Afterlight (20 page)

‘Me, Nathan and Helen, we’re going down to London.’

‘Oh.’

‘The lights have come on in London.’

She frowned. ‘What?’

‘Mr Latoc said he saw them . . . from a long way off. A big glow over the Thames.’

Leona stirred in the chair. ‘He said that?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Across London?’

She missed the hesitation in his reply. ‘All along it, all over, that’s what he said.’

Some sense of
possibility
tingled inside her. An alternative to sitting here in the middle of the road until she could muster enough willpower to push that stupid blunt tip all the way into her wrist.

An alternative.

‘They’ve been rebuilding quietly,’ continued Jacob. ‘Nathan reckons they wouldn’t be radioing out and telling everyone that they’re rebuilding things ’cause it might draw too many people at once. Swamp them, you know?’

‘That’s why we haven’t heard about it on the radios,’ Jacob continued. ‘It’s a secret. They’ve been doing it bit by bit. Otherwise there’d be people coming across from other countries too, probably.’

‘It’s one of those safe zones, I reckon, Lee. One of them that’s come to life after all this time, and now it’s rebuilding the city. It’s remaking our home.’

‘What about Mum?’

Jacob was quiet for a few moments. ‘Dr Gupta reckons she’ll pull through. She’s strong. We left a note. Telling them we’re going to see what’s happening in London. Then we’ll come back.’

She could hear a lot more pain and conflict in his voice than he was prepared to own up to. As for herself, right now, Leona felt nothing for Mum but a dim sense of regret, clouded by blame and anger; some of it deserved, most of it not. Every ounce of grief she’d cried out in the last few days had been for Hannah. But then this kind of pain mostly flowed that way, didn’t it? Downwards - mother to child. Mum knew that, she’d understand.

‘If it’s all getting fixed up, we can come back and get everyone to join us and return to London. How cool would that be?’

Leona nodded.

‘Just a scouting trip,’ he added. ‘That’s all. We’re going to go find out and report back.’

Perhaps there’d be a chance to revisit their abandoned house in Shepherd’s Bush. To lie on her old bed once more, look at the faded posters on her pink walls. And if this glistening promise of lights turned out to be an empty promise, a mirage that came to nothing, then she could think of far worse places to come to a fitting end than in her childhood room, snug beneath her quilt, and Dad - Andy Sutherland, oil engineer, father, husband - lying still in the next bedroom, undisturbed these last ten years.

‘Can I come along with you?’ she found herself asking.

Jacob hugged her clumsily. He was always clumsy, her little brother. He mumbled something into her shoulder. She stretched an arm out and hugged him tightly. Not just a sparrow-chested little dork any more, but a young man with broad shoulders. He was big enough that they could look after each other now.

‘Thank you, Jake,’ she whispered, planting a kiss on his head amidst the tousled hair.

‘So,’ he replied, letting her go and swiping at his face with the back of his hand, ‘we need to find you a bike and stuff.’

 

 

 

J
enny stared at him, sitting on the end of her cot. His face was still young, still thirty-nine, still carrying that tan he’d picked up last time he’d returned from a contract abroad; his fine buzz-cut strawberry-blond hair, a goatee beard and several days of stubble catching it up: Andy Sutherland, her dead husband, exactly as she remembered him.

You did well, Jenny
, he said, a smile tugging his lips.
I’m so proud of you.

‘Oh, God, Andy,’ she cried, knowing he couldn’t really be sitting here. Knowing, at best, this was her fevered mind playing games with her. But it didn’t matter. It was a good, lucid hallucination. Right now she was happy to have that.

‘I’ve missed you so much,’ her voice cracked painfully.

I’ve missed you, too.
His voice, his soft Kiwi accent . . . but she knew they were her words. She reached out for his hand, wincing at the pain from the burns up her arm and across her shoulders, her neck.

She knew he was right, her mind - or perhaps it was the drugs - had given her this much. She should be thankful for that.

‘Andy, your granddaughter . . . Hannah, she was beautiful.’ Her voice failed, leaving just a whisper. ‘You should have seen her.’

‘She was. Just like Leona was at her age.’

Andy smiled.
Yes. Stubborn.

In her dream, she could feel tears rolling down her cheeks. The saltiness stung her left cheek where the skin was open and raw and trying desperately to knit.

Andy looked so young; thirty-nine still.

‘I feel old, Andy. Since you died it’s been so bloody hard. So many days that I’ve wanted to curl up somewhere with a bottle of pills and just admit defeat.’

We. He was talking about mankind, talking about oil - the subject had obsessed him over the final years of their marriage. He’d become a Cassandra on the subject. An engineer who could see the fracture marks in the engine casing; the lookout who could see the approaching iceberg where no one else could, or even wanted to.

Andy had once told her that the twentieth century was the oil century; every major event, every war, every political decision had oil behind it. A century of jockeying for position, musical chairs to see who ended up sitting on the biggest reserves when the music stopped.

‘We knew, and what did we do?’ They’d talked about moving out of London, as far from a population centre as possible, but they never did. It ended up being just talk.

You did well to survive the crash,
he said.
Got our children through the worst of it alive. You’ll never know how much I love you for that.

‘But they’re gone, Andy,’ she whispered. ‘Gone. I heard Walter and Tami discussing it over my bed.’ They must have thought she wasn’t hearing them. But she had, and many other harried conversations between them, filtered and disordered by the drugs, the fever, until it was almost impossible to untangle and make sense of. But this she knew - her children had left her.

He leant forward, close enough that if she dared dispel the illusion, she could have reached out and touched his tanned face.

Survivors, not scavengers. People who’d carved sustainability from the ruins around them. People like that minded their own, kept themselves hidden away. Good people essentially. Andy was right, there were no more bands of uniformed scavengers, or migrating hordes of city folk. They were long gone.

‘Maybe . . . maybe I can’t survive without them,’ she said.

You have to, love. The people out here rely on you. You’ve made this place work. You’ve built a safe haven. It’s sane here, there’s fairness, kindness; it’s like an extended family. That’s a projection of you, Jenny,
of your personality; firm and fair, just like you were with the kids. Somebody who could never stand that corporate arse-talk at work, any kind of bullshit, injustice, prejudice.
He grinned.
That’s why we got it together at college. You remember? You stopped me talking bullshit.

Jenny managed a wheezy laugh - little more than a weak rattling hiss and a half-smile.

‘No they don’t, they’re fed up with me in charge. Anyway, I’ve had enough—’

Andy had always hated politicians. He’d always joked that the best way to filter out the bad seeds was to place a job ad for Prime Minister in a national newspaper and all those that applied would be automatically disqualified. The bad seeds - those were the ones who were going to be jockeying for position whilst she lay here in the infirmary drugged to the eyeballs.

‘But, Andy, I can’t do it any more.’

Then he was gone. Just like that. Gone. Conjured up and magicked away just as easily by her mind.

‘Andy?’ She reached out with a hand, wincing as taut healing skin stretched across her shoulder blades, and felt the cot where he’d been sitting. She wanted her hallucination back.

‘Andy, please . . . I need you,’ she whispered, settling her head back against the pillow, exhausted, dizzy, spent. ‘Please . . . come . . . back . . .’

 

 

 

 

 

 

‘
I
’m glad we didn’t set up camp in there,’ said Helen, nodding towards the slip road with its diner and petrol station alongside it. ‘It just feels wrong, sort of like it’s a . . . I don’t know, like it’s some sort of museum.’

Jacob, Leona and Nathan finished assembling the tents, the kind that required little more than threading thin flexible plastic rods through several vinyl sleeves. They’d picked them up at a camping store along with a small camping trailer designed to attach to a car’s bumper, that they were towing behind their bikes on the end of several lengths of nylon rope.

‘Like one of those little thingies set up in a whatcha-call-it to show you what a typical street looked like in olden times.’

‘A diorama?’ said Jacob.

‘What?’

‘Diorama? Where they sort of make a scene of exhibits and stuff from the past.’

Helen smiled dizzily. ‘Yeah, one of them things.’ Her pale brow knotted momentarily. ‘I think me mum took me to one of those once. All dark streets at night and flickery gas lamps. Must’ve been four or five then.’ She glanced across at the empty buildings. Although some of the smaller windows were still intact, it was clear that both the diner and the petrol station had long ago been thoroughly picked clean.

‘Anyway, glad we’re camping out here on the road, really. I hate going in buildings and finding you know . . .
stuff
.’

She let the rest of her words go. Didn’t need saying. They knew what she meant; the dried and leathered husks of people.

‘Jay, catch!’

Jacob looked up as Nathan tossed him a sealed tub of freeze-dried pasta. He caught it in both hands. Heavy. Something else they’d managed to find at the same retail park outside Bracton in the camping supplies warehouse. There were gallon tubs of this stuff in storage at the back; freeze-dried ‘meal solutions’ that required only cold water to metamorphose what looked like flakes of dust and nuggets of gravel into a palatable meal. Jacob noticed on the plastic lids covering the foil seal a ‘best by’ date of 2039. This stuff, kept dry, lasted decades. They’d piled a dozen tubs onto the back of the tow cart. Enough food to keep them going for weeks. Certainly enough to get them to London and back.

He scooped out four portions using the plastic ladle inside and poured in four pints of water from a plastic jug; stirring the savoury porridge until the desiccated flakes of pasta and nuggets of ham and vegetable began to swell. Before his eyes the sludge-like mixture began to look almost like food.

Half an hour later, the sludge was bubbling in a pan over a campfire. Helen dumped an armful of things to burn that she’d gathered from the diner: vinyl seat cushions, fading menu cards promising an all-day breakfast for £5.75, lace curtain trim from the windows, the pine legs from half a dozen stools.

Although the day had been bright and dry, it was getting much cooler out here in the middle of the road now the sun had gone down.

Nathan arrived with another load of flammable bric-a-brac; a stack of glossy magazines and A to Z road maps from the garage.

 

‘But what I mean is,’ said Helen, ‘what I’m saying is . . . is . . . I just don’t get it.’

Leona rolled her eyes tiredly. In the sputtering light of the campfire, no one seemed to notice.

‘What’s the bit you don’t get, Helen?’ asked Nathan.

Her bottom lip pouted and her eyebrows rumpled thoughtfully. ‘Why . . . I guess . . . why it all happened so quickly.’

This subject was a floor-time discussion topic Leona had hosted during morning class on many an occasion. For children like Helen, who would have been only five at the time of the crash, and those younger, it seemed to be a bewildering piece of history; almost mysterious, like the mythical fall of Atlantis or the sudden collapse of the Roman Empire.