Waiting in Disrepair
Nina’s old grandfather clock ticked heavily in the quiet stillness of the hallway. Standing in the dim, cold light that filtered through the grimy window of the front door, it was a sentinel against time’s unaccountable urges to skip through minutes and hours. Wise to the underhanded games that the supposedly steady march that time made from one moment to the next, the clockmakers of old had devised their tools to keep track of every instant. Each hour, each minute and each second was monitored by the progress of a hand on the clock’s face, and their steady, even progress around the circle was evidence of time’s good behaviour. If, however, any one of them was seen to skip a part of the rotation, be it a quarter, a half, or any other arbitrary fraction, the clock would give humanity a chance to see it, and to hold time to account.
This particular clock of Nina’s, however, was not a prime example of the art form. Although, on the surface, it did a passable enough job of reporting what the time was, it saw no reason to conform to the traditions of following tick with tock. In fact, it saw very little reason to ever tock at all. If someone, prior to the acquisition of this clock, had asked Nina to distinguish between a tick and a tock in isolation then she would have been singularly unable to do so. It was one of those distinctions that was utterly impossible to characterise outside of the exact circumstance under which it is expected, but if those circumstances are met, the brain forms a concrete definition of both sounds that must not be tampered with. It was largely for this reason that Nina was so jarred when the expected tick-tock rhythm failed to materialise, and in its place rang the eternal, lonely tick. Watching the pendulum swing from left to right, stay to the right for three beats, and then swing back to the left again had been disconcerting to be sure, but her focus was entirely set on the auditory dissonance. Every day, the hallway was dominated by ticking. During dinner one night she thought she might have heard a quiet and solitary tock, although it could also have been a tick coinciding with the letterbox flapping. As she went to bed that same evening there had definitely been a tack, the thought of which had kept her up all night, but she had never heard either a teck or a tuck. Presumably, it was only a matter of time.
Regardless of the sounds emitted by the grandfather clock, its hands moved around the face in more or less the expected manner. On that still and quiet day, they tracked the crawling, glacial progress of the morning while Nina and Grace, sitting in the living room with one eye on the clock and one eye on the window, could only wait.
“What’s the time now?” Grace asked, languishing on the pale grey sofa. Although too old to be described as new, the sofa still offered a lot of comfort and surprisingly firm cushions. Too light to cause them any severe compression, Grace appeared to be balanced on top of it rather than sitting into it.
“It’s… seventeen minutes past ten.” Nina replied. She was squatting atop an armchair, the back of which still rose up above her head, while the arms functioned as impressively effective buffers against falling.
Grace sighed. They’d only been waiting for seventeen minutes. Had they not been in possession of the clock, to hold the passage of time to account, she would have estimated something closer to a fortnight.
“Not that long then. Feels like it’s been forever.” She said dejectedly. Nina grunted in equally disappointed agreement. Silence reasserted itself in the room, except for the persistent ticking from the hallway. The television in the corner was dormant, no longer broadcasting their marathon of documentaries about walls and fences from the dark ages up to the modern day. This was particularly irksome to Nina, who had been riveted by the episode on feather-edged fence panels when their power had gone out. Neither one of them had had the heart to switch the television off, even though it was unpowered and silent, just in case their electricity supply should happen to be reconnected by surprise, ahead of schedule. To find out the news from the velvety voice of a narrator, who is embroiled in a deep discussion of advancements in concrete post technology, would be the sweetest gift of all at the end of a planned power outage.
As was to be expected, the lights were all off. Overcast as the sky liked to be, so that the sun could have its privacy, it gave the interior of the living room a grey, washed out pallor despite the curtains being thrown completely open. It didn’t help that the carpet was in dire need of replacement, having seen sufficient horrors to prematurely age it, and having lived for long enough to age by the traditional mechanisms as well. A double-old carpet was not a thing of beauty, and its sickly, faded pile sought to further desaturate any colour that dared to enter the room. This included the neon leggings that Grace was currently sporting, on account of not being able to face her pile of laundry just yet.
“Why did they need to cut us off, again?” Nina asked. Her chin was propped up by her hands, which in turn were supported by co-operation between her elbows and knees. It was a team effort, worthy of appreciation.
“It was something about a suspected giant worm crawling along the line of the underground power cables in this area.” Replied Grace, trying to recall the details from their notification letter. Missives from energy companies were so painfully boring that her brain had learned to resist them, forcing her eyes to jump wildly around the page instead of absorbing the information. It was, according to Nina, a self-defence mechanism against their powerful tranquilising effect. “The letter’s in the kitchen if you want to read it.”
“It does sound like pretty thrilling stuff. I think I might save that excitement for later though, I mean, it involves not only having something to read, but also two walks.”
“Two walks?”
“Yeah.” Confirmed Nina. “One to the kitchen to read the letter, and one back from the kitchen to sit down again. We don’t want to waste those precious nuggets of entertainment this early, do we? What if we’re waiting all day for them to finish digging up the street?”
“I don’t want to think about that possibility.” Grace decided. “But, you could easily make the letter good for four walks. Go the kitchen to grab it, then come back. Then read it, take it back to the kitchen, and come sit down again. Twice the walking for the same letter.” She proposed. Nina’s eyes widened.
“You’re a genius, Grace. We could drag things out so much more by insisting on doing everything in this living room.” She said, a world of possibilities rushing past in her mind’s eye. “Even so, we’d best save it for a bit. Four walks still aren’t that many to spread out over a whole day.”
“Yeah, that’s fair.”
Silence returned, except for the steady tick, tick, tick of the clock.
“I could make us a cup of tea! That’d break things up because there’s a walk, there’s tea-making, and there’s a cup of tea to enjoy. This is a no brainer!” Cried Nina, leaping up excitedly. The armchair behind her remembered the space she’d occupied, just in case she wanted to collapse back down into it. No self-respecting, busy, modern arm chair could spare the time for its padding to spring back into shape after someone stood up, just to have it immediately compressed again because they’d changed their mind. No, the real titans of chairship knew when to hold their deformations in place.
“There’s no power; we can’t use the kettle.” Grace said, like an avalanche smothering out the last glowing ember of a scented candle. A scented candle would have very little business on a snowy mountainside, of course; exactly as much business as Nina had standing up to use a kettle without power.
“Oh… oh yeah you’re right. That’s why we’re not doing it.” She said, while deflating. Her knees began to tremble slightly, preparing to flop her back down onto the waiting armchair, when the brain ticked over once more. “But I could use the saucepan! We’ll boil water the old fashioned way like utter, bloody savages, using a saucepan! Dude, I can’t wait to take my eye off it for a moment and then see it boil over the rim.”
There was a small fanfare of sofa-cushion creaking as Grace shifted herself slightly, so as to better face Nina.
“First of all, you could quite easily just use a bigger pan, or put less water in it. I don’t know how much tea you’re planning to make, but brimming any of the pans will be more than two mugs. We’d be urinating for the best part of an hour if we drank all that.” She said, always a voice of clear-cut reasoning and excellent pan-size estimation. “Secondly, the ignition on the hob is electric as well. If you try that, all you’ll do it fill the house with gas.”
Nina frowned. From what she understood about explosion hazards and the human requirement to breathe, filling the house with gas from their hob would be a bad move.
“We’ve got a firelighter somewhere though… from the barbecue we had during the summer. Where would that be…”
Reluctantly, behind her, the armchair’s padding started to return to its nominal shape. It appeared that the previous incumbent of the seated position was determined to stay standing, at least for the short term.
“Oh yeah, er… it might be in the crap drawer?” Suggested Grace. She was reluctant to give in to any form of animation just yet, in case the endeavour to make tea was audacious bordering on futile, but Nina’s firelighter idea was dangerously tempting.
“I’ll check it.” Nina said, striding unevenly on slightly numb legs into the kitchen. From her position on the sofa in the living room, Grace heard the tell-tale opening of a drawer, and some assertive rustling and shuffling of miscellaneous items. “What colour was it?”
“Uh, red, I think.” Grace called back. Paying attention to the colour of the lighter hadn’t been much of a priority for her during the summer.
“Alright…”
More rustling and searching sounds followed, along with some mildly irritated huffing and puffing. After a minute or so, Nina called out again.
“I can’t see it in here. Anywhere else you can think of?”
“What about under the sink? We might have stuck it in there with the lighter fluid.” She answered, remembering how they’d struggled to get their kindling to take, and had therefore doused the whole thing in lighter fluid. Aside from the collateral damage dealt to their hydrangea by the ensuing fireball, the move had been a success.
“Oh, yeah, good call.”
Cupboard doors were thrown open, and the clanking of metal and plastic bottles against one another rang out from the kitchen. Sinking a little deeper into the cushions, Grace wondered if their lack of entertainment was reason enough to sort the cupboard out properly. Every form of storage in their kitchen was, to put it mildly, more like the inside of a skip than a home. It was much easier to simply throw the bleach blindly into the cupboard than set it into place, and likewise when the kitchen counter was covered in pens, letters, screws, coins, or even the keys of their guests, it was much easier to clear it by opening the drawers and pushing everything off the edge of the worktop. Once that attitude has been in place for a short time, resolving the problems it causes becomes a mammoth task. Neither she nor Nina had the time in their daily life to waste sorting drawers out, but this wasn’t normal daily life. This was a day devoid of any of their usual vectors for entertainment, and extreme measures were therefore on the cards.
“Found it!” Nina shouted. “Time for tea!”
The cupboard’s enchantment over Grace was immediately dispelled, taking every foolish and desperate notion of tidying up with it.
“Awesome! I’ll come help!” She said, leaping up. She herself was a little surprised by the sudden burst of energy; the prospect of boiling some water had never enticed her that much previously in her life, even when she’d really wanted some pasta.
In the kitchen, she found Nina on her knees, leaning into the pan cupboard to select the prime candidate for water boiling purposes. Every other time they tried to boil something they just grabbed the big pan, the one with burn marks up the side from many a conflagrated spillage. It did the job, everything fit inside, and it was easy to wash up. But now, with the ever-present threat that this might be the most interesting part of their morning, it appeared that Nina wanted to give the selection process its due care and attention.
“I didn’t know we had a pan with a spigot on it!” She cried into the cupboard, sending muffled echoes back out to Grace. “This’ll be perfect for tipping fluids, of which hot water happens to be one, into other vessels, as which mugs with teabags could be reasonably described.”
“We do?” Grace leaned her head in as well, over the top of Nina, blocking most of the light out. They both squinted in the deepened gloom of the cupboard. “Oh yeah! I sort of remember that…”
They both withdrew from the cupboard, Nina with the pan in hand and Grace with no treasure to show for her adventures.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before.” Nina insisted. “Did you have it before we met?”
“Probably, yeah, but you’ve definitely seen it as well, come to think of it. We used it when we made pancakes the other year, remember? We made the sauce in this and then drizzled it on top.” Grace reminded, questioning herself on why that was a memory worth holding onto so tightly, when she couldn’t ever remember to set her alarm for work.
“I remember the pancakes.” Nina said, meeting Grace half way. Gushing water from the cold tap slapped the bottom of the pan hard, bouncing up again and covering a generous amount of the work surface, as well as the dormant kettle.
“Every ruddy time…” Grace sighed, much to Nina’s amusement. The latter made no indication that she had any intention to wipe the water up again, instead taking her dripping saucepan over to the hob.
“Alright.” She said, taking the firelighter from her pocket. “Do you go gas first and then flame, or flame first and then gas?”
“Probably wipe up the water first, and then flame, followed by gas shortly afterwards.” Grace tried, but it was no use. Nina had ignored requests to clean up the kitchen before, and she saw no need to pay attention to them now. The clicking of the lighter played well with the ticking of the clock in the hallway, synchronising just for a moment, before the hiss of gas gave way to the thwoom of ignition. A happy blue flame encircled the hob, quickly finding itself underneath a wet pan, sizzling as water evaporated away.
Meanwhile, Grace had occupied herself with fetching a pair of mugs, Nina’s ‘Silk Appreciation Society’ one and her own zebra’s-bottom-shaped model, and some teabags. Side-by-side she stood them, bags already in place, so that they would be ready to receive the bounty of hot water that the pan promised.
“Nice, cool. We’re ready for tea!” Nina said, looking down at the pan. There was, as yet, no indication from the water inside that it was anything but cold. “How long do you think this will take? Should we watch it to make sure it happens right?”
“There’s definitely a saying about watched pots when it comes to boiling, Ninny. But what is it that you think will go wrong if we don’t keep an eye on it? What would constitute water boiling wrong?”
Leaning against the work surface, back to the mugs and hands in her pockets, Nina pondered the question. Grace didn’t rush her; they had the luxury of time in abundance.
“I suppose it could boil over, and we’d need to be here to catch that before it happened.” She suggested.
“Yes, heaven forbid we should end up getting water everywhere.” Grace replied flatly, indicating the sodden mess around the sink with one hand.
“Or… it could start bubbling at the top and we’d need to flip the water over to make it bubble from the bottom, like it’s supposed to.”
“You’ve gone delirious with boredom and a lack of electricity.” Grace decided, frowning at Nina, who simply shrugged by way of response. Both of them looked down into the water in the pan. Nothing much was changing particularly quickly. After a few minutes some small bubbles began to form at the very bottom of the pan, signalling that the water was starting to consider how it might boil, should the mood take it at some stage in the near future.
From the hallway the sound of the grandfather clock’s relentless ticking drifted in, a metronome over which the sound of burning gas was played. It’d never be as timeless as Beethoven, but it was a fittingly tedious soundtrack for the activities of the kitchen.
Somehow tiring of watching the water generate a new bubble every six to ten weeks, Grace relented, grabbed a tea towel, and started to mop up the flood. Made of sterner stuff that than, and never one to give up on a pointless task half-completed, Nina kept a laser-focus on the pan. This level of attention was admirable, given that it was boiling, ironically, at a glacial pace.
With a dried sink and a wet tea towel, Grace once again joined the stoic vigil over the pan of water. Both of them strained to think of something to say about it, from a pithy observation about how tedious it was to an optimistic proclamation about how good it would be to have the tea, but nothing materialised in their minds. The thick blanket of tedium, sitting like a smothering blanket over the whole house, choked out any form of creative thought or enthusiasm, and left only the capacity to stare at a pot of hot water and wait for it to boil.
“Maybe there really is some truth in the saying.” Nina eventually managed, after a few minutes of silence. “It could be a quantum physics thing, where observing the water stops it from getting any hotter.”
“Or it could just take a while and not be very interesting.” Counter-offered Grace. “Hard to say really, isn’t it.”
“Mm, yeah.” Nina replied, ushering a whole new distended silence, except for bubbling, burning and ticking.
After the passage of some amount of time, one which would never be accurately estimated by anyone present in that kitchen, the water was at a raging boil. With an excitement that had been dulled by the rampaging rust of time, Nina turned off the gas, lifted the pan, and poured the water into the eagerly waiting mugs.
“This spigot really does the business. No wonder we used it in this alleged pancake sauce incident.”
“It certainly does perform the function that one would expect it to. We’d best not have any milk though,” she said, as Nina moved towards the fridge. “you’ll let the cold air out, and then the food might spoil.”
“It’ll only be for a few seconds, Grace. I’m not planning to leave it open while we drink. I’m not going to put the pan of boiling water in the fridge.”
“Right, but the power might be off all day, so putting the warm air in now will leave it warm all day.” Grace argued. “I think we need to go without it.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Nina groaned, and stomped back from the fridge to the mugs.
“Fine.” She said, dipping a teaspoon into her drink, hooking out the bag, and catapulting it in the general direction of the sink. It landed, perfectly neatly, on top of the tap. “Ha! Bet you can’t do that.” She said, right to Grace’s deeply unimpressed face.
“Just… why…” She lamented. Nina was not interested in answering, instead holding the teaspoon out to lay down the gauntlet. Reluctantly, Grace took the spoon, fished out her own bag, and walked it calmly to the bin.
“I guess I win then.” Nina decided, taking the most valuable of crowns. In her victory she treated herself to an exciting walk back to the living room, Grace following along one eye-roll later.
Both of them sat back down where they had been before. Whereas the armchair started to regret springing back from its previously established Nina-groove, the sofa had no such qualms. Grace slotted neatly back into the slight depression she’d formed over years of slovenly reclining, two cups of tea were placed on coasters on the floor, and clock in the hall kept ticking away.
Against all the odds, being in possession of a cup of tea each did nothing to make the depth of their powerless boredom any more bearable. There was still no sign of an approaching engineer up the front path, the television remained stubbornly dormant, and the clock continued its crusade against tocks. The only difference was that, every now and again, one of them could take a sip of their bitter, milkless tea, and force themselves to pretend that they were enjoying it.
“What’s the time?” Grace asked, desperately hoping to be closer to the end of their promised window for power restoration.
“Ten twenty-seven.” Nina replied, disappointedly. “At least the tea killed ten minutes, I guess.”
“Yeah.”
Silence, except for the ticking.
In the corner of the ceiling, a spider lurked in its web. There were no flies for it to catch, but still it waited patiently, hoping that eventually a bluebottle or mosquito would sneak in and bump into its sticky trap. Grace looked up at it, wondering if she was now feeling how the spider felt every day, or if the spider had some greater sense of zen.
“Are spiders meditative creatures?” She asked. Nina looked at her askance, and took a sip of her tea. It was, if anything, more bitter than before.
“I don’t think so?” She said. “They don’t seem the leg-crossing, ‘om’ humming sort.”
“Hm.” Considered Grace, staring at their arachnid guest. “I just wonder how they do this all day.”
Nina shifted around in her squat, attempting to reassert her own groove into the armchair.
“They’re waiting for food to arrive, I guess. Like when we’re waiting for a takeaway.”
“I suppose.” Grace accepted. “Maybe I could try that lifestyle. I’ll sit in the corner of the room variously ordering, waiting for, or eating a takeaway.”
“Might want to sleep at some stage as well.” Nina suggested. “You could try sleeping in the waiting periods, I suppose, but I don’t know how authentic that would be.”
“Yeah, fair. I don’t know if spiders sleep either.”
“But,” warned Nina, “it would mean that the sink would always be wet and covered in tea bags. I mean, I’m certainly not going to take on the burden of cleaning up after me. Can you imagine? It’d be awful”
Grace closed one eye and looked over at Nina. It was true; she would definitely let the sink succumb to coastal erosion before she ever wiped it over with a cloth.
“If I’m not moving, or cleaning, or going to work, then it’s probably fair for you not to want to do a bunch of extra cleaning up.”
“I’m not plumbing you a toilet in, either. You’ll have to move to use the bathroom.”
“That’d ruin everything. I never see the spider move to use the toilet.” Grace complained. “But I don’t really want to sit in my own filth either, so we’d best call it off.”
Nina nodded and took another bitter sip. Grace followed suit. Neither of them were terribly pleased about what they’d done, but at least they were doing something.
“What’s the time now?”
“Ten twenty-eight.”
“Urgh.”
Middle-distance became the most interesting part of the room, as both Nina and Grace stared at it, glassily. One could have been forgiven for assuming that each of them was lost in thought; lost they certainly were, but to call it thought would have been a drastic over-estimation. It was closer to the kind of meditative state of which spiders were presumed by both of them to be incapable, except it didn’t carry much of a relaxing, rejuvenating vibe. It was more of a dusty, empty hangar than a peaceful meadow. Oppressive shadows suppressed cognition, instead of an open sky letting it drift away. All they could bring themselves to do was stare, open-mouthed, while their eyes focused on nothing at all.
Outside the window, drab grey clouds drifting high above. There was nothing different about the scene outside to see, especially not through a window from a darkened living room. No cars could pass by, because the works had closed the road. No pedestrians wandered by because the housing estate didn’t lead to anywhere in particular. It was the most banal that a scene could hope to be.
Without warning, Nina stood up and walked to the window. Grace wondered whether it was to get a better look at the unchanging scene outside, or whether she was checking up on the workers from the power company. It transpired to be neither, and instead she was tugging the curtain back just a little. She heard the curtain rings slide against the rail, moving by a whole inch or two.
“There we go. Gets a little more light in here.” Nina said, trying to justify her actions. Grace couldn’t argue with it, even if the benefit of that additional inch of exposed window was questionable at best. After a quick snoop out of the window, and a shrug to relay that nothing of any interest had been learned, Nina slumped back down in her chair again.
“What’s the time now?” Grace asked.
“Er… Ten thirty-one.”
“God!” Grace growled, rolling over to lie face down on the sofa. After a solid breath through her nose she turned face up again, and remembered why she never pushed her face into upholstery.
“We could rearrange the cupboards?” Nina suggested, with a mixture of guilt and anxiety. Apparently, she had been afflicted by the same curse that had tried to claim Grace earlier.
“No! Never that, Nina!” She cried. “If we give in to boredom-tidying then there’s no telling where it might end. We’ll end up making a rota for the housework, or promising ourselves to clean more often, and we know how that always goes.”
“Sure, but there’s nothing else to do.”
“If we give in to this now then it’s like allowing the boredom to siphon our souls away. I know I was telling you to clean up your water spillage earlier, and I am still bothered about the teabag, but this isn’t the time for drastic alterations to our lives.”
Nina looked at her, puzzled.
“There are easier ways than that to just say you don’t want to do it.” She said.
“It’s not just that I don’t want to do it.” Grace said weakly. Nina kept her focus unwavering. “Although that is true, to be fair.”
“Fine. Then we could go for a walk and… get the groceries? Go to the park?”
“We could… but aren’t we supposed to stay in, in case the electricity company needs to come and check our fuse box?” Grace replied.
“Why would they possibly need to do that?”
“It’s in the letter. If the giant worms lay eggs then they can travel through the wires and into the fuse box. The company need to check it and remove them if so.”
“There is no way there are worm eggs that can be transmitted along cables.” Nina snapped. “How would that even work?”
“I don’t know. I’m not a worm expert. You can read the letter yourself if you want to.”
Nina checked the time. Ten thirty-two. It was still quite early to blow the four-walk and one period of reading source of entertainment, but on the other hand she had to learn the veracity of Grace’s statement. Some questions needed to be answered.
“Alright, I’ll check it out.” Nina decided, walking back into the kitchen and taking the letter from the side. Already reading it, she sat back down on her armchair. Grace watched her face intently, and giggled when the saw the eyebrows rise.
“They really are checking for giant worms… and they actually might have to check the fuse box for eggs… what?!” She cried.
“I know, right? Pretty annoying.”
“So there might have been eggs in our fuse box ever since we got this letter and you didn’t think to check?”
“It’s not that I didn’t think to do it.” Grace corrected. “It’s that I’m not an electrician or a worm specialist. I wouldn’t know what I was looking for.”
“That feels like flimsy reasoning. I’m looking now.” Nina announced, once again leaping out of the armchair, once again plunging it into a crisis of whether or not to spring back into shape, and heading towards the fuse box. Grace followed her, and manoeuvred her way to the cupboard under the stairs, the only place that a fuse box can be reasonably allowed to sit within a home.
Most often opened to throw a pair of shoes in, or to grab a pair of shoes out while lamenting the mess that all the shoes are in, the cupboard under the stairs was a dark and damp realm. It had the faint aroma of mud and feet, with an undertone of new carpet from the offcuts that been tucked away in the corner. In short, it wasn’t a pleasant place to be. As Nina flicked the light switch on and leaned in to open the fuse box, she suddenly felt a pang of sympathy for the power company employees who had to read the meter. One day, she decided, she and Grace would clean it out, when they had time. Not today, obviously, because Grace had already given an edict around major tidying activities, but one day.
“Be careful. What if the eggs have hatched and a load of worms fall out?” Grace worried.
“Then we’ll have to clear them out of the shoes.
“Can we put some newspaper down so that they don’t go into the shoes in the first place?” She suggested. With a huff and puff, Nina conceded that it was a good idea. A few minutes and a lot of rustling later, there was a full covering of newspaper over the stockpile of footwear. It did a passable job of suppressing the odour, and Nina resolved to leave it in place.
“Alright. Here goes.” Nina said with a deep breath. Grace gripped onto the back of her shirt, as if to yank her to safety in the event of a worm calamity. It was sweet as a notion, although Nina suspected that it would simply lead to stretching of the fabric.
With a plastic clicking sound the latch on the fuse box was released, and the cover flopped open. Much to their relief, there was no eruption of worms from among the fuses, and the newspaper, although a welcome addition, was proven to be redundant. There were, however, a handful of ovoid shapes scattered around the interior of the enclosure.
“Oh no…” Nina muttered.
“What is it? Are they in there? Oh…” Grace said, leaning in alongside Nina. “That’s a shame.”
“Yes. Yes it is.”
They both removed themselves from the cupboard, and closed the door.
“I guess we’d better wait then.”
“Do you think we should go and tell the workers outside? So that they know we definitely have eggs to remove?” Asked Grace. “I’d rather not leave it up to them to work it out.”
“We’ll do it later in the day.” Nina said. “Don’t really want to bother them now, and if it looks like they’re going to leave without… you know… purging our fuse box then we’ll tell them.”
“Alright, but we can’t forget, OK?” Grace said.
“OK.”
They looked at each other, discovered that there was little else to be done, and sat back down in the living room. With an eye on the window for an approaching engineer, and their minds on the eggs in the fuse box, Nina and Grace waited for the day to roll past, while the clock in the hallway kept on ticking.
This particular clock of Nina’s, however, was not a prime example of the art form. Although, on the surface, it did a passable enough job of reporting what the time was, it saw no reason to conform to the traditions of following tick with tock. In fact, it saw very little reason to ever tock at all. If someone, prior to the acquisition of this clock, had asked Nina to distinguish between a tick and a tock in isolation then she would have been singularly unable to do so. It was one of those distinctions that was utterly impossible to characterise outside of the exact circumstance under which it is expected, but if those circumstances are met, the brain forms a concrete definition of both sounds that must not be tampered with. It was largely for this reason that Nina was so jarred when the expected tick-tock rhythm failed to materialise, and in its place rang the eternal, lonely tick. Watching the pendulum swing from left to right, stay to the right for three beats, and then swing back to the left again had been disconcerting to be sure, but her focus was entirely set on the auditory dissonance. Every day, the hallway was dominated by ticking. During dinner one night she thought she might have heard a quiet and solitary tock, although it could also have been a tick coinciding with the letterbox flapping. As she went to bed that same evening there had definitely been a tack, the thought of which had kept her up all night, but she had never heard either a teck or a tuck. Presumably, it was only a matter of time.
Regardless of the sounds emitted by the grandfather clock, its hands moved around the face in more or less the expected manner. On that still and quiet day, they tracked the crawling, glacial progress of the morning while Nina and Grace, sitting in the living room with one eye on the clock and one eye on the window, could only wait.
“What’s the time now?” Grace asked, languishing on the pale grey sofa. Although too old to be described as new, the sofa still offered a lot of comfort and surprisingly firm cushions. Too light to cause them any severe compression, Grace appeared to be balanced on top of it rather than sitting into it.
“It’s… seventeen minutes past ten.” Nina replied. She was squatting atop an armchair, the back of which still rose up above her head, while the arms functioned as impressively effective buffers against falling.
Grace sighed. They’d only been waiting for seventeen minutes. Had they not been in possession of the clock, to hold the passage of time to account, she would have estimated something closer to a fortnight.
“Not that long then. Feels like it’s been forever.” She said dejectedly. Nina grunted in equally disappointed agreement. Silence reasserted itself in the room, except for the persistent ticking from the hallway. The television in the corner was dormant, no longer broadcasting their marathon of documentaries about walls and fences from the dark ages up to the modern day. This was particularly irksome to Nina, who had been riveted by the episode on feather-edged fence panels when their power had gone out. Neither one of them had had the heart to switch the television off, even though it was unpowered and silent, just in case their electricity supply should happen to be reconnected by surprise, ahead of schedule. To find out the news from the velvety voice of a narrator, who is embroiled in a deep discussion of advancements in concrete post technology, would be the sweetest gift of all at the end of a planned power outage.
As was to be expected, the lights were all off. Overcast as the sky liked to be, so that the sun could have its privacy, it gave the interior of the living room a grey, washed out pallor despite the curtains being thrown completely open. It didn’t help that the carpet was in dire need of replacement, having seen sufficient horrors to prematurely age it, and having lived for long enough to age by the traditional mechanisms as well. A double-old carpet was not a thing of beauty, and its sickly, faded pile sought to further desaturate any colour that dared to enter the room. This included the neon leggings that Grace was currently sporting, on account of not being able to face her pile of laundry just yet.
“Why did they need to cut us off, again?” Nina asked. Her chin was propped up by her hands, which in turn were supported by co-operation between her elbows and knees. It was a team effort, worthy of appreciation.
“It was something about a suspected giant worm crawling along the line of the underground power cables in this area.” Replied Grace, trying to recall the details from their notification letter. Missives from energy companies were so painfully boring that her brain had learned to resist them, forcing her eyes to jump wildly around the page instead of absorbing the information. It was, according to Nina, a self-defence mechanism against their powerful tranquilising effect. “The letter’s in the kitchen if you want to read it.”
“It does sound like pretty thrilling stuff. I think I might save that excitement for later though, I mean, it involves not only having something to read, but also two walks.”
“Two walks?”
“Yeah.” Confirmed Nina. “One to the kitchen to read the letter, and one back from the kitchen to sit down again. We don’t want to waste those precious nuggets of entertainment this early, do we? What if we’re waiting all day for them to finish digging up the street?”
“I don’t want to think about that possibility.” Grace decided. “But, you could easily make the letter good for four walks. Go the kitchen to grab it, then come back. Then read it, take it back to the kitchen, and come sit down again. Twice the walking for the same letter.” She proposed. Nina’s eyes widened.
“You’re a genius, Grace. We could drag things out so much more by insisting on doing everything in this living room.” She said, a world of possibilities rushing past in her mind’s eye. “Even so, we’d best save it for a bit. Four walks still aren’t that many to spread out over a whole day.”
“Yeah, that’s fair.”
Silence returned, except for the steady tick, tick, tick of the clock.
“I could make us a cup of tea! That’d break things up because there’s a walk, there’s tea-making, and there’s a cup of tea to enjoy. This is a no brainer!” Cried Nina, leaping up excitedly. The armchair behind her remembered the space she’d occupied, just in case she wanted to collapse back down into it. No self-respecting, busy, modern arm chair could spare the time for its padding to spring back into shape after someone stood up, just to have it immediately compressed again because they’d changed their mind. No, the real titans of chairship knew when to hold their deformations in place.
“There’s no power; we can’t use the kettle.” Grace said, like an avalanche smothering out the last glowing ember of a scented candle. A scented candle would have very little business on a snowy mountainside, of course; exactly as much business as Nina had standing up to use a kettle without power.
“Oh… oh yeah you’re right. That’s why we’re not doing it.” She said, while deflating. Her knees began to tremble slightly, preparing to flop her back down onto the waiting armchair, when the brain ticked over once more. “But I could use the saucepan! We’ll boil water the old fashioned way like utter, bloody savages, using a saucepan! Dude, I can’t wait to take my eye off it for a moment and then see it boil over the rim.”
There was a small fanfare of sofa-cushion creaking as Grace shifted herself slightly, so as to better face Nina.
“First of all, you could quite easily just use a bigger pan, or put less water in it. I don’t know how much tea you’re planning to make, but brimming any of the pans will be more than two mugs. We’d be urinating for the best part of an hour if we drank all that.” She said, always a voice of clear-cut reasoning and excellent pan-size estimation. “Secondly, the ignition on the hob is electric as well. If you try that, all you’ll do it fill the house with gas.”
Nina frowned. From what she understood about explosion hazards and the human requirement to breathe, filling the house with gas from their hob would be a bad move.
“We’ve got a firelighter somewhere though… from the barbecue we had during the summer. Where would that be…”
Reluctantly, behind her, the armchair’s padding started to return to its nominal shape. It appeared that the previous incumbent of the seated position was determined to stay standing, at least for the short term.
“Oh yeah, er… it might be in the crap drawer?” Suggested Grace. She was reluctant to give in to any form of animation just yet, in case the endeavour to make tea was audacious bordering on futile, but Nina’s firelighter idea was dangerously tempting.
“I’ll check it.” Nina said, striding unevenly on slightly numb legs into the kitchen. From her position on the sofa in the living room, Grace heard the tell-tale opening of a drawer, and some assertive rustling and shuffling of miscellaneous items. “What colour was it?”
“Uh, red, I think.” Grace called back. Paying attention to the colour of the lighter hadn’t been much of a priority for her during the summer.
“Alright…”
More rustling and searching sounds followed, along with some mildly irritated huffing and puffing. After a minute or so, Nina called out again.
“I can’t see it in here. Anywhere else you can think of?”
“What about under the sink? We might have stuck it in there with the lighter fluid.” She answered, remembering how they’d struggled to get their kindling to take, and had therefore doused the whole thing in lighter fluid. Aside from the collateral damage dealt to their hydrangea by the ensuing fireball, the move had been a success.
“Oh, yeah, good call.”
Cupboard doors were thrown open, and the clanking of metal and plastic bottles against one another rang out from the kitchen. Sinking a little deeper into the cushions, Grace wondered if their lack of entertainment was reason enough to sort the cupboard out properly. Every form of storage in their kitchen was, to put it mildly, more like the inside of a skip than a home. It was much easier to simply throw the bleach blindly into the cupboard than set it into place, and likewise when the kitchen counter was covered in pens, letters, screws, coins, or even the keys of their guests, it was much easier to clear it by opening the drawers and pushing everything off the edge of the worktop. Once that attitude has been in place for a short time, resolving the problems it causes becomes a mammoth task. Neither she nor Nina had the time in their daily life to waste sorting drawers out, but this wasn’t normal daily life. This was a day devoid of any of their usual vectors for entertainment, and extreme measures were therefore on the cards.
“Found it!” Nina shouted. “Time for tea!”
The cupboard’s enchantment over Grace was immediately dispelled, taking every foolish and desperate notion of tidying up with it.
“Awesome! I’ll come help!” She said, leaping up. She herself was a little surprised by the sudden burst of energy; the prospect of boiling some water had never enticed her that much previously in her life, even when she’d really wanted some pasta.
In the kitchen, she found Nina on her knees, leaning into the pan cupboard to select the prime candidate for water boiling purposes. Every other time they tried to boil something they just grabbed the big pan, the one with burn marks up the side from many a conflagrated spillage. It did the job, everything fit inside, and it was easy to wash up. But now, with the ever-present threat that this might be the most interesting part of their morning, it appeared that Nina wanted to give the selection process its due care and attention.
“I didn’t know we had a pan with a spigot on it!” She cried into the cupboard, sending muffled echoes back out to Grace. “This’ll be perfect for tipping fluids, of which hot water happens to be one, into other vessels, as which mugs with teabags could be reasonably described.”
“We do?” Grace leaned her head in as well, over the top of Nina, blocking most of the light out. They both squinted in the deepened gloom of the cupboard. “Oh yeah! I sort of remember that…”
They both withdrew from the cupboard, Nina with the pan in hand and Grace with no treasure to show for her adventures.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen it before.” Nina insisted. “Did you have it before we met?”
“Probably, yeah, but you’ve definitely seen it as well, come to think of it. We used it when we made pancakes the other year, remember? We made the sauce in this and then drizzled it on top.” Grace reminded, questioning herself on why that was a memory worth holding onto so tightly, when she couldn’t ever remember to set her alarm for work.
“I remember the pancakes.” Nina said, meeting Grace half way. Gushing water from the cold tap slapped the bottom of the pan hard, bouncing up again and covering a generous amount of the work surface, as well as the dormant kettle.
“Every ruddy time…” Grace sighed, much to Nina’s amusement. The latter made no indication that she had any intention to wipe the water up again, instead taking her dripping saucepan over to the hob.
“Alright.” She said, taking the firelighter from her pocket. “Do you go gas first and then flame, or flame first and then gas?”
“Probably wipe up the water first, and then flame, followed by gas shortly afterwards.” Grace tried, but it was no use. Nina had ignored requests to clean up the kitchen before, and she saw no need to pay attention to them now. The clicking of the lighter played well with the ticking of the clock in the hallway, synchronising just for a moment, before the hiss of gas gave way to the thwoom of ignition. A happy blue flame encircled the hob, quickly finding itself underneath a wet pan, sizzling as water evaporated away.
Meanwhile, Grace had occupied herself with fetching a pair of mugs, Nina’s ‘Silk Appreciation Society’ one and her own zebra’s-bottom-shaped model, and some teabags. Side-by-side she stood them, bags already in place, so that they would be ready to receive the bounty of hot water that the pan promised.
“Nice, cool. We’re ready for tea!” Nina said, looking down at the pan. There was, as yet, no indication from the water inside that it was anything but cold. “How long do you think this will take? Should we watch it to make sure it happens right?”
“There’s definitely a saying about watched pots when it comes to boiling, Ninny. But what is it that you think will go wrong if we don’t keep an eye on it? What would constitute water boiling wrong?”
Leaning against the work surface, back to the mugs and hands in her pockets, Nina pondered the question. Grace didn’t rush her; they had the luxury of time in abundance.
“I suppose it could boil over, and we’d need to be here to catch that before it happened.” She suggested.
“Yes, heaven forbid we should end up getting water everywhere.” Grace replied flatly, indicating the sodden mess around the sink with one hand.
“Or… it could start bubbling at the top and we’d need to flip the water over to make it bubble from the bottom, like it’s supposed to.”
“You’ve gone delirious with boredom and a lack of electricity.” Grace decided, frowning at Nina, who simply shrugged by way of response. Both of them looked down into the water in the pan. Nothing much was changing particularly quickly. After a few minutes some small bubbles began to form at the very bottom of the pan, signalling that the water was starting to consider how it might boil, should the mood take it at some stage in the near future.
From the hallway the sound of the grandfather clock’s relentless ticking drifted in, a metronome over which the sound of burning gas was played. It’d never be as timeless as Beethoven, but it was a fittingly tedious soundtrack for the activities of the kitchen.
Somehow tiring of watching the water generate a new bubble every six to ten weeks, Grace relented, grabbed a tea towel, and started to mop up the flood. Made of sterner stuff that than, and never one to give up on a pointless task half-completed, Nina kept a laser-focus on the pan. This level of attention was admirable, given that it was boiling, ironically, at a glacial pace.
With a dried sink and a wet tea towel, Grace once again joined the stoic vigil over the pan of water. Both of them strained to think of something to say about it, from a pithy observation about how tedious it was to an optimistic proclamation about how good it would be to have the tea, but nothing materialised in their minds. The thick blanket of tedium, sitting like a smothering blanket over the whole house, choked out any form of creative thought or enthusiasm, and left only the capacity to stare at a pot of hot water and wait for it to boil.
“Maybe there really is some truth in the saying.” Nina eventually managed, after a few minutes of silence. “It could be a quantum physics thing, where observing the water stops it from getting any hotter.”
“Or it could just take a while and not be very interesting.” Counter-offered Grace. “Hard to say really, isn’t it.”
“Mm, yeah.” Nina replied, ushering a whole new distended silence, except for bubbling, burning and ticking.
After the passage of some amount of time, one which would never be accurately estimated by anyone present in that kitchen, the water was at a raging boil. With an excitement that had been dulled by the rampaging rust of time, Nina turned off the gas, lifted the pan, and poured the water into the eagerly waiting mugs.
“This spigot really does the business. No wonder we used it in this alleged pancake sauce incident.”
“It certainly does perform the function that one would expect it to. We’d best not have any milk though,” she said, as Nina moved towards the fridge. “you’ll let the cold air out, and then the food might spoil.”
“It’ll only be for a few seconds, Grace. I’m not planning to leave it open while we drink. I’m not going to put the pan of boiling water in the fridge.”
“Right, but the power might be off all day, so putting the warm air in now will leave it warm all day.” Grace argued. “I think we need to go without it.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
Nina groaned, and stomped back from the fridge to the mugs.
“Fine.” She said, dipping a teaspoon into her drink, hooking out the bag, and catapulting it in the general direction of the sink. It landed, perfectly neatly, on top of the tap. “Ha! Bet you can’t do that.” She said, right to Grace’s deeply unimpressed face.
“Just… why…” She lamented. Nina was not interested in answering, instead holding the teaspoon out to lay down the gauntlet. Reluctantly, Grace took the spoon, fished out her own bag, and walked it calmly to the bin.
“I guess I win then.” Nina decided, taking the most valuable of crowns. In her victory she treated herself to an exciting walk back to the living room, Grace following along one eye-roll later.
Both of them sat back down where they had been before. Whereas the armchair started to regret springing back from its previously established Nina-groove, the sofa had no such qualms. Grace slotted neatly back into the slight depression she’d formed over years of slovenly reclining, two cups of tea were placed on coasters on the floor, and clock in the hall kept ticking away.
Against all the odds, being in possession of a cup of tea each did nothing to make the depth of their powerless boredom any more bearable. There was still no sign of an approaching engineer up the front path, the television remained stubbornly dormant, and the clock continued its crusade against tocks. The only difference was that, every now and again, one of them could take a sip of their bitter, milkless tea, and force themselves to pretend that they were enjoying it.
“What’s the time?” Grace asked, desperately hoping to be closer to the end of their promised window for power restoration.
“Ten twenty-seven.” Nina replied, disappointedly. “At least the tea killed ten minutes, I guess.”
“Yeah.”
Silence, except for the ticking.
In the corner of the ceiling, a spider lurked in its web. There were no flies for it to catch, but still it waited patiently, hoping that eventually a bluebottle or mosquito would sneak in and bump into its sticky trap. Grace looked up at it, wondering if she was now feeling how the spider felt every day, or if the spider had some greater sense of zen.
“Are spiders meditative creatures?” She asked. Nina looked at her askance, and took a sip of her tea. It was, if anything, more bitter than before.
“I don’t think so?” She said. “They don’t seem the leg-crossing, ‘om’ humming sort.”
“Hm.” Considered Grace, staring at their arachnid guest. “I just wonder how they do this all day.”
Nina shifted around in her squat, attempting to reassert her own groove into the armchair.
“They’re waiting for food to arrive, I guess. Like when we’re waiting for a takeaway.”
“I suppose.” Grace accepted. “Maybe I could try that lifestyle. I’ll sit in the corner of the room variously ordering, waiting for, or eating a takeaway.”
“Might want to sleep at some stage as well.” Nina suggested. “You could try sleeping in the waiting periods, I suppose, but I don’t know how authentic that would be.”
“Yeah, fair. I don’t know if spiders sleep either.”
“But,” warned Nina, “it would mean that the sink would always be wet and covered in tea bags. I mean, I’m certainly not going to take on the burden of cleaning up after me. Can you imagine? It’d be awful”
Grace closed one eye and looked over at Nina. It was true; she would definitely let the sink succumb to coastal erosion before she ever wiped it over with a cloth.
“If I’m not moving, or cleaning, or going to work, then it’s probably fair for you not to want to do a bunch of extra cleaning up.”
“I’m not plumbing you a toilet in, either. You’ll have to move to use the bathroom.”
“That’d ruin everything. I never see the spider move to use the toilet.” Grace complained. “But I don’t really want to sit in my own filth either, so we’d best call it off.”
Nina nodded and took another bitter sip. Grace followed suit. Neither of them were terribly pleased about what they’d done, but at least they were doing something.
“What’s the time now?”
“Ten twenty-eight.”
“Urgh.”
Middle-distance became the most interesting part of the room, as both Nina and Grace stared at it, glassily. One could have been forgiven for assuming that each of them was lost in thought; lost they certainly were, but to call it thought would have been a drastic over-estimation. It was closer to the kind of meditative state of which spiders were presumed by both of them to be incapable, except it didn’t carry much of a relaxing, rejuvenating vibe. It was more of a dusty, empty hangar than a peaceful meadow. Oppressive shadows suppressed cognition, instead of an open sky letting it drift away. All they could bring themselves to do was stare, open-mouthed, while their eyes focused on nothing at all.
Outside the window, drab grey clouds drifting high above. There was nothing different about the scene outside to see, especially not through a window from a darkened living room. No cars could pass by, because the works had closed the road. No pedestrians wandered by because the housing estate didn’t lead to anywhere in particular. It was the most banal that a scene could hope to be.
Without warning, Nina stood up and walked to the window. Grace wondered whether it was to get a better look at the unchanging scene outside, or whether she was checking up on the workers from the power company. It transpired to be neither, and instead she was tugging the curtain back just a little. She heard the curtain rings slide against the rail, moving by a whole inch or two.
“There we go. Gets a little more light in here.” Nina said, trying to justify her actions. Grace couldn’t argue with it, even if the benefit of that additional inch of exposed window was questionable at best. After a quick snoop out of the window, and a shrug to relay that nothing of any interest had been learned, Nina slumped back down in her chair again.
“What’s the time now?” Grace asked.
“Er… Ten thirty-one.”
“God!” Grace growled, rolling over to lie face down on the sofa. After a solid breath through her nose she turned face up again, and remembered why she never pushed her face into upholstery.
“We could rearrange the cupboards?” Nina suggested, with a mixture of guilt and anxiety. Apparently, she had been afflicted by the same curse that had tried to claim Grace earlier.
“No! Never that, Nina!” She cried. “If we give in to boredom-tidying then there’s no telling where it might end. We’ll end up making a rota for the housework, or promising ourselves to clean more often, and we know how that always goes.”
“Sure, but there’s nothing else to do.”
“If we give in to this now then it’s like allowing the boredom to siphon our souls away. I know I was telling you to clean up your water spillage earlier, and I am still bothered about the teabag, but this isn’t the time for drastic alterations to our lives.”
Nina looked at her, puzzled.
“There are easier ways than that to just say you don’t want to do it.” She said.
“It’s not just that I don’t want to do it.” Grace said weakly. Nina kept her focus unwavering. “Although that is true, to be fair.”
“Fine. Then we could go for a walk and… get the groceries? Go to the park?”
“We could… but aren’t we supposed to stay in, in case the electricity company needs to come and check our fuse box?” Grace replied.
“Why would they possibly need to do that?”
“It’s in the letter. If the giant worms lay eggs then they can travel through the wires and into the fuse box. The company need to check it and remove them if so.”
“There is no way there are worm eggs that can be transmitted along cables.” Nina snapped. “How would that even work?”
“I don’t know. I’m not a worm expert. You can read the letter yourself if you want to.”
Nina checked the time. Ten thirty-two. It was still quite early to blow the four-walk and one period of reading source of entertainment, but on the other hand she had to learn the veracity of Grace’s statement. Some questions needed to be answered.
“Alright, I’ll check it out.” Nina decided, walking back into the kitchen and taking the letter from the side. Already reading it, she sat back down on her armchair. Grace watched her face intently, and giggled when the saw the eyebrows rise.
“They really are checking for giant worms… and they actually might have to check the fuse box for eggs… what?!” She cried.
“I know, right? Pretty annoying.”
“So there might have been eggs in our fuse box ever since we got this letter and you didn’t think to check?”
“It’s not that I didn’t think to do it.” Grace corrected. “It’s that I’m not an electrician or a worm specialist. I wouldn’t know what I was looking for.”
“That feels like flimsy reasoning. I’m looking now.” Nina announced, once again leaping out of the armchair, once again plunging it into a crisis of whether or not to spring back into shape, and heading towards the fuse box. Grace followed her, and manoeuvred her way to the cupboard under the stairs, the only place that a fuse box can be reasonably allowed to sit within a home.
Most often opened to throw a pair of shoes in, or to grab a pair of shoes out while lamenting the mess that all the shoes are in, the cupboard under the stairs was a dark and damp realm. It had the faint aroma of mud and feet, with an undertone of new carpet from the offcuts that been tucked away in the corner. In short, it wasn’t a pleasant place to be. As Nina flicked the light switch on and leaned in to open the fuse box, she suddenly felt a pang of sympathy for the power company employees who had to read the meter. One day, she decided, she and Grace would clean it out, when they had time. Not today, obviously, because Grace had already given an edict around major tidying activities, but one day.
“Be careful. What if the eggs have hatched and a load of worms fall out?” Grace worried.
“Then we’ll have to clear them out of the shoes.
“Can we put some newspaper down so that they don’t go into the shoes in the first place?” She suggested. With a huff and puff, Nina conceded that it was a good idea. A few minutes and a lot of rustling later, there was a full covering of newspaper over the stockpile of footwear. It did a passable job of suppressing the odour, and Nina resolved to leave it in place.
“Alright. Here goes.” Nina said with a deep breath. Grace gripped onto the back of her shirt, as if to yank her to safety in the event of a worm calamity. It was sweet as a notion, although Nina suspected that it would simply lead to stretching of the fabric.
With a plastic clicking sound the latch on the fuse box was released, and the cover flopped open. Much to their relief, there was no eruption of worms from among the fuses, and the newspaper, although a welcome addition, was proven to be redundant. There were, however, a handful of ovoid shapes scattered around the interior of the enclosure.
“Oh no…” Nina muttered.
“What is it? Are they in there? Oh…” Grace said, leaning in alongside Nina. “That’s a shame.”
“Yes. Yes it is.”
They both removed themselves from the cupboard, and closed the door.
“I guess we’d better wait then.”
“Do you think we should go and tell the workers outside? So that they know we definitely have eggs to remove?” Asked Grace. “I’d rather not leave it up to them to work it out.”
“We’ll do it later in the day.” Nina said. “Don’t really want to bother them now, and if it looks like they’re going to leave without… you know… purging our fuse box then we’ll tell them.”
“Alright, but we can’t forget, OK?” Grace said.
“OK.”
They looked at each other, discovered that there was little else to be done, and sat back down in the living room. With an eye on the window for an approaching engineer, and their minds on the eggs in the fuse box, Nina and Grace waited for the day to roll past, while the clock in the hallway kept on ticking.