Nine lines on a clipboard

There is a clipboard nailed to the hydro pole at the corner, 38 m from my front door, with a pencil on a string. It went up two days ago and nobody will say who put it there. I read it properly for the first time at 9:10 this morning: nine lines, five hands, and one of them a child's.

Nine lines on a clipboard

Nobody has written please. Two people struck out a price and wrote a worse one under it.

• HAVE 4 AA. WANT 1 L GAS OR 2 CANDLES.
• HAVE 12 EGGS, 6 JARS TOMATOES. WANT BATTERIES, ANY SIZE.
• HAVE CHAINSAW, 2 L MIX. WANT BAR OIL 1 L, OR 4 HOURS LABOUR.
• HAVE 20 LB PROPANE, FULL. WANT 4 L GAS.
• WANT SOMEONE WHO KNOWS FURNACES. HAVE A BOTTLE OF RYE.
• WANT NEWS. ANY NEWS. WILL TRADE.
• 3 BOOKS. 1 CHOCOLATE BAR. I AM 9.

The propane line stopped me. I have two 20 lb cylinders in the garage, both full, and I have not offered either of them to anybody on this street. A man on the far side is asking 4 L of gas for one.

The woman two doors down was at the pole when I got there, copying the egg line onto the back of an envelope. Her front room is 8 °C, up from 4.

I wrote mine at 9:20. HAVE COFFEE. WANT 4 AA AND 2 CANDLES.

She read it over my shoulder. "What are you giving?"

"Coffee," I said.

"How much?"

"Five hundred grams."

She took the pencil out of my hand, wrote 500 g at the end of my line in her own writing, and gave it back. She said a line with no weight on it is a request, and that she had watched two men on this street write requests and call them trades. She did not say who the second one was.

Three hundred and forty grams

At 9:50 I opened the tin: 907 g, bought the third week of October, rationed at one cup on Sundays. There were 340 g in it. At 10 g a cup that is 34 cups, and I have drunk three.

My partner put it on the scale, read the number, and said, "You wrote five hundred." Then she went back to the sink.

The mistake was counting after promising, because I wanted my line up before the good lines were taken. I went back at 10:05 and did not rub out the 500. I wrote underneath it: PLUS 70 MINUTES OF LABOUR.

The woman at 14 has the two children. Her path is 26 m to the sidewalk, 30 cm of snow and ice underneath. I cleared it in 70 minutes with four strips of tape across the back of my left hand. The handle is 3 cm ash and I could not close my third and fourth fingers round it, so I pushed with the heel of my hand. The tape from Day 16 came off at 11:20 and I did the last 8 m with the hand open rather than stop and re-tape it.

What I got: 4 AA cells, two candles at 9 cm, and 6 eggs.

The eggs I cannot check. I do not know what temperature they have been at for nineteen days. I boiled two hard at 5:40, 11 minutes at a rolling boil. The other four are in the cold room at 3 °C, colder than a fridge since Day 3.

That is the rate on the card now. The cells are the only one I cannot make myself. Both of us knew that, and she took the coffee anyway.

The children

At 3:40 the door went. The nine-year-old from 14 was on the step with three paperbacks against her coat, and her brother, six, stood behind her on the path I had cleared and said nothing.

She had the line memorised. "Three books. One chocolate bar."

There is no chocolate in this house. There is a 400 g tin of cocoa with 240 g left.

I did not offer her cocoa. I asked what she wanted for the books. She said a chocolate bar. I said I did not have one. She looked at the books in her arms, then at the step.

So I traded six level spoons of cocoa, about 30 g, for one paperback. She watched each spoon as I levelled it.

Then she asked to sweep the step as well, because "the book is not worth that much". I said the book was enough. She swept it anyway, 20 minutes, and stacked the snow where the plough would not push it back.

I wrote it in the notebook as a trade: 30 g cocoa for one paperback, cover torn, which I will not read.

The dog came out while she was sweeping and she said his name before I did. She has been saying it through the fence for two years, on the way to school, and I have been in that kitchen for two years and never once seen her do it.

Two of the three things I wrote down today were gifts with a price stuck on them so that nobody had to say thank you out loud. The first one was mine to give. The second one was hers, and hers was the better trade.

Ten minutes of the six o'clock news

At 5:40 I walked across the road with two torn pages: 14 loads in his house, running and starting watts, from the Day 13 work on my own place. It took two hours. The top of the page says it is from memory, because I got the furnace wrong on my own list.

He has a radio and a notebook. Since Day 3 he has written the outage list off the six o'clock news into it, street by street. I have four minutes of a bulletin and he has nineteen days of them.

I said I had something to trade: ten minutes with the notebook.

He read the pages in his doorway with his coat open, which is the first time he has stood still in front of me since Day 13. Then he said, "You did not have to write all that out."

I said I did.

16 streets in the notebook. Ours is not one of them, and neither is the eighth line he stood at the end of his drive for last night. He said a street coming back is a name and a time, not a date. I copied the 16 down while he held the torch, and there was nothing in it I could act on.

The empty bottle is still in my coat pocket. I did not decide anything about the walk in his porch and have not since.

He kept the paper, and the two propane cylinders are still in my garage.

Water at the end of the day: 7 L. Five this morning, two 36 L melts for 5.3 L each and 168 g of gas, then 8.6 L drunk and cooked with, one litre of it through the dog.

The candle is 1 cm and tonight is its last night.

I have made four offers since Day 15 and not one had a price I could pay. Everybody on that pole writes the number down.

At 9:40 I walked to the corner with the torch. Nobody had taken my line. I rubbed out the coffee and wrote underneath: COFFEE GONE. STILL HAVE LABOUR. Then I came home and copied the nine lines into the notebook, in order.

What I should have had on day zero

• 24 AA and 12 AAA cells in one box, dated, about $18. I had four cells and a headlamp that takes three.
• Coffee in four sealed 250 g packs instead of one open tin, so a promise can be weighed against a packet and not against a guess.
• Two pencils and a dry pad in the front hall, so the board at the corner would have been mine on Day 2.
• A list of the 14 electrical loads in this house in watts, made in October, not from memory in December.
• One skill written down. The load arithmetic costs nothing to give twice.