Epilogue
I look back now and realise how different things might be today if we’d been overrun by that mad bastard’s boy army. We just wouldn’t have survived under Maxwell. Him and his army would probably have taken what they wanted and moved on like a horde of locusts.
But something happened on those rigs that morning. Something quite remarkable. Leona Sutherland shamed those boys into putting down their guns. She shamed them into taking off their orange jacket uniform. That morning, she stood up and stared them all in the eyes and somehow made them see the truth . . . that their guns and swagger, their gold chains, their rap-star nicknames were all just a pitiful, needy, grasping for the past.
She made them see that. That there was no future in it. Fighting over the scraps of what remained, the last tins, the last bottles, the last drops of oil.
I saw her transform there and then. Become every bit as strong as her mother. Perhaps even stronger. I saw her stare at those boys until they could only look at their own feet in shame.
A year and a half after that battle on the gas platforms, the last of the moving ashore was completed and the area around Bracton became our home; the soldier boys, the women, the workers and the steady trickle of newcomers - those that had heard the country was rebuilding itself here in East Anglia - all of us working together.
She led that unlikely collaboration for nearly thirty years.
She’s dead now, Leona.
Died ten years ago from cancer. Still, we had a wonderful life together. I wake up every morning missing her. Then I open my eyes and realise I’m living out my days in a world that is a reflection of her. So in a way, she’s not gone. She’s all around me.
I was looking the other day through my old diaries. And I found an entry written not long after we’d started the move ashore. She’d just discovered she was pregnant. I remember asking her what she’d want to call our baby and she said she already knew what names she was going to call it, boy or girl. She was like that . . . bossy sometimes. So certain and so clear in mind.
But I think it was knowing she was pregnant - that was the source of her determination and strength in those tough early days after we moved from the rigs; when there was so much to do and so many things that could still have gone wrong for us. It was that determination to be damned sure our children inherited something better that fuelled her, drove her on, gave her such seemingly endless energy.
And I think our son has inherited a much better world . . . and, of course, so have his children: Jacob and Hannah. Here I am at the tail end of my life, and I can see that now; looking around at windmills, and roads filled with bicycles and people having so much less, yet living more. People no longer tucked away in isolation surrounded by an Aladdin’s cave of mail-ordered possessions; no longer tapping anonymously on keyboards to an internet world of other lonely people. Instead, I see people tending allotments together, repairing things together, reaching out and connecting with each other in a way that never happened before the oil age crashed and burned.
I’m living in the world Leona and her mother made. I can honestly say that I see a little bit of her in everything around me . . . and not just in the occasionally stubborn expression on our granddaughter’s face. She’s here in spirit, I suppose, in the way we all live now.
When young people ask me how hard it was just after the crash, how did we manage to get through those tough, dark times and build things anew, I find myself thinking that it was ‘power’ that got us here. Not the sort of power that comes from burning oil or gas, or spinning turbines, but the kind that comes from a mother who wants something better for her children.
There truly is nothing more powerful, more world-changing, more complete than a mother’s love.
Adam Brooks
21 December, 51 AC
Author Notes
Afterlight was something I wanted to write directly after I finished writing Last Light. The temptation I suppose was to follow straight on with the tale, following the Sutherland family out of London and into whatever post-oil survival nightmare awaited them. But, I decided to let another book intercede (October Skies) which took me somewhere else for a while and allowed me the time and distance to think about how I was going to conclude the Sutherland’s tale.
The main result of giving myself that time was the decision to follow on ten years after the events of Last Light. And I’m so glad I did that because I think, certainly from my point of view, it’s been a far more interesting exercise looking at the world long after the dust has settled, than just to write a continuation of the unravelling chaos of a collapsing world. Anyway, we’ve seen all that before in countless zombie movies; all those chaotic scenes set in shopping malls and petrol stations.
This was a chance to see what a world without oil looked like. And quite a sobering experience it’s been. I never really imagined it being the commune-living-in-the-Welsh-valleys post-apocalyptic idyll that some survivalist types seem impatient to experience. Instead in this book I’ve imagined it as being a relentlessly hard life of grim endurance, where every day is a constant reminder of all the little luxuries we once had, and lost. Hot water at the twist of a tap, light and heat at the flick of a switch . . . a hot meal at the push of a microwave button.
So this book has ended up being less about railing against our evil, greedy, consumer ways and more a swansong to those times. See, I know despite all the moaning I do about waste and greed, and consumerism and selfishness and this dumbed down me-me-me culture . . . that given a week in a wet forest with nothing but damp firewood and a diet of scrawny trapped rabbits, I’d be pining for these times.
And that’s exactly what the characters do. They ache for that old world. They pine for it.
Afterlight has certainly turned out to not to be a manifesto for the hardcore survivalists out there. It’s not a celebration of anti-consumerism nor a yearning for a simple smallholder lifestyle. Sorry, that’s just not me. But, what it is - just like Last Light was - is a warning that we can’t go on consuming the way we’re doing now. Simple maths dictates that this world won’t support eight billion people all wanting their TVs and cell phones and cars. In fact, if I’m being brutally honest, it won’t support eight billion people wanting something as simple as . . . meat. (Yes, in our time, I’m convinced we’ll all have to become vegetarians if everyone’s going to have enough to eat. And believe me, as a bacon-lover that’s a bitter pill to swallow.)
Tough times ahead. Tough decisions ahead . . . and it’s unavoidable. Perhaps the only positive note I can tack on the end here is that the sooner we wake up and start making the really hard decisions about the future; decisions about how much we in the first world should really own; decisions about how best the third world can control its population growth . . . .then, the less likely we are to face a scenario like the one portrayed in these two peak oil books.
But, do I have faith that everyone will wake up sooner rather than later and make all those really hard decisions? Pfft. Nope, can’t say I do. In the end, we’ve all become children . . . unable to delay gratification, unwilling to wait for our goodies, unwilling to do without all our shiny things . . . and content to sit back and watch the world walk towards a big crunch point.
The sad thing is . . . even though I’ve had my head in Peak Oil for years and written these two books, I’m just as childish and selfish and short-sighted as anyone else.