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on the couch and I half wanted to wake him up so he wouldn’t miss out. When I opened the door Mrs White’s dogs whined and strained on their leashes, pawing my legs and nosing my feet.
    ‘Oh boys! Stop it! Heel!’ she said in a voice that was less than authoritative. They panted and looked up at me with big lolling grins.
    ‘Hello Fin. Is your dad here?’ Mrs White asked, craning to look past me into the house. She had a kind of plump homeliness about her that made me think of freshly baked Anzac biscuits. You could practically smell the golden syrup.
    ‘No. He’s not.’
    ‘No?! Where is he?’
    ‘Um, I don’t really know. I haven’t seen him since Wednesday.’ I almost choked up when I said that.
    ‘Wednesday! My goodness! You should have come around, Fin. I had no idea. I thought I saw him come home from work on Wednesday night?’
    ‘Yeah, he and, um, Kara went out again that night. They didn’t come back, probably because of the roads. I hoped they would be back by now but I guess it’s just got colder – more icy.’
    ‘Oh my goodness, Fin. You poor love. You know he’s probably perfectly safe, they’ve got no way of clearing the roads, I suppose. It’s not like we’re used to dealing with snow down here!’ She laughed but her eyes darted around nervously. ‘I was just calling in to see if you’d had any luck with the internet, if you’d managed to get any news. It’s like we’ve fallen into a black hole.’ She laughed again and shook her head. One of the dogs yawned and put its head on her foot. ‘It’s just awful, isn’t it? But I suppose they’ll sort it out soon enough, get the electricity back up. I just want to know how long this cold’s going to stick around. You know we’ve got our daughter’s wedding next month, we thought it’d be a lovely spring wedding.’ She motioned out to the street. ‘But instead we’ve got the next ice age!’
    ‘Yeah, sorry, no luck with the net.’
    ‘Oh dear. Have you got enough food, love? We’re always well stocked up, you let me know if you need anything.’
    I nodded. ‘We’ve got a fair bit. Mum was really worried about shortages.’
    ‘Okay. You know where we are. Try not to worry about your dad.’
    I said goodbye to Mrs White and watched her dogs pull her up the driveway. I took off my socks. I put them out on the porch beside the tracksuit pants I had worn the other day and closed the door.
    Our house started to show symptoms of neglect – the grotty kind that comes from having only male occupants under the age of twenty. The kitchen had become a festering dump and precarious towers of dishes had grown over the bench tops. There might have been a time when you could joke about it being a toxic-waste hazard, but now comments like that didn’t seem funny.
    This is embarrassing and I really don’t want to admit it, but neither of us had washed since the power went off. The thought of stripping off and washing in freezing and possibly radioactive water wasn’t exactly enticing. But it wasn’t until after I had been exposed to the fresh air when I was talking to Mrs White that I noticed the putrid, stale smell mulling in our house; one part body odour, two parts Rexona and one part vanilla-scented candles. I’m also ashamed to say that I didn’t really notice the neglected state of the kitchen either until we ran out of clean plates. I couldn’t remember the last time I had done washing-up. Before we got a dishwasher Max and I used to whine about having to do the washing-up and beg for a dishwasher. Mum would say that if we had a dishwasher we’d just whine about unpacking it and we were like ‘No way!’ But she was right, we did. Spoilt brats.
    I cleared everything out of the sink – piling dishes on the floor when I ran out of bench space – and located the plug underneath a damp dishcloth that smelled like a rotting carcass. I opened one of the bottles of water and sloshed the bare minimum into the sink. It would be