by Alex Scarrow
It’s been a while now since the world collapsed.
I miss Andy. I miss him so much. And his children miss him.
I don’t know how we’ve survived, how we managed to keep going. It’s been a blur to me, just moving from one day into the next. I know we left London soon after that night. I remember Leona had to drag me out of our house, away from our bedroom, where we left Andy.
Leona’s been a tower of strength. I was useless for a long time. She got us out of London, and then we finally found a community in the countryside willing to take us in.
Very kind people, very different - historical re-enactors; the sort of people you would see at those big English Heritage events where they replayed battles from the English Civil War. Normal people with jobs and mortgages (back before the collapse), but with this other parallel life, attempting to revive, to learn the everyday skills of a time long before we had oil doing everything for us. Very different people, unlike any I’ve met before; they had already mastered so many of those skills of survival, the basics like . . . how to make soap, how to make bread from grain. You know? The simple things.
And there’s so much to do, we’re kept busy, which is just as well.
We have several wind-up radios in the community, and from time to time there are broadcasts from the BBC World Service. For a time, just after the first week, it looked like a recovery might be on the cards. Oil lines were being fixed and a trickle of oil was getting through. But things were too broken, too messed up. We heard horror stories coming from the two dozen or so ‘safe areas’ the government had established. The supplies ran out at the end of the second month, and the people crammed inside turned on each other. And the same thing, so we hear, has happened in other countries around the world. America, I think, has been hit particularly badly.
In the months that followed, there was a worrying time . . . there was a limited war between China, India and Russia over the Tengiz oilfields. It started with tanks and infantry, and escalated to a few nuclear bombs. Then very quickly it blew itself out. Perhaps some sanity broke out at the last moment, or perhaps their troops decided to stop fighting. Or maybe they simply ran out of the oil they needed to continue fighting.
Often, in the evenings, when the community gathers together, we discuss who was behind it all. Because, you see, it’s obvious to everyone now that there was someone behind this. The theories are many and varied. The most-voiced opinions are that it was either a Muslim plot to destroy the decadent western lifestyle, or, alternatively, an attempt by America to destabilise all her economic rivals in one go . . . but somehow it went wrong for them too.
I’m not convinced by either theory, but I don’t know enough about politics to offer a better suggestion. Andy would have known. He knew all about that kind of thing.
We’re being kept very busy right now, as I was saying. There’s a lot to do, crops to grow, tend, cultivate or pick. We’re digging a well, down to the clean water-table below us, and we have animals that need looking after. Jake’s landed the main role as chicken tender; feeding them, collecting the eggs. When he’s a little older, he’ll also have to cope with killing them on occasion, plucking them, gutting them.
Leona’s struggling a bit now. She was strong for me when I needed her. Now, she’s finding it hard to cope. I know she misses her father, and I know some of the things that happened before I got home really traumatised her. There’s a lot of crying.
Jacob misses Andy terribly too. But he’s also so proud of his dad, and tells anyone who’ll listen that his dad was a superhero. I love that he thinks that about Andy.
Anyway, we’re alive, and my kids will mend eventually. And things will eventually knit themselves back together again. All those empty cities, full of burned-out homes, and looted shops . . . one day people will migrate back to them. When it all eventually comes back together again, I think it’s going to be very different.
To use one of Andy’s pet phrases . . . the oil age is over.
Just like all those other ages; the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Steam Age . . . it’s been and gone. Hopefully what replaces it will be a world less greedy, less obsessed with having things; trinkets and baubles, gadgets and bling. I wonder what my children’s children will make of the weathered and faded mail order catalogues they’ll undoubtedly come across, everything lavishly powered by electricity; giant American-style fridge freezers, those extravagant patio heaters, electric sonic-pulse hi-spin toothbrushes, automatic can-openers.
God, did we really get that lazy?
That’s something Andy would have said, isn’t it? Christ, I miss him.
I need to say something though, out loud.
I’m pretty sure you won’t hear this Andy, you’re gone. There’s none of that looking down from heaven nonsense, is there? You’re gone, that’s it. But all the same, I need to say this even if it’s just for my own ears . . .
I’m sorry. I did always love you, I just forgot that for a while. You came back for us, and you saved us. Our son and our daughter will always, always remember you as a hero.
And so will I.
Love you, Andy.
Author’s Note
Last Light started out four years ago as a result of my stumbling across a phrase being repeated over and over by two posters for a forum. They were hotly debating a geological issue and this phrase kept cropping up: Peak Oil. Being capitalised like that suggested that this was some sort of technical term in common use by those in the know. Curious, I Googled it.
And so, to indulge in an appalling cliché, a journey of discovery followed. Out there in internet-land are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of websites devoted to Peak Oil. I should perhaps explain what the term means before going any further. Simply put, it refers to the point at which all the easy-to-extract oil has been sucked out of the ground leaving only the really hard to get to, very expensive to refine, stuff. Now, there is a great deal of debate amongst geologists and petro-industry experts about how much oil there is left in the ground. It ranges from either a doom ’n’ gloom scenario that we’ve already ‘peaked’ and it’s rapidly running out, to a naively optimistic view that we have another fifty or sixty years of untapped oil. I’m not going to make a call on that debate here. But what no one disagrees on is how utterly reliant we are on the stuff. If you’re reading this, having read the book, you don’t need me to reiterate here the warnings Andy offered his family. The fact is, with globalism having run its course, the world is now inextricably linked as one large, interlocked set of dependencies; we get our sausages from this far flung country, our trainers from that far flung country, our plasma TVs from yet another far flung country . . . and so on.
Whether we’re about to run out of oil, or whether the world is approaching a clash of religious ideologies or an economic - possibly military - showdown between the new economic superpowers and the old; whether the world’s climate is on the cusp of a dramatic change that could imperil billions and lead to mass migration; whichever one of these scenarios lies ahead of us, to be so completely dependent - as we are here in the UK - on produce grown, packaged and manufactured on the other side of the world . . . well, that’s simply asking for trouble.
Last Light is the book I’ve wanted to, no, needed to write since . . . well, since 9/11. It’s not really a book about Peak Oil - that was merely the starting point for me. No, it’s a book about how lazy and vulnerable we’ve allowed ourselves to become. How reliant on the system we are. How little responsibility we are prepared to take for our actions, for ourselves, for our children. Somewhere along the way, in the last two or three decades, we broke this society of ours; whether it was during Blair’s tenure of power, or Thatcher’s, I’m not sure. But somehow it got broken.
And here we are, the ghastly events of 7/7; the increasing prevalence of gang related gun crime in London; legions of disaffected kids packing blades to go to school; a media that night and day pumps out the message - screw everyone else, just get what’s yours; reality T
V that celebrates effortless transitory fame over something as old-fashioned as ‘achievement’; corporations that rip off their employees’ pension funds; a Prime Minister deceiving us into entering an ill-conceived war; and politicians of all flavours putting themselves and their benefits first. All these things, I suspect, are the visible hairline cracks of our broken society that hint at the deeper, very dangerous, fault lines beneath. And all it’ll take is some event, some catalyst, for the whole thing to come tumbling down.
Damn . . . this has turned into something of a rant, hasn’t it? That wasn’t my intention. Ah well sod it, ‘author’s note’ is my one opportunity to get things off my chest without having to worry about plot, character and pacing.
Anyway, I’d like to think that a whiff of Last Light will remain with you once you snap the cover shut. I’m hoping Andy Sutherland achieved something; that the world looks slightly different to you now - more fragile, more vulnerable. After all, to be aware is to be better prepared.
I dunno . . . is it just me? Or do you get that feeling too? That something’s coming, something on the horizon . . . a correction of some sort?
Peak Oil - Do you want to know more?
I came across numerous websites on this subject whilst researching for the book; they range from being very dry, statistics-heavy pages for industry insiders to the more bizarre survivalist sites that feature banner ads for automatic weapons and nuclear shelters. But one of the best laid-out sites that I came across - a site that spells out the whole issue in a way that is easily digestible and appropriately sobering - is this one:
http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net
If this book has piqued your interest, and you want to follow the trail yourself, you can do far worse than start right there.
Alex Scarrow 12.09.07
