CHAPTER 78
10 years AC
‘LeMan 49/25a’ - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
Half an hour out from shore they picked out the platforms on the horizon; like a row of five fat ladies with thick shapeless legs, skirts held up and wading through ankle-deep water for cockles. Walfield opened the throttle and the engine rose a note. They carved across the flat sea, leaving a tail of tumbling suds behind them and Leona’s spirits rose as she began to pick out more and more detail on their approach. Best news of all, she couldn’t see any barges anchored nearby or tethered beneath any of the platforms.
We got here first.
‘Jesus. Much larger than I imagined,’ called out Adam.
Twenty-five minutes later the men were getting a much better idea of how large the platforms were, towering above them as Walfield eased back on the throttle and aimed the tugboat towards the base of the tallest platform amongst the cluster.
‘It’s like a bleedin’ jungle up there,’ said Walfield gazing up at the dangling terraces of foliage.
Leona detected movement along the decks; the ever-shifting green of endless leaves, lining every deck and walkway; the multicoloured fluttering of clothes strung out on laundry lines, and the movement of curious people emerging to gather along the safety rails.
She waved up at them, trying to see if she could recognise individual faces yet.
Walfield threw the tug into reverse to take the last of the momentum off the vessel, and the deck beneath their feet shuddered. Leona shaded her eyes, looking up at the closest faces on the spider deck.
‘It’s us!!’ she called out. ‘It’s me! Leona! Where’s Mum?’
Several voices called back, over each other, lost against the idling chug of the engine.
‘Mum?! You up there!!?’
A male voice called down. ‘Who is that?’
Leona didn’t recognise it at first. Then she remembered the newcomer, the foreign man. It seemed like a lifetime ago that she’d been teasing Mum about fancying him.
‘It’s Leona!’ she replied. ‘I also have some friends with me!’
She heard a chorus of voices stirring above her.
‘Somebody go get her, will you!’ she called out. No one was going to lower anything to them until Mum said it was okay to do so.
‘How many friends?’ It was that foreign guy again. She remembered his name now. Valérie.
She shrugged an answer. ‘Four of them. Can you go get my mum, please?’
She saw him now, leaning over the cellar deck railing. ‘Four men?’
Why is he speaking for them?
She wondered what was taking Mum so long. She wondered why Walter wasn’t already manning the davits, being a nosy bugger and calling out twenty questions to them as he lowered the crane hooks.
Something’s not right.
‘Where’s Mum? Where’s Walter?’
Adam emerged from the cockpit and stood beside her on the foredeck.
‘Everything okay here?’
Valérie Latoc’s voice came down to them. ‘Your mother is not in charge now! Things have changed!’
She looked along the crowd on the spider deck. She saw familiar faces. Deborah Hardy, her two toddlers, Ronnie, Moira and Audrey - white-haired old sisters - Saleena Chudasama, her children, Alice Harton, Denise Bingham. A deck up she recognised Tami Gupta, Howard, the Yun sisters, Keisha, Desirae and Kara and some of the other Bible-bashers. She saw Edward waving and grinning, David beside him. She saw Hamarra, Rebecca, the Barker sisters . . .
Familiar faces, but all somehow a little different. She’d expected smiles; teeth everywhere and waving hands. But instead the lined-up faces watched events impassively.
‘What’s going on? Why the hell isn’t Mum in charge?’
Latoc’s hesitation told her something. ‘I have replaced her! The people here wanted this! It is for the best!’
‘What?!’
‘You should go!’ called out Alice. ‘It’s not your mum’s place any more!’
‘Where’s my mum? I want to speak to her!’
‘Your crazy mum went and threw a bloody hissy-fit!’ snapped Alice. ‘She shot Valérie!’
Leona steadied herself on the foredeck as the tugboat bobbed gently. ‘What? She wouldn’t do that! Where is she?’
‘She is in our prison!’ replied Latoc. ‘We have decided she cannot stay here any more! She is going to be evicted! She can leave with you!’
This is crazy. When she’d left Mum was in the infirmary dosed up to the gills on painkillers and antibiotics. Walter was ostensibly running things, maybe not a popular choice, but as her right-hand man, the obvious choice.
The newcomer, Valérie, is in charge? How the hell did that happen?
Leona turned to look at Adam. ‘Something’s gone wrong.’
She turned back to face the others along the railings. ‘This is my mum’s place, for f*ck’s sake! She took you all in! You can’t just kick her off!!’
‘This is now a place of God! A place of worship!’ said Latoc. ‘I asked her to join with us, to pray with us. Instead she took a gun and shot me,’ he continued. He waved his bound hand over the side. ‘Do you see? I cannot allow her to stay here any more.’
‘This is my home, as well!’ cried Leona. ‘You can’t stop me coming aboard!’
‘Yes we can!’ shouted Alice. ‘You pissed off looking for something much better, didn’t you? Well tough shit! It’s the faithful only allowed on here. Do you understand!’
‘Alice!’ snapped Valérie, hushing her. ‘I am sorry,’ he continued. ‘I cannot let you and your friends with their guns come onto our ark.’
Ark?
‘This is a holy place now, Leona! These people have been waiting for me!’
Adam turned to look at Leona. ‘That guy’s a headcase,’ he muttered.
She nodded.
Without warning, something landed with a heavy thud on the foredeck behind her. She spun round to see the bottom end of a rope ladder snarled in a pile of coiled rope and wooden slats. She looked up to see that it had flopped down from the main deck. At the top of it was Martha.
‘NO!! This isn’t no holy place!!’ Her shrill voice cut across the space above them. She looked down at Leona. ‘You come up, Leona, love!’
Valérie Latoc’s eyes widened. ‘Get that rope up now!’ Several people, not too far along the main deck from where Martha stood, stepped towards her.
‘Oh-my-God-grabbit!’ hissed Leona.
Adam leapt across the deck and got a hand on the rope ladder before it could be yanked up beyond reach. Meanwhile, Martha had turned to fend off the people approaching her. ‘You stay back!!’ she screamed, slapping the face of the nearest woman with the palm of her hand. The others stepped forward and wrestled with her. The scuffle quickly became an undignified tangle of flaying hands; an almost comical bitch fight between her ample form and three others, hair-pulling and face slapping.
Adam turned to Walfield. ‘Danny! A warning shot, please.’
The sergeant shouldered his SA80 and cracked a single shot into the air. The effect was instantaneous; everyone dropped back from the railings and out of sight. Except Martha and the others still slapping, scratching and screaming at each other.
Adam pulled himself up the first few slats of the rope ladder. It swung precariously over the side of the tugboat’s foredeck with his weight, leaving him swinging above the water.
‘Just cover me till I get my leg onto something!!” he bellowed as he swung. Working quickly he pulled himself arm over arm, up the next dozen wooden slats until he was banging his hip against the side of the spider deck’s safety railing. Several pairs of hands snatched at his khaki shirt trying to pull him off the rope ladder. Walfield fired another single shot that whistled close to them and zinged off the underbelly of the deck above. The hands disappeared back out of sight.
Adam swung against the railing again, this time letting go of the rope and grabbing at the rusty metal, hoping it wasn’t so corroded that it was going to snap loose and bend out of shape and come tumbling down into the sea with him. He swung himself over the railing with the clumsiness of a man too exhausted to care how he landed. The spider deck rang with the impact. A moment later he appeared on his feet again, pulling the gun down from his shoulder.
‘All right, everyone get the f*ck back!’ he screamed. ‘Please!’ he added as an afterthought.
The nearest of them melted away from him, wide-eyed at the sight of the levelled gun. A deck above them they could hear Valérie Latoc screaming an order for someone - anyone - to go and retrieve the community’s weapons from Walter’s trusty locker room.