Afterlight (9 page)

‘What do you say, Hannah?’ asked Walter. ‘Want to help your mum, too?’

She shrugged. ‘Maybe. I’ll think about it.’

Jenny laughed.
Such a little madam.

‘I know it smells bloody awful down here,’ said Walter, ‘but if you get into the habit of breathing through your mouth—’

‘Can’t we move it to somewhere better ventilated?’ asked Jenny.

He stood up straight, stretching his stiff back. ‘It’s the warmest location on the production platform.’ There were no windows down here, the room was perfectly insulated on all four sides by other storage rooms.

‘It’s the easiest place for us to maintain a consistent fermenting temperature,’ he said, ‘and let’s be honest, the chickens on the deck above are unlikely to moan about it.’

Hannah giggled. ‘Moaning chickens.’

‘It worries me,’ said Jenny regarding the other two digesters. Thick rubber hoses attached with G-clamps ran from both of them up to the ceiling and there, attached with wire ties to a metal spar, snaked across towards a doorway leading to a second windowless room where the generator rattled away noisily.

‘What does?’

‘That we can’t ventilate this place properly. Isn’t that a bit dangerous? ’

He shrugged. ‘We just keep the door open. That’ll be all right.’

‘I know. But that’s another worry - the door always open, one of the smaller children could just wander in and—’

Walter stood up and arched his back. ‘They all know not to come down here.’

‘Could you not rig up an extractor fan or something? Then that door could be closed and locked.’

He sighed. ‘Another thing to put on the To Do list, I suppose. I could consider relocating all of this to a cabin with a window, for safety’s sake, but then we’d need to heat the room to keep it warm enough for the slurry to ferment. That’d be a lot of work, Jenny.’

She nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose.’

‘For now, as long as the children know they’re not to play down here, we’ll be just fine.’

Jenny hefted another shovel of spent slurry into the barrel at her feet. ‘Perhaps something to think about in the future, Walter.’

Hannah was doing her best to help out with a trowel, scooping small dollops out of the digester with a determined frown on her face. Leona grimaced at the sight of shit smudged up her daughter’s arm. ‘But did you have to rope in Hannah?’

‘I want to help my nanna and Uncle Walter,’ she answered.

Walter smiled at her. ‘You’re our little helper. Aren’t you, poppet?’

Hannah scooped up another heavy trowel, carelessly flicking a small dollop of pale brown mush onto her forehead. ‘Yup.’

‘Ugghh,’ Leona made a face, ‘be careful, Hannah, you’re getting covered in crap.’

‘It’s not crap,’ said Walter. ‘Just think of it as rocket fuel for our potatoes, onions and tomatoes. That’s all it is. Everything gets used; there’s no room for waste or slack on these rigs. You know that.’

Leona continued to curl her lip at the sight of the slurry as they shovelled and scraped it out of the plastic tube.

‘Walter,’ said Jenny after a while, ‘how’s our newcomer? I’ve not had a chance to drop in on him yet.’

‘Tami says he’s still very weak.’

‘What do we know about him?’

Walter shook his head. ‘Not much. I’d say he’s in his late thirties. He’s French, or at least he speaks French. He looks Mediterranean, perhaps Middle Eastern at a pinch . . . hard to say.’ He stood up straight, leaning tiredly on the shovel. ‘But, to be honest,’ he hesitated a moment, choosing the right words, ‘he looks like the type you wouldn’t normally take on, Jenny.’

‘Hmm?’ she mumbled.

‘A loner. The loners are always trouble. You know that.’

They’d had trouble before; a young man they’d encountered in Bracton harbour, foraging for things nine months ago. They’d taken him in and assigned him a cot on the drilling platform. A fortnight later he’d sexually assaulted a woman there. They’d nearly tossed him over the side. Instead Jenny decided he should be taken back to Bracton and left to fend for himself. A year before that there’d been a couple of younger men with guns who’d buzzed the platforms in a motorboat, demanding to be let on and firing off a few wild shots in anger when she’d refused them. And before them, there was the wild and ragged twenty-something lad they’d found living on scraps in Great Yarmouth. He’d ended up nearly beating Dennis to death because the old boy had complained about the lad’s language in front of the young ones. Men of a certain age, in their twenties or thirties, seemed to be either dangerous predators who viewed this quiet world as their personal playground, or were unbalanced and unpredictable.

‘This French chap was being pursued by the others,’ added Walter with a cautionary tone to his voice. ‘There could be any number of reasons for that.’

Jenny nodded. ‘True.’ She pursed her lips and took a moment. ‘When he’s well enough, I want to interview him, though. If he really is from France or further afield, I want to know what he’s seen.’

‘Of course,’ said Walter. ‘And then?’

‘And then, yes . . . when he’s fit enough that he can look after himself, maybe we’ll send him back. I’ll just have to see for myself. I really can do without worrying whether we’ve picked up another nut or some sort of an axe murderer.’

She realised an interview was very little on which to make a judgement. But, to be honest, she couldn’t be entirely certain of any one of the men
already
on the rigs. There was no way of knowing if at some time in their past they’d been violent, abusive; perhaps taken advantage of the chaos and anarchy and done unpardonable things. She couldn’t know that. All she did know was that the few men living here had behaved themselves thus far. More importantly, that these few men were vastly outnumbered by women.

Best to play it safe, she decided, and assume this man was potentially a danger until he could prove himself otherwise. After all . . .

 

 

 

H
annah watched the man; his chest rising and falling evenly beneath the sheet. She felt sorry for him. He looked so thin and frail, his olive-coloured skin almost grey by the light seeping in through the round porthole above the bed.

Dr Tami told her the man was not to be pestered. She could look at him, but she wasn’t to be a nuisance. Dr Tami was gone now, left the sick bay to visit someone who’d had a fall on one of the other platforms and possibly broken something.

The man’s dark hair tumbled down in lank ringlets onto the pillow. He looked like the picture of Jesus Martha had shown her once; a peaceful, kind face, not etched with angry lines around his eyes, but kind lines . . . a man used to smiling.

A coil of limp hair was curled into his beard and stuck in the corner of his mouth. She reached over the bed and pulled it away from his dry lips.

‘You poor, poor thing,’ she uttered softly as if this sleeping man was a baby griping and mewling with wind. His eyelids quivered ever so slightly, then a moment later flickered open.

‘Oooh,’ whispered Hannah.

Brown eyes, unfocused and dazed, darted around the cabin walls, the ceiling above him, the small porthole opposite, then finally onto Hannah.

She smiled. ‘Hello, my name’s Hannah.’

He stared at her silently.

‘You’re sick,’ she added, ‘you got shot by bad men and you’re poorly. Dr Tami said you have to stay in bed and I’m not to be a nuisance.’

His eyes narrowed, dark brows locked as he studied her. Finally the thick thatch of bristles around his mouth stirred and parted. ‘Pplease . . . you have water?’

For a moment she struggled to make sense of the man’s strange accent.

‘Water?’ he rasped again, voice thick with phlegm.

Then she understood. She grinned and nodded, eager to be like Dr Tami, caring for a patient just like a real doctor. She clacked quickly across the floor and poured treated rainwater from a jug into a plastic tumbler. She came back to the bedside and held it out proudly in front of her.

‘Please . . .’ he whispered softly.

He was asking for help to sit up. Just like she’d seen the doctor do before, she reached up on tiptoes to slide a small hand behind his head, tilting it as best she could so that he could drink from the tumbler. She tipped the cup carefully, some of the water going where it was intended, the rest soaking into his thick beard and trickling down either side of his face and onto the pillow.

‘There, there,’ she cooed softly. She eased his head back. ‘Is that much better?’

He closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and returned her smile. ‘Better, thank you,’ he replied, his voice a little stronger now; more than a dry rattling whisper.

‘My name’s Hannah,’ she said again. ‘I’m nearly five years old.’

He smiled. ‘I thought . . . I thought you were an angel,’ he replied. ‘Just now . . . when I opened my eyes.’

‘An angel!’ Hannah giggled at the thought of that, grinning like a Cheshire cat. ‘My nanna calls me that sometimes.’

His eyes went from her, back to the walls, the ceiling, the other cot in the sickbay. ‘Please, what is this?’

She knew what he was asking. ‘You’re in our
home
. We live above the water on big legs.’

He licked dry lips and winced with pain as he tried to sit up.

‘You have to sit very still,’ cautioned Hannah.

‘More water? Please?’ asked the man, glancing at the tumbler.

She helped lift his head again and held the tumbler to his mouth. ‘Dr Tami is going to make you better again with all her medicine.’ She let his head rest back again on the pillow when he’d finished the water.

He nodded gratefully. ‘Thank you.’

‘You are French,’ she informed the man. ‘Mum told me.’

He shrugged weakly. ‘No. Not French. Belgian.’

Hannah’s brow knotted. ‘Bell-gee-an. I never heard of that. Is it in Africa?’

‘Europe,’ he managed a wan smile, ‘what is left . . . at least.’

‘U-rope?’ she repeated the vaguely familiar name. She repeated it again under her breath, her face locked in concentration. ‘That’s another place, isn’t it? Is it an island? Like America?’

He shook his head, closing his eyes, dizzy and nauseous. ‘No, not really.’

Hannah felt a passing stab of guilt. Dr Tami had told her not to pester the man; that he was weak and needed as much rest as possible. And here she was pestering him.

‘I better go now,’ she said. ‘I have school soon.’

She turned to go.

‘Please!’ the man called out.

She stopped.

‘You . . . what you say your name is . . . ?’

‘My name’s Hannah Sutherland.’

He nodded. ‘
Merci beaucoup
- thank you very much - for the water, Hannah.’

‘What’s your name?’

‘My name is . . .’ he licked his lips, ‘my name is Valérie.’

Her eyebrows knotted disapprovingly.
‘Valerie
? Ewww. That’s a girl’s name!’

He laughed tiredly, his head collapsing softly back against the pillow. ‘Girl, boy, is same
en français.
’

She thought about it for a moment. ‘You’re very funny.’

His eyes remained closed, the rustling sound of his breath growing long and even. He nodded sleepily. ‘I try.’

‘I should go now,’ she said again.

She thought he was asleep, but he cracked an eye open and winked. ‘Thank you, little angel.’

She was grinning as she fluttered down the corridor to the stairwell to deck B, carried aloft by the invisible little wings she’d suddenly decided to grow.

 

 

T
he Millennium Dome loomed before Flight Lieutenant Adam Brooks. He refused to call it the ‘O2 Arena’ just because some profit-fattened telecoms company had bought the abandoned site at a knock-down price and decided to re-brand it.

Enormous, squat, daunting, the last time Adam had stepped inside he’d been going to a Kaiser Chiefs’ gig. The dome, lit up at night, had looked like something out of Disneyland - the canvas cover illuminated from within by a spinning kaleidoscope of neon colours. It had looked like some sort of giant undulating pearl in the darkness.

This afternoon the canvas appeared a drab vanilla, worn by the elements, washed dull by ten years of interminably wet British weather.

The pedestrian plaza in front of the dome’s entrance was thick with civilian emergency workers, all wearing requisite bright orange waistcoats to identify them. The vast majority of them were crisis-situation draftees: paramedics, firemen, GPs, security guards, health and safety managers, Scout leaders . . . community-minded civilians who’d registered online as willing emergency helpers last time there had been an avian flu scare. Many of them were queuing to be processed; name and national insurance number taken down, given an orange waistcoat, an ID badge and a supervisor to report to.

Adam returned from his hurried jog around the dome’s perimeter - a cursory inspection to see how much work they’d need to carry out to successfully contain the area. He found most of the gunners gathered around the backs of their trucks, amidst off-loaded and stacked spools of razor wire and equipment yokes laid out in several orderly rows. They were crowded tightly together, heads cocked and leaning forward; a circular and improbably large rugby scrum of soldiers, watching a TV in the middle.

‘Hey!’ he bellowed. ‘Sergeant? What’s going on here?’

Sergeant Walfield straightened up guiltily. ‘Sorry, sir. Prime Minister’s just come on the telly. Thought I’d let the lads hear what ‘e’s got to say.’