She gives a small, tight-lipped nod, and I feel I don’t deserve even that.
‘May I suggest something?’ says Clarita. ‘There are decisions to be made as we move forward. Some of them are hard decisions. We should have some sort of leadership structure. A council perhaps, that can vote and decide which path we take.’
There are nods and murmurs of agreement.
‘I’d like to nominate Violet to chair the council,’ Clarita continues.
‘I second that nomination,’ says Jan Marshall. ‘And I think you should be on it too, Clarita.’
‘I’m not from here,’ Clarita protests.
‘You are now, girl,’ says Violet.
Barri Taylor nominates Peter Wu.
Then a familiar voice speaks.
‘I nominate Prudence Palmer.’
I stare at Mateo, my mouth hanging open. There are mutters and rumbles of discontent.
‘Are you crazy?’ says Jan. ‘The Palmer girls lied to us.’
‘Can we trust her?’ asks David Bratton.
Mateo gazes calmly at me. ‘Tell them what you can do.’
There’s no point keeping it a secret anymore.
I take a deep breath. ‘I can find water just about anywhere and make it drinkable. I can navigate by the stars. I can use a ham radio. I know about medicinal plants, and plants you can eat, and plants that are poisonous. I can light a fire in the rain without matches. I can make pretty much anything out of gaffer tape. I know about food canning and preserving. I can make cheese from powdered milk. I can dress wounds, set bones and do some basic emergency dentistry. I can fish and shoot a bow or a gun, and I can skin and gut whatever I’ve caught.’
There’s a long silence after I finish speaking.
‘I second that nomination,’ says Violet. ‘Prudence Palmer, welcome to the Jubilee Council.’
There’s no applause. ‘Thank you,’ I say.
There is some discussion as to how the council will work, and we agree that there should be a weekly town meeting where the council can report on their decisions, and the other townspeople can raise areas of concern.
Then the meeting is over. People stand up and stand in small groups, chatting quietly, or heading out the door. Blythe takes a deep breath, squares her shoulders and heads over to confront Keller. I can’t hear what she’s saying, but she looks furious. Keller’s head is bowed low and pathetic. Maybe after today I’ll never have to talk to him again.
The thought cheers me, and I look over at Mateo, who is standing with Clarita.
He nominated me.
He showed the town that I can be useful. That the Palmer sisters aren’t just callous monsters who don’t care for anyone but themselves. He’s given me a second chance. A chance to prove myself to Jubilee.
I’m grateful, and also hopeful. Does this mean that he’s forgiven me? Was the nomination a peace offering? An acknowledgement that he understands why I did what I did?
I head over to him.
‘Hey,’ I say.
He nods at me, but doesn’t make eye contact. Clarita glances back and forth between us and then excuses herself.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘For everything. You were right. We never should have kept the Paddock a secret.’
He doesn’t respond.
‘And, um. I wanted to say thanks. For nominating me.’
Mateo raises his head. Whatever it is that I’m looking for in his eyes, I don’t find it.
‘I didn’t do it for you,’ he says, his voice cold. ‘You have skills that are useful. I did it for the town.’
The air is squeezed out of my lungs and I feel my face grow hot, as if I’ve been slapped. I mumble something, I don’t know what, and excuse myself.
I see Clarita heading for the door, and in an instant I decide to break another promise. I catch her by the sleeve.
‘I need your help,’ I say. ‘Grace is really sick.’ I explain about the cut on her hand and the resulting infection.
‘Why didn’t she come to me earlier?’ Clarita asks with a frown.
I sigh. ‘She was afraid you’d find out I’d already given her antibiotics,’ I say. ‘And then you’d want to know where I got them from.’
‘Ah.’ Clarita makes a face.
‘She made me promise not to tell you. Can you help her?’
‘I’ll see what I can do.’ Clarita looks around. ‘Where is she?’
I glance back to where we were sitting, but Grace isn’t there. I feel a flutter of panic, and then I see her.
She’s standing at the front of the room.
She sways a little, unsteady on her feet. She looks so thin and childlike in her red flannel pyjamas. Her infected arm hangs uselessly by her side. Her other arm is stretched right out in front of her.
Grace has the gun that Keller took, and it’s pointed at me.
‘Nobody move,’ she says, her voice low and wobbling.
The room falls silent as people notice her, and the sheen of sweat on her skin. The pallor of her face. That her eyes don’t quite focus, and that when she speaks, her voice is slurred.
‘Grace,’ I say, trying to keep my voice calm.
She shakes her head. ‘You betrayed us,’ she says to me. ‘You betrayed the family. Family comes first. That’s what Dad always said.’
‘I know. I’m doing my best.’
Blythe is still over by the wall with Keller, her face a mask of fear and shock.
‘There are spies everywhere,’ hisses Grace. ‘These people aren’t our friends.’
I notice David Bratton melt away from the edge of the crowd and slowly make his way towards the side of the room.
‘Grace,’ I say. ‘You’re sick. You’re not thinking right.’
‘I’m the only one here who is thinking right. You think it’s a coincidence that the mine was targeted? The very mine where Dad was working?’
‘The mine wasn’t targeted, Grace,’ I say. ‘It’s the solar storm. It’s everywhere.’
Grace lets out an unsteady huff of laughter. ‘Solar storm? Really? And how do we know it’s a solar storm? Because he said so.’ She waves the gun in Keith’s direction. ‘Who even is he? Do we know? He could be anyone. He could be one of them.’
‘Gracie, please,’ says Blythe, stepping forward.
‘They’ll kill us.’ Grace’s hands are trembling. ‘They’ll kill us while we sleep. Because of what we know.’
David Bratton edges along the wall towards Grace. She doesn’t notice.
A clap of thunder sounds, so loud and close that people duck and cover their heads, thinking that the gun has gone off. The sky outside flashes white with lightning.
‘Dad was right. He was right about it all. He was right to come out here. He was right about Mum. They got to her. And he did everything he could, but they still found him. And they’ll find us too!’
There’s a tapping noise on the roof, and it takes me a moment to realise that it’s rain.
It’s raining. I can see it pattering against the windows, collecting the red dust that has settled on everything, so it looks as if the window is splattered with blood.
David Bratton grabs Grace from behind, pinning her arms against her side. She twists and squirms, fighting against him. He loses his grip on her and she whirls around.
The tapping noise builds to a steady roar. Water runs down the outside of the windows in bloody rivulets.
David grabs Grace by the wrists, twisting to make her drop the gun. His fingers wrap around her infected hand. She cries out in pain.
It happens so fast.
I hear Blythe shriek, ‘Grace, no!’
The noise from the gun is so loud that for a moment I go deaf. Everything gets very small for a moment, like the universe contracts to something so tiny that I could hold it in the palm of my hand. Then my hearing starts to return and there is a high-pitched whine over everything and the room expands again and is full of shouting and the smell of boiled eggs and smoking copper and rain-soaked earth.
There’s a thunk and I see the gun hit the floorboards, and a faint haze of grey smoke.
I hear Panda yipping in terror and see her streak towards the door, a black and white blur.
People are shouting at me but I still can’t quite hear them and I yell for someone to turn off whatever is making that whining noise even though I know it’s my ears.
The rain is a thundering roar under everything, so heavy that I’m afraid Jubilee might get swept away. The ceiling is leaking over by the Wall of Hope, and dusty red water is pouring down over photos of loved ones.
‘Is everyone okay?’ I hear Clarita shout, but it sounds as though she’s a million miles away.
Family must always come first.
I look around and see Grace, crumpled on the floor, a puddle of pale skin and red tartan. David Bratton is standing frozen beside her.
I hurl myself across the room to her, skidding to my knees and enfolding her in my arms. Her mouth opens and closes without making a noise and I fumble at her, looking for blood, searching for the place on her body that’s been torn open by the bullet, the place where her life will start to ebb away unless I can stop it.
She lifts her hand and I’m so full of panic that all I see is spidery purple veins and throbbing red infection. I see how pale the rest of her skin is. I see how tight it is stretched over the bones of her wrist.
I toss my head to clear it of the whining noise, but I can’t shake it loose.
The Heart trembles under the relentless pounding of the rain.
Grace’s hand trembles in the air.
It takes me a moment to realise that she is pointing.
I turn my head.
I turn my head and see Blythe.
I see her eyes, wide and bluer than the sky. I see her sun-browned skin turned so white her freckles stand clear. I see her brows crease in a frown and her lips part, like she’s about to say something outrageous.
The sparkly unicorn T-shirt is her favourite. She’s had it since before we moved here – Mum bought it for her eleventh birthday. It’s too small now, tight across her chest. It’s been washed so many times that the sparkles have gone dull and grey.
But today the sparkles aren’t grey. Today they are blooming bright red around Blythe’s hand which is pressed against her stomach, as red as the rain pounding against the windows.
13
They strip the Paddock clean.
Every package and container. Every crumb of food. Anything that might help us all survive. The two solar panels are dismantled – one is installed on the roof of the Heart, the other transferred to Lake Lincoln, where Mateo rigs it up to a pump for the water tower. The wet season, after waiting so long to arrive, settles in with a vengeance, with day after day of steady rain, broken up by the occasional few hours of sunshine.
We grieve.
We regroup.
We survive.
Everyone is busy. We distribute jobs according to ability, and make sure people are happy to participate. They usually are. The kindness of Jubilee never ceases to surprise me.
Grace and I move into the post office with Keller. I don’t know how it happens – everyone else in the town is still suspicious of us, and we don’t get any other offers. We have to stay in town so Grace can get better. The obvious choice is the hotel, but I can’t bear to be that close to Mateo. I try to convince Grace to move into Ana’s house, but she is firm, and I can’t bring myself to resist her.
Clarita performs surgery on Grace’s hand, cutting deep to root out the infection. She sterilises everything and doses Grace up with new antibiotics. Her hand heals, but Grace isn’t okay. Half of her died that day, and I don’t know if she’ll ever recover.
Panda’s gone too. She got spooked by the gunshot and ran away. I search high and low for her, cycling through the rain-soaked scrub, hollering her name. But she doesn’t come back. After a month, I stop looking. Grace doesn’t, though. Every night she stands out on the back step of the post office, calling and calling. But Panda never comes.
Mateo doesn’t speak to me.
We find four ancient cars that haven’t been driven for years, and Georgie and Paddy Nowak gut them in the mechanic’s yard. Georgie strips the electronics out of the newer cars and retrofits them with older parts. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. As the weeks go by, her pregnant belly becomes too large for her to do much of the physical work, but she perches on a stool in the car yard and instructs Paddy and anyone else who comes by to help.
Violet Hickory manually pumps fuel up from the tank under the petrol station. The supply will run out, so we use the Holden sparingly. On the other hand, petrol doesn’t last forever – within a year it’ll be pretty much useless anyway.
We sow vegetable seeds along the bank of the lake, where I used to swim with the other Jubilee teens. There’s good, soft earth there, and ready access to fresh water. We plant rows of sweet potato, snake beans, eggplant and Ceylon spinach, which sprout within days in the wet, humid weather.
I gratefully relinquish the chest of guns to David Bratton, who goes on a weekly hunt in the Holden, returning with dead kangaroos and rabbits which he and Simmone butcher and then cook up in big twice-weekly barbecues. We’ve run out of LPG gas, but I teach everyone how to build a good fire for cooking using wood from down by the creek and around the lake. Leftovers get turned into nutritious stews and soups, and the gristly bits are fed to the town’s few remaining pets, and the chooks. There’s no shortage of protein, for now.
There are four or five households with chooks – including ours. We merge them into one flock and David Bratton builds a big coop in his back yard. The chickens spend most of the day free-ranging around town, before being securely locked up every night. There are still foxes and wild dogs around, and an egg-laying hen is a valuable resource.
Clarita bursts into tears when she sees Dad’s medical library. There are surgical textbooks and army field guides and books on herbal medicines. Dad had a special seed bank of medicinal herbs, so we plant digitalis, poppies, aloe vera, comfrey and chamomile, and I successfully transplant a small willow tree from our own garden.
Christmas comes, and we have a little party in the Heart. We decorate an artificial tree and Peter Wu leads us in carol-singing as the rain beats time on the tin roof. Barri makes boiled Christmas puddings, and David dresses up as Santa and gives us all silly gifts that he’s scrounged from around town. I get a collectible Jubilee spoon in a little plastic case.
Dad always scoffed at the community preppers online, dismissed them as feckless hippies and dreamers. He was far too paranoid to trust anyone. But he was wrong. Whatever chaos might be happening in the cities and bigger towns, here in Jubilee we are coexisting peacefully. Sure, there are arguments and debates. But we are respectful. When there’s dissent we compromise. We work out solutions to our problems.
Elsewhere, the shit may have hit the fan, but in Jubilee, we are getting shit done.
Violet Hickory looks down at the notebook in front of her.
‘So we have plenty of food and water,’ she says. ‘But we’re almost out of toilet paper.’
We’re sitting in the Heart for our weekly meeting. We have mugs of tea and there’s a plate of Tim Tams on the table. It feels jarringly ordinary.
‘Have you found Dad’s toilet paper tablets?’ I ask.
Violet shakes her head.
I explain about the aspirin-sized tablets that Dad stored in the Paddock, which expand into a handy wipe with a few drops of water. Dad had enough to last the four of us for a year, but between all the Jubilee residents it wouldn’t last more than a month or two.
‘So we still need to start thinking about alternatives,’ Clarita says. ‘Hygiene is so important right now.’
‘What about old newspapers?’ Peter Wu suggests. ‘That’s what people used to do.’
I nod. ‘And it might be worth going through the houses and collecting up all the spare sheets and towels to cut into reusable strips.’<
br />
‘Also tea towels and sponges.’
Clarita frowns. ‘We’d have to boil them before they can be used again.’
‘Sounds like a real fun job,’ says Violet with a chuckle.
I take the opportunity to tell them about my home-made menstrual pads. Peter Wu’s cheeks go a bit pink, and Clarita tells him to toughen up.
‘Right,’ she says. ‘What about long-term stuff? What else should we be thinking about?’
‘Sanitation,’ I say. ‘We’re lucky that our septic system doesn’t require any electricity, so we’ve been able to keep using our toilets. But that septic tank will fill up eventually, and we need a contingency for what to do next.’
‘What are our options?’
I screw up my nose. ‘No good ones. We don’t have the chemicals we need for the septic, so even if we did bucket out what’s in there now, we can’t continue to use it. We’ll have to dig latrines, somewhere downwind.’
It’s not an appealing thought.
‘How much longer do we have before we have to deal with this?’ asks Clarita.
‘Six months if we’re lucky. Maybe less.’
‘Perhaps we could table this until a bit later on then,’ says Peter, and we all agree.
‘I want to create a more permanent memorial, perhaps in the cemetery,’ Peter adds. ‘To honour those we cannot bury. The men lost at Hansbach, and the other folk who haven’t returned to Jubilee.’
Violet nods. ‘Good idea.’
The meeting adjourns and Violet and Clarita head off together towards the clinic.
I hesitate. I’ve wanted to talk to Peter for a long time, but never quite plucked up the courage.
‘Was there something you wanted to chat about?’ he asks, picking up our empty mugs.
‘I just wanted to know…’ I bite my lip. ‘Do you think I’m a terrible person? For keeping Dad’s bunker a secret?’
After the Lights Go Out Page 19