Afterlight (57 page)

Just like Jenny used to be, she mused, always hurrying from one task to the next, worn down with the endless attrition of having to attend to a million different things.

She felt a soft stab of guilt for her friend.

Jenny had just walked into their prayer meeting like that and fired a gun at him, point blank. Like some kind of automaton, no expression on her face at all. No anger. Just the empty, set, expression of someone who knows exactly what’s coming next. It wasn’t the scarring that made her look so unlike the Jenny she knew, it was those dead eyes. She thought she knew Jenny; never would have thought in a million years that she could do something like that out of spite because . . . what? Because they’d decided to vote someone else as the leader?

That wasn’t like Jenny. Not like her at all.

How many times had she heard Jenny moan about being the boss? How many times had she half-seriously suggested walking away from the responsibility and letting someone else have a go at doing better? The carping from every quarter, the bitching, the complaining, trying to keep everyone happy? It wore her out. She never imagined Jenny would do what she did because . . . simply because she got
voted out?

A breakdown, that’s what it was, she decided. The accumulation of stress, the grief from losing Hannah, endless worry about her kids - and God knows, Martha knew what that felt like. There wasn’t a morning she didn’t wake up with a prayer on her lips for Nathan’s safe home-coming or didn’t send herself to sleep at night muttering the very same prayer.

Martha scooped up Latoc’s shirt from the tangle of blankets, quilts and cushions on the floor of his quarters.

Jenny, though . . . Martha had always thought Jenny was stronger than that. Stronger than anyone else. Indestructible. Not the type to just
snap
like that.

I thought I knew her
.

Four and a half years she and Nathan had been living here. Joined them, in fact, not long after they’d set up on the rigs. She and her boy, and about a dozen others, had been amongst the first to cross her path; making their way north along an abandoned road from London, clattering along on the back of a horse-drawn cart, and there she’d been standing in the middle of the road, almost as if she’d been waiting all the time for them. As if she’d known they were coming.

She owed her so much.

Martha bent down again to scoop up more of Valérie’s things. The dark blue khaki trousers he seemed to wear all of the time - all pockets. Some shorts he wore as underwear, thick woollen socks carelessly balled and inside-out on his bed. It was no different, she decided somewhat nostalgically, to going around Nathan’s messy old bedroom, back in the good old days; untangling his scuzzy smalls from the game controller cables stretched across his unmade bed. Maybe that’s why she enjoyed doing this. It felt like she was back then . . . back in another time.

Something fell out of the swaddle of clothes she was holding under her arm onto Valérie’s bedding. She looked down at it.

A loop of hair; a thick tress of curly blonde hair, curled and tied up with a faded pink ribbon. She reached down and picked it up, spreading the soft loop of hair between her thumb and forefinger.

She could have told anyone who that hair belonged to, even without looking at the ribbon. She’d run a brush through it often enough, trimmed it, plaited it, pulled it into cornrows, pulled it back into a ponytail Lord knows how many times.

Seeing it there, nestling amongst Valérie Latoc’s bedding, caught her by surprise; it stole a breath from her mouth. The lock of hair had dropped out of his blue trousers. Out of his one-of-many pockets.

A question arrived unannounced, unsolicited and very much unwelcomed.

She looked at the bundle of clothes under her arm. And before she realised she was doing it, she had placed them down and was pulling his blue trousers from the pile.

For a moment she held them at arm’s length; tatty blue army-style trousers, patched and mended several times. The kind of thing men do - pick a favourite item of clothing and hang onto it for dear life, nursing worn holes and unthreading seams, unable to toss them away. She held it at arm’s length not because they smelled of stale body odour - they did, an accumulation of a week - but because . . .

Something that had no reason to be there.

Her hand drifted slowly towards a hip pocket lumpy with something inside.

She answered that aloud, and dishonestly. ‘I’m jus’ emptyin’ the pockets is all. Can’t wash them with full pockets, right?’ she muttered. How many times had she had to do that with Nathan’s school trousers? Finding endless screwed-up balls of paper; ‘pass-it-around’ notes on exercise book paper, dog-eared Yu-Gi-Oh cards, shredding tissues stiff with dried snot.

Her fingers unbuttoned the pocket flap and curled inside. She realised her hand was trembling as she did so. A hand wanting to find nothing more than a sweaty old bandanna or a handkerchief.

She looked down at the lock of Hannah’s hair on the bed and realised with an unsettling lurch in her chest that they’d condemned and killed a man on finding something less. They’d killed Walter because of a solitary gym shoe on his boat. Because they were so absolutely certain what finding that on his boat meant. Because there were those who’d been absolutely certain Walter was guilty even before they’d bothered to look for anything.

Then her fingers touched something soft inside. Material. Cotton. She felt her heart flutter and flip in her chest. She closed her eyes as she pulled it out, praying it was a just a forgotten strip of bandage or a spare sock; praying it was only that one lock of blonde hair that she needed to find a way to explain away in her mind; to conjure up an acceptable reason for it being there.

She opened her eyes and stared at the small garment that dangled from her fingers.

‘Oh, dear God, no,’ she whispered.

A pair of sky-blue child’s underpants with a constellation of five dark spots of dried blood on the white elasticated waistband.

 

 

 

M
axwell watched them dancing on the wharf; an impromptu party that had started only an hour or so after they’d tied up at Felixstowe and begun exploring the maze of stacked freight containers. Many of them had remained unopened all these years, their thick corrugated doors had obviously resisted earlier attempts by people to break in; scratches and gouges where levers and wedges had been banged into the gap between hatch and frame. A decade’s worth of corrosion later, their hinges gave far more easily.

Each one they prised open proved to be an Aladdin’s cave of treasures. Some of the boys had found a red Lamborghini in one and wheeled it out onto the wharf where they’d been pushing and shoving each other to take turns to sit in the front seat and pretend to drive the thing. The impromptu party, however, had begun shortly after some of them had stumbled upon a container filled with stacked pallets of alcopops and bottles of spirits.

A fire now shimmered in the afternoon light as the boys took turns in tossing on the bone-dry slats of broken pallets, throwing on bottles of brandy and vodka, delighting in the explosion of glass and rolling mini-mushroom clouds of blue alcohol-fuelled flames.

‘S’getting out of ‘and, Chief,’ muttered Jeff.

Maxwell looked at his pilot, sitting beside him on the foredeck of the tugboat. Even from here they could feel the wavering heat of the boys’ growing bonfire. ‘Relax. They’re just letting off some steam.’

Maxwell had smiled beneficently when a group of boys had emerged from the maze of containers to present Edward, Nathan and him with some of the bright orange and yellow coloured bottles of Froot-ka they’d discovered. The boys had already started opening and chugging away at them.

So he’d smiled and told them, since they’d all been such good boys, they bloody well deserved a party. The girlfriends had already been pulled out of their cots from the bowels of the second barge and plied with copious amounts of alcohol and were now, as he watched from afar, busy servicing clusters of boys. It had the look of a Roman orgy; a last-night bender before the end of the world. In fact, it very much had the look of the first few nights of the big crash. Maxwell wondered what would happen if he tried to flex his authority this second, right now - step ashore and announce that the party was over and it was time for them all to go to bed.

He felt the hair on his forearms stir and prickle.

It would be an open challenge to his authority; a dangerously open challenge. He realised the answer to that question was that he daren’t step ashore. It wasn’t a sudden realisation, more a gradual clarification, a truth he’d half suspected for a while that was now, finally, sliding into sharper focus for him. He didn’t truly control these boys, not really. Sure, they were happy to follow orders, follow the schedules and routines that he’d assigned them over the years, happy to cheer his habitual party night opening speech, call him ‘Chief’ and knuckle a salute as he passed them by. But that was because he was the Chief, the guy at the top who made sure every one of them got their perks.

Another recurring, wake-up-sweating nightmare was that one day he was going to publicly give an order to one of the boys and the boy would turn round and tell him to fuck off.

What kept the boys knuckling their foreheads and nodding politely as he passed was a residual deference to him as their school teacher, as the official authority figure put in charge of Safety Zone 4. But more importantly, he was the man who made the lights happen, the arcade machines go on, who opened the sweetie-box and handed out grog and dope on party nights. He was the man promising them even more of that; promising them enough power that every night they could play on the games consoles they’d brought along, watch the library of action movie DVDs they had tucked away.

He shuddered at the thought of what would happen when he finally had to start telling the boys they couldn’t have a party. If they’d stayed on at the dome, that day would have eventually come. And not too far off, that day, either.

With these rigs at least there was the leverage of limitless oil or gas, whatever their generator was tapping for fuel. DVDs, games and girlfriends would keep them busy, keep them happy for the foreseeable. And this container port looked like a useful place to come back to for more booze and fags later on, should he need to sweeten his leadership.

‘You okay, Chief?’ asked Jeff.

Maxwell forced a smile. It felt uncomfortable and ill-fitting and fled quickly. ‘Fine.’

‘We heading off again tomorrow?’

‘I think we’ll give it a day before we move on,’ he replied, ‘see what other supplies we can forage here first.’

Getting the boys to mobilise tomorrow morning, with their heads pounding, was going to be difficult. At least back at the Zone the grog was under lock and key. He put some of it out for them once a week, and once it was gone, it was gone. Tomorrow morning, whilst the boys were all nursing their heads, he’d get what was left of that Froot-ka stored down below on the tugboat. After all, if they were going to have to fight their way on, the boys would be all the better fired up for a scrap with a little alcopop buzz inside them.

He picked Edward out of the milling crowd, his dark face shimmering on the far side of the vodka- and wood-fuelled fire; holding court, relaxed and reclining like a lord on a chaise longue of car tyres covered with fake-fur coats. Beside him, Jay-zee, now proudly wearing the ‘second dog’ jacket inherited from Dizz-ee; the jacket the other boy - Jacob - would have worn alongside Nathan.

He sensed, with a creeping disquiet, that the balance of power was one day going to swing Edward’s way. The young man didn’t need to bribe the boys with perks or parties. They followed his say-so because he was one of them, because he was like the big brother. He looked right, he sounded right. He acted right. The top dog.

 

Snoop watched the boys queuing up to take their turns with the girls, shuffling forward with their trousers already undone and round their ankles. Most of the girls - mercifully for them - were so drunk they were barely conscious.

He watched the boys dancing around the fire like wraiths, playing with burning sticks and daring each other to leap over the flames as they waned. Snoop had tried a bottle of the sugary drink and curled his lip in disgust. In any case, he wasn’t in the mood to get totally smashed. Not like these morons in front of him.

When they got this off their heads, this stupid and infantile, the boys truly embarrassed him. When they got too rough with the girls, he felt ashamed of them. Watching them now, he wondered what the real difference between them and those feral children was. They looked just as wild and out of control.