Powerless in the Dark
Final Collapse
Lonely on the farm in West Kilimanjaro.
My wife had been away nearly a month. The plan had been two and a half weeks on a timber-sourcing trip, home in time for Christmas. The promise anyway.
Christmas came. Went.
No wife. No text or HF radio call. No way of finding out what was going on except leaving my work commitments to go search for her. Who knows where she might be except that it’ll be many hours of hard driving away. Of course that’s assuming she is actually even doing what she told me.
If I went off after her she’d probably turn up here to an empty house (that had happened another time, another place). I had only patchy contact with the outside world so I was left to wait, wonder, and try not to let my fears run amok.
On Boxing Day evening the generator blew up.
That horrible high-revving Yanmar made such a din you heard it a hundred metres away. It ran whenever we needed to weld or compress air in the workshop, plus every evening so my and the workers’ houses could have light.
I was sitting down for dinner on my sunsets-to-die-for verandah when the lights dimmed, flickered, and quit. Then dead quiet.
A watchman arrived with a pretty decent rendition of the last ugly clunking throes he’d heard from the generator bay. We went up and found the Yanmar seized solid. Totally cooked. Not outta diesel. A thrown conrod? Given her vintage not worth fixing.
Brilliant.
Trying to source and install a new generator in northern Tanzania was not exactly straightforward between Christmas and New Year. My boss was holidaying in New Zealand and the only replacement I could find was expensive enough to require his sign-off. The Aussie sparky selling it was way less sober than usual. Nothing was gonna happen until he dried out sometime after the New Year was in.
The irony was not lost on me.
I already felt powerless far too often in my nearly nine years long marriage.
Now I was powerless in my own house too. Sitting in the dark with no light to see by.
What I did know, with a sinking inevitability, was that if my wife turned up before the generator was sorted, she was gonna be filthy.
She was.
Late afternoon on New Year’s Eve I drove the four miles to the one hill on the farm where I could usually catch a whisper of a cell signal if I stood on top of the Land Cruiser holding high my Nokia. A text ting-tinged in: my wife had arrived in Arusha a couple days ago and had texted two hours ago to say she was heading my way.
By the time I skidded back down the hill, I could see a dust trail approaching quickly. It morphed into a red coupe turning up my long driveway nearly a kilometre ahead of me.
She was in the house when I arrived. Not pleased.
I barely got hello out before she launched in.
Why wasn’t I home with dinner cooked and waiting? She’d messaged me two hours ago! Why are the lights not working?
Told her the generator had naffed itself six days ago. I’d spent two days in Arusha organizing a new one but, you know Africa, nothing gonna move fast.
That didn’t help.
She refused staying home on New Year’s Eve without power. I refused her desire to party in Arusha all night. I didn’t say as much but I wasn’t driving two hours to spend the night in some dingy hooker-infested dance club. Mainly, I hadn’t seen her for ages and wanted a quiet evening together.
“I’m done with you. How much money have you got here? I want all of it.”
To wrap that ever so nicely she then announced she was leaving me for good this time.
Something in me flipped.
Not courage exactly.
More like exhausted surrender tripped a fuse. Fatigue phase overload.
Enough with the drama and flaming blaming. Finally comprehending that no matter what I fixed, supplied, arranged, earned, or endured, it would never be enough.
I walked to the office, took all the cash that wasn’t the companies out of the safe.
Enough to live on for many months.
Counted thirty Benjamins into her impatient hands.
Stunned mullet me was operating like an automaton so the symbolism of the amount didn’t compute until she’d gone.
Shoving the cash in her handbag, she grumbled that it was disgustingly little and restated that she was leaving for keeps.
Strode out the open door into the night.
I didn’t follow her.
Watched her taillights fade with distance, and stood there powerless on New Year’s Eve.
No wife.
White knuckle loneliness.
No power.
Blacked out darkness.