Afterlight (21 page)

‘Our dad knew it was going to happen,’ said Jacob. ‘He worked in the oil business, didn’t he, Lee?’

She nodded in a vague way, eyes lost in the fire.

‘Dad said the oil was running out quickly back then. He called it “peak oil”. Said it was running out much faster than anyone wanted to admit.’ Jacob had heard Mum and Leona discuss that week many times over. ‘So, because there wasn’t much of it, no one managed to build up reserves, no one had it
spare
. So when those bombs exploded in . . . in . . . those Arab countries and all those other oil places, and that big tanker thing blocked the important shipping channel over there and the oil completely stopped, there was nothing anyone could do. It was too late.’

He tossed several pages from a faded magazine onto the fire, producing a momentary flickering of green flame. ‘There was no oil for anyone. That meant no fuel. No fuel meant nobody bringing food on ships and planes to England.’

Helen shook her head. ‘So why weren’t we growing our own food here?’

Jacob shrugged. ‘It was cheaper to import it than grow it ourselves. Right, Lee?’

She nodded mutely. ‘Economics. The finely tuned engine.’

‘That’s right,’ said Jacob, ‘the “Finely Tuned Engine”.’ He sighed.

Nathan shrugged. ‘The fuck’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Something our dad used to say.’

Nathan and Helen stared at him, none the wiser.

‘It’s what Dad called the world,’ he answered. ‘It was one of his sayings, wasn’t it, Lee?’

She nodded.

Jacob nodded at her. ‘Go on, you can explain it better than me.’

She sighed. ‘It was just one of his metaphors: the global economy was like a perfectly tuned engine, like a Formula One racing car; tuned to deliver the best possible performance and profit, but only under, like,
perfect
racing conditions.’ She tossed a menu card on the fire. ‘So, sure, it drives just fine on smooth dry tarmac. But not so good at coping with a pothole, or crossing a muddy bumpy field. That’s what the world was - a finely tuned engine for churning out profit. That’s all. Efficient, but very fragile. No money wasted on non-profit stuff like safety margins or back-up systems. No money wasted on tedious things like emergency storage or contingency supplies.’

She looked across the fire at them. ‘For instance, no supermarket was ever going to bother wasting its profits on setting up expensive warehousing for storage when they could rely on a just-in-time distribution system. So this country only ever had about forty-eight hours’ worth of food in it. It was always coming in on ships and trucks, refrigerated and as fresh as the day it was picked and packaged.’

‘Dad used to say we’d be screwed in the UK if something serious ever happened,’ added Jacob. ‘More screwed than just about any other country in the world.’

‘True, that,’ Nathan nodded.

‘There were no emergency stockpiles for us. No contingency planning, ’ said Leona. ‘We were totally caught out.’

‘Dad used to say the fuckwits who ran this country didn’t have a clue between them.’

Leona smiled in the dark. He certainly did. She remembered him shaking his head in disgust at the TV, snorting at the dismissive platitudes offered by government suits when uttered by some talking-head.

The fire crackled in the silence. Jacob tossed some broken strips of chipboard onto the flames.

‘It was only in the last year or so, when oil started getting really expensive, that the big important fuckwits at the top - the men in smart suits - began to realise their finely tuned engine was struggling to cope; that we were all gonna get caught out by something.’

‘So why didn’t they change things?’ asked Helen.

Jacob shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

Leona looked up. ‘Because the fuckwits in suits were only thinking about the next financial quarter and their next big bonus, that’s why.’

The others turned. It was the first real sign of life they’d had out of her all day.

‘Too greedy for their own good.’

‘Well, that’s just silly,’ said Helen. ‘The men in charge should’ve fixed things if they knew they were all wrong.’

‘Yeah, right,’ muttered Leona. ‘So, a pothole in the road finally turned up.’

‘The bombs in those oil places?’ said Helen.

Leona nodded. ‘And our finely tuned engine just rattled and fell to pieces.’

‘Within a single week,’ added Jacob.

Leona tossed the wooden leg of a stool onto the fire, sending a small shower of sparks up into the sky, the flames momentarily flickering with renewed appetite. The dancing pool of amber light stretched a little further up and down the smooth tarmac of the motorway, picking out several abandoned cars along the hard shoulder, nestling amidst tufts of weeds that emerged between the deflated tyres and wheel arches.

‘I suppose we all had it coming,’ said Jacob after a while.

Leona nodded, her eyes glinting, reflecting the guttering flames. ‘Dad was right,’ she uttered quietly, before shuffling down on her side and zipping up her sleeping bag.

 

 

 

W
alter held her hand. He knew she wasn’t hearing any of this, she was elsewhere, the place people go when they’re dosed up on enough codeine to knock out a horse.

‘The explosion shredded the feed pipes, it doubled back into the methane storage cylinder and blew that to pieces. The shards of that lacerated the other two of our three digesters. So, before we’re going to have some power again, I’m going to need to find replacements for those as well.’ He sighed. ‘They were bloody well perfect for the job as well. I suppose if I can find another brewery nearby . . .’

Jenny lay still, her breathing deep and even. The right side of her face, her right shoulder and arm and her torso were bandaged. The burns from the flash of gas igniting had been third degree across her shoulder and arm, and second degree across her neck and the right side of her face. Dr Gupta had told him Jenny had something like fifteen to twenty per cent damage to her BSA - body surface area. A person could quite easily die from that amount of damage, she’d added.

An infection and a fever had threatened to complicate the matter. So there was little more she could do but dress the knitting skin and keep it as clean as she could and bombard her with antibiotics.

It looked as if the infections were clearing up and the fever lifting. Jenny’s temperature was down, although the skin, where it had burned badly, still radiated an almost fever-like heat. Tami was still keeping Jenny out for the count; sedated and anaesthetised with a cocktail of drugs - as much as she dared use together.

‘There’ll be extensive scarring,’ she had told Walter. ‘This side of her face, her neck and her shoulder. There’s a chance some of her hair may not grow back on the right side. For a woman that’s, well, that’s not easy to accept.’

The scars were always going to be there, across her cheek and neck where she could easily see them every time she faced a mirror; always reminding herself of the day she lost a granddaughter.

He sighed, squeezing her hand gently.

Truth was, Hannah died because she was playing where she shouldn’t, and had kicked the feed pipe by accident. That would do it, he realised. That would have been enough to dislodge the G-clamp.

But that’s what they’re saying, isn’t it?
He kept overhearing mutterings that it was his shoddy workmanship that had killed the poor girl. Nasty spiteful assertions that the silly fool had cut too many corners, eager to hurry up and make electricity so he could impress Jenny - woo her into his cot with a spectacular display of his practical ingenuity.

Bitches.

And with Jenny out of the loop for now, for quite a few weeks, if not months, according to Dr Gupta, Walter was having to stand in as her replacement. No one seemed to be particularly happy with that idea. Certainly not that sour-faced bitch, Alice Harton, who seemed to be taking every opportunity to be canvassing support and stoking dissent.

Oh, yes, she sees herself as Jenny’s replacement all right
.

Without Jenny at his side he suddenly felt very lonely. Not even the other old boys, Howard and Dennis, were bothering to stand by him. David Cudmore, the chap Alice was bedding right now, must have talked them round for her. They all bunked together on the drilling platform, all thick as thieves.

And there was that Latoc fella, too. He was over there - he seemed to have attracted something of a following.

Groupies.
That’s what they were. His adoring bloody fan club.

Walter didn’t have a cluster of people around him that could shore him up. If Jenny’s kids hadn’t buggered off and left him, he’d at least have had them gathered close and giving him some support. But instead, all he had was Tami, and perhaps Martha, although she seemed to be increasingly interested in spending time up the far end of the platforms.

Everyone else . . . they were carrying on with their duties as they were spelled out on the whiteboard and turning up for their correct meal sittings; doing their bit and politely nodding at Walter when he had to issue instructions. But that was hardly support.

‘Jesus, Jenny, hurry up and get better,’ he muttered.

She stirred in her sleep, her clogged voice calling softly for someone.

He wondered how much she was aware of things. Every day there were periods when her glassy eyes were open and she was groggy but awake; moments when she could manage a few muddled words through the fog of drugs, as she sipped carefully spooned tepid stew - not hot, that would hurt the raw skin around her lips. But those were snatched moments amidst a chemical haze. He wondered if she even knew Hannah was gone, that her children had deserted them.

Thing is, it would be down to him to tell her; news that was going to break her heart. Not now though - not now. If she really could hear him, then that was news she could do without knowing at this point in time.

He looked at her hand, strangely untouched by the explosion, a lean and elegant hand. A grandmother’s hand. A mother’s hand . . . a beautiful hand. He raised it to his lips and kissed it gently, wishing he was twelve years younger and more her type; wishing he was a bit more like the husband she had lost in the crash. He knew she still mourned him, still spoke to him in quiet moments.

He sighed. Only with her like this, unconscious, did he have the courage to say what he’d yearned to say for a number of years now.

‘I love you, Jenny,’ he whispered. ‘I’d do anything for you. You know that, don’t you? Absolutely bloody anything.’

 

 

 

I
t was far easier to replace Helen’s bicycle than bother to fix the puncture. It went flat with an explosive
pfffft
just outside Thetford. Half a mile further along the road they rolled past a turning that promised them yet another retail park. Five minutes later the wheels of their bikes and the trailer rolled across a broad leaf-strewn parking forecourt. Untamed weeds pushed up in places, and the tarmac was lumpy where the roots of a row of decorative saplings were making a show of their spread down one side.

Like every other parking area they’d encountered, this one was more or less bereft of cars. Jacob remembered seeing roads clogged with vehicles in the week after the crash. It had seemed any car or van with at least a quarter of a tank of petrol had been pressed into service, packed with families desperately trying to get away from the chaotic anarchy of London.

But every artery out of the city had been sealed with a roadblock manned either by armed police and soldiers or ‘emergency response workers’ - civilians hastily pressed into service, armed and invariably supervised by a solitary policeman. They’d quickly discovered the civilian workers were a greater hazard, using the roadblocks as an opportunity to stop and shake down people for water and food supplies. Every major road and motorway out of London was now a graveyard of cars, vans and trucks - a carpet of immobile metal rooftops, bubbling and blistering from the rust spreading beneath their paintwork. The frames of their windscreens dotted green with small islands of moss, anchored to the perishing rubber seals.

The retail park looked like the dozen others they’d passed by in the last couple of days; even damaged to the same degree, as if a tacit agreement had passed amongst the panicking people of Britain that IKEA, Mothercare, Pets World, B&Q and the ubiquitous McDonald’s were to be ruthlessly targeted and plundered, and the likes of Currys, Carpetright and PC World were to be left well alone.

Leona told Jacob and Nathan to watch the trailer whilst she took the gun and led Helen inside Halfords to find a new bike for the girl.

Jacob watched them disappear into the dark interior then glanced back at the glass front of PC World. It looked utterly untouched. Not a single panel of glass broken, not even cracked. No lights on inside, of course. But, by the muted vanilla glow of late afternoon, he could just as well be in the past again; a Sunday morning before ten a.m. opening time, waiting for the first member of staff to turn up, yawning, nursing a hangover and unlocking the double doors for the first over-eager customer, impatient to get inside and replace an ink cartridge.

‘You see PC World?’ he said, pointing to it.

Nathan turned to look at the unbroken glass.

His eyebrows flickered up. ‘Hey, cool. Ain’t broken.’

Jacob realised that neither of them had seen an expanse of glass as large as this one still intact; not since before. Really quite an odd sight in a world where every window was a frame of snaggle-toothed shards, or snow-white granulated crystals.