Three hours without power

Marina is halfway through a call when the whole building goes quiet. Not just the lights. The fridge, the router, the air conditioning in the front room and a background hum she didn't know was there until it stopped being there. The laptop stays on, and the client's face keeps talking for another four seconds before the wifi works out that it has gone too.

She sits looking at a dead screen. Ten past eight on a Tuesday.

From the window she can see it isn't the block: it's the whole area. The main road is black as far as the flyover, and only the hospital six streets down is still lit, in that generator white that never quite passes for light.

Her phone is on thirty-one per cent.

She goes looking for candles and finds two, bent, in a pasta jar. Lights one off the hob, which runs on gas and carries on working, and in the middle of that small victory remembers that the water pump does not run on gas.

Marina is on the ninth. The tank above her will last as long as it lasts.

She opens the kitchen tap and gets a cough, a hiss and nothing. So she picks up the bucket from the bathroom and the torch on her phone and starts down.

Otávio is on the eleventh and is in the shower when the water stops, which is a very specific kind of humiliation.

He stands under the dry shower for a while with shampoo on, working back through the sequence of decisions that led him here. Then he wraps a towel round himself, crosses the flat in the dark and catches his foot on the bookcase, because every home has one piece of furniture waiting for exactly this.

He pulls on shorts and a T-shirt with his hair still full of it. Picks up two buckets.

The stairwell was built in 1978 and has a small hopper window on every landing. With no emergency light, which has never worked because nobody replaces the battery, what's left is whatever comes through those windows: grey off the street, headlights crawling past because the traffic lights have died with everything else, and nothing more.

He counts the landings under his breath on the way down. Eleven, ten, nine.

On the ninth there is a woman standing with an empty bucket and her phone pointed at the floor.

Marina knows the face. He's the one from the eleventh, the one who always holds the lift and always asks which floor even though he knows. She has never known his name.

"You've got shampoo in your hair," she says.

"I know."

"Quite a lot of shampoo."

"I know quite a lot."

They go down together. The tap is behind the service gate off the car park, and there's a queue: the couple from the fifth with a saucepan, the woman from the second with a jug, the boy from the seventh who came out in flip-flops and thinks this is the best thing that has happened all year.

Filling a bucket is slow. Slow leaves room for talking.

He's called Otávio, works in public tendering, which he describes as "paper, a lot of paper", and has lived there two and a half years. She's been in the block seven. They work out roughly how many times they must have shared the lift and arrive at a ridiculous number.

"We should have done this sooner," he says.

"Talked?"

"Found out the name."

Going up with a full bucket is a different activity altogether from coming down with an empty one.

Otávio stops on the fifth landing with both arms shaking and admits to himself that the basic gym membership does not cover this. Marina stops too. She doesn't need to stop, and stops anyway, and he files the gesture without saying anything about it.

The window on the fifth is the only one that gives onto the internal shaft, so that landing is darker than the rest. They sit on the steps with a bucket each between their knees, and the block makes all the noises that only turn up when everything else shuts up: a door somewhere, a dog on the eighth, water dripping in an empty pipe.

"Thirty-one per cent," she says, showing him the screen. "That's what I had when it started."

"And now?"

"Nineteen. Because I've been staring at it for no reason at all."

"Turn it off."

She turns it off. The landing drops to the grey coming up the shaft, and it takes fifteen seconds or so before either of them can make out the shape of the other again.

Neither of them stands up.

What Otávio will remember afterwards is the order of things.

That she laughed first, at nothing, at the absurdity of the buckets. That he put his shoulder against hers because the step is narrow and there was no other way to sit, and that she didn't move her shoulder. That they spent two minutes talking about public tendering, the deadest subject available, and that both of them were paying wildly disproportionate attention.

That she reached up and started taking the dried shampoo out of his hair, a bit at a time, the way you pick grit out of a grazed knee.

That he let her.

That her hand came down from his hair to the back of his neck and stayed there for a length of time that has nothing to do with shampoo.

What Marina will remember is the concrete.

Cold at her back, grainy, with that texture old buildings have where nobody finished the render properly. The iron handrail freezing. The bucket that went over on the third step and rode down to the landing below making a noise they both heard and neither went after.

She'll remember thinking, with strange precision, that the power could come back at any second. That there was a switch somewhere in the world, in the hand of an engineer miles away, and that this engineer was deciding how long this lasted.

She'll remember hoping he took his time.

The power comes back at twenty past eleven.

It comes back the way it always does, all at once: the landing bulb, the entryphone chiming through its restart, the pump choking in the basement and then catching, and somebody's television on the sixth at the volume of a television belonging to a person who forgot the volume was up.

They are sitting on the fifth landing. One bucket where it should be, the other two flights below.

Otávio still has shampoo behind his left ear. Marina sees it in the light and doesn't mention it, because mentioning it now would be a way of closing the subject.

"Twenty past eleven," he says, reading the entryphone clock through the open corridor door. "Three hours and ten."

"You were counting?"

"I counted just now."

She stands and straightens her shorts, and the gesture fixes nothing, and they both know it.

Marina goes up to the ninth with the bucket that survived.

The water is back, so the bucket is of no use to anybody. She leaves it in the utility area anyway, full, and it stands there six days before she empties it.

The following Saturday, in the lift, he asks which floor.

She tells him the floor.