CHAPTER 26
10 years AC
‘LeMan 49/25a’ - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
Jenny 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.
Don’t, Jenny.
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 a pickle, wasn’t she?
‘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.’
Survival is a hard business, Jenny. We got lucky over the last century and a half. Like a lottery winner, we all grew fat and lazy. You know what I’m talking about.
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.
I could have done more, he said. I could have warned more people.
‘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.
They’re grown up now, Jen. Not children any more, but strong young adults. They know how to survive, Jenny, because you showed them how to do that. Out there now, on the mainland it’s just deer and dogs, and survivors like them.
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.
Don’t give up, Jenny. They need you here.
‘No they don’t, they’re fed up with me in charge. Anyway, I’ve had enough—’
Don’t let someone else take over, Jenny. Don’t let someone who wants to be in charge take over. You know where that leads.
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.
Don’t let anyone else take over, Jen. I’m serious. You’ve made something good here. Don’t let someone turn it into something else.
‘But, Andy, I can’t do it any more.’
Fight for it, Jenny, fight for it. Don’t give up.
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 . . .’