Miner's strike

Craig Gutierrez looked up from the motherboard, shaking his head, as another yell outside disturbed him. He wanted to finish four more today and get them online tonight. Another explosive family ‘discussion’ next door threatened his peace, but he knew it would be quiet soon.

Guilt drove them from the shells of their other lives to congregate at the family home, like hermit crabs fighting over a shell. After an hour or two they would reach a critical mass, the arguments erupting once more before scuttling away, back to their parallel existences.

It hadn’t always been like this. When they moved in three years ago, they were a model family. The home and garden perfect, he heard nothing. They were polite and quiet when he met them. The inside corner plot they bought had been on the market six months because of the cramped garden. Craig only moved here because he knew it was on a node of the network and had the fastest broadband in town. He knew no-one else nearby, and he rejoiced in that—their family sedan suburban lives held no interest for him.

Craig mounted the board and fired it up without cooling to test it. The usual BIOS problem, but he’d fix that later. He prepared the next board. Strange, he thought, these people with needs, with something to prove, they searched but always ended up sad and disappointed. He’d found that if you assume life will go wrong, you will be happier.

His marriage had been short. She’d rushed into his life, dazzled him with her brightness and eighteen months later, lay wanton and careless, in the arms of another man. Vivacious, funny and engagingly wicked—he’d loved her, but she was a nomad and he didn’t ‘happen’ for her. It had hurt for a long time—she’d damaged him but, he changed gears, re-focussed his life and found solace in the great works of literature, challenged himself by learning to cook and found a source of income inside a wooden shed.

He knew he had a time window of two to three years before the Chinese state-owned enterprises caught up but, it would be enough. As long as bitcoin existed, he wouldn’t need to work again, re-reading Proust, Flaubert, Tolstoy and James Joyce. His solitary existence was part accidental and part intentional—he could rationalise it either way.

They were ‘New Australians’, mixtures of a mixture. Olive-skinned with flashing brown eyes and black hair. Modern suburban Australian middle-class citizens, a testament to Australia’s recent immigration policies. How he’d wished it had been so for his Mexican labourer grandfather.

He’d have to get more SATA cables tomorrow and fix the standby power supply. He scribbled a list on another yellow square of his life.

It started with the mother and ended with the younger daughter. A life-smudge that went from black to white, from idealism to practicality, from spirituality to school socks. The religious cult had sucked her life dry. It was symbiotic—she couldn’t live without it, and it needed her for nourishment. Weekly meetings became daily meetings and then she didn’t show for days which then extended into weeks. The destruction she wrought was palpable. It pervaded their lives like a plague. Craig sensed it through the walls.

The father couldn’t handle the pressure of his other-worldly wife, so he cut himself adrift, bouncing and swirling along the stream of life until he caught up in the branches of a fallen tree. The man found solace in the tree; she understood him; she was gentle and kind and divorced and still had enough pretty to interest him. If he climbed from the tree, it soon became frightening. Unseen beasts would savage him. If he beat one, a different one materialised. So he didn’t. He stayed in the tree.

The elder daughter was, for a time, the glue that held this dysfunction together. A kind heart but neither bright nor practical. Her late discovery she was an attractive teen eroded her sense of responsibility. Still only eighteen but, in outlook, middle-aged. The millennial boyfriend with whom she now lived in his parent’s home took the view that if they can’t bother to look after her sister then why should she? Sure, she looked in, but without money or skills, she was ineffectual.

You had to be sorry for the younger daughter. A mother who wasn’t, the father that didn’t, the sister that couldn’t. After they lauded her third novel, this would be as a seminal moment. You make your own luck; don’t give in; work hard and accept kindness; take pleasure when you can but you never, ever, rely on other people.

He had the mower out, anyway. It’d take three minutes to stop their neighbours from blaming Fatima again for her family’s failings. If it could bother any of them to look away from their narrow, inconsequential existences, they might understand, even offer to help. She left for school the next morning noticing he had mowed it and made a mental note to thank him. At fourteen, you shouldn’t have to think this way but this was her life. That her grandmother married and was pregnant by this age was a recurrent and sanguine thought. Fatima knew she was part of the problem. Brilliant at school, self-assured and popular. People like her had to do some heavy lifting in life—if you can, you have to, for those that can’t.

Craig wasn’t a total stranger in their home. It was a great comfort to Fatima that she had his number—he knew what to do with a flooded shower base and the washing machine that refused to run on the program she needed but would, on a similar one if she just pressed that button. She didn’t bother him with the shower that ran cold before she could rinse her hair and she was too proud to ask him if she might access his WiFi.

Being disconnected was the biggest blow. The ISP cut her off three weeks ago, her smartphone became a brick a week later. The latest cyclical family argument concluded that she didn’t need broadband, she could go online at school or at the mall. Fatima became angry, reasoning it was she that covered for their parental failures in providing a legal adult home for her.

It was a late summer storm, crashing over the coast with flashing blue echoes and biblical rain that tripped the switches. Fatima knew where the panel was, how to reset the black levers by flashlight and not touch metal but, still, the power was out. In the street, others had light. She might manage a day without power but she had to complete a school project in two days. She took a breath and punched the keys.

It had shocked him. How could they be so callous? The main isolators reset, he had checked the house. The shower was freezing and her voice broke as she told him he was wasting his time trying to reset the router. She looked dejected, embarrassed at having to cover for those who had a duty of care and yet he saw a strength in her, a determination and maturity borne of necessity—it was impossible to not help her—a small gesture might lift her. He sent her next door with his WiFi password whilst he reset everything that worked.

Rinsing hair uncut for two years under his rain shower with its strange scent of man mixed with ‘deodorant pine’, was luxury. Craig found her slumped in the corner of his sofa with a towel around her hair, smartphone in hand, drowned inside his huge bathrobe, smiling and radiant. She looked like a puppy. It elated him to bring light into her vulnerable life. She stayed an hour, dried her hair, updated Facebook, dressed and returned home. After Fatima left, the place appeared empty, as if a presence that belonged, was no longer here. He had made a small difference to her life, but she had made a huge difference to his.

She lay in bed, warm, clean, updated and happy, yet curious. She smelled her arm; it was him, here with her. Strange and exciting although she couldn’t understand why. Fatima dreamed that night waking at dawn with a fuzzy, light head. Through the fog of waking she recalled—she had stayed next door after her shower and it had been wonderful.

Fatima had WiFi access now, at least in her kitchen near Craig’s router and he’d fixed her shower. She was strong, making her way in the world without her damn family. But Craig—he was an enigma—kind and caring, not like she supposed men to be. He interested her, but she had no reason to make contact; he had made himself obsolete. Why did he do that? Was she a nuisance? What was it he did? How old was he? Why was he alone? Where was Mrs Craig?

A delighted Craig had upgraded The Shed and bitcoin was booming. He took a break down south just to breathe fresh air instead of solder fumes. After she left him and after he’d cried the pain away, he’d taken these little ‘re-sets’ to build his confidence and to inspire him. It worked for him and he took them still.

Along a deserted beach, it rained. The acrid aroma of fallen rain on the charred thicket of eucalypts made him think of Fatima—fragrant and young but damaged by bush fire. He wondered if she’d make it through all this without losing her balance and falling into the chasm. Perhaps she might be the one to pull that family back together. Maybe she buried her feelings and was inaccessible but he didn’t wonder why he wondered about her. She was so strong, so pretty, but so out of reach, far too young. It was wrong. He should forget about her.

He returned invigorated with new ideas, peppering his desk with a myriad more yellow squares. Yellow meant activity and distraction from his past but also a girl that stuck in his mind.

Saturday, cars arrived next door as guilt built up and people drifted back to the property. The evening was quiet until 11 p.m., then the first rumblings permeated the still night air. By midnight, it sounded cataclysmic, and the law arrived, doubtless invited by citizenry nearby. At 1 a.m. the place was dark and quiet. Too quiet.

Fatima answered in a tremulous voice. “You OK?” he asked.

Her voice was quiet “Yeah,” she said, relieved to hear his voice.

“Do you want to talk?” Craig asked. She didn’t answer.

“I know you’re upset, Fatima,” he said, “look, if you want to come round, it’s OK. I’m waiting for you.”

She sat in that corner of the sofa, wrapped in on herself, tiny and fragile. It was almost 3 a.m. He made sweet black tea which she sipped with both hands.

“It was awful,” she said, “we’re tearing ourselves apart.”

“You don’t deserve this,” he said. She sighed, shaking her head.

“Fatima, you’re fourteen, am I right? You can’t do this alone. Something will break,” he said.

“I have to, there’s no alternative. If I report them, it’ll be the end, but sometimes…” Her silence spoke more than words. Craig wanted to hold her. He knew hurt. At the time he’d longed for someone to share the pain, talk and hug, a woman, a man—it wouldn’t have mattered. But Fatima was too young, or was she? She had suffered enough. He watched her, thought about a beach in the rain and how she’d looked in his bathrobe.

“You have me,” he said, the words dying on his lips, sounding clumsy and stupid in the silence. He regretted not thinking about the consequences. She regarded him, mature beyond her young years.

“Tell me,” she asked, “tell me about Craig.”

He told her of his disastrous marriage, the pain of separation from someone you still loved, the finality of divorce and his love of great literature. She followed his eyes to the shelves bowed under the weight of books. She felt his enthusiasm. He explained how bitcoin mining worked and what was outside in The Shed. Fatima listened, her head tilted. There was, she thought, an odd symmetry between them.

After he finished, she still looked quizzical, as if he had avoided the question, cheated.

“Twenty-eight,” he said, “I’m twenty-eight, Fatima.”

She smiled before she unfolded, a butterfly in sunshine.

“You understand me,” she said, “I guess I do have you. And I’m very lucky,” she added, standing. She crossed over to him, offering her hands, and he accepted them, looking up into a smile.

“I’m freezing,” she said.

As dawn crept westwards, it found them sitting under the warm coverlet on the sofa. Fatima’s head was on his shoulder as she slept, twitching in the last act of a dream. The first rays of soft morning sun were playing reflected patterns on the ceiling as Craig woke. He studied them flickering a new day into a promise. He was excited and anxious but remained still until she became conscious. For a second, it disoriented her. She was warm and safe here, imagining her fingers playing with the first few threads of something she might soon pull around herself. Fatima didn’t want to move. He didn’t want her to move.

She looked up. “Is this where we kiss?”