of splashing and laughter. The others were messing about in the jacuzzi. There were no jets or bubbles, of course, and the water in there was murky with algae, but it was tepid.
‘I think they’d rather stay here than head on down to London,’ she said.
Raymond shrugged. ‘You guys can stay as long as you want but since we’re eating up your freeze-dried rations, eventually, I’ll have to ask you to bring in some more food or . . .’
‘Or leave.’
‘Basically.’ He offered an apologetic smile. ‘It’s lovely to have company but I really can’t afford to feed you. It sounds shit of me to say that, but it totally unbalances my food system.’
She nodded. ‘We have to go, anyway. The sooner the better. If we find there’s nothing in London, those tubs of freeze-dried pasta crap have got to last long enough to see them safely back.’
He turned to look at her. ‘Them? Not you?’
Silently, she cursed her slip.
He looked at her. ‘I . . . uh . . . I know about your little girl,’ he said. ‘Helen told me last night.’
‘It’s not her business to blab like that.’
‘I think she just didn’t want me saying anything clumsy. She was thinking of you.’
Leona looked away, tight lipped. ‘Whatever we find, I won’t be going back.’
‘If you find nothing, and you don’t go back to your rigs, then what?’
She shrugged. The gesture spelled it out all too clearly.
‘You’re going home . . . going home to end it, aren’t you?’
She said nothing. She said nothing for far too long. Her fingers twisted and wrestled uncomfortably with each other. She could’ve blurted a ‘no’, but it would have rung false.
‘That’s it?’ pressed Raymond. ‘Going home to die?’
Eventually she looked up from her hands. ‘Yes.’
Raymond nodded. ‘I thought I saw that.’
‘Saw what?’
‘Sort of . . . a calm. You’ve made your bed and you’re ready to go and sleep in it. If I’m honest with you I think I saw that in Tanya. She didn’t leave a note or anything, just a whole load of planting charts and notes. Didn’t want to leave me in the lurch. That’s what I think happened to her. She just walked out on me, wanted to go home.’
Leona nodded. ‘That’s . . . what I want. I’m tired.’
‘That surprises me.’
‘Why?’
‘You don’t strike me as the giving-up type.’
She took a deep breath, looked around at the towering leaves above them, the shafts of light from a floodlight above lancing down into the micro jungle. ‘Hannah was why I bothered. It’s different now. I suppose it’s easier in a way. I know that sounds shit, but it’s easier. I suppose I see a way home now,’ she replied. ‘I see a way back to her, to my dad, to others I lost during the crash.’
‘And you don’t strike me as the expecting-a-lovely-pastoral-afterlife type, either.’
‘Who knows? Maybe they’re there, maybe not. But either way, I guess I’m all done in, Raymond, tired of the struggle. It just goes on and on and all you get every day for the hours of effort is enough food and water to keep you going for another day. That’s not life. That’s just—’
‘Actually, it is. It’s what life has been for more than half a billion years. The basic struggle to find enough protein to last another day.’
‘Yeah?’ she sighed. ‘Well, you make it sound so wonderfully appealing.’
They both laughed, a dry mirthless chuckle that quickly petered out. ‘Truth is, I’m not sure I can cope with another fifty or sixty years of eating boiled fish and potatoes, of longing for a steaming hot bath, longing for a million little luxuries that I’m never going to enjoy again.’ She nodded at the others playing in the pool. ‘They were all young children back then. They barely remember how wonderful life was, how much we had, how happy we all were.’
‘Were we?’
‘Shit, I was.’
‘Hmm . . . I remember how it was becoming normal to talk of a failing society. You remember that? No community, no sense of belonging, no one looking out for each other any more.’
‘I was happy, Raymond.’
‘Then perhaps you were an exception.’
‘Maybe I was.’ She looked down at the vegetable garden. ‘But I do know that I can’t be arsed with this any more, grubbing around in the dirt for my protein.’ She smiled. ‘I know it sounds sad, lazy even, but I’m happy in a way. I know what I want to do, and I’m on my way