The shutter, and the man with the nephew

I left at 7:40 with the empty bottle in my inside pocket and 500 mL of water, and walked the 12 km east. I was at the counter of the grocery store at 10:50. The pharmacy at the back of it was shut behind a grey roller shutter with a padlock on the hasp.

Twelve kilometres and a padlock

The route was on the back of the water card in pencil. −6 °C, no wind, the road plowed to one lane and the walking on the crown. 3 hours 10 minutes for the 12 km, 3.8 km/h against the 4 I had budgeted, because the north side was ice. I drank nothing before the top of the first hill at 9:05. The tape on my left hand lifted at 2 km, and I pressed it down and kept going.

The store was open on a generator, cash only, 9 people on a floor built for 40. Flour, tinned tomatoes, coffee. I had no money and nothing worth a dollar, and I stood in a lit shop full of food and could not buy a tin of anything.

The pharmacy counter is at the back. Roller shutter, 2.4 m across, pulled to the floor, padlock through the hasp. Under the bottom edge a 40 mm gap, and through it the bottom shelf and the boxes on it, white with blue bands. I lay down on the floor of a grocery store to look. The manager gave me three answers: the pharmacist comes Thursday, the key is with her, and there is nowhere to leave the bottle. The generator cable ran past that counter, taped down, and went to the tills and the coolers instead.

I read the label four times: my name, the drug, the dose, filled 9 November. None of that is a refill, and this is the first morning with nothing in my blood, and I cannot feel it. A pharmacist has to check a prescription and sign it before one of those boxes comes over a counter, and there was nobody in the building who could. The tyre iron is in the boot of the car, 12 km behind me, and the car has 1 L in it. 12 km at 9 L/100 km is 1.08 L. I thought about the iron for four seconds.

The man with the nephew

Four people in the queue. One talked. A man in a canvas coat with a carton of milk. He asked how far I had come. 12 km. He had come 6, and then he told me the news, because a man who has walked 6 km for milk wants to be useful.

"They're switching the eighth line back on tonight. Six o'clock. By the weekend at the latest."

"How do you know?"

"My nephew's on the London crew. He told me Sunday."

Sunday. Six days ago, on a phone, from a man in a crew yard, who had it from somebody else. I asked him two questions: did the store have my tablets, and were the roads east passable. I did not ask the crew's name, or which substation, or what switching a line back on means when the poles are where I last saw them. Those questions were free.

He let me stand behind the generator exhaust for ten minutes with my hands in the warm, and did not want anything for it. I have not worked out whether that makes it better or worse.

I left at 11:30 and was home at 3:10, 3 hours 40 minutes for the same 12 km. I built the six o'clock list on the way, out loud. Fill the tub while the pressure is up. Charge the phone. Put the insulin cooler on the counter. I had it finished before the second hill.

What I did with the afternoon

The dog had been alone 7.5 hours and met me at the door with his whole body. He got his 1 L before I took my coat off. That is the line I have not moved in eighteen days.

The stove was lit at 3:20. 36 L of loose snow into the big pot, two trips to the drift, 5.3 L out of it. Then rice and the last of the dried beans on the same flame, 45 minutes. 190 g of gas in the afternoon. The cartridge is lighter in my hand now than the 500 mL bottle with water in it.

That is the mistake, and it is not the rice. At 3:20 I melted 36 L of snow and cooked a meal I would not have cooked on an ordinary day. A man with a carton of milk had said six o'clock. The card on the cupboard door says 8.6 L a day. We have been under it since Day 14, at 5.2 to 5.6, by drinking less than we should. Today we drank to the card.

8.3 L out. 3.1 L through me, including the 500 mL on the road. 2.2 L through her. 1 L to the dog. 2 L into the pot, twice. The melt put 5.3 L back and the day closed at 5 L, the lowest since Day 7.

The second firing was 5:05, 12 minutes for tea and 2 L left warming in the room in case the radiators came on.

She said it was the first hot food since Day 15 that was not soup. Then I said that at this rate we should have a date more often. She looked at the pot and then at me and said, "We had a date." I laughed. She did not. It was not a joke, it was a receipt.

Six o'clock

At 5:50 I walked to the corner with the torch off. Fourteen houses. I counted them on Day 6 and again tonight: still 14, still 0. The transformer at the end of the street did not hum.

6:00. Nothing. At 6:05 the man across the street came out and stood at the end of his drive, and went back in. At 6:30 I used 4 minutes of the battery radio: outages across the county, crews from outside the region, no date given. No mention of the eighth line. At 6:40 the woman two doors down opened her door in her coat and said, "Not tonight, then." I said no. She said, "All right," and shut it. That was 50 minutes in the road at −6 °C.

The bell did not ring at six. It has not rung since the storm and I have stopped expecting it. I listened for it anyway.

She was at the table with the water card. "We have 5 L and a lighter stove than we had this morning." She wrote 5 in the box. I would have preferred it if she had said it was my fault. I had the answer ready and she did not ask.

Thursday is 5 days. At 5.2 L a day that is 26 L, and we have 5. The bottle in my pocket weighs 14 g.

I did not pray today. Not once, not badly, not at the corner. I had a date, and a date is easier than a prayer. By 3:20 I was spending against it: water, gas, a hot meal, a pot of warm water for a radiator that was never going to come on. I have put my weight on a sentence before. I have used a word about other people for doing it. I am not going to write that word down tonight.

Water: 8 L at 6:00 this morning, 5 L now.

What I should have had on day zero

• A 90-day supply of my own tablet, not a 30-day fill that runs out on a date nobody wrote on a calendar.
• A card in the coat with the drug name, the dose, the pharmacy's address and the health card number, in block capitals.
• $200 in fives and tens in the house, and $40 in the coat pocket. I had nothing in a shop that was open.
• Two sealed butane cartridges in the shed. We have one, borrowed, and it is lighter than a 500 mL bottle.
• A printed outage list with the street names on it, so a date has an owner.