CHAPTER 11
10 years AC
‘LeMan 49/25a’ - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
‘Mum, you really don’t need to be shovelling this shit,’ said Leona. ‘Seriously, you’re in charge round here, no one would expect you to.’
Jenny looked up from the foul stinking slurry before her. The odour rising from the warm, steaming bed of human and chicken faeces was so overpowering that she’d been fighting a constant gag reflex until she’d managed to adjust to the unfamiliar habit of breathing solely through her open mouth.
‘I’m taking my turn just like everyone else,’ she said, tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear. ‘If I ducked this job, the likes of Alice would have a field day with it.’
Alice was a miserable shrew. There wasn’t a day that passed without Jenny hearing some little barbed comment come from the woman’s flapping lips. There wasn’t a day Jenny didn’t regret allowing the woman to join them. She’d been so quiet and meek the first few months, no trouble at all . . . that is until she’d found her feet; found other quiet voices like hers. Voices that wondered why this community should have an unelected leader; why one woman should be allowed to impose her values, her opinions on all of them, when it was everyone who contributed to their survival.
Jenny suspected it wasn’t the idea of democracy being shunted aside because it was a temporary inconvenience that so irked Alice Harton, it was the fact that some other woman was in charge . . . and not her. After all, as she constantly let everyone know, she’d had extensive management experience back in the old world; ran a local government department of some kind. Logically, it should be someone like her team-leading, not some workaday middle class mum.
‘Sod Alice,’ said Leona. ‘She moans about everything anyway. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t with a bitch like her.’
‘Still, we all should take turns doing this, Lee. It’s going to be your turn soon.’
Leona grimaced. ‘Oh, gross.’
‘We’ve all got to do our bit, love.’
Walter nodded. ‘Each digester stops producing methane after three weeks and needs emptying and refilling.’ He gestured at the other two sealed eight-foot-long fibreglass cylinders that he’d rescued from a brewery. ‘Huey and Dewey are doing fine right now. Week after next, I think it’s your name up on the rota to clean out Dewey.’
The rota . . . The Rota . . . was the community’s closest equivalent to a Bible. It was written out in tiny handwriting on a whiteboard in what had once been some sort of meeting room. There were four hundred community members old enough and fit enough to work one chore or another. Every day Jenny found herself in front of that whiteboard, shuffling names around, shifting groups of people from one chore to the next.
No one escaped the rota, she insisted, not even herself.
This task, though, was generally considered to be by far the worst; shovelling the spent slurry from the digester into several dozen four-gallon plastic drums to be taken up to the plant decks and used as fertiliser. There was always someone who refused point-blank to do it; like Alice Harton did, like Nilaya Koundinya who claimed it was unacceptable for someone of her caste to work directly with human faeces. On both those occasions she’d found herself in the middle of a shouting match, ultimately having to threaten eviction if they didn’t shut up and take their turn.
This isn’t a popularity contest, she told herself daily. Remember that.
‘Next week is it?’ asked Leona.
‘Yup,’ replied Walter.
‘Fantastic,’ Leona replied drily. ‘And do I get your help as well, Walter?’
The old man grinned but didn’t reply. He’d volunteered to come down to the ‘stink room’ to help Jenny out when her turn came up on the rota. His infatuation for her was embarrassingly obvious.
‘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 . . .
After all, it takes just one fox to get into the hen house . . .