Second Year

Kel doesn't say much in the ute. He never does. He drinks his coffee out of the thermos lid and drives with one hand and the radio on the footy station, and Dane has learned over eighteen months that this is not a man who needs filling in. "You're doing the board today," Kel says, somewhere past the roundabout. Dane's stomach does something. "By myself?" "I'll be there. But I'm not touching it." "Right." "Right." The job is a reno in Belmont, a couple in their sixties who've knocked through to the back and want the switchboard upgraded to match. Dane has done maybe forty boards. He's done every one of them with Kel's hand somewhere in the process, tightening a lug, pointing at a label, going "nup, other one." He's never done one where Kel just stands there. Kel just stands there. He stands in the hallway with his arms folded and his coffee and he watches Dane strip the old fuse carrier out, watches him mount the enclosure, watches him run the mains. Every time Dane's hand hesitates, he feels Kel notice. Kel says nothing. Once, when Dane reaches for the wrong screwdriver, Kel makes a small noise in his throat, like a cough that isn't, and Dane puts it back without looking round. It takes three hours. Dane's shirt is stuck to him by the end. "Test it," Kel says. He tests it. Everything reads right. He goes through each circuit twice, labels them in his best handwriting, which is not good, and then stands back. Kel unfolds his arms and walks over and looks at it for a long time. Long enough that Dane starts going through it all again in his head, the earthing, the neutral bar, whether he'd torqued the main switch. "You've put the lighting circuits on the left," Kel says. "Yeah." "I put them on the right." "You said it didn't matter." "It doesn't." Kel looks at him. "That's what I'm saying. You did it your way. You'll do all of them that way now, for the rest of your life, and some poor bugger in 2060 will open that up and go, who put the lights on the left, and it'll be you."

Dane doesn't know if that's a compliment. He decides it is. The woman who owns the house comes through with a plate of Anzac biscuits and Kel takes two and says, "Young fella did that," and nods at the board, and she says, "Oh, lovely," the way people do about switchboards, and goes back out. In the ute, Dane says, "Was that alright, then?" "Yeah." "Like, actually." Kel takes a while. He's got the thermos lid in his hand again, empty. "My old boss, Terry, Terry Vickers, he let me do a board on my own in my second year. Bit of a shocker of a job, out at Lara. I was that nervous I dropped a whole tin of screws in the guy's pool." "You never told me that." "Nah. Well. Terry didn't say a word. Just stood there. I asked him after if it was alright and he said, 'Yeah,' and that's all I got. Drove me mental for about a week." Kel puts the ute in gear. "Then I figured out what it meant." "What did it mean?" "It meant yeah." They pull out. The footy station's going on about something. Dane's hands are still shaky and he sits on them, and looks out the window, and thinks about the lighting circuits on the left, in a wall in Belmont, with his name on them in a way nobody will ever see.