fair eyebrows locked together. ‘What the hell’s an oompah-loompah? ’
He grinned. ‘That’s what the “cast” called us backroom nerds. Very funny, or at least they thought so. Mind you, we used to get our own back on them . . .’
Raymond talked all the way through dinner. Leona guessed he hadn’t had any company for quite some time and now, feeling more at ease with them than he had been earlier at the retail park, he seemed to enjoy opening up, giving them a glimpse of his past life in the old world. His pasta must have been cold by the time he finally got round to finishing it. But she enjoyed listening to him, hearing references to the past, to places she would have liked to have seen and places she had seen.
Raymond Campbell; an engineering graduate from Edinburgh University, he’d bummed around in India and Goa for a while before getting work in London. Then, later on, he got to work on some prestigious development projects in Dubai and then Disney in Florida before finally getting the job to run this place.
‘I suppose I’ve always been a bit of a tech-geek. I love fiddling with stuff, optimising systems, you know?’
Helen cocked her head and pursed her lips. ‘Do you mean making things run better?’
Raymond smiled at her. ‘That’s exactly it. There isn’t anything you can’t make run a little better, a little faster, a little smoother, if you take the time to analyse it and component-split the processes,’ he replied, his eyes remaining on the young girl - eye contact that lingered between them for a few charged seconds.
Leona stepped into the moment. ‘So, Raymond, what’s your crash-story? ’
He knew what she meant by that, everyone had their story; how they survived the crash, what the first day, the first week, the first month was like for them, how they managed to get through it.
Helen played at being hausfrau, stacking up the bowls in the gathering darkness as he settled back in his chair again. It creaked in the stillness.
‘We were preparing to open the Oasis back then. Our first guests were already booked in for the middle of December. If I remember right, it was some footballer and his fashion-model wife and their extended family. There were a dozen staff here and a couple of builders finishing up work on the chalets when it all started. Those bombs went off in Saudi, kicking off the Middle-Eastern troubles. The bombs in the big refineries and that tanker exploded in the Gulf blocking the shipping routes, and the Prime Minister came on . . . my God, do you remember that?’
They did. Everyone, except Helen.
‘He stood in that press room, ripped up what he was meant to say, and told us we were all as good as screwed.’
Helen was too young to remember that so clearly, nonetheless, she’d heard the story many times over.
‘So anyway, I was co-managing this place with a lady called Tanya - she was a botanist, in charge of the plants and bugs and stuff. Anyway, we dismissed all the others so they could get home to their families. We stayed, though; someone had to keep things running here.
‘We thought it was a scare that would blow over in a few days. Like everyone else. We just thought the Prime Minister had panicked, had a nervous breakdown on camera or something. We assumed the government had a handle on it. We assumed there were oil reserves, food reserves and some sort of contingency plan for this kind of a crisis. But then, of course, it got out of hand so quickly. We watched on the news as the riots spread right across London. When the BBC stopped broadcasting, I guess we realised at that point that this was worse than we thought. Really bad.’
‘We were in London then,’ said Jacob quietly. ‘Me and Leona, during those riots.’
Raymond looked at him. ‘It must have been frightening.’
‘It was,’ replied Leona. ‘Very.’
‘Go on,’ urged Nathan, ‘you was saying, Ray.’
‘So Tanya and me stayed on here. She continued to look after the tropical ecosystem, I kept the generators going and we sat it out, listening to the radio; FM for the first week or two, then medium wave then finally long wave as British stations stopped broadcasting. We heard about the safe zones in London and elsewhere collapsing a few months after the crash. We heard brief reports on the short wars, Russia and Georgia, India and Pakistan, Israel