fewer people, owning far fewer things. The skyline no longer bristles with telecoms pylons sprouting satellite dishes and mobile phone antennae. There are no longer garish advertising billboards or phallic mine’s-bigger-than-yours high-rise office towers. Instead, our horizons are broken by a sea of wind turbines, big and small.
I think of it as her world.
She helped make it. She helped define it. I see her stubbornness, her determination, her common sense, her sense of fair play and her maternal wisdom in everything around me.
But sadly she’s a footnote in history. The e-books being written on the Oil Crash by academics today tend to focus on the things that went wrong in the first weeks and months of the crisis. Not on the rebuilding that began ten years later.
So her name is a small footnote. Just a surname in fact.
Sutherland.
But I met her. I actually knew her.
Adam Brooks
21 December, 51 AC [After the Crash]
Chapter 1
2010 - Eight days after the Oil Crash
North London
‘I’m really, really thirsty, Mummy.’ A quiet voice - her son.
‘Yeah,’ whispered her daughter, ‘me too.’
Jenny Sutherland realised they’d not stopped since the first light of dawn had made it possible to pick their way through the rubbish strewn streets without the help of a torch.
Her mouth was dry and tacky too. She looked up and down the deserted high street; every shop window a jagged frame of threatening glass shards, every metal-shutter-protected shopfront was crumpled and stove in. Several cars, skewed across both sides of the road, smouldered in the pale morning light, sending up acrid wisps of burning-rubber smoke into the grey sky. She glanced at the stores either side of them, all dark caves within, but all promising goods inside that had yet to be looted.
Jenny would much rather have stayed where they were, out in the middle of the road, well clear of the dark shadows, the interiors. But water, safe bottled water, was something not to be without. Her children were right, this was probably as good a place as any to see what they could find.
‘All right,’ she said.
She turned to her daughter, Leona, and handed her one of their two kitchen knives. ‘You stay here and mind Jacob.’
Leona’s pale oval face, framed by dark hair, looked drawn and prematurely old; she had eyes that had seen too much in the last few days, eyes that looked more like those of a haunted veteran from some horrible and bloody war than those of a nineteen-year-old girl. A week ago at this time of the morning Jenny could imagine her daughter lying under a quilt and wearily considering whether to bother dragging herself across the university campus to attend the first study period of the day. Now, here she was being asked to make ready to defend her little brother’s life at a moment’s notice with nothing better than a vegetable knife whilst the matter of a drink of water was seen to.
‘Mum,’ she said, ‘we should stay together.’
Jenny shook her head firmly. ‘You both stay here. If you hear me shout out to run, you run, understand?’
Leona nodded and swallowed nervously. ‘Okay.’
‘Mummy, be careful,’ whispered Jacob, his wide eyes hidden behind cracked glasses and bent frames.
She ruffled his blond hair. ‘I’ll be fine.’ She even managed a reassuring smile before turning towards the nearest shop: a WH Smith’s newsagent.
She could see it had been repeatedly visited and picked over in the last week from the litter strewn out of the doorway and into the street. It was surprising, even now, after so many days of chaos, how worthwhile finds could still be had amidst the debris - a can of soda pop here, a packet of crisps there. Looters, it seemed, weren’t the systematic type; the shadowed corners of a floor, the spaces behind counters, the backs of shelves, still yielded goodies for someone patient enough to squat down and look.
She stepped towards the shop, her feet crunching across granules of glass. Outside the door - wrenched open and dangling from twisted hinges - sat a news-board bearing a scrawled headline from last Wednesday.
OIL CRASH - CHAOS ACROSS LONDON
Wednesday seemed so long ago now; it was the day this country flipped into panic mode, completely spiralled out of control. The day the government suddenly decided it needed to be honest and tell the public that things had become extremely serious; that there would be severe rationing of food and water and there’d be martial law.
Actually, Wednesday was the day the world panicked.