Afterlight Page 2

  They’re just kids, she told herself. Just boys. Boys who could be scolded and cowed if one picked just the right tone of voice.

  ‘So where are your parents?’ she asked.

  Another snigger.

  ‘Who cares?’ replied one of them.

  ‘Fuckin’ dead for all I know,’ said another.

  Jenny took another step backwards, hoping it was too dim for them to see her attempt to put further distance between them.

  ‘You should get out of the city, you know,’ she said, trying hard to sound like a voice of authority. ‘Seriously. You’ll starve when there’s nothing left to pick up in the shops.’

  ‘Thanks, but we’re all right, love.’

  She saw the pale outline of a baseball cap move, the scraping of a foot and the tinkle of broken glass. One of them getting up.

  ‘Hey, why don’t you give me a blow job? An’ I’ll give you a fag.’

  A snort of laughter from the others.

  Oh, God, no.

  ‘How dare you!’ she snapped, hoping to sound like an enraged headteacher. Instead it came out shrill and little-girly. She stepped back again, her foot finding a plastic bottle that cracked noisily beneath her shoe.

  ‘Hey? Where you goin’?’

  She saw more movement, they were all getting up now.

  ‘I’m going,’ she announced. ‘You boys stay here and get pissed if that’s what you want, but I’m leaving.’

  ‘Look,’ said one of them, ‘why don’t you stay?’ Phrased as a question, as if she was being given a choice in the matter. The nearest boy took another step forward, wobbling uncertainly on his feet and swigging again from his plastic bottle.

  Her hand closed around a wooden handle poking out from the waistline of her skirt. She pulled the knife out, feeling emboldened by the weight in her hand.

  ‘You stay where you are!’ she barked, holding the bread knife out in front of her.

  ‘I just wan’ you to give me a little luurrve.’

  ‘Yeah, me too,’ said one of the boys behind him.

  ‘I’ve got a knife!’ shouted Jenny, ‘and I will fucking well use it. Do you boys understand?’

  That drunken giggling again.

  ‘We’re going to a part-eee,’ one of the others cheerfully announced from the back with a sing-song voice.

  ‘She’s doing me first,’ insisted the lad nearest her. He lurched clumsily forward, reaching out for her with big pale hands. Instinctively Jenny slashed at one of them.

  ‘Ahhh, fuck!!’ he screamed, tucking his hands back. ‘Shit! Bitch!! Bitch fuckin’ well cut me!’

  A torch snapped on and, for a moment, she caught sight of the boy’s face. Beneath the peak of his hoodie-covered baseball cap she saw the porcelain skin of a child, pulled into a rictus sneer of hate and anger. Surely no more than fifteen, sixteen at a stretch, his big hands, one gashed, reached for the knife. It happened too quickly to remember anything more than a blur of movement. But a moment later she could see the handle protruding from the side of his waist, a dark bloom of crimson spreading out across his Adidas stripes.

  The boy cried out, all trace of his puberty-cracked voice gone, now screaming like a startled toddler stung by a wasp. He collapsed heavily onto the floor of the shop, his desperate whimpering accompanied by the clatter of displaced bottles and cans, the scrape of feet as his mates drunkenly clambered forward either to help him or, far more likely, to overpower her now she no longer held her knife.

  Jenny turned and ran, stumbling across an overturned newspaper rack, her foot slipping on the glossy covers of a spread of gossip magazines scattered across the shop floor. She headed towards the front of the store and grey daylight, leaving the drunk boys behind her.

  This is how it’s going to be from now on, she realised with a growing sense of dread; the world Jacob and Leona will inherit is a world of feral youths, a lifetime of scavenging for the last tins of baked beans amidst smouldering ruins.

  The Beginning

  Chapter 2

  10 years AC

  ‘LeMan 49/25a’ - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea

  Jenny sat up in her cot, a scream caught silently in her throat.

  That nightmare again.

  There were others, of course. Plenty her subconscious mind could choose from, but that one in particular kept returning to haunt her sleep. It was worse than the other memories perhaps because the boys had been so young, just babies really - drunk, dangerous babies. Maybe because that particular encounter had happened the day after Andy died. She’d still been in shock then, confused. Running on autopilot for her children’s sake, her foggy mind making foolish decisions.

  She rubbed the sleep from her face and tucked the nightmare back in its box along with the others, hoping for a few nights of untroubled sleep before another managed to creep out and torment her.

  Through the porthole beside her bunk a grey morning filled the small cabin with a pallid light. The North Sea, endlessly restless, seemed calmer than usual today. She could hear the persistent rumble of it passing beneath the rig, feel the subtle vibration in the floor as gentle swells playfully slapped the support-legs a hundred and forty feet below.

  Newcomers to their community always seemed terribly unsettled by that - the slightest sensation of movement beneath their feet. Once upon a time, this archipelago of man-made islands had been called ‘LeMan 49/25a’; a cluster of five linked gas platforms, in the shape of an ‘L’, a couple of dozen miles off the north-east coast of Norfolk. Now it was called ‘home’. Five years of living here and even when the North Sea was throwing a tantrum and sixty-foot swells were hurling themselves angrily against those tall, hollow support-legs, she still felt infinitely safer here than she did ashore.

  She heard the clack of hurried footsteps on the stairs outside her cabin. The door creaked open. ‘Breakfast time, Nanna.’

  Jenny smiled wearily. ‘Morning, Hannah.’ She slipped her legs over the side of the cot, her feet flinching on the cold linoleum floor, and glanced at the empty bunk opposite, the blankets tossed scruffily aside. Leona was gone.

  Hannah grinned cheerfully, eyes too big for such a small face tucked beneath a fuzz of curly strawberry-blonde hair.

  ‘Mummy’s up already?’ Jenny asked, surprised. Usually she had to kick Leona out of her bed in the mornings.

  Hannah rolled her eyes. ‘Lee’s eating breakfast already.’

  Jenny sighed. She tried to encourage Hannah to call her mother ‘Mummy’, but since Leona actually encouraged the first name thing - sometimes it seemed like she almost wanted to be more of a big sister than a mother - it was a futile effort on her part.

  ‘Okay . . . tell her I’ll be down in a minute, all right?’

  Hannah nodded and skittered out of the cabin, her wooden sandals rapping noisily along the floor of the passageway.

  Jenny unlatched the porthole and opened it a crack, feeling the chill morning air chase away the cosy fug in the cabin. She shivered - awake for sure now - and pulled a thick, chunky-knit cardigan around her shoulders and stood up.

  ‘Another day,’ she uttered to the woman in the mirror on the wall opposite. A woman approaching fifty, long untamed frizzy hair that had once been a light brown, but was now streaked with grey, and a slim jogger’s figure with sinews of muscle where soft humps of lazy cellulite had rested a decade ago.

  A poor man’s Madonna.

  Or so she liked to think.

  She smiled. The Jenny of before, the Jenny of ten years ago, would probably have been thrilled to be told she’d have a gym figure like this at the age of forty-nine. But then that very different, long lost, Jenny would probably have been horrified by the scruffy New-Age-traveller state of her hair, the lined and drawn face, tight purse-string lips and the complete absence of any make-up.

  She was a very different person now. ‘Very different,’ she whispered to no one but the reflection.

  The smile in the mirror dipped and faded.

  She pulled on
a pair of well-worn khaki trousers and a pair of hardy Doc Martens that promised to out-live her, and clanked downstairs to join the others in the mess room.

  Four long scuffed Formica-topped tables all but filled the mess; utilitarian, unchanged from the days when gas workers wearing orange overalls and smudged faces took a meal between shifts.

  Busy right now. It always was with the first breakfast sitting of the day. There were nearly a hundred of them sitting shoulder to shoulder; those on the rota for early morning duties. Potato and fish chowder steamed from plastic bowls and the room was thick with chattering conversation and the chorus of too-hot stew being impatiently slurped.

  Jenny spotted her daughter. She grabbed a plastic bowl, ladled it full of chowder and squeezed in beside her.

  Leona looked up. ‘Mum? You okay?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘You were whimpering last night. Bad dreams again?’

  Jenny shrugged. ‘Just dreams, Lee, we all have them.’

  Leona managed a supportive half-smile. ‘Yeah.’ She had her nights too.

  Jenny cautiously tested a mouthful with her lip. ‘I noticed it’s a good sea and fair wind out there today. We’re overdue a shore run. Could you get together a shopping list and I’ll grab it off you later?’

  ‘Yeah, okay,’ Leona replied, picking an escaped chunk of potato off the table and dropping it back into Hannah’s bowl. Nothing wasted here. Certainly not food.

  ‘Anything you want to put on the list?’

  Jenny’s mouth pursed. ‘A couple of decent writing pens. Some socks, the thermal ones . . . oh, and how about booking me in at a posh health spa for a weekend of pampering.’

  Leona grinned. ‘I’ll join you.’

  Jenny hungrily finished her breakfast before it had a chance to cool; too much to do, too little time. She clapped her hands like a school-teacher and the hubbub of conversation slowly, reluctantly, faded to silence.

  ‘It looks like a good day for a shore run. The sea’s calm and we’ve got a westerly wind. So Leona’s going to be coming round this morning to get your “wants and needs”.’ She picked out a dark-skinned and broad-framed woman halfway down the table. ‘And, Martha Williams, let’s try and keep George Clooney off the list this time.’

  There was a ripple of tired, dutiful laughter across the canteen and a loud cheerful cackle from Martha. Her grin and the musical lilt in her accent still hung on to a fading echo of Jamaican beaches.

  ‘Aye, Jenny, love. How ’bout me ’ave some Brad Pitt, then?’

  Martha got a better response; popular with everyone.

  Jenny grinned; to do less would be disingenuous. She gave the room her morning smile; even those who she knew sniped at her behind her back, those who muttered and complained in dark corners about Jenny’s Laws. A smile that assured them all she’d weathered far worse than sticks and stones and whatever bitchiness some of them got up to out of her earshot.

  ‘Busy day today. We’ve got seedling propagators to transfer from Drilling to Accommodation, slurry from the digesters to bring out and spread; we had some rain last night so all the water butts and catch-troughs to check.’

  There were some groans.

  ‘First teatime sitting will be at four-thirty; a little later since we’re getting more evening light now.’ She nodded. ‘Okay?’

  Chairs and benches barked on the scuffed floor as everyone rose to go about their morning duties. The mess door opened, letting in a lively breeze. Outside on the deck, those waiting to come in for the second breakfast sitting rubbed their hands and shuffled impatiently.

  Jenny felt her sleeve being tugged and looked down to see Hannah cocking a curious barrister’s eyebrow. ‘Who’s Brad Pitt?’

  Chapter 3

  10 years AC

  ‘LeMan 49/25a’ - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea

  The catch bell jangled. Jacob looked up from his pack of weathered and faded Yu-Gi-Oh cards to the net cables tied off along the platform railing. They were both as taut as guitar strings and twitched energetically - a sure sign there was enough squirming marine life in the net to make it worth his while pulling it in.

  He crawled on hands and knees out of the sheltered warmth of the rustling vinyl one-man tent and onto the grating of the spider deck - an apron of metal trellis running around the bottom of the accommodation platform’s thick support-legs, no more than thirty feet above the endlessly surging swells. The tent snapped and rustled in the fresh breeze as he stood up and leaned over the safety rail.

  The sea gently rolled and slapped against the side of the nearest leg, sending a languid spray of suds up towards him, but not quite energetic enough to reach him. He grabbed the winch handle and began to wind the net up, a laborious process that seemed to take ages, each creaking turn on the winch hoisting the laden net just a few inches.

  He gazed out at the sea as his arm worked the handle. It was well behaved today, mottled with the shadows of clouds scudding across the sky. He pushed a long tangled tress of sun-bleached hair out of his eyes and squinted up at the platform towering above him. From down here all he could see was a large messy underbelly of welded ribs, giant rivets and locking bolts sporting salt and rust collars, and criss-crossing support struts linking all four enormous support-legs together.

  This early in the day, the sunlight was still obscured by the body of the tall, top-heavy accommodation module perched on this platform, like an elephant balancing on a barstool. It towered a hundred and thirty feet above him, a multi-storey car-park on stilts. On top of the module he could see the large circular perimeter of the helipad. Faint rays of sunlight diffused through the safety netting and promised to angle down here to the spider deck come midday, but for now he had to shiver in the accommodation platform’s tall shadow.

  The fishing net was out of the water now and he could see amidst the struggling tangle of slippery bodies a healthy haul of mackerel, whiting, sand eel and other assorted specimens of marine life drawn to graze for food in and around the man-made ecosystem below; a thick forest of seaweed that propagated around the support-legs below the sea like a fur stole.

  He smiled, satisfied with the haul.

  Enough there.

  He could finish early, pack up his tent and join the second sitting in the mess. Occasional wafts of chowder and stewed tomatoes had been drifting down from the galley’s open window, accompanied by the faint clink and rattle of cutlery and ladles.

  His tummy rumbled for breakfast.

  Above him feet clanked across the suspended walkway from the neighbouring gas compression platform - people on their way over for second sitting. Most of the machinery, cooler tanks, scrubbers and pumps that had once been installed over there had been stripped out before the crash when these rigs were being mothballed. Now, about a hundred and fifty members of the community were sheltered on the compression platform amidst a cosy, often noisy, cavernous interior; a rabbit warren of towelling ‘cubicles’, bunks and hammocks, and laden washing lines strung across the open interior space from one gantry to another; a many-layered bazaar of multicoloured throw rugs, bedsheets and laundry.

  The second, smaller, compression platform, also stripped from the inside out, played host to another technicoloured shantytown; just over a hundred of them living cheek by jowl in a warm, stuffy, smelly fug. Both compression platforms linked to the accommodation platform overshadowing him. That was home to the most; about two hundred and forty people lived there. The cabins, once designed to keep a crew of fifty in home-from-home comfort, were now cosily filled four to a cabin, and, like the compression platforms, a noisy maze of chattering voices and clothes lines strung across hallways.

  Beyond the smaller compression platform was the production platform. It hosted the generator room and the stinking methane room with its digesters full of slurry - a mixture of human and chicken shit - with the chicken deck directly above. No one lived there. It would be a resilient person who could endure both the rancid stench of fermenting faeces and the
endless clucking of several hundred brainless poultry.

  At the furthest point of the cluster of platforms, flung out at the end of the longest linking walkway, beyond production, was the drilling platform. Just under fifty people lived out there. It was quieter than the other places, and a much longer walk for breakfast, the evening meal and any community meetings that needed to be attended. But it was where those less sociable preferred to bunk.

  All five platforms, unique in shape and purpose, were united in one thing, though: they were green. Every walkway, every terrace, every gantry, every external stairwell, every cabin and every Portakabin rooftop was overgrown with potted vegetables, grow-troughs, bamboo frames holding up rustling mini forests of pea and bean climbers. Approaching the platforms from a shore run, Jacob always thought that, from afar, they looked like a sea-borne version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a towering wedding cake of rustling green.

  He heard his name being called out and looked up, a hand shading his eyes from the pale glow of the morning sky. His mum was leaning over the railing of the cellar deck.

  ‘Jake!’ she called, her voice competing against the thud and spray of languid swells and the clanking of feet across the walkway above. ‘Good haul?’ she smiled.

  ‘Yeah, Mum.’

  She disappeared back out of sight and then a moment later he saw her making her way down the ladder to the spider deck. She stopped midway - close enough to talk.

  ‘We’re doing a shore run today. You okay to go with Walter?’

  ‘Yup.’

  ‘Go get some breakfast first, love, all right? Walter’s going to lower the boat in about an hour.’

  ‘Okay,’ he called back.

  She gave him a hurried wave then clambered back up the ladder and out of sight.

  On her rounds. She was busy paying each platform a visit, checking every deck and walkway of plants, conferring with those tending them, ensuring every chore that needed to be done was being done, settling minor disputes, soothing ruffled feathers and petty egos . . . tirelessly keeping this little world of theirs ticking over.