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 well before Christmas. The promise anyway.
Christmas alone.
No wife. No comms - a text or HF radio call. No way of finding out what was going on except leaving to go search for her. Who knows where she might be except that it’ll be many hours of hard driving away. Assuming she is doing what she said.
If I left Murphy’s law was she’d probably turn up here to an empty house (that had happened before in another time, different 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.
The generator blew up on Boxing Day.
The 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 the farmhouses 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.
Soon a watchman arrived to give me a fairly decent rendition of the last clunking throes he’d heard from the generator bay. We went up and found the thing seized solid, stinking of burnt oil. Cooked. 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 found was expensive enough to require his sign-off. Mr Aussie sparky selling it was even less sober than usual. Nothing was gonna happen until he dried out sometime after the New Year.
The irony was not lost.
I already felt powerless far too often in my nearly nine years long marriage. Now sans power in my own house. In the dark with no light.
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.
Oh yeah.
Late afternoon New Year’s Eve found me bumping the four miles down to the one hill at the very far end of 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. After a long minute 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 sunset-lit dust trail approaching even quicker than the dusk. It morphed into a red Renault coupe turning up my long driveway over half a mile ahead of me.
She was in the house when I arrived. Not pleased.
I barely got hello out before she launched in.
Where was dinner, she’d messaged two hours ago! Why are the lights not working?
Explained the generator naffing itself six days ago. That I’d spent two days in Arusha organizing a new one but, you know Africa, nothing gonna move fast.
It didn’t help.
She refused staying home on New Year’s Eve without power. I refused accompanying her to Arusha to party all night. I wasn’t driving two hours to spend the wee hours in some insanely loud dingy hooker-infested dance club. Mainly, I hadn’t seen her for yonks and wanted a quiet evening together.
“I’m done with you. How much money have you got here? I want all of it.”
Then to wrap a bow on my delayed present she announced she was leaving for good this time.
Something in me flipped.
Not courage exactly.
More like exhausted surrender finally tripped it’s fuse. Fatigue phase overload.
Enough 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 it all into her impatient hands. Thirty Benjamins.
Stunned mullet me was operating like an automaton so the symbolism didn’t compute until much later.
Shoving the cash in her handbag, she grumbled that it was disgustingly little then restated she was leaving for keeps.
Strode out the open door. It was night.
I didn’t follow.
Watched her taillights fade into greater distance, standing there powerless on New Year’s Eve.
No wife.
White knuckle lonely.
No power.
Dark blackness.