see the tall black kid in a tracksuit approaching her. He wore an orange vest with the fading word ‘staff’ stencilled across it and wore several heavy gold chains round his neck. He was holding a gun in both hands. It wasn’t pointed at her, it was pointed down. No threat. Instead, he looked almost chastened; like a schoolboy asking for his ball back having broken a pane of glass in a greenhouse.
She vaguely recognised him through a foggy recall of the aftermath in that small room that stank of her own faeces.
‘That your mum?’ he said quietly, not seeming to recognise her. ‘I’m sorry. Real . . . real sorry what just happened. Don’t know if it was me hit her . . . or . . .’ He glanced at Maxwell’s body, skewed awkwardly across the walkway, the gun still held in his hand. He might have fired it, might not have.
Leona could see the boys gathered beyond him at the mouth of the walkway, looking much the same way as he did. Lost. Not sure what should happen next.
More fighting? Or something else?
No longer Super Army Soldiers . . . just lost boys.
‘Yeah.’ Leona nodded slowly, stroking her mother’s scarred cheek. ‘Yeah, that was my mum.’
The boy squatted down beside her and reached for one of Jenny’s wrists, feeling for a pulse. Leona already knew she was gone. Perhaps to somewhere she’d be happy. Perhaps not.
She pulled herself to her feet. ‘All of you,’ she croaked. She cleared her throat, dry as parchment, hawked, spat and tried again. ‘All of you boys,’ she said, her voice louder, stronger.
‘Why don’t you put down those guns?’
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