Afterlight (24 page)

Walter knew he wasn’t a popular choice of stand-in leader. Tami would probably have been more welcomed in the role.

She was looking at him as he thought that; reading his face like a book. ‘You know, Walter, no one can really blame you for that explosion,’ she replied. ‘That is not fair.’

‘But they are, aren’t they? I’ve heard what’s being said.’

He sometimes even wondered himself whether he
was
to blame. Even something as simple as those £30 cooking stoves you used to be able to buy at any camping store had a bayonet fitting as well as a screw valve. Safety should have been more on his mind than
haste
; haste to get something up and running for Jenny. And his allowing Jenny to bring Hannah down into the generator’s back room with those methane digesters, when no children, under any circumstances, should have ever been allowed in there . . .

What was Hannah doing down there on her own, though? She knew she shouldn’t play there, she knew that very well. So why? And the feed pipe lying on the floor, the G-clamp lying beside it.

There’d only been a fleeting few seconds down there in that dark room before the explosion. He’d caught the briefest glimpse of her feet protruding from behind the generator and the rubber hose dangling from the roof softly hissing gas. That’s it. That’s all he saw. But she would have had to have been climbing over the top of the casing to pull that hose free, surely? If she’d had an urge to climb on something, for crying out loud, there were plenty of other places she could have done that. It just didn’t make sense. Hannah was a good girl. She knew she’d have been out of bounds. She knew the generator was dangerous; not a climbing frame. It just didn’t make sense to him.

Dr Gupta interrupted his wool-gathering. ‘So, what are you going to do with Mr Latoc?’ she asked quietly. ‘Is he staying or going?’ She slurped a spoon of chowder. ‘You cannot leave the question unanswered for much longer, you know?’

‘I know, I know.’

Walter would ask Jenny what she wanted to do about him, but she was still out of it, either half asleep, or half-cut on those knock-out-a-horse painkillers she was taking.

Walter wanted the man gone. Valérie Latoc was trouble brewing. He had the people living over on the drilling platform in thrall to him. Every time he caught sight of the man, it was with a row of people sitting patiently, listening to him talking.

Of course it was women listening, mostly.

But he’d also noticed David Cudmore and Kevin in one of Latoc’s little audiences. It always seemed to look like a prayer group; a sermon on the mount kind of thing.

‘He’s some sort of preacher, I think,’ said Walter.

‘I know. Jenny would not be happy with him if she knew.’

Much as he’d like to, he couldn’t just kick the man off the rigs. Jenny had said he could stay on probation and, given that she was slowly getting better and would hopefully be able to take the helm again one day soon, it was her decision. Not his. If she woke and found Latoc gone, she’d think he’d booted him off out of petty jealousy. In fact, everyone would say that, wouldn’t they?

Even if he tried to have the man removed, Walter suspected it wouldn’t be allowed to happen. There’d be an uproar amongst his fan club.

‘Oh, speak of the devil,’ said Dr Gupta.

Latoc entered the mess followed by three women. Walter knew them quite well, they were bunked on the main compression platform. He hadn’t spotted them before amongst Latoc’s regular drilling platform crowd. Keisha, Desirae and Kara. The first two were sisters who’d once lived in north London. Kara was originally from Nottingham. Together, the three of them were normally an infectiously cheerful group, filling any room they were in with loud and cheerful bingo-hall banter frequently peppered with high-pitched and raucous belly-laughs.

New recruits. It seemed that Latoc’s brand of charm was spreading like a bloody virus to the other platforms now. They grabbed plastic bowls from the galley’s counter and were served a ladle of steaming broth each and then sat together at one of the other long tables.

Valérie Latoc extended his hands across the table and they reached out for them. His head bowed, as did theirs, and he began to utter, quite loudly, a prayer of thanksgiving. Walter knew Jenny would be on her feet already, on her way over to ask him to do this quietly or take it outside. This space was communal, shared not only by non-believers but by so many others of different faiths, who were equally asked to keep their faith a personal thing.

Jenny was strict on this. No public prayers, not here, not in the mess. Otherwise the door would be opened to all sorts of petitions: people wanting to eat on single-faith tables, people wanting the men to eat separately from the women, people insisting on fasting, people insisting on eating before sun up or after sun down.

Tami tapped Walter’s arm and nodded towards them. He shot a glance over his shoulder at them and then turned back round to face her, reluctant to meet her eyes.

‘You know Jenny would not accept this?’

He nodded.

‘If you let this happen, it will happen again.’

‘I know . . . I . . .

A dozen more people entered the canteen; the start of the fourth sitting, children chatting noisily to each other, hungry and too energetic for the mums shuffling in with them. One or two of them eyed Valérie and the others curiously.

‘You cannot let this happen and not say something, Walter. People see this and there’ll be others who will want their particular faith blessings before each meal.’

‘Yes, yes,’ he whispered. ‘Okay . . . let me just think how I’m going to say—’

But then it was done. Valérie, and the ladies sitting with him, chorused ‘amen’, released each other’s hands and the canteen was almost immediately filled with their high-spirited chatter and good-natured laughter.

Walter bit on his lip and made a face. ‘Maybe if he does it again . . . I’ll, uh . . . I’ll have a quiet word.’

Dr Gupta looked at him and shook her head, tutting. ‘Not good,’ she muttered. ‘Not good.’

 

 

 

‘
I
turned this little bit of the oasis over to, well, you can see,’ said Raymond, pointing towards rows of runner bean and pea vines, ‘to climbers mainly - vertical crops. You get a much better space-to-yield return.’

Leona nodded. ‘We’ve done the same on the rigs.’

‘It must be tight for space on there.’

‘We manage. There’s a surprising amount of surface on which to grow all sorts of things; every ledge, every walkway, every deck, we have things in pots.’

He chuckled. ‘What about sea salt? It’s in the air. That must make it hard to grow things.’

‘Where we are it’s not so bad as say someone trying to grow vegetables in a garden on the seafront, where the wind whips up spray and spoils everything. We’re high up. The upper decks where everything is growing . . . it’s like a hundred feet above the sea.’ Leona silently appraised Raymond’s vegetable plot. ‘Do you grow enough to get by on?’

‘The tomatoes, the peppers, the oranges I showed you earlier, it’s enough to sustain two adults. Tanya had it properly balanced to feed the pair of us indefinitely without taking up too much of the space. She didn’t have the heart to uproot all these tropical plants and replace them with food plants. So, it turned out we had enough space to keep our rain forest ecosystem, and still grow enough fruit and veg to tide us over. I just follow the plans and planting schedule she drew up. Anyway,’ he said, ‘at a push I could grow stuff outside the dome in the woods, or pick mushrooms, berries . . . even trap rabbits. The forest is crawling with them.’ He grinned. ‘And it’s not as if I’ve got anyone else to share the woods with.’

She looked out through the foggy perspex at the dark outline of trees. Raymond was right. He had little to worry about on that score. Thetford forest seemed to be all his.

‘I often wonder how many people are alive out there,’ she said after a while.

‘In the UK?’

She nodded.

He sucked in a breath. ‘I did the maths once. I reckoned on about two to five million now . . . roughly five to ten per cent of the population was my guess.’

‘That many? It doesn’t seem like there’s anywhere
near
that many people around.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ he said. ‘I think it’s possible so many survived because the die-off here in the UK was so rapid. A slower attrition rate would have meant those small groups that have survived to today would have had more competition for resources. Think about how much is still out there. You can still find edible canned and packet food if you know where to look. If the die-off had been slower, those harder-to-find things would have been picked clean by now by those who were hanging on. You’d have nothing left now. So, ironically, I think if we’d coped slightly better and more people had managed to hang on and last longer, it would be harder for the survivors today.’

Leona frowned doubtfully. ‘So where’d you suppose these two to five million people are then? We’ve seen no one really, not since we left.’

‘Of course not. You’ve been on the road all the way, haven’t you? Think about it, any groups struggling to survive within eyesight of a road would have long ago been paid a visit by a starving mob. Picked clean and wiped out.’

‘They’re all hiding then?’

‘Basically. Tucked away in woods and forests, nestled discreetly in Welsh valleys, remote farms. Shit, I could even imagine city centre rooftop communities, as long as they were careful . . . the top of an office block with all that roof space? The top floors with all those large office windows would make a perfect greenhouse.’ Raymond seemed tempted to sit down and plan out the viability of such an existence, then stopped himself. ‘The point is, those who managed to lie low long enough to outlive the . . . the . . . the
unprepared
, until there were too few to present a problem, it’s those people that are alive today, just hidden away somewhere. Trust me. There’s plenty more people out there than you think.’

They could hear the sound of splashing and laughter. The others were messing about in the jacuzzi. There were no jets or bubbles, of course, and the water in there was murky with algae, but it was tepid.

‘I think they’d rather stay here than head on down to London,’ she said.

Raymond shrugged. ‘You guys can stay as long as you want but since we’re eating up
your
freeze-dried rations, eventually, I’ll have to ask you to bring in some more food or . . .’

‘Or leave.’

‘Basically.’ He offered an apologetic smile. ‘It’s lovely to have company but I really can’t afford to feed you. It sounds shit of me to say that, but it totally unbalances my food system.’

She nodded. ‘We have to go, anyway. The sooner the better. If we find there’s nothing in London, those tubs of freeze-dried pasta crap have got to last long enough to see them safely back.’

He turned to look at her.
‘Them
? Not you?’

Silently, she cursed her slip.

He looked at her. ‘I . . . uh . . . I know about your little girl,’ he said. ‘Helen told me last night.’

‘It’s not her business to blab like that.’

‘I think she just didn’t want me saying anything clumsy. She was thinking of you.’

Leona looked away, tight lipped. ‘Whatever we find, I won’t be going back.’

‘If you find nothing, and you don’t go back to your rigs, then what?’

She shrugged. The gesture spelled it out all too clearly.

‘You’re going home . . . going home to end it, aren’t you?’

She said nothing. She said nothing for far too long. Her fingers twisted and wrestled uncomfortably with each other. She could’ve blurted a ‘no’, but it would have rung false.

‘That’s it?’ pressed Raymond. ‘Going home to die?’

Eventually she looked up from her hands. ‘Yes.’

Raymond nodded. ‘I thought I saw that.’

‘Saw what?’

‘Sort of . . . a
calm.
You’ve made your bed and you’re ready to go and sleep in it. If I’m honest with you I think I saw that in Tanya. She didn’t leave a note or anything, just a whole load of planting charts and notes. Didn’t want to leave me in the lurch. That’s what I think happened to her. She just walked out on me, wanted to go home.’

Leona nodded. ‘That’s . . . what I want. I’m tired.’

‘That surprises me.’

‘Why?’

‘You don’t strike me as the giving-up type.’

She took a deep breath, looked around at the towering leaves above them, the shafts of light from a floodlight above lancing down into the micro jungle. ‘Hannah was why I bothered. It’s different now. I suppose it’s easier in a way. I know that sounds shit, but it’s easier. I suppose I see a way home now,’ she replied. ‘I see a way back to her, to my dad, to others I lost during the crash.’

‘And you don’t strike me as the expecting-a-lovely-pastoral-afterlife type, either.’

‘Who knows? Maybe they’re there, maybe not. But either way, I guess I’m all done in, Raymond, tired of the struggle. It just goes on and on and all you get every day for the hours of effort is enough food and water to keep you going for another day. That’s not life. That’s just—’

‘Actually, it is. It’s what
life
has been for more than half a billion years. The basic struggle to find enough protein to last another day.’