CHAPTER 27
10 years AC
Norfolk
‘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.
‘Our dad knew it was going to happen,’ said Jacob. ‘He worked in the oil business, didn’t he, Lee?’
She nodded in a vague way, eyes lost in the fire.
‘Dad said the oil was running out quickly back then. He called it “peak oil”. Said it was running out much faster than anyone wanted to admit.’ Jacob had heard Mum and Leona discuss that week many times over. ‘So, because there wasn’t much of it, no one managed to build up reserves, no one had it spare. So when those bombs exploded in . . . in . . . those Arab countries and all those other oil places, and that big tanker thing blocked the important shipping channel over there and the oil completely stopped, there was nothing anyone could do. It was too late.’
He tossed several pages from a faded magazine onto the fire, producing a momentary flickering of green flame. ‘There was no oil for anyone. That meant no fuel. No fuel meant nobody bringing food on ships and planes to England.’
Helen shook her head. ‘So why weren’t we growing our own food here?’
Jacob shrugged. ‘It was cheaper to import it than grow it ourselves. Right, Lee?’
She nodded mutely. ‘Economics. The finely tuned engine.’
‘That’s right,’ said Jacob, ‘the “Finely Tuned Engine”.’ He sighed.
Nathan shrugged. ‘The f*ck’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Something our dad used to say.’
Nathan and Helen stared at him, none the wiser.
‘It’s what Dad called the world,’ he answered. ‘It was one of his sayings, wasn’t it, Lee?’
She nodded.
Jacob nodded at her. ‘Go on, you can explain it better than me.’
She sighed. ‘It was just one of his metaphors: the global economy was like a perfectly tuned engine, like a Formula One racing car; tuned to deliver the best possible performance and profit, but only under, like, perfect racing conditions.’ She tossed a menu card on the fire. ‘So, sure, it drives just fine on smooth dry tarmac. But not so good at coping with a pothole, or crossing a muddy bumpy field. That’s what the world was - a finely tuned engine for churning out profit. That’s all. Efficient, but very fragile. No money wasted on non-profit stuff like safety margins or back-up systems. No money wasted on tedious things like emergency storage or contingency supplies.’
She looked across the fire at them. ‘For instance, no supermarket was ever going to bother wasting its profits on setting up expensive warehousing for storage when they could rely on a just-in-time distribution system. So this country only ever had about forty-eight hours’ worth of food in it. It was always coming in on ships and trucks, refrigerated and as fresh as the day it was picked and packaged.’
‘Dad used to say we’d be screwed in the UK if something serious ever happened,’ added Jacob. ‘More screwed than just about any other country in the world.’
‘True, that,’ Nathan nodded.
‘There were no emergency stockpiles for us. No contingency planning, ’ said Leona. ‘We were totally caught out.’
‘Dad used to say the f*ckwits who ran this country didn’t have a clue between them.’
Leona smiled in the dark. He certainly did. She remembered him shaking his head in disgust at the TV, snorting at the dismissive platitudes offered by government suits when uttered by some talking-head.
The fire crackled in the silence. Jacob tossed some broken strips of chipboard onto the flames.
‘It was only in the last year or so, when oil started getting really expensive, that the big important f*ckwits at the top - the men in smart suits - began to realise their finely tuned engine was struggling to cope; that we were all gonna get caught out by something.’
‘So why didn’t they change things?’ asked Helen.
Jacob shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’
Leona looked up. ‘Because the f*ckwits in suits were only thinking about the next financial quarter and their next big bonus, that’s why.’
The others turned. It was the first real sign of life they’d had out of her all day.
‘Too greedy for their own good.’
‘Well, that’s just silly,’ said Helen. ‘The men in charge should’ve fixed things if they knew they were all wrong.’
‘Yeah, right,’ muttered Leona. ‘So, a pothole in the road finally turned up.’
‘The bombs in those oil places?’ said Helen.
Leona nodded. ‘And our finely tuned engine just rattled and fell to pieces.’
‘Within a single week,’ added Jacob.
Leona tossed the wooden leg of a stool onto the fire, sending a small shower of sparks up into the sky, the flames momentarily flickering with renewed appetite. The dancing pool of amber light stretched a little further up and down the smooth tarmac of the motorway, picking out several abandoned cars along the hard shoulder, nestling amidst tufts of weeds that emerged between the deflated tyres and wheel arches.
‘I suppose we all had it coming,’ said Jacob after a while.
Leona nodded, her eyes glinting, reflecting the guttering flames. ‘Dad was right,’ she uttered quietly, before shuffling down on her side and zipping up her sleeping bag.