The neighbour's children, for a day

They came at 8:10 with a bag of clothes and a note. Three of them: 11, 9 and 6. The youngest had a rabbit under one arm and boots two sizes too big. She took the boots off at the door and did not put them on again all day.

Six blocks on the back of a cereal box

The note said their mother would be back before dark and gave a phone number that stopped working on Day 0. I read it twice and put it in the drawer with the other paper.

We made a schedule at 8:40 because I could not think of anything better to do with them. It went on the back of a cereal box in marker: six blocks of forty minutes. Forty is about as long as the six-year-old will hold one thing, and my watch is the only clock in the house that runs. The kitchen clock stopped at 6:40 on Day 0 and has not moved since, because it is electric and I have spent twenty-three days not noticing that.

Chores first, in the porch, gloves on: twenty minutes of sorting kindling by thickness, twenty minutes of sweeping a floor that was already swept. Then the ash bucket, which is the 11-year-old's job and stays his job. Then schoolwork: fourteen sums on the back of a municipal notice, twelve spelling words, one page of reading each out loud.

The mistake was at 9:30. There are two tablets in this house and one of them had 8% left. I gave it to the six-year-old because she was asking, and it ran for eleven minutes and went black, and the morning got worse from that point rather than better. She had a screen for eleven minutes and then she had a house. The other tablet has been dead since Day 6, when the power bank went. The car will not charge anything: it has about 1 L in it and it is a radio now. I am not burning the last litre to top up a battery.

Eleven minutes. I wrote that on the box.

Nothing to do is the dangerous part

A child in a cold house does not sit down. Over seven hours, three of them found four things I had not thought about. The cellar door, the candle on top of the fridge, the axe by the woodpile, and the pail of ash.

The stove is not in the house. It is in the shed, 14 m from the back door, and that is not a preference. The matches are in my coat pocket and there are 31 left, counted on Day 12 and counted again this morning.

Candles: three, each in a jar, each on a metal tray, all at 1.4 m or higher. That was true before today and it was not true enough, because a six-year-old climbs.

The cellar is the real one. Nine steps, no handrail on the left side, and a door with no latch on it.

Yesterday I sent the 11-year-old down those steps with a 12 L bucket of melt water. It was 4:50, the light was going, my left hand has not closed properly since Day 16, and he offered. He got four steps and slipped on the third from the bottom. He sat down hard and the bucket went into the wall and did not tip, which was luck and not skill, and I have not decided whether to tell him that. His shin has a bruise the length of my thumb. He did not mention it to his mother. She did not mention it either, this morning, at the door, which is worse than if she had. Yesterday was also the day I spent six hours on a car a seven-year-old pointed me at, so the bucket was the second thing I got wrong in one afternoon.

At 8:15 my partner put a kitchen chair on its side across the cellar doorway, seat against the frame. At 2:40 the six-year-old had the chair moved and the door open and was standing at the top of the stairs looking down into 5 °C dark. I was 4 m away in the kitchen and I did not hear the chair move.

The water is the other thing. 36 L, in four containers — two 9 L, one 12 L, one 6 L — in the cold room behind a board. One knocked jug is 9 L, which is more than a day. The board went up on Day 20 and I am glad of it now for a reason I did not have then.

The girl and the number

The nine-year-old found the water card at 10:20 and asked what it was for, and I said it was the tally, and she asked for a pencil.

She kept it better than I do. At 11:05 I said we were at 35 L and she said 36, and she was right, because I had not counted the 6 L jug. She wrote 36 and put a line under it. At 12:30 she asked why the dog gets a litre and she does not. I did not have a good answer, so I told her the truth: the dog does not understand rationing and she does. She thought about that and said it was not fair, and went back to the sums.

Their mother sent 4.5 L with them, three bottles in the bag, which I did not expect. I said thank you and meant it. I did not want to be the man measuring water out to somebody else's children. She did not want to be the woman who assumed. So we both did our part, and neither of us said anything about it.

We used 4 L of ours. 1.2 L each for my partner and me. 1.0 L for the dog. 0.6 L across three cups, the pot, and one cup the youngest put on the floor by the door. 1.2 L a day each is under what a person should drink and I know it. It is what there is. Water at the end of the day: 32 L.

She said about thirty words today and eleven of them were to the children. She did not mention the cellar once. She put the chair back at 2:45 and said, "You carry the water from now on," and went out for kindling. That was the whole conversation. I would have taken an argument better. An argument would have let me explain.

The children were better than I was. The six-year-old cried for four minutes at 11:00 over nothing I could identify, then stopped and asked for a job, and swept the porch a second time. The 11-year-old carried kindling for forty minutes without being asked twice. At noon the nine-year-old said grace over cold beans, out loud, in her own words, four sentences, one of them asking for her mother to be all right. I went and stood in the cold room until I could come back out. Nobody followed me and nobody asked.

Later the six-year-old wanted to know why the bell does not ring. I said I did not know. She said her nan's clock does not work either and nobody minds, and went back to the rabbit.

What if this is the winter. Six blocks of forty minutes, three children, a chair across the cellar door, from now until March. That is 120 days of it and I have 32 L. The bottle is still in my coat pocket, empty, and the walk east is not happening on a day with three children in the house. Tomorrow, if the ice holds and their mother comes back.

What I should have had on day zero

• Four 4 L containers with screw lids a child cannot open, so 36 L is never one jug away from 27.
• A wall clock that is not electric, or a wind-up alarm. Forty-minute blocks are a guess without one.
• A hook-and-eye for the cellar door and a stair gate. The hook is $3 and twenty minutes with a drill.
• 200 matches in one tin with a lid, kept above 1.4 m, counted once a week.
• Two decks of cards, a cribbage board and a pencil each. Not a tablet.