next minute everyone’s going crazy. And now there’s no fuckin’ food anywhere, because the selfish bastards who got in first are hoardin’ everything what they took.’
‘I guess it’s the same everywhere, not just here,’ she replied.
‘Yeah, s’pose. Anyway. We sort of formed a co-operative, over on the Runston housin’ estate. There’s old ’uns and a lot of mums and kids that’re gettin’ hungry over there,’ said the man. He turned and pointed towards the pavilion. ‘There’s a shit-load of food in there they should be sharin’ out with us. But the fuckin’ manager of this place won’t give us a thing.’
‘Yeah, selfish bloody bastards,’ Jenny said, shaking her head disdainfully. ‘Look, good luck anyway mate. I hope you have better luck than I did.’ She began to wind the window up.
‘Hang on love,’ said the man, placing his hand over the rising rim of glass.
She stopped winding it up. ‘Yeah?’
‘You can help us out.’
‘I don’t see how. They wouldn’t let me in, so I guess I’ll see if there’s somewhere else—’
‘Listen love. You could just smack their front wall in. It’s only fuckin’ plastic. We thought it was glass last time we was here, it wouldn’t break. Things just kept fuckin’ well bouncing off it.’ The man pointed towards the pavilion. ‘You could just run your truck into the front, beside the entrance. Wouldn’t need to do it too hard neither, you could just reverse it in really. It wouldn’t do your rig any damage.’
Jenny made a big show of giving it some thought as the man warily kept his hand over the rim of the window. Behind him, the other people looked up at her hopefully; a cluster of very normal and very worried people, very much at odds with Mr Stewart’s description of the ‘gang of yobbos that had terrorised us’ earlier. Perhaps they had been kids that were passing through, or perhaps kids from the same housing estate as these people? Either way, these were just ordinary people trying to survive, no different to the lucky few inside who’d been working the evening shift here when things started to unravel.
Jenny wondered what right Mr Stewart had to decide who should receive and who shouldn’t, and why he’d been willing to let her, Paul and Ruth in, and yet not prepared to help these people.
It was all down to our appearance, wasn’t it? Ruth in her dark business trouser-suit, my smart interview clothes, Paul’s tidy, expensive looking casuals. Not a single tattoo between us, no sportswear, no trouble.
That’s what it boiled down to she supposed, at least to someone like Mr Stewart.
Those nice, smart-looking people can come in. But those bloody oiks from the estate? Let ’em starve.
Jenny looked up. She could see many, many more people emerging from the line of stunted saplings, coming down the slip-road and gathering in loose clusters and groups across the car-park. If there had been tattered piles of neatly ordered bric-à-brac on the ground and a row of sensibly parked Ford Escorts behind them, it would have looked like the early stages of a car-boot sale.
‘What do you reckon?’ prompted the man.
Jenny shifted uncomfortably. These people deserved to share what was in there, just as much as those inside. But, there were just too many of them - perhaps a hundred now, and, she suspected, there would be more to come. She could imagine the scale of this little siege growing quickly, as word spread to the various estates and villages around this nondescript piece of A road in the middle of nowhere.
Maybe Mr Stewart let us in simply because it was just the three of us, on our own?
Jenny looked around. In a matter of hours this car-park could be full of people pressed against the wall, hammering on it, pleading for food and water, and seeing them inside drinking tea and enjoying fried burgers . . . and that frustration quickly turning to anger, rage.
And if they found a way to smash in the front?
Jenny shook her head. ‘Look, sorry mate.’ She resumed winding up the window and stuck the key into the ignition.
‘Fuckin’ hell, love,’ shouted the man through the glass, his matey, we’re-in-this-together demeanour quickly replaced with a flash of aggression. ‘Just askin’ for a little fuckin’ help!’ he shouted over the throaty rumble of the truck’s diesel engine, idling noisily. Jenny stabbed the accelerator and the truck growled deafeningly and belched smoke.
‘Sorry!’ she shouted apologetically back, and with an awkward backward lurch that almost pulled the