully it’ll all be business as usual.’

  It won’t be. I’m pretty sure by now. But at least Dad will be there, and he’ll know what to do. My heart tugs a little when I imagine the stubble on his chin, his large, capable hands, the pride in his eyes when we ace a drill.

  ‘I never thought this would actually happen,’ I say before I can help myself.

  ‘I don’t think anyone thought this would happen,’ Mateo replies. ‘An EMP? Come on. Except maybe for those conspiracy theory freaks.’

  I backpedal. ‘I mean being out here. Dad always used to talk about moving to the bush, but I never thought he’d really leave the city. I miss it so much. My friends. My life.’

  Mateo nods. ‘I guess I kind of did it the other way around. I grew up on the Island, and it was small and safe. We had this simple life, me and my moms and my abuela. And then we moved to the States and it was so big and scary, but it was also exciting. I love going back and seeing my family, but I don’t think I want to live there again.’

  ‘So…you lived on an island off Puerto Rico?’

  Mateo raises his eyebrows.

  I feel my cheeks redden. ‘It’s possible I don’t know exactly where Puerto Rico is.’

  ‘Yeah, I guessed that.’

  ‘I mean I know it’s in…’ I hesitate. ‘South America?’

  Mateo laughs. ‘It’s in the Caribbean.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Right.’

  ‘Okay,’ says Mateo, grabbing a piece of kindling and scraping lines in the sandy orange soil. ‘You know where Florida is? The pointy bit on the bottom right-hand side of the US? Looks a bit like a dick? Where Harry Potter World is?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right. South of there is the Caribbean Sea. Directly below Florida there’s Cuba. Below Cuba there’s Jamaica. East of Jamaica is Haiti and the Dominican Republic. East of that is Puerto Rico.’

  This is the kind of thing I might know if Dad hadn’t been so busy teaching us how to identify all the local plants and animals. In his defence, though, those things will probably be quite useful in this particular circumstance.

  ‘So what happened with your mom?’ Mateo asks. ‘You said she left.’

  I nod. ‘Back when we still lived in the city. She wasn’t happy with us. She and Dad used to fight all the time. And then one day she told us she’d fallen in love with some lawyer she worked with, and that she was leaving us to be with him.’

  ‘She didn’t try to take you with her?’

  I snort. ‘She said she needed a fresh start.’

  ‘That sounds…harsh. Moms aren’t supposed to act that way.’

  I kick the dirt. ‘Dads run off all the time,’ I say. ‘Why should it be different for a mother? Our family is all about equal opportunities for deadbeat mums.’

  ‘What did she say when you moved out here?’

  ‘I don’t know. I haven’t spoken to her since.’

  ‘You haven’t spoken to your mom for three years?’

  I shake my head. ‘Nope. I don’t need her. I have Dad, and the twins.’

  I throw another log on the fire, and use a stick to poke it around into a better shape.

  ‘Pru?’ says Mateo.

  ‘Hang on.’ One of the burning logs has toppled sideways. I find another stick to lever it back into place.

  Mateo stands up and takes a few steps away from the fire.

  ‘Pru.’ His voice sounds funny.

  A slight breeze wafts smoke into my eyes, and I cough.

  ‘Prudence.’

  I don’t hear my full name very often. I suddenly realise Mateo could be in trouble, and I scramble to my feet away from the fire, blinking smoke from my eyes. I reach into my pocket and pull out my torch, casting the light from side to side until I spot him. He doesn’t look as if he’s been bitten or stung by anything. He’s standing perfectly still by the billabong, his face turned up to the sky. I follow his gaze, and I switch off the torch, my breath catching in my throat.

  The sky is on fire.

  The deep velvety darkness of the night sky is shot through with colours – pinks and blues and greens and purples. The colours shift and streak as we watch them, dancing across the sky in a shimmering curtain. They light up the terrain around us, staining it pink and green, and are mirrored on the surface of the billabong so that everything around us is shifting, changing colour, above and below.

  I’ve never seen anything so beautiful in my life.

  I look over at Mateo, and he’s crying. The entire universe is reflected purple and blue in his tears. I take his hand and we stare up at the sky, and it is so huge and beautiful that it feels like we’ve become part of it, like we are made entirely of stars, dancing through the universe on shimmering ribbons of light and colour.

  Mateo’s hand is warm in mine. Our fingers lace together.

  Sparks start to fall from the sky like rain, tiny blazes of white light streaking down around us and blinking out when they touch the earth or the surface of the billabong.

  I don’t know who kisses who first,
but it feels like the most natural thing in the world. The two of us have shared something so momentous and profound, being out here in the desert, out here in the stars with the tapestry of colour and light weaving around us. It is inevitable that we join together.

  It feels as though the aurora is wrapping around us, my body humming with the touch of raining stars and Mateo’s hands. My lips tingle and I pull him closer.

  He tastes like apples and chocolate biscuits and starlight. He winds his fingers into my hair and I slide mine up the back of his shirt to rest in the hollow of his back.

  We sink onto the ground and our bodies press together, warm and alive and shimmering with a million colours. I feel giddy from the stars and the kiss and how utterly real everything feels, as if my whole life has been a rehearsal for this moment.

  The tingling in my lips intensifies, and my ears begin to itch.

  Suddenly I’m very aware of the cold, hard dirt beneath me, and even more suddenly the magic feeling vanishes.

  Everything is wrong.

  I feel a sinking in my gut, and push Mateo away, scrambling back to the fireside. My mouth fills with metallic-tasting saliva, and I lean to the side to spit. Snot starts to stream from my nose.

  ‘Are you okay?’ Mateo calls out of the darkness. He sounds a little out of breath.

  ‘Um,’ I say, and I can already feel my tongue swelling up, causing me to lisp. ‘Did you eat anything with peanuts today?’

  He comes over to crouch down next to me, and his eyes widen in horror. ‘Oh my god, you’re anaphylactic.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say, trying to shape the words clearly around my enormous tongue. ‘I’m okay.’

  I am not okay.

  Mateo scrambles to his feet as if he’s been bitten by a snake. ‘We have to get you to a hospital!’

  In his panic he’s forgotten that there are no hospitals. I want to tell him that I’ve got it covered, but my throat is closing over and it’s too hard to speak. So I crawl over to my bug-out bag and unzip the front pocket. There are two epipens there, each one sealed in a hard plastic case. I pull one out and hesitate for a moment, my hand shaking. I’ve done this before, and I know it doesn’t hurt much, but there’s something so instinctively wrong about shoving a needle into your flesh. I wrap my hand around the pen, and then jab it hard against my thigh, through the fabric of my shorts. I hear a click as the adrenaline is discharged. I count to ten in my head, then pull it out. That part does hurt a bit. I drop the epipen and rub my thigh hard. I can feel sharp cold then hot running up the inside of my leg, then the adrenaline hits and my heart starts to pound. Sweat breaks out along my hairline. I close my eyes, but am hit by a wave of dizziness so I open them again, staring at the fire to anchor myself.

  The aurora continues to dance and whirl overhead and the electric rain continues to fall around us, because nature really doesn’t give a shit about allergic reactions. Mere minutes ago, I was made of stars. Now I’m made of swollen, itchy, burning embarrassment.

  The tightness in my throat loosens, and I can breathe normally again. I use the hem of my T-shirt to wipe the snot that’s streaming from my nose, and look over at Mateo, whose face is frozen in terror.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I tell him, my voice a little hoarse. ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘I. Am. So. Sorry.’

  I shake my head. ‘Really, it’s fine.’

  Mateo’s eyes flick down to the dirt, where the used epipen is lying, the needle glinting pink and green from the aurora’s light. I look down at it too, and suddenly I can’t stop thinking about how many I have. One more here in my bag. Two in the bathroom cabinet at home. There are five at the Paddock. It’s hard to get more without a prescription. Dad has been trying to source them on the internet.

  Mateo looks back up at me, his expression grave. I can tell we’re both thinking the same thing. Modern medicine is all very well, but what do you do when you can’t just nip down to the chemist for a refill? What happens if I have an allergic reaction, and there aren’t any epipens left?

  I scoop the discarded pen up, return it to the hard plastic case and put it back in my backpack. ‘Well,’ I say, forcing a lightness into my tone. ‘As far as kisses go, that one was definitely memorable.’

  Mateo smiles at me, but the smile doesn’t reach his eyes. ‘Are you sure there’s nothing I can do?’

  ‘You can pass me my water bottle. And…’ I grin. ‘Maybe you can brush your teeth before we do any more kissing?’

  Even in the dim firelight, I see Mateo’s dark skin stain pink. I’m making him blush. That’s a good sign. But the mood has changed, and I know there isn’t going to be any more kissing tonight.

  I open my bag and pull out a bottle of antihistamines. The effects of the adrenaline will only last for a half-hour or so – long enough for the loratadine to counteract the allergic reaction.

  ‘How long have you known you’re allergic?’ Mateo asks.

  ‘Since I was a baby. My mum’s allergic to nuts too, so they got me tested. She was used to being careful.’

  ‘Have you done that before? Injected yourself?’

  ‘Of course,’ I tell him, like it’s nothing.

  It’s part of Dad’s emergency drills. Sometimes he walks me through a hypothetical attack, addressing possible symptoms and then making me use a trainer epipen with no needle. Other times he’ll slip crushed peanuts into my food without telling me, and time how long it takes for me to locate my epipen and use it. He always has a spare on hand, of course, just in case.

  Sometimes, when I can feel my throat swelling and closing over, and sense the approaching coldness of death, I’ll look over at Dad, holding a stopwatch, his face grim. I know he’s only trying to look after me. I know it’s for my own good. But that isn’t how a father is supposed to treat his daughter.

  ‘We’d better get some sleep,’ I tell Mateo. ‘Long day’s walk tomorrow.’

  I lay out my second epipen and more loratadine beside me in case I have a biphasic reaction. The ground is hard underneath us, but our bodies are exhausted. As the adrenaline wears off, my limbs fill with a fuzzy drowsiness, and before long I sink into the welcome embrace of sleep.

  There’s nothing quite like waking up at dawn in the desert. The air is cold and crisp, and the light is stunning. The aurora has gone, the pink and orange colours in the sky caused only by sunrise.

  A hooded robin begins the call for morning, and within minutes the air is full of birdsong, literally hundreds of birds joining in the dawn chorus.

  Mateo looks rumpled and cranky, but cheers up once he is upright and has had a few more chocolate biscuits.

  I splash my face in the water of the billabong, and get spat at by archer fish who mistake me for a tasty insect snack.

  I slather myself in sunscreen and make Mateo do the same. Then we skirt around the billabong and pick our way through the boulders up to the top of the gully, where a solitary boab tree stands like a sentinel, long-reaching fingers sprouting upwards from its fat bottle-shaped trunk.

  Mateo stops, his chest heaving from exertion, and points to the tree. ‘Is that…a baobab?’

  ‘We call them boabs, but I think they’re the same thing.’

  He seems oddly delighted. ‘Like in The Little Prince!’

  My expression betrays my ignorance.

  ‘Children,’ he says gravely. ‘Watch out for the baobabs.’

  I have no idea what he’s talking about, but he chuckles and we walk on.

  I concentrate on the landscape, on monitoring the position of the sun in relation to our direction. I watch which way birds are flying overhead. I spot lizards and insects. I identify every plant I can think of. Ghost gum. Woollybutt. Mulla mulla.

  We tramp over jagged hills as the sun rises and the air grows hot and still. We don’t talk. Every scrap of energy must be conserved. We take breaks when we have to, trying to ration the water we have. Every now and then I pull out the map and try to spot some familiar landmarks. But everything looks
the same, an ancient red land that stretches unbroken in all directions.

  Mateo stops suddenly and I nearly barrel into him.

  ‘Don’t. Move.’ His voice is low and shaking.

  His tone immediately sends me into defence mode. My heart-rate speeds up and I become hyper-aware of my surroundings. We’re exposed here, at the top of the ridge. We should duck back down into the gully.

  Mateo lets out a quiet stream of Spanish that I am pretty sure is swearing. I lean around him and see what he’s panicking about, and breathe a sigh of relief.

  ‘It’s only a snake.’

  ‘It is the biggest motherfucking snake in the world.’

  It is a big snake. It’s coiled up on a red boulder, so I can’t tell exactly how big, but I’d guess it’s three or four metres long.

  ‘Don’t panic,’ I tell Mateo. ‘It’s only a scrub python. It isn’t venomous.’

  ‘How do you know?’ he asks, his voice choked. ‘How can you be sure? It looks poisonous. It looks like it could kill us both in a second.’

  ‘It’s a constrictor,’ I explain. ‘It incapacitates its prey by squeezing them unconscious, not by injecting them with venom.’

  I decide not to tell him that there are some local snakes that do both, and that I’ve spotted several of them since we left the Holden yesterday.

  ‘Right,’ says Mateo. ‘Right. Fine. So the biggest motherfucking snake in the world isn’t going to poison me. It’s just going to squeeze me to death. Fantastic.’

  The snake raises its head and watches us pass. The sun catches the purply sheen of its brown scales. Mateo lets out a little squeal of fear. With a liquid shudder, the snake uncoils and flows off the boulder, gliding across the rocky red ground and disappearing into a clump of spinifex.

  ‘That was literally the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,’ says Mateo.

  ‘Relax. Scrub pythons are pretty common, and not aggressive at all.’

  Mateo narrows his eyes. ‘But there are other snakes, right? Snakes that are poisonous. And aggressive.’

  ‘Yes,’ I admit. ‘But people rarely get bitten. Really rarely. I’ve lived in Jubilee for three years and have never known anyone to get a snakebite.’