CHAPTER 45
10 years AC
Shepherd’s Bush, London
Leona gazed out of the small study window at the cherry tree swaying gently in next door’s front garden, caught in the morning sun, the blossoms seeming to glow from within. A lovely view. She’d seen Dad a million times sitting in his office chair gazing out of the window.
Probably loving that same tree.
She smiled. It almost felt like he was there in the room with her somehow. Not the body upstairs in Mum and Dad’s old room . . . not that. That wasn’t Dad any more, it was just the fossilised remains of a cadaver beneath a rotting quilt. No, sitting here, at his desk, looking at the faded Post-It notes stuck to the side of his monitor, the walls, a year planner with jobs and contracts penned in and still yet to do, articles from oil industry magazines, charts and graphs pinned to the cork board, a Gary Larson calendar on the desk; one fresh cartoon for every day. It was still on Monday 4 July - the day he left here for his last job over in Iraq just a few days before the crash happened.
This study, the room itself, was Dad.
Nanna said Grandad was the one who discovered the oil was all running out?
Leona smiled at the memory of Hannah’s voice.
Was he a famous science man?
‘No, just a geologist and an engineer,’ she said aloud. She shook her head. ‘And no, he didn’t discover that. Everyone knew, they just weren’t bothered about doing anything.’
The whole oil business knew it was running out. Dad just wrote the report about how bad it could get and how easily the entire industry could be disabled by taking out no more than a dozen distribution nodes.
‘He just wrote a report about it.’ Hearing her own voice deadened by the walls of Dad’s book-lined study was strangely reassuring. ‘He wrote this big essay about it. A big chunky thing. Wrote it way back just before the new millennium, when I was just nine. And he warned what might happen. How someone could make oil stop with just, like, a few bombs in all the right places. They paid him a lot of money for it.’
She shrugged. ‘And then ten years later it happened. It happened exactly as he’d written it down. Bomb after bomb . . . as if he’d predicted the future.’
Wow! Was Grandad a wizard?
Leona laughed. ‘No, not a wizard, Hannah.’ Her gaze drifted back to the window, the glowing cherry blossoms outside, her mind a million miles away. ‘My mum never told you kids when she did the peak oil class, though - never told anyone, in fact - that the people Dad wrote the report for were the same people that made those bombs happen.’
She laughed again, bitterly this time. ‘In a way, you could say the end of the world all started right here, in this little room. Dad - he sort of wrote the plans for it. Showed how it could be done.’
People . . . bad people?
‘Yes, bad people.’ She shook her head vaguely. ‘Never really knew for sure who they were. Dad thought they were oil people. I guess they weren’t.’
Evil terror-men?
‘We’ll never know. Doesn’t really matter who it was now, does it? Or why they’d want to do it. It doesn’t matter any more. They’re all gone. It’s history now.’
Something skittered across the floor above; it could have been a rat, or a wild cat chasing a rat. Their home’s new tenant, mother nature, was clearly impatient to move in.
How long?
Not Hannah’s voice any more, just her own.
How long?
She opened her mouth to answer her own question and realised she honestly didn’t know. ‘Jacob and Nathan might yet come,’ she uttered softly. She didn’t want her little brother coming home and finding her, like Dad, tucked up and dead. Because, yes, he must have made it out of there. He must have. So, maybe the boys had found their lights and new friends and a future, or if not, were well on their way back home.
So how long?
How long indeed. There was food in the trailer outside, and water. Enough to keep her going for weeks, if not months. But that wasn’t the plan.
‘I’m home,’ she whispered.
And that was good enough for now. Her eyes drifted back to the shifting cherry tree outside.