Afterlight Page 3

  He shivered as a teasing gust played with his anorak. He zipped it up and resumed winding in his catch, a smile spreading across his face. The shore run was a welcome departure from his daily routine. The foraging trips to the coastal town of Bracton came with much less frequency these days, not like in the early days when they’d first settled on the rigs and needed so many things that they were constantly ferrying supplies from the mainland.

  He cherished the trips ashore. An opportunity to explore, to see something other than these windswept islands of paint-flaked metal. He savoured the fading reminders of the past, often wandering a little away from the others as they busily foraged for the things that were needed. He enjoyed standing in the silent high street. The shop signs were all still there: WH Smiths, Boots, Nationwide, Waterstones . . . but the storefront windows were long since gone. If he half-closed his eyes, let them soft-focus, and used a little imagination, he could almost see the high street busy once more; the soft creak of swinging signs replaced with the hum of traffic, the boom of music from the back of a passing car, the pedestrian thoroughfare filled with mums pushing buggies, the jingle of a newsagent’s door opening.

  His smile turned into a cheerful grin. ‘Shore run,’ he announced happily, as he hauled the net over the rail, ‘cool.’

  Chapter 4

  10 years AC

  Bracton Harbour,

  Norfolk

  Walter Eddings dropped the sails twenty yards out from the concrete quayside and let the thirty-foot yacht glide forward under its own momentum. The boat drew parallel as he steered her to a gentle rest. He watched as, on the foredeck, Jacob and his friend Nathan flipped tethered buoys over the side to cushion the boat’s fibreglass hull. As they bobbed gently, drifting the last few yards to a standstill, both young men equipped themselves with boat hooks and reached out to snag the moorings.

  Jacob hopped across onto the quayside, Nathan tossing him a couple of lines which he secured fore and aft.

  ‘Good enough,’ shouted Walter, a ruddy face half hidden by the thatch of a grey-white beard and framed by thick salt-and-pepper hair pulled back into a ponytail that fluttered in the breeze like a battle standard. He looked like an aging biker, like an old roadie who’d happily tell you how many groupies he’d once banged in the back of Status Quo’s tour bus. However, in the Sealed Knot uniform that he kept safely tucked away and took out and wore on very special occasions, he looked every bit a musketeer from the King’s Royal army, snatched from the seventeenth century and dumped into the twenty-first.

  Jacob loved listening to him describe the battles of Nazeby, Edgehill, Marston Moor, as if he’d actually been there. He could almost smell the acrid smoke of gunpowder, feel the thud of cannons firing and the grunting of massed pikemen going toe-to-toe . . . and he could certainly imagine Walter, thickset and ruddy-faced, in the middle of it, pouring powder from a horn down the long barrel of his musket.

  It was gone two in the afternoon. They’d made good time from the rigs to Bracton Harbour with the wind behind them. Walter had got them across without needing to turn on the engine once. Something he preferred to do whenever the wind was in their favour. Even though they’d discovered a diesel tank still half full in the marina from which they topped-up each time they visited, and promised to last them a good many years yet, he was determined to use as little of it as possible.

  Walter looked at his watch. ‘We’ve got about five hours of daylight left,’ he announced.

  Enough time for them to forage for most of the items on the very long shopping list, whilst Walter did a water-run. Across the marina was a tugboat moored on a side canal. It was tethered up to the delivery jetty of an old ale brewery. The brewery had its own well, tapping the very best of ‘natural Norfolk drinking water’, or at least that’s how it was described on the labels of their traditional brown glass bottles. It was in fact clean enough to drink and showed no sign of running out any time soon. Every time they did a shore run Walter filled the several dozen brewery drums in the back of the tug with well water, piloted the tug out to the rigs and exchanged the full drums for empty ones. It supplemented the rainwater they managed to catch in their water butts.

  He’d usually returned, refilled the tugboat’s fuel tank and moored it back down the canal by the time the others had returned from their foraging. They’d then overnight at the quayside aboard the yacht, spending a few hours the next morning looking for whatever was left on the list, before heading home.

  ‘All right then, gents, it’s gun time,’ said Walter.

  Four guns in the cockpit, the community’s entire arsenal. Jenny had appointed Walter - her right-hand man - as sole custodian of them a long time ago, fed up with being pestered by the boys, Jacob included, to get them out so they could hold them.

  Walter picked up a shotgun. ‘As normal, we’re pairing off. One gun per pair.’

  He handed the shotgun to a tall, narrow-shouldered guy called Bill Laithwaite who pushed scuffed glasses up the bridge of his nose and grimaced uncomfortably as he took possession of the gun.

  ‘Bill, you can take young Kevin with you.’

  Kevin pulled a face. ‘Can’t I go with one of them?’ he whined, pointing towards Jacob and Nathan. Kevin was just thirteen, yet considered himself to be one of the ‘big boys’. The last thing he wanted was to be paired up with Bill who fretted and worried like an old woman.

  Walter scowled. ‘Excuse me, you’ll do as you’re told. You’re with Bill.’

  ‘Great,’ Kevin pouted.

  Walter picked up the second gun. ‘Jacob and Nathan, you can have the SA80.’ He passed it over to Nathan, who took a moment to pose with the army assault rifle like some urban gangster.

  Jacob snorted.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Nathan! It’s not a frigging toy!’ snapped Walter irritably.

  Chastened, but still flashing a conspiratorial grin at Jacob, Nathan passed it carefully over before hopping across to join him on the quayside.

  ‘Howard and Dennis . . .’ Both men were old, older even than Walter. The three of them regularly played cribbage together in the mess during the evening lights-on hours. ‘You chaps can have the HK carbine.’

  Walter picked up the remaining weapon and looked at David Cudmore. ‘And we’ll have the MP5.’

  ‘Righto,’ replied David, running a hand through the thin wisps of hair on his head.

  ‘Okay then,’ said Walter impatiently, ‘you’ve all got your lists?’

  They nodded.

  ‘Back here no later than eight this evening, please. We should have supper on the go by then.’

  Jacob pushed the shopping trolley down the aisle. The wheels squeaked with an irritating metronome regularity. However, unlike most of the other trolleys discarded outside in the high street, exposed to ten wet English summers and ten even wetter winters, at least the wheels hadn’t seized up with rust.

  It was piled almost to overflowing with medicines requested; antibiotics, antiseptics and a variety of painkillers. This particular chemist had weathered the looting better than most stores. Of course, the windows had gone in and all the energy drinks, fruit juices and bottled water had vanished a decade ago within the first few days. But most of the rest of the shop’s stock was still patiently sitting on shelves or scattered across the floor collecting dust. For those who needed to dye their hair, wax their legs, or colour their nails this was going to be the place to visit for many more years to come.

  Jacob looked down at the list. They’d ticked off most of the items, mostly the different branded painkillers. Of the four hundred and fifty-three members of their community, a large proportion were women between the ages of sixteen and fifty. On any given day there were at least half a dozen of them reporting to Dr Gupta - once upon a time a GP - for something to ease stomach cramps.

  Jacob wheeled the trolley through the checkout, Nathan walking behind him with the SA80 held casually in both hands, the muzzle pointing safely at the ground, just as Walter warned them
, ad nauseam, to do.

  ‘Nah, it was definitely a game on me PlayStation,’ said Nathan, continuing a conversation Jacob had almost forgotten they’d been having. ‘I know it was. I think it was the last game me dad got me.’

  Jacob shook his head. ‘But I’m sure I played it on my Nintendo, though.’

  ‘Nope, you didn’t . . . couldn’t have, Jay. Was a PlayStation-only, man.’

  They emerged outside onto the high street. The sun was just dipping behind the flat roof of the multi-storey car-park opposite; the dark shadow it cast slowly creeping across the thoroughfare of weed-strewn paving.

  Jacob stepped through tufts of waist-high nettles, the trolley squeaking and rattling before him, the small wheels juddering over a broken paving slab.

  He let go of the trolley and rested for a moment.

  ‘’Sup, Jake?’

  He shrugged. ‘You ever stop and pretend?’

  ‘Pretend what?’

  ‘That the street’s still alive.’

  Nathan looked around at the overgrown pedestrian way, the dark shop entrances, the jagged window frames, cars resting on flat tyres, many of them displaying tell-tale bubbles of rust beneath the paintwork.

  ‘Used to. Sort of gets harder to imagine each time we come ashore, though. You know what I’m saying?’

  Jacob looked at the signs above the shop doorways. Most of them - the homogenous chain stores - were plastic façades, perfectly well preserved, some still bright and colourful. Here and there, fractures in the moulded lettering had allowed thin veins of moss to take hold and spread bacilli-like fingers of growth. The sign above a phone store in front of him had slipped down from its mount above the shop’s front window at some point in the past and lay on the ground, cracked on impact with the street, weeds and grass growing around it.

  ‘We used to live in London.’

  ‘I know, Jay.’

  Jacob turned to him. ‘Can you remember how streets used to sound?’

  Nathan’s dark features clouded for a moment; he tucked a wiry dreadlock behind one ear and scratched at the meagre tuft of bristles on his chin. ‘Shit . . . not sure,’ he replied, the soft echo of Martha’s accent in his. ‘Where me mum ’n’ me was livin’, it was sort of always rumbly.’

  ‘The cars?’

  Nathan nodded. ‘And car music. Sort of a boom . . . boom . . . boom . . . kinda thing?’

  ‘Yeah, I remember that.’

  ‘And police cars and fire engines sometimes. Me mum said it was a rough place.’

  Memories from a younger mind flickered momentarily in front of Jacob. He remembered so little from before the crash. It was that chaotic week that formed most of his recall of the old world; the wailing of sirens, trucks full of soldiers on a gridlocked high street. People hurrying, not yet running . . . but hurrying; not quite ready to be seen panicking, but eager to get home and lock the door. Harried-looking newsreaders on the TV talking about oil, and food rationing and martial law. Images of Oxford Street full of people smashing windows and running away with arms full of stolen things.

  ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I remember those siren noises.’

  They stood in silence for a moment, listening to the fresh North Sea breeze hiss through the leaves of a young silver birch tree, growing out of a decorative island in the middle of the shopping centre’s thoroughfare. It had probably been little more than an anaemic sapling when the crash happened.

  ‘What do you miss the most, Nate?’

  Nathan pursed his lips in thought. ‘Gonna have to be me game consoles. There was great games and graphics that was, like, real enough you could be in there.’ Nathan’s hands absent-mindedly cupped around buttons and joysticks in the air. ‘I guess I miss all that. And the telly,’ he said wistfully. ‘What about you?’

  Jacob rubbed his eyes irritably. Since his glasses had finally fallen to pieces several years ago he’d had to make do without. It left him too often nursing a headache and tired eyes. His face creased with concentration. ‘I miss the orange.’

  ‘Orange?’

  ‘At night time,’ added Jacob, ‘the orange. Night wasn’t black like it is now. It was always sort of orange.’

  Nathan’s face clouded with confusion for a moment, then cleared. ‘Oh yeah, man. It was, wasn’t it? You talkin’ about the street lights.’

  Jacob nodded and smiled. ‘I remember even the sky was a dull sort of orange. And those lights always had a glowy fuzzy sort of halo round them. I remember there was one outside my bedroom window. It used to buzz every night.’

  Nathan shrugged. ‘We lived up high. I was always lookin’ down on ’em.’

  Jacob watched the evening shadow complete its slow crawl across the high street as the sun set, and begin to climb the deserted shopfronts. The setting sun, warm and blood-red in a vanilla sky, glinted off the few shards of glass that remained in the store windows.

  ‘I suppose I miss that the most - the night time lights.’ His face cleared, brushing away hazy childhood memories. He turned to look at Nathan. ‘And TV, too. I miss The Simpsons.’

  Nathan’s face cracked with a broad grin. ‘D’oh . . . stoo-pid oil-crash apocalypse.’

  Jacob doubled over. Nathan could do Homer’s voice perfectly. He could do all of them brilliantly. Many’s the time he had the mess filled with laughter, impersonating some old TV personality from the past. Just like his mum, Martha - very popular, because he could make smiles happen. And, fuck, you needed a reason to smile every now and then.

  Jacob slapped his forehead Homer-style. ‘Duh!’

  ‘No, man, it’s d’oh !’

  Nathan did it so much better.

  ‘Doh.’

  ‘Nearly, Jay.’

  Chapter 5

  10 years AC

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

  Leona sat on the accommodation platform’s helipad savouring the warmth of the evening sun on her back. Hannah, her best friend, Natasha, and several other children were chasing each other across one side of the open deck. On the other side, tomato plants grew in endless tall rows, sheltered beneath a large plastic greenhouse roof. The tangy odour of the plants drifted in pleasant waves across to her, alternating with the faint stench of fermenting faeces coming all the way across from the production platform.

  Nice.

  Apart from that particular fetid odour, which fluctuated in strength from one day to the next, this was her favourite place on the platform. Up here on the highest open space amongst the five linked platforms, she had a three-hundred and sixty degree panorama to enjoy. The sea varied little, of course, always dark, brooding and restless, but the sky on the other hand was an ever changing canvas, sometimes steel-grey and solemn, sometimes like this evening, splashed with mischievous pinks and livid crimson.

  Strings of light-bulbs began to wink on as the sun dipped closer to the waves and the evening light waned. She could just about hear the distant chug of the generator. The lights would stay on until an hour after the last dinner sitting in the canteen. Time enough for everyone to eat and make their way safely back home, perhaps read a chapter of a book, darn a sock, tell a bedtime story or two, play a card game . . . then lights out. Thanks to Walter’s technical know-how and hard work, they generated a modest but steady supply of methane gas. Enough to give them a few hours of powered light every evening and no more.

  Leona heard soft footsteps and the rustle of threadbare khaki trousers behind her as her mum approached and squatted down beside her.

  ‘Hey.’

  ‘Hey back.’

  They watched Hannah get tagged by another little girl and resentfully have to stand still like a statue until ‘freed’ by someone else. She lasted all of ten seconds before getting bored and pretending that she’d been released. She rejoined her friend, the same age, same size . . . they even looked similar; frizzy hazel-coloured hair, tamed, more or less, by bright sky-blue hair ties. That was their colour. Sky blue . . . for some reason. Leona squinted her eyes
as she watched them play - they could almost be twins.

  Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

  ‘She’s so like you were,’ said Jenny. ‘Always cheating at games.’

  Leona smiled.

  ‘And stubborn.’

  Above the soft rumple of the wind and the chatter of the children, she could hear people emerging from the mess and clanking back across the walkways to their platforms for the night. Another routine, uneventful evening.

  ‘I know you still pine for the past, Lee. But it’s gone. It’s not coming back.’

  Leona shrugged. ‘I know.’

  ‘I listened in on your school class this morning. You were talking to the kids about how music used to be.’

  Leona nodded. She ran classes, along with another woman, Rebecca, for the younger children. It wasn’t much of an education, truth be told; basic reading and writing and a little maths, that’s all. This morning one of the children had asked about what music she used to listen to before the crash and, before she could stop herself, she was telling her class about the gigs that she’d gone to as a student. About how electricity used to go into guitars and make them sound fantastic and big. About how the shows were flooded with powerful flashing lights and dazzling effects and lasers. They’d sat and listened, spellbound, all of them born after the crash, all of them used to nothing more than campfires, candles, oil lamps and, only recently, the miracle of flickering strings of light-bulbs. The only music they heard were nursery rhymes and Bob Dylan songs strummed rather badly by an old Buddhist earth-mother called Hamarra.

  ‘It’s not good for them, Leona. You can’t fill their heads with things as they were. They’re never going to see any of those things. This is all they’ll have.’