The Weather Station Incident

Gregor Wakefield was forty-four years old and sitting in a Corolla outside a weather station on the top of a hill in rural New Zealand, wondering how his life had come to this.

Six hours of driving. Six. For a software upgrade. On a system that logged wind speed.

Well. He knew how his life had come to this. The divorce, mostly. Marie had gotten the house, the good chairs, and most of his self-esteem. He had gotten the Corolla and a sudden urge to prove he was still somebody. Young. Vital. A man who did exciting things in remote locations.

So here he was. Rain on the windshield. Sheep in the paddock. A weather station.

"Thrilling," he told the sheep.

The station itself was a squat white building with a small hotel bolted onto one side, like a barnacle. Wind coming off the hill had stripped most of the paint on the sign. He grabbed his bag and his laptop case and went in.

The lobby was also the common room, apparently. Two couches, a kettle, a corkboard with tide charts, and a shelf of paperback novels nobody had read since the nineties. Behind a small desk stood a young woman in a station jacket. Her badge said CELIA. She looked twenty-something, maybe twenty-eight, and deeply tired.

"Gregor Wakefield," he said. "Software upgrade. I'm booked."

"Yes," she said. "About that."

And then, from the armchair by the window, a voice he had not heard in twenty-two years.

"About bloody time."

He turned. Sabine Newton. Forty-three now. Still built like she could bench-press the Corolla. Still wearing her hair short. She had a mug in one hand and a look on her face that could strip paint off the remaining sign.

"Sabine."

"Gregor."

"What are you doing here?"

"Bus driver meetup. Regional. Booked in March." She took a sip. "What are you doing here?"

"Work. Software."

"You fix software now. On weather machines."

"Somebody has to keep the wind logged, Sabine."

Celia cleared her throat. "So. Here's the situation."

The situation was this: one guest room. One double bed. Two bookings. A clerical error at head office, or possibly the system Gregor himself was here to upgrade, which he chose not to mention.

"I can't resolve this," Celia said flatly. "There's no other room. The nearest motel is ninety minutes down the hill. I'm not driving that in this."

"Then one of us sleeps on the couch," Sabine said.

"It's the common room," Celia said. "Shift staff walk through it all night. There's a policy."

"About guests sleeping on couches?"

"About guests being walked in on."

Gregor looked at Sabine. Sabine looked at Gregor. Somewhere in the building a door banged in the wind and both of them flinched.

"Fine," Sabine said. "But I get the left side. I've always slept on the left."

"You have not. You slept on the right when we..."

"Left side, Gregor."

He dropped it. Twenty-two years ago they had dated, briefly and intensely, the summer he was an intern and she drove the town bus. It had ended the way those things end, badly, over an argument neither of them could fully remember but both could fully reenact.

"I'm forty-three, by the way," she said, dumping her bag on the bed's left side. "Since you were staring."

"I wasn't staring."

"You were doing the thing with your eyebrows."

Celia showed them the room. It was small. The bed was double, not queen. The thermostat was an old dial unit on the wall, and next to it a vent cover hanging at an angle.

"The thermostat's been off for a week," Celia said. "Either sauna or meat locker. Maintenance guy comes Thursday. You're here Monday and Tuesday, so. Good luck." She left.

Sabine opened her bag and started pulling out items one by one, holding each up like evidence at a trial.

"A fitness tracker. Gregor."

"It tracks fitness."

"A zinc sunscreen stick."

"You burn."

"I burn. You moisturize." Next item. "A wireless earbud case the size of a cigarette packet. And what is this? A magnesium spray?"

"It helps with sleep."

"You're forty-four, not seventy."

"Says the woman who brought her own pillow."

"My pillow is a good pillow. Your pillow is hotel cotton wool." She tossed the magnesium aside. "Divorce hits you hard, huh."

"We're not doing this."

"Doing what?"

"The post-mortem. In a hotel room. On a hill."

"Fine." She sat on the bed. It creaked. "Then do something useful. It's freezing in here."

He looked at the thermostat. The dial was set to 21 but the room felt like 12. He put his hand near the vent. Cold air. Barely any.

"I can fix it."

"You can fix weather station software."

"The vent's above that shelf." He looked around. There was a ladder in the corner, aluminum, lean-to style, one rubber foot cracked. "That'll do."

"That ladder looks like it was built by a sheep."

"It'll hold."

"It won't hold."

He set it up anyway, because that was who he was as a person. Sabine stood at the base with her arms crossed, which he took as supervision rather than support.

He climbed. The ladder wobbled on the second rung. He kept going. Third rung. The vent cover was screwed in wrong, someone had wedged it with a folded brochure for a winery. He reached up, popped the cover, and peered in.

"There's a dead bird in the duct."

"A what?"

"A bird, Sabine. It nested. It's blocking the airflow. That's why the thermostat's mad, the room never hits temperature so it keeps running the wrong mode."

"So pull it out."

"I'm getting to it." He leaned further. The ladder bucked. He grabbed the shelf next to him for balance, which was a mistake, because the shelf was a shelf, not a handhold.

Instruments went everywhere. An anemometer sensor clattered off the edge. A box of barometers, or what he assumed were barometers, small brass things, rolled across the floor like billiard balls. A glass beaker bounced once and did not break, which was the only good news of the evening. Something else, a chart recorder or a very old radio, hit the floor with a sound like a piano being told bad news.

"Gregor!"

"I'm fine."

"The shelf is not fine."

He climbed down. The shelf was indeed not fine. It leaned at a new angle, and the floor was covered in brass and glass and one very confused dead bird, which he now held in his hand because it had come out with the vent cover.

"Put the bird down."

He put the bird down.

Celia appeared in the doorway. She looked at the shelf. The floor. The bird. The two of them.

"I said no drama," she said. "That was my whole thing. Finish the shift. No drama."

"This isn't drama," Sabine said. "This is an incident."

"There's a difference?"

"Drama has shouting. This is just... wreckage."

Celia pinched the bridge of her nose. "Maintenance is Thursday. Thursday."

"I can fix the shelf," Gregor offered.

"Nobody believes that," Sabine and Celia said, at the same time.

The room was still freezing. The bird was still dead. Somewhere down the hall, the wind banged a door again, and Sabine looked at the bed, then at him, and sighed like a woman calculating how little sleep she was going to get.

"Left side," she said.

Sabine found a broom in the hall closet and swept the brass barometers into a dustpan like she'd been waiting her whole life for an excuse. Gregor held the shelf upright while she kicked its legs straight. It leaned anyway. They agreed to call it character.

"Dead bird," she said, sweeping that too. "Twenty-two years and you still wreck things by reaching too far."

"That's harsh."

"It's accurate." She emptied the dustpan into the little bin. Then she stopped, broom in both hands, and looked at him. "You know what I remember? The flood."

"Oh no!"

"Two thousand and four. You were an intern. Twenty-two, wore the same shirt three days running. The river came up over the low road and every pensioner in town was stranded at the pharmacy." She leaned on the broom. "Somebody had to drive the bus through it. Nobody would. Except me."

"I stood in the water for you."

"You stood in the water like a lost dog. I drove forty pensioners through a flood because a skinny intern with bad shoes said please." She put the broom back. "Then we broke up over something neither of us remembers and I never saw you again until tonight, holding a dead bird."

"I said sorry at the time."

"For what? Neither of us remembers." She almost smiled. Almost. "You got old, Gregor."

"You got better looking. Which is unfair."

"I know." She sat on the bed's left side. "Talk. Divorce. Fast version."

"Marie got the house, the good chairs, most of my self-esteem. I got the Corolla." He sat on the right side. The bed groaned.