look almost like food.
Half an hour later, the sludge was bubbling in a pan over a campfire. Helen dumped an armful of things to burn that she’d gathered from the diner: vinyl seat cushions, fading menu cards promising an all-day breakfast for £5.75, lace curtain trim from the windows, the pine legs from half a dozen stools.
Although the day had been bright and dry, it was getting much cooler out here in the middle of the road now the sun had gone down.
Nathan arrived with another load of flammable bric-a-brac; a stack of glossy magazines and A to Z road maps from the garage.
‘But what I mean is,’ said Helen, ‘what I’m saying is . . . is . . . I just don’t get it.’
Leona rolled her eyes tiredly. In the sputtering light of the campfire, no one seemed to notice.
‘What’s the bit you don’t get, Helen?’ asked Nathan.
Her bottom lip pouted and her eyebrows rumpled thoughtfully. ‘Why . . . I guess . . . why it all happened so quickly.’
This subject was a floor-time discussion topic Leona had hosted during morning class on many an occasion. For children like Helen, who would have been only five at the time of the crash, and those younger, it seemed to be a bewildering piece of history; almost mysterious, like the mythical fall of Atlantis or the sudden collapse of the Roman Empire.
‘Our dad knew it was going to happen,’ said Jacob. ‘He worked in the oil business, didn’t he, Lee?’
She nodded in a vague way, eyes lost in the fire.
‘Dad said the oil was running out quickly back then. He called it “peak oil”. Said it was running out much faster than anyone wanted to admit.’ Jacob had heard Mum and Leona discuss that week many times over. ‘So, because there wasn’t much of it, no one managed to build up reserves, no one had it spare. So when those bombs exploded in . . . in . . . those Arab countries and all those other oil places, and that big tanker thing blocked the important shipping channel over there and the oil completely stopped, there was nothing anyone could do. It was too late.’
He tossed several pages from a faded magazine onto the fire, producing a momentary flickering of green flame. ‘There was no oil for anyone. That meant no fuel. No fuel meant nobody bringing food on ships and planes to England.’
Helen shook her head. ‘So why weren’t we growing our own food here?’
Jacob shrugged. ‘It was cheaper to import it than grow it ourselves. Right, Lee?’
She nodded mutely. ‘Economics. The finely tuned engine.’
‘That’s right,’ said Jacob, ‘the “Finely Tuned Engine”.’ He sighed.
Nathan shrugged. ‘The fuck’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Something our dad used to say.’
Nathan and Helen stared at him, none the wiser.
‘It’s what Dad called the world,’ he answered. ‘It was one of his sayings, wasn’t it, Lee?’
She nodded.
Jacob nodded at her. ‘Go on, you can explain it better than me.’
She sighed. ‘It was just one of his metaphors: the global economy was like a perfectly tuned engine, like a Formula One racing car; tuned to deliver the best possible performance and profit, but only under, like, perfect racing conditions.’ She tossed a menu card on the fire. ‘So, sure, it drives just fine on smooth dry tarmac. But not so good at coping with a pothole, or crossing a muddy bumpy field. That’s what the world was - a finely tuned engine for churning out profit. That’s all. Efficient, but very fragile. No money wasted on non-profit stuff like safety margins or back-up systems. No money wasted on tedious things like emergency storage or contingency supplies.’
She looked across the fire at them. ‘For instance, no supermarket was ever going to bother wasting its profits on setting up expensive warehousing for storage when they could rely on a just-in-time distribution system. So this country only ever had about forty-eight hours’ worth of food in it. It was always coming in on ships and trucks, refrigerated and as fresh as the day it was picked and packaged.’
‘Dad used to say we’d be screwed in the UK if something serious ever happened,’ added Jacob. ‘More screwed than just about any other country in the world.’
‘True, that,’ Nathan nodded.
‘There were no emergency stockpiles for us. No contingency planning, ’ said Leona. ‘We were totally caught out.’
‘Dad used to say the fuckwits who ran this country didn’t have a clue between them.’
Leona smiled in the dark. He certainly did.