After the Lights Go Out

by Lili Wilkinson

  Clarita looks at him for a long moment, and then I see her face fall. ‘Oh, Keith,’ she says, and I don’t know what’s going on, but I know it’s not good.

  I see his chin quiver a little, then he rolls his shirt sleeve down over the scratch. ‘I don’t talk about it,’ he says. ‘It makes people uncomfortable.’

  ‘When was the last time you had a CD4 count done?’ Clarita asks.

  ‘About seven months ago. Six-twenty-six.’

  ‘That’s a good result.’ Clarita tries to smile, but it doesn’t banish the concern in her eyes. ‘But you realise we can’t order you a new test, right? Even if I knew how to do it, we don’t have the right equipment.’

  Keith shrugs. ‘Not really much point, is there? I’m assuming Jubilee doesn’t have a long-term cache of antivirals.’

  ‘Your count is good,’ Clarita says. ‘If you’re careful, you can afford to take some time off. There are plenty of people with HIV who have to temporarily suspend treatment for one reason or another.’

  HIV. Keith has HIV.

  Chronic illnesses are one of the biggest dangers of living in a post-disaster world. Diabetes, HIV, even something like asthma. If you rely on any medication, it’s only a matter of time before supplies run out.

  Poor Keith.

  I realise I’m standing there like a creep, listening to this intensely personal conversation. I’m not hiding or anything, but suddenly it feels super inappropriate for me to be there. So I go into the hotel and up the staircase to Mateo’s room, and find him sitting by the window, surrounded by a giant kinked scribble of copper wire, what looks like the remains of a ceiling fan, and a pile of M&Ms.

  He’s wrapping the copper wire around a toilet paper roll. Every three or four wraps, he twists the wire into a little loop. He’s so focused on what he’s doing, he doesn’t seem to notice me at all.

  ‘You killed your fan,’ I said.

  He jumps, and M&Ms go spilling onto the floor.

  I can’t help but laugh as he swears and scrabbles around, picking them all up. ‘I’m building a radio,’ he says, sounding excited. ‘It’s not electronic, so it won’t be affected by the EMP.’

  ‘You know how to build a radio?’ I’m impressed – Mateo has a survival skill that I don’t. Why didn’t Dad ever teach me to build a radio?

  Mateo nods. ‘I went on engineering camp in the fifth grade. Building a crystal radio was the first thing we did. It’s not that hard.’

  He takes off his glasses for a moment and blinks, wiping sweat from his brow. He looks at me and grins.

  ‘Hey,’ he says.

  ‘Hey,’ I reply, and there is an awkward moment where we both try to figure out if the other one wants to make out, before we bite the bullet and launch into it.

  When we come up for air, Mateo looks around. ‘Did something happen?’ he asks. ‘I heard raised voices outside.’

  I tell him about Jan and Barri, and he sighs. ‘It won’t be too much longer before we all start eating each other.’

  ‘That’s what Blythe said.’

  Mateo nods. ‘Blythe is a kindred spirit.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ I ask him. ‘Are you eating something other than M&Ms?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Mateo says. ‘I grabbed a bunch of tins and stuff from the old hotel kitchen when we first got back here and hid them under my bed.’

  Everyone is hoarding food. It’s human instinct.

  ‘Did you get everything you could?’ I ask. ‘Because someone else will take it if you don’t. You have to be prepared.’

  ‘Hey.’ Mateo reaches out and cups my chin in his hands, tilting my head so I look directly into his eyes. ‘I know how to look after myself, okay? You don’t have to be responsible for every single person in this town.’

  If he only knew.

  ‘I feel so awful,’ I say, but I can’t tell him why I feel awful, so I rabbit on about wanting to help the town and worrying about everyone. ‘I wish there was something I could do to help,’ I finish, lamely.

  ‘Wanna help me build a radio?’

  Mateo slides his glasses back on and I feel a complicated burst of affection, attraction, jealousy and guilt. ‘Yes,’ I tell him.

  ‘Great. I got all the wire out of the ceiling fan’s induction motor, but it needs straightening out.’

  He shows me how to smooth out the kinks in the wire by running it over a metal rod a few times. Then he gets back to tinkering, explaining as he goes.

  ‘There are five parts to the radio. Antenna, diode, tuning coil, headphones and ground.’ He holds up the wire-wrapped toilet roll. ‘This is the tuning coil.’

  He’s talking a million miles a minute, telling me all about diodes and oscilloscopes and asymmetric negative resistance. He shows me a little square of cardboard with what looks like a DIY steampunk version of one of those drinking-bird desk toys mounted on it.

  ‘This is called a cat’s whisker detector,’ he says. ‘I made it using bits I found in the fan motor, and also in the back of the VCR.’ He points to a disembowelled black case on his bed. ‘Thank goodness for this backwards town still having VCRs.’

  ‘Hey,’ I say in mock outrage. ‘Some of us also have DVD players. The Brattons have a Blu-ray.’

  ‘Whatever. Look at this.’ Mateo holds up a little red crystal, a look of triumph on his face.

  I peer at it. ‘Is that…one of the crystals that Barri sells?’

  When she’s not doing hair and nails, or participating in secret affairs with Mick Marshall, Barri dabbles in spiritual healing and fortune telling. At the back of her shop she has a table of glittery crystals that she says can cleanse auras and balance auras. I’ve never paid them much attention because, you know, nonsense.

  Mateo nods. ‘It’s zincite. Her husband used to bring her back the pretty bits he found in the zinc slurry from the mine. She has a whole box of it. She says it helps you channel your inner goddess.’

  If Blythe were here, she’d make a snarky comment about Barri finding her inner goddess in Mick Marshall’s pants. I stare at the muddy red crystal. It doesn’t look very powerful to me. ‘And you need to channel your inner goddess into a radio?’

  Mateo laughs. ‘As well as being an excellent goddess-channeller, zincite is also the perfect semiconductor. If set up right, it can both amplify and oscillate, which is why it was used – along with a copper pyrite crystal – for Pickard’s Perikon detector.’

  He looks at me expectantly, like I’m supposed to understand anything he’s just said.

  ‘Perikon?’ he says again. ‘You know, Perfect Pickard Contact?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  He shakes his head in pity, and then places the little crystal into the coathanger steampunk drinking bird.

  ‘So what does it do?’

  ‘It converts the current from AC to DC.’

  ‘But where does the current come from?’ I ask. ‘There’s no power.’

  Mateo grins at me, and for a second I can see exactly how he looked when he was a little kid. ‘It doesn’t need a power source,’ he says. ‘It’s powered by the radio waves themselves. How cool is that?’

  I laugh. ‘You are such a nerd.’

  ‘Coming from Miss I Can Navigate by the Stars and Build a Shelter Out of Sticks.’

  ‘That’s Ms I Can Navigate by the Stars and Build a Shelter Out of Sticks, thank you very much.’

  ‘Okay. Now all that’s left is to connect this wire here to the diode, and then this one goes to the earpiece, which is the part I haven’t done yet.’

  ‘Can you use regular headphones?’

  He shakes his head. ‘They need some modifications. Luckily, the crystal goddess lady came through again.’

  He holds up a piece of folded white cardboard.

  ‘That’s a birthday card.’

  Barri also has a stand of cards and gift-wrap in between the crystals and her pedicure chair.

  ‘Not just any birthday card.’

  He hands it to me. It has a cartoon of a hedg
ehog playing a saxophone and the words HERE’S A NOTE…

  I open it up, and see the words TO SAY HAPPY BIRTHDAY.

  ‘O-kay.’

  Mateo picks up another card from the table and rips the back of it open, exposing a little disc and circuit board. ‘They’re supposed to be musical greeting cards,’ he says. ‘But the circuit boards all got fried by the EMP. Luckily we don’t need them.’

  He takes a screwdriver and carefully pries off the circuit board and wires, leaving a copper disc with what looks like a smaller ceramic disc glued to it.

  ‘This is a piezoelectric disc,’ he says, and then launches into another complicated explanation featuring linear electromechanical interaction and inversion symmetry and electric dipole moments.

  ‘Right,’ I say weakly, once he’s finished, and he laughs at me.

  ‘It’s a round thing that goes beep,’ he says.

  He extracts a second disc from another greeting card, then digs in his bag and pulls out a pair of fancy headphones, holding them out before him reverently, like Hamlet with Yorick’s skull.

  ‘I saved up for six months to buy these,’ he says. ‘You can’t believe how much it hurts me to do this.’

  He inserts his screwdriver into the side of one of the earphone shells and cracks it open.

  ‘It’s like killing my own child,’ he moans, as he rips out circuit boards and other components.

  He attaches the discs from the greeting card into the earphone shells with glue, then lights a tea-light candle and uses the flame to melt some soldering lead to connect the headphone’s wires to each disc. Then he pops the covers back on the headphones, taping up the broken plastic with masking tape.

  ‘And there you have it,’ he says. ‘A functional crystal radio, hopefully.’

  ‘Will it work?’

  ‘Probably not. With a regular AM radio and normal conditions, you can usually only pick up a signal being transmitted locally.’

  ‘What’s defined as local?’

  ‘Under a hundred kilometres.’

  ‘Oh.’ There is literally nothing within a hundred kilometres of Jubilee, in any direction.

  ‘And a crystal radio is significantly crappier at picking up a signal.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But there’s a chance. AM broadcasts work by bouncing a signal off the ionosphere, a layer of the upper atmosphere that is ionised by solar radiation. We’ve had a lot of solar radiation because of the storm, so there’s a chance it will help a signal travel farther. Under the right conditions, an AM signal can theoretically travel thousands of kilometres.’

  ‘So it’s worth a try?’

  He nods. ‘It’s worth a try.’

  We head outside. Paddy Nowak comes pelting down the street.

  ‘You seen Emma?’ he pants.

  I shake my head. ‘No, why? Is everything okay?’

  He laughs at the concern on my face. ‘Yeah. We’re playing hide-and-seek. She’s really good.’

  He runs off, and we trudge up Snob’s Knob, a hill with an outcrop of red rock on top. We hike up the overgrown path, sweating and swearing in the humidity.

  ‘We couldn’t wait until twilight to do this?’ I growl.

  Mateo is panting too hard to reply.

  Eventually we reach the top of the hill, and Mateo hammers a metal pole he got from Georgie into the ground, and wraps more copper wire around it, attaching it to his little radio. Then he connects the headphones, slips them over his head, and attaches an alligator clip to one of the loops on the main coil.

  I watch his face carefully, as he shifts the alligator clip to the next loop, and the next one, and the next one. There are around fifteen loops in all. I don’t need to ask if he’s having any luck. I can tell he’s not getting a signal.

  On the thirteenth loop, I see Mateo’s brow crinkle. He cups his ears over the headphones and closes his eyes.

  I hold my breath.

  After a minute or so, Mateo opens his eyes and looks at me.

  ‘Anything?’ I ask.

  He slips the headphones off his head and hands them to me. I put them on and snatches of a recording whisper into my ears. It’s so faint I can barely hear it. It’s a woman’s voice, a recorded message on repeat.

  ‘It’s Indonesian,’ I say slowly. ‘I studied it at school.’

  ‘Can you translate?’ asks Mateo.

  I shake my head. Bloody Dad. He told us learning languages wasn’t a priority. Instead I can kill, dress and cook a rabbit.

  I close my eyes and concentrate.

  ‘Bahaya,’ I say. ‘That means danger. Rumah means home.’

  Then the woman says something I’ve never heard before, but I instantly understand. Mateo sees my expression change.

  ‘What is it? What does it say?’

  I pull the headphones off. ‘She said pulsa elektromagnetik.’

  Mateo stares at me. ‘Holy shit.’

  ‘In Indonesia. There’s an emergency broadcast about the EMP in Indonesia.’

  ‘Does that mean that Indonesia has power? They must do, right? To be able to send out a signal? So maybe it’s an Indonesian news story about what’s happening here.’

  I shake my head. ‘It’s just a loop,’ I say. ‘Maybe their government had equipment in a Faraday cage or bunker for emergency broadcasts.’

  The pulse is big. Really big. Like, whole Asia-Pacific region big. Maybe even bigger. Maybe the whole world. I look out over the edge of Snob’s Knob back down to Jubilee. I can see the whole town from here. It’s so tiny compared to the vast expanse of outback that surrounds it.

  Pulsa elektromagnetik.

  I see a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. Emma Zubek is sprinting down Waratah Way, black hair flying behind her. She ducks into a small space between a green Colorbond fence and a tin shed, crouching down low.

  There’s no one coming to help us. Jubilee is going to get swallowed by the desert. How can we possibly survive this?

  We return to Mateo’s room and curl up on his bed. We don’t talk, or fool around. We just hold one another, each of us lost in our own thoughts.

  There is no help coming. With no electricity anywhere, there is no way to repair the fried electrical substations. No way to replace the damaged circuit boards. We are back in the Dark Ages. Maybe forever.

  ‘It’s getting late,’ Mateo murmurs. ‘Shouldn’t you be heading off?’

  I nod, and reluctantly climb off Mateo’s bed, pulling on my shoes. He walks me down the stairs to the street where my bike is, and I put my arms around him and pull him close, breathing in his scent.

  I don’t want to go back to the Paddock.

  ‘Can I stay with you tonight?’

  Mateo looks surprised. ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘If you’re sure you want to.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I do.’

  Mateo pulls me closer. ‘Why don’t we ever go to your place?’

  I shake my head. ‘It’s so far. And my sisters are there. We’ve got more privacy here.’

  Mateo raises an eyebrow. ‘My mom sleeps in the room next door.’

  I squirm internally. I want to tell him. How come stupid Keller can know about the Paddock, but lovely Mateo can’t?

  Family must always come first.

  Good girl.

  ‘I know the truth,’ says Mateo. ‘You have a secret bunker full of supplies and gold bullion, right?’

  The laugh escapes from my mouth as though I mean it. ‘I guess I feel like here I can leave it all behind. Be with you, in the moment. At home…’ I sigh. ‘It all reminds me of Dad.’

  Mateo reaches out and touches my cheek. ‘I get it.’

  I’m a terrible person.

  We’re about to go back inside, when suddenly Keller Reid is there on his bicycle, looking clean and predatory.

  ‘Are you heading back?’ he asks me. ‘I’ll ride with you.’

  Mateo shoots me a questioning, somewhat hurt look.

  ‘Didn’t she tell you?’ Keller asks sm
ugly. ‘I hang out with the girls at their place sometimes. I’m surprised you haven’t scored an invite.’

  He laughs, like he’s made the funniest joke. And I suddenly realise that I can’t stay with Mateo, even though I desperately want to. I have to go home to keep an eye on Keller. To protect Blythe from his wandering hands and silver tongue.

  I can hear raised voices coming from one of the houses nearby, and I remember the hard faces I saw earlier that day. Nine meals from anarchy.

  Mateo is scowling. ‘You’re an asshole, Keller,’ he says. ‘Come on, Pru.’

  He turns to go, but I don’t move. ‘I can’t,’ I say, knowing full well that at this moment Keller isn’t the arsehole in the conversation, I am. ‘I really should go home.’

  I walk away quickly to retrieve my bike, because I can’t handle the hurt that’s on Mateo’s face. I can still hear shouting, although I can’t make out the words. I don’t want to be here anymore.

  I pedal hard all the way back to the house, making Keller work to keep up. He makes a few attempts at conversation, but I am a granite wall of cold anger, and he eventually gives up.

  We dump our bikes in the shed behind the house, and head up over the ridge on foot. Every time I take a slightly different route, so as not to form any worn paths or tracks that might give us away. Keller follows me, a few steps behind. The sun is sinking low, lighting up the world in stunning orange and violet, but I don’t care. I’m made entirely of prickles and rage.

  I could be with Mateo right now.

  We could be eating cold beans from a tin, curled up on his bed, trying to make sense of this terrifying new world together.

  But instead I’m covered in sweat and dust, traipsing back to the Paddock with bloody Keller Reid to make sure he doesn’t molest my sister.

  ‘Pru,’ he says, and my irritation explodes as I round on him.

  ‘What?’ It’s everything I can do not to launch myself at him, fists flying.

  ‘I don’t know why you hate me.’ Keller spreads his hands in a gesture of peace. ‘We’re on the same side.’

  ‘We are not on the same side.’

  ‘I want to help keep the twins safe.’

  A flock of pelicans flies overhead towards Lake Lincoln, their wingbeats heavy in the air.

  ‘They have me,’ I say between gritted teeth. ‘They don’t need you to look after them. We don’t need you.’