Home is where the heat is

The morning after the tremors, I woke up to a freezing house.

I’d only felt the tremors lightly – I had been dreaming that I was on a raft on a river, and the waters had gotten rougher and whiter, so I’d had to spread my feet wide and balance on the raft like a surfboard. I had woken up at this point, to find my bed softly trembling, like something alive, but I was used to the tremors by now (they happen often here) and so I’d fallen back to sleep almost immediately.

Three hours later, long before my alarm, the chill air woke me and when I gasped at the shock of it, a little puff of vapour rose up from my lips. My nose was frozen; my ears nearly numb. The cover was pulled right the way up to my neck, but already I could feel the cold seeping underneath it, reaching for my core. After a few seconds of self-encouragement, I finally leapt up out of bed, into my dressing gown and slippers.

The thermostat lit up happily when I touched it, but when I felt the radiators they were frozen. Not an electrical fault, then, but probably something physical. Some damage from the tremors, maybe, but who knew whether it was at my end, or at the main facility, or anywhere along the hundreds of miles of piping in between.

“Hello?” Mona sounded sleepy when she picked up the phone.

“The heat is out in my house. Is it OK at yours?”

“Yes, we’ve got heat. Are you OK?”

“I’m fine, I’ll call the company, thanks.”

The heating company picked up after a few rings. They apologised for the inconvenience and said they’d had a number of complaints from across the district about the heating going out because of the quake. The soonest they could get an engineer to my house would be three hours, they said.

As soon as I hung up the phone, there was a knock on the door. It was Mona, bearing hot soup.

“I found your fault,” she said.

Small stones crunched under my slippers as I followed Mona up the frozen path behind the corner shop. She stopped next to a little ridge on the ground that wasn’t usually there. Behind the ridge was a small crack, and through it I could see the blue of one of the district heating pipes.

“I asked around and it’s only your house that’s affected, I think,” she said.

“They can’t send someone for three more hours.”

“Come to mine.”

Within ten minutes of stepping through Mona’s front door, I was warm again. Her radiators were merrily pumping out heat, and it was so toasty that the view through the window onto snowy trees and an iced-over pond looked almost artificial. Mona felt my hands and rubbed them between her own. Then she offered me an armchair and a thick blanket and left me to drink the mug of soup.

“I’ll be right back,” she said as she disappeared through the front door.

It was all I could do not to fall asleep again. The cold had gotten me out of bed much earlier than was normal for a Sunday, and now, with the warmth of Mona’s house wrapping around me and the radiator gurgling gently against the far wall, I found my eyelids gently closing. The now-empty mug drooped slightly in my hands.

With a sudden thump and a flurry of cold air from outside, the front door opened and Mona hurried in.

“Come quick!” she said. “Come and see!”

Reluctantly, I left the blanket and the armchair and went back out to the crack behind the corner shop.

A small crowd had gathered, holding spades and garden forks and even, in the hands of one person who might have been slightly confused, a garden hose. I recognised about half of the people – neighbours, people I was on nodding terms with on the street – and the others were strangers to me. But they were all bundled up in thick coats and gloves, and they were using whatever implements they had brought to dig up the street and expose the broken pipe.

“We can’t fix it, of course,” said Mona, “but at least we can dig it up so the engineers can fix it quicker when they get here.”

“Mona!” I exclaimed, but I didn’t really know what else to say. Instead I stood and watched as the little huddle of people hacked away at the frozen ground, doing what they could to bring the warmth back to my house.

“Are there any spades left?” I asked.

Mona smiled.

“Don’t you worry about that! You go back to mine and get warm. We’ll let you know when the engineers arrive.”

I turned towards Mona’s house, feeling warm inside and out, and walked away to the sound of other people’s spades chipping away at the earth.