day Mum was going to have to face down an open challenge to her authority. It could be over any number of contentious issues; her refusal to allow any prayer groups to be organised, the relentless work-schedule for everyone, her insistence they remain hidden away on these gas platforms with no clear indication for how long. Surely not for ever? And, of course, they were welcome to leave if they didn’t see things her way.
One day, Leona suspected, a group of them were going to down their tools and defy Jenny. If for no other reason than to see what she would do in the face of such a challenge - to see what sort of a person she really was. And then, in that moment of truth, what would she do? Evict them at gunpoint? Mum was tough, she had to be to make this place work, but Leona hated the idea that she was paying for that with what was left of her old self.
‘I’m sorry to moan,’ said Jenny, breaking into her thoughts. ‘But you can’t dwell on what’s gone. Our children need to be happy with what we’ve got, Lee. Not pining for what you once had.’
‘Our children can’t live their whole lives here either, Mum. I won’t do that to Hannah.’
Jenny’s face tightened. ‘Look, one day we’ll settle back on the mainland,’ she said after a while. ‘When we can be sure it’s safe again. When we can be sure that the bastards who take what they want at gunpoint have run out of things to scavenge and have starved to death.’
Leona shrugged.
Jenny turned to her, softening her voice, realising how harsh she must sound. ‘Hannah will inherit a better world. One day it’ll be better than this. Better even than it used to be before the crash.’
Leona offered a wan smile. The old spiel, again.
She had heard that speech about a million times, ‘All That Was Wrong With The Oil Age World’; greed and consumerism, borrowing and spending, debt and negative equity, haves and have-nots; me generation people living lonely lives in their own plastic bubbles of consumer comfort. Maybe she was right? Maybe it was a miserable world full of discontented people, but in a heartbeat, in a heartbeat, she’d have that shitty old world back and thoroughly embrace it. So would Jacob.
‘Mum . . .’
Jenny looked at her.
‘You know, one of these days, Jacob will go out on one of our shore runs and he won’t be coming back.’
Jenny’s face pinched and she sat silent for a moment. ‘I do worry that will happen every time I send him.’
‘So why do you send him?’
‘Because I hope he’ll see enough to realise there’s nothing ashore, nothing to run away to, only overgrown streets and buildings falling in on themselves.’
Leona knew he felt differently. ‘Several of the older boys, Jacob included, are convinced that things are rebuilding themselves on the mainland. That somewhere in the big cities they’ve already got power going again, that street lights are coming on and the like.’
Jenny sighed. ‘We’d know, Lee, wouldn’t we? We’d have heard something on the radio about it. Something from a passer-by.’
‘I know that. I’m just saying Jacob’s becoming, I don’t know, sort of taken with the idea that out there, some sort of . . . glittering metropolis is waiting for him.’
Jenny watched as Hannah flopped to the ground, exhausted from her running around. Natasha flopped to the ground beside her, and the pair of them, for some reason, suddenly decided to waggle their feet and hands in the air like struggling house flies.
‘You can talk to him, Lee. He listens more to you than he does me now. Tell him that’s a bloody stupid idea.’
Leona shook her head. ‘I do talk to him. But, you know, I guess sometimes I feel a bit like that too.’
Jenny turned towards her. ‘Leona, it’s a dead and dark world. You’ve seen it for yourself. If there are any people left, they’re dangerous and hungry and looking for people like us to strip bare.’
Leona noted mum had kept that comment gender neutral. But by ‘them’ she meant men, and ‘us’ she meant women.
‘Here, on these platforms, we’re safe. We’ve had time to consolidate, to build things up. We can feed ourselves now, we aren’t relying on a dwindling supply of canned goods in some grubby warehouse. We’re not scavengers, Lee.’
Jenny reached out for one of Leona’s hands and squeezed it. ‘I know it’s tough, it’s cold, it’s