Afterlight (32 page)

Valérie knew deep down it wasn’t mere chance that had driven him east out of London up to this remote rump of England. He was needed here. These people, these hard-working, these
wonderful
people, who’d managed to create something that vaguely resembled a little Garden of Eden on these ugly rusting platforms, they needed to hear that they were all alive and fed and safe and living in this remote place for a very specific reason.

Valérie could see what these platforms were; true they didn’t have a keel or a rudder, or a hull - they stood on solid base rock instead of floating on the sea, but those details withstanding, undeniably, this was an ark for those God had determined should survive.

He understood now that God - Jehovah, Allah, Jahmeh . . . whatever people chose to call Him - had a sense of irony, a sense of humour even. He could have gone Old Testament on the old world and flooded it once again with globally-warmed ice water from the polar caps. But, instead, He’d chosen a very modern way to show His displeasure; He’d chosen to strangle man with his own arrogance. All that technology, all those power stations, all those convenient machines that mankind so relied on, were stilled in one night when the oil was stopped from flowing through pipes from the Middle East.

Valérie shook his head.
Who would have expected God to be so modern-minded?

He watched a dozen people making their way across the long walkway from the production platform. He recognised some of their faces from the last prayer meeting he’d held, and there were some new faces that they’d brought along with them. Word was spreading amongst the others that he had something to say worth hearing. That God wanted to talk to
all
of them - whatever faith they’d been clinging to in the past - and explain His plans. Here, on this sea-borne Garden of Eden, right here, was where the future could be written. And Valérie could feel the tug of destiny, the obligation to step into Jennifer Sutherland’s shoes before things fell apart completely and lead these people to a place where he suspected Jennifer had already, gently been coaxing them; away from old material values towards a simpler,
sustainable
life.

The only thing she’d forgotten to add to the mix was God’s merciful message. It was the knowledge that they were special,
chosen,
that would bind them together, and they certainly needed that.

Martha Williams appeared in the doorway across the deck from him. She waved to catch his eye. ‘They’re ready below,’ she said.

He nodded. ‘I will come along in a minute.’ He watched her turn and step back inside. The woman had become his most helpful ally. Although Alice Harton had been one of his first converts, she wasn’t a popular woman. Martha, on the other hand, everyone seemed to warm to, and trust. The fact that she’d recently gathered up her few belongings and moved across from the accommodation platform to be with him on the drilling platform had helped his cause immensely. Others were coming now. Several more fresh faces each and every day.

Things were gently sliding Valérie’s way. Walter was doing a fair job of alienating almost everyone he interacted with, and the more he sensed authority slipping through his fingers, the more stressed and harried he seemed to become.

When Jennifer finally recovered enough to climb out of her cot, he hoped she would be sensible enough, and selfless enough, to hand over the burden of leadership to him. These people needed what he had to offer. Needed it so badly. It would be damaging for everyone’s morale if there was some sort of an unsightly power struggle between them.

For now, though, the longer she stayed in bed, the longer Walter had to really screw things up, the longer Valérie had to build his congregation, the better it would eventually be for all of them.

An idea occurred to him.

An idea to help speed things along. Many of the women already viewed Walter with a little suspicion; clucked amongst themselves at how close he’d always been to the Sutherlands, particularly Leona . . . particularly Hannah. Hadn’t there been something about his almost constant proximity to the little girl that had looked a little inappropriate . . .
needy
even?

Didn’t he just look the part, too? Old and unappealing, bushy eyebrows that shadowed furtive eyes and opportunistic glances and a Captain Birdseye beard on those florid cheeks, thick enough to hide the subtle leer of a pervert.

And that shrew of a woman, Alice, seemed the perfect person for him to ask.

After all, that’s all it took - just
asking
the question - to taint an unappealing old man like Walter with the lingering smell of that kind of a suggestion.

Once branded, always branded. It’s how that kind of thing worked.

 

 

 

H
ome was almost as Leona remembered it. St Stephen’s Avenue, Shepherd’s Bush - a leafy suburban cul-de-sac flanked on either side by a row of modest terraced family homes fronted by modest gardens gone to seed.

They’d left this place a decade ago; the morning after Dad had died . . . in the aftermath of the riots. London’s skyline had been smudged with columns of smoke, the roads and streets cluttered with things pulled out from homes and shops; like some bizarre end-of-the-world street party left for someone else to clean up. And it had been strangely quiet the day they had set off to escape London for good.

Ten summers and winters appeared to have changed little here; last autumn’s leaves lay in small, wind-gathered mounds against the kerb and around the bases of tree trunks lining both sides of the narrow avenue. The front gardens were lost beneath waist-high grass and weeds. She noticed a tile had slipped here and there on one or two of the roofs.

She brought her bicycle to a halt with the squeak of brakes outside one of the houses.

She climbed off the bike, pushed open the garden gate with a creak and stared at the small front garden - liquor bottles and crumpled cans of lager nestled in the tall grass.

Hannah asked her once about their home and the crash.
Was there fighting, Leona?

‘Yes, there was fighting,’ she replied. She still had nightmares about that week - ones that woke her with a scream in her mouth. ‘There was a gang of boys that hung around outside. Boys, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years of age having a party just outside our house every night of that first week.’ Leona spotted the fading peak of a Nike baseball cap and the rusting blade of a flick knife tangled in the long grass.

‘Then finally they got brave enough to start breaking into the houses one after the other. Stealing things, doing horrible things to the poor people inside.’

‘It was, love. Me and Jake did all right. Better than others. We survived it.’

She pushed her way through the stalks of grass, up the short gravel path to the front door. She examined it. It was closed and locked, just as they’d left it a decade ago. It looked like it hadn’t been forced.

It meant he hadn’t beaten her home. Her heart sank.
Jake’s not here.

He would have had to force the front door.

She fumbled for something she’d kept on a chain around her neck all these years, never really knowing why, and produced a worn and scuffed latch key that jangled against a brass ankh pendant as she pulled it out of her top. The key slotted into the lock and clicked effortlessly. She pushed the door open and stepped inside.

‘Jacob?’ she called out hopefully. Perhaps he’d forced the back door.

It smelled faintly of damp, of mildew, just like every other building did nowadays. But unlike so many other homes, at least it wasn’t gutted, it wasn’t a mess of things pulled out, inspected and tossed aside or broken; walls sprayed with graffiti. It still looked like a place in which people once lived - just dusty and in need of an airing.

To her left the doorway leading to Dad’s study, to the right the door to the kitchen. There were cardboard boxes on the floor in the hallway, Mum’s handwriting on them: ‘Jenny’s CDs’, ‘Andy’s DVDs’. She knew they’d been considering a trial separation at the time the crash happened. They hadn’t been getting on for a while.

She shook her head sadly. It had taken the end of the world to bring the pair of them back to their senses. At least they’d had a chance to say to each other what needed to be said before . . .

Her eyes stung and she wiped the tears away.

She checked the back door, that too was still locked and unforced. Jacob hadn’t come here last night. Which meant . . .

She closed her mind to what exactly that meant. She didn’t need to do that right now. Not now.

Lee?
Hannah’s insistent voice in her head again.
What you going to do now?

She looked up the stairwell in the hallway. Up there were their bedrooms, Mum and Dad’s room, and presumably Dad’s body at rest beneath a rotting quilt. She slumped down on the bottom step in the dark hallway and gazed out at the overgrown front garden, the open gate and the quiet leaf-filled street beyond. The morning sun dappled the brick walls of the house opposite. Quite pretty really, poppies in their front garden and cherry blossoms on the tree.

‘I don’t know. I guess I’ll just wait here for a while.’

 

 

 

W
alter stared at the scorched interior of the generator room. The rubber pipes had ignited in the blast, then burned and melted. So had the digesters, leaving pools of hardened plastic on the ground. The generator itself was largely undamaged but it had been knocked off its mounting by the blast and the casing was dented in several places.

It had taken him a couple of years of tinkering, foraging and learning to build them a methane-fuelled generator. All that could be done again. At least he’d know better what he was doing second time around. Jenny said she wanted them to have power again. Said it was a beacon of hope for the people; a sign of progress. Something they really needed to see.

He surveyed the mess around him. It was going to take quite some time to get things fixed up again. He needed to find another small brewery with similar sized incubators or . . . he scratched his beard in thought, or he could link up a series of smaller beer-brewing bins, each feeding into the methane tanks independently. Either way, there was a lot of foraging work that needed to be done, a lot of back-and-forth between the rigs and shore. He wasn’t sure he liked the idea of leaving Jenny alone so much. She was still weak and vulnerable and although she could get about a bit, shuffling painfully as her mending skin stretched and pulled uncomfortably, she wasn’t strong enough to get much further than the stairs down to the mess room.

Down there she had a chance to chat with people as they came in for breakfast and evening meals, and she was determined to do that; to show her face, to show everyone it was going to be business as usual.

That bastard Latoc was slowly pulling more and more people across to his platform to listen to his bloody sermons. He watched them traipsing across the walkway towards the drilling platform four or five times a day. Women mostly, some of them taking their children with them.

He wondered what Latoc’s appeal was.
Is it his accent? Is it his looks?

The man was slender and his lean face chiselled in a way that made him look both enigmatic and a little vulnerable. He imagined the older ladies wanted to mother him, the younger ones to bed him. But there were also some of the men amongst his followers; David Cudmore, Ronnie, Howard and one or two others. Whatever Latoc’s phony spiritual message, it seemed to have got through to them as well.

He cursed himself for not having the balls to throw the foreign bastard off the rigs the first time he’d caught him offering prayers in the mess.

Jenny’s support from those not yet under Latoc’s spell was ambivalent at best. They were happy to go along with the routines as they stood: after all, everyone needed to eat. But there were many amongst them who longed for the community to relocate ashore. Others who just wanted to have a greater say in how things were run. They may not have been buying into Latoc’s bullshit, but they certainly didn’t seem to want to loyally rally around Jenny.

After all she’d done. The least they could do was show a little support now she needed them.

As he surveyed the burned-out room, muttering his thoughts and grumbles aloud, he heard, through the metal ceiling, the scrape of feet entering the chicken deck above. Feeding time.

The muted murmur of the hens’ stupid cooing rose in pitch and persistence as they realised food was coming their way. The ceiling clicked with the sound of scurrying claws across the floor above as the birds scrambled to get close to those feeding them.

Several feathers and flakes of rust floated down from the ceiling, disturbed by the fluster of hungry birds. There were holes here and there; small ones. Patches of rust pecked at and worked on by the birds. Nothing so big that one of them could escape through, though. Not yet, anyway.

He returned his mind to the task of cataloguing the things he was going to need to acquire from shore. Trips he could try and combine with shore runs for fresh water and the periodical ‘shopping trip’ in order to conserve the marina’s dwindling store of diesel.