people pretended to be happy, but weren’t.’
‘Your grandmother is right. Even I did not see this back then. I pretended to be happy like everyone else. We had our cars, our gadgets, our internet, our shopping malls. And the nights glowed with neon signs, telling us to buy even more things, to wear more things, to eat more things. But I am sure now few of us were happy.’
‘Why?’
‘I think . . . because deep down, we knew it was wrong. I know now there was a . . . a voice, a quiet voice telling me that bad things were coming. That the food we were eating was poisoning us. That the electricity we were using, the materials we dug out of the ground, were not going to last for ever. That there were too many of us being much too greedy.’
Hannah thought she understood that quiet voice. There were times she’d been naughty, doing something she knew she shouldn’t be doing, and not even enjoying it, because that annoying little voice was telling her there’d be hell to pay when Leona or Nanna found out.
‘I think there were some who sensed that a . . .’ Valérie looked around for the right word, ‘that a storm was coming. And that storm would kill many people.’
‘A storm,’ she echoed quietly.
‘But we did not stop or change our ways.’ He looked sad. ‘We were like caterpillars.’
‘Caterpillars?’
Valérie nodded. ‘A type of caterpillar that eats much too much. I remember reading about them - they are a species that live in some jungle. They eat and eat these green leaves, and then, when the leaves have all gone, they will just eat each other until only one of them is left on the plant.’
‘Oh.’ Her favourite picture-book in the classroom’s small library was The Very Hungry Caterpillar. She wondered whether she might start seeing that story differently.
‘God made such a beautiful world, Hannah. Then he put us on it and all we have done is destroy it. We have suck it dry of valuable resources and in turn fill it with useless things we do not need. We turn a beautiful thing into an ugly thing.’
Hannah looked down at the decks below; rusting, cluttered and messy. He was right.
‘I feel this now, that the crash was like a judgement on us. Out there I have seen nothing but darkness and evil left behind, Hannah.’ He smiled. ‘But here, in this place, maybe I see goodness for the first time, in a long time. I see hope.’ He looked out across the rigs, pushing dark hair from his eyes. ‘This is a special place your grandmother has created; like an Eden. But . . . yes, the generator, it worries me.’
‘Why?’
‘Your friend, Nathan and your brother, Jacob?’
‘He’s my uncle.’
Valérie shrugged. ‘They, and Walter and others will want more electricity soon. And they will want other things, more and more things. And so I think we will head back to the way we once were. We will not learn.’
Hannah’s eyebrows furrowed as she thought about that.
‘Your grandmother, I think, sees that the past was very bad times,’ he continued, ‘and that is good. She is a clever woman. But, I wonder if she sees that the generator is not a good thing; the first step back towards the bad times.’
‘The bad time before the crash?’
‘Yes. Perhaps life is better here just as it is? You see that, yes?’
Hannah could hear the wisdom in his voice, even if she didn’t entirely follow the logic. The jenny-rater rooms did in truth smell awful, and all that smell and hard work just to make a few light-bulbs glow? They had candles for that. She’d heard Leona and Jacob go on about the old world so much. Hannah often wondered what was really so bad about this world? The last time she’d actually felt genuinely sad was ages ago - when she’d accidentally lost a doll over the side and watched it tumbling in the wind all the way down into the sea, making hardly a splash.
And Nanna said the same things as Mr Latoc. It sounded like people spent so much time being unhappy in the old days. Sad, and angry too, because they didn’t have the same shiny things as someone else had.
‘I think it is a mistake.’
She sensed Mr Latoc was somehow disappointed in them, as if he’d hoped they were better people than they’d actually turned out to be. That thought burned her -