Chapter 32
10 years AC
Thetford Forest, Norfolk
‘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.’
‘Yeah?’ she sighed. ‘Well, you make it sound so wonderfully appealing.’
They both laughed, a dry mirthless chuckle that quickly petered out. ‘Truth is, I’m not sure I can cope with another fifty or sixty years of eating boiled fish and potatoes, of longing for a steaming hot bath, longing for a million little luxuries that I’m never going to enjoy again.’ She nodded at the others playing in the pool. ‘They were all young children back then. They barely remember how wonderful life was, how much we had, how happy we all were.’
‘Were we?’
&nbs
p; ‘Shit, I was.’
‘Hmm . . . I remember how it was becoming normal to talk of a failing society. You remember that? No community, no sense of belonging, no one looking out for each other any more.’
‘I was happy, Raymond.’
‘Then perhaps you were an exception.’
‘Maybe I was.’ She looked down at the vegetable garden. ‘But I do know that I can’t be arsed with this any more, grubbing around in the dirt for my protein.’ She smiled. ‘I know it sounds sad, lazy even, but I’m happy in a way. I know what I want to do, and I’m on my way there.’
‘So the others . . . ?’
‘Don’t know. I’ll take them to London to see if we can find these lights. If it’s all a waste of time, then I’ll point them in the right direction to get back home. They’re big boys and girls now. They don’t need me to hold their hands.’ She sighed. ‘And then I’ll find my way home.’ She looked up at Raymond. ‘Do please keep this to yourself.’
‘Sure, all right.’
‘I mean it. Most of all, I don’t want Jacob to know.’ Her voice faltered slightly. ‘He wants to live on. You can see it. He’s so young. Him and Nathan, they’re so hungry for life, to fight on and to make things better again. You know? To rebuild things and have all those cool things we once had again.’
‘And you don’t?’
‘I feel like an old woman. I feel like I’m sixty-five.’
‘You’re younger than me, aren’t you?’
‘Doesn’t matter. It’s how I feel. Life just isn’t fucking well worth the struggle.’
‘That’s a shame. Particularly in someone like you.’
‘Why?’
‘Here you are, you made it through the worst of it. Ten years on, you’re alive, you’re not malnourished, you’re healthy and fit. You made it this far. Why give up now?’
She looked at him. ‘We’re different people. I’m just a . . . I’m just a normal girl who’d have been perfectly happy working in an office Monday to Friday and kicking back at the weekends. You, on the other hand, strike me as the kind of survival nut who gets a buzz out of making a go of it. The challenge of it.’
She looked up at the pale plastic sky. ‘I mean this is great. You’ve created a survival bubble and you’ll be just fine. But it’s a world for you,’ she glanced at the others, ‘and one guest. A little capsule for two. Meanwhile outside, the world is slowly being overgrown and buildings gradually crumbling and falling in. And there’s us eating fish chowder every day and getting all excited just because, for a couple of hours a night, we can turn on some light-bulbs.’
She pursed her lips. ‘Like I said, without Hannah, I suppose I have the luxury of saying, stuff it. You know?’
Chapter 33
10 years AC
Thetford Forest, Norfolk
‘I want to stay,’ said Helen adamantly. ‘I know he fancies me and that’s really okay, despite the age thing, because I think he’s nice, too.’
Leona rested a hand on her arm. ‘I’m not leaving you here.’
She pulled her arm away angrily. ‘I’m not a child any more.’ She looked up at Leona. ‘And you’re not, like, my teacher any more. Okay?’
Outside the chalet they could hear the boys laughing, talking. And music. Raymond was playing tracks from his favourite-artists playlist over the newly installed speakers; attempting to educate Nathan and Jacob that the really old stuff - Nirvana, Chili Peppers, Zeppelin - was better than the plastic pop they’d been exposed to in their childhood. Part of Leona wanted to rush outside and argue the case for the Goo Goo Dolls but there was a more pressing matter right now.
‘Helen, you can’t just stay here. You are still a child. And Raymond’s a grown man.’
‘He’s just a few years older than you! And anyway I’m fifteen, nearly sixteen. And I really like it here.’
That was perfectly understandable. Perhaps under different circumstances, Leona wondered whether she might have batted her eyelids at Raymond a few times and earned that one spare space he’d hinted existed here in this finely balanced ecosystem.
Probably not. This was nice, it was comfortable . . . but it was a bubble. It wasn’t the beginning of a new future, the start of Britain rebuilding; it was an isolated chamber that could never change, grow, develop, expand; a little kingdom for two people and several thousand butterflies and insects, that’s all it could ever be - a time capsule in which Raymond was comfortably living. Waiting for the world outside to get a move on and fix itself; happy with his library of music and DVDs, and tending his acre of rain forest and his various vegetable plots.
‘I’m grown up enough to make my own decisions,’ said Helen firmly.
Think about it, she told herself, just a few months older in the world before and she’d be old enough to get herself pregnant, to be given her own council flat and cohabit with whomever the hell she chose.
What difference does a few months make now?
‘If we leave you here, Helen, it’ll be for good. You know you’d be stuck here?’
She nodded.
‘And if it doesn’t work out between you . . . what then? Returning home on your own - making your way to Bracton, and the rigs, by yourself - you know how dangerous that could be?’
‘But it will work. I know he fancies me. And he’s got such cool things here. This is everything I’ve ever wanted. I’ll never get bored here.’
Bored? Leona shook her head imperceptibly; bored, as if that was the most important thing for Helen to be taking into consideration.
A thought occurred to her. ‘So, have you asked him if he wants you to stay?’
She nodded. ‘Last night. He said he’d like that.’
Leona couldn’t recall a quiet moment with the two of them alone long enough to move onto a conversation like that. They’d all been out in the middle at the table by the pool until long after the sun had gone down and the lights had automatically clicked on, illuminating the large fronds above with soft ambient green spotlights. They’d all been together until they’d decided to turn in for the evening.
She must have sneaked across to his chalet during the night.
Leona didn’t like the fact that Raymond had not mentioned something was going on. Perhaps the two of them had slept together. That felt wrong. But then she realised that was a judgement from another time. Different values then. Way different.
‘Helen, I’m not happy leaving you here. Not on your own.’
Her face hardened. ‘You can’t exactly drag me along with you, can you?’
Her question rang off the wooden walls of the cabin until it was silent. Through the chalet door she could hear the thud of a drumbeat, a base line and Raymond singing tunelessly along to lyrics she vaguely recognised.
Helen was right, though, they couldn’t drag her along.
‘All right,’ she said eventually, ‘all right, stay if you want.’
Her face brightened, the sulky curl in her lip straightening. ‘Thank you, Lee. I knew you’d see it my way.’
Leona offered a tight smile. ‘I hope it works out for you both.’
They stayed a second night, which pleased Helen, giving her another try-before-you-buy session with Raymond. But Raymond seemed less engaged with the rest of them, distracted as if the novelty of their company had finally worn off and he was keen to get back to whatever routine he maintained, albeit now with his newly acquired partner.
Leona couldn’t shake off the feeling that she’d handed over a child bride to a man old enough to be her father. Sure, Raymond looked much younger than his thirty-five years, but the age gap existed.
The boys weren’t entirely surprised when she told them Helen was staying. Jacob was perhaps the most affected, surprisingly. He and Helen routinely poked and prodded each other with playground insults, but deep down, Leona realised, there’d been a tender sibling-like bond there.
The next day they packed their things aboard their trailer, still sitting on the back of the truck with their bike
s, and Raymond drove them all to the junction beyond Thetford. An old army blockade of rusting loops of wire and flaking concrete barriers still stretched across the slip road leading onto the A-road. The road blockades were one of the measures put in place by the government, trying to restrict the mass movement of people by locking down the transport systems; railways, airports, block the motorways and A-roads to prevent logjams of traffic. It was the last thing they managed to do before the chain of command began to falter and they lost control of the situation.
Their last folly.
Jacob and Nathan hefted the trailer off the back of the truck between them, hooked their bikes up to it and made ready to lead the trailer around the blockade. Then there were tearful hugs between the boys and Helen as Leona stepped aside to talk with Raymond.
‘You’ll look after her, won’t you?’
He nodded. ‘I will.’
‘And what if it doesn’t work out? What if you two find out you don’t get on?’ she asked, realising she sounded like the mother of the bride cross-examining a potential suitor.
‘Different rules now. This is the Make-Do world, Leona. You make sure things work. There really is no alternative.’
She shrugged. It was probably the best answer he could have given. Perhaps Raymond would drum some common sense into that woolly young head of Helen’s.
She offered a hand and he took it.
‘You know,’ he said softly, ‘don’t get me wrong, but I actually hope you don’t find what you’re after. You know? Your home, your way out.’
Her smile was tired and worn down to a lifeless curve.
They watched the others for a moment. Helen was sobbing like a baby as she hugged the boys. They in turn were firm-lipped, competing with each other to hold back tears in as manly a way as possible.
‘Take good care of her,’ she said again, squeezing Raymond’s hand. ‘If the boys decide to return to the rigs after London, they’ll be sure to drop by and say hello . . . if that’s all right with you?’ There was gentle caution in her voice.