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?’