by Sarah Hall
‘There’s an iron,’ I say.
‘It’s a nuclear power station,’ she says. ‘Lots of ions.’
I look at her suspiciously. ‘I’ve only seen the one,’ I say.
*
Lastly I show her our control room, and how to operate the CCTV screens. She nods along.
‘You didn’t show me the reactor,’ she says, when I’ve finished.
We go back up to the viewing screen and I point out the white-painted dome sticking out from behind the control centre. All that’s visible is part of the outer concrete shell. Inside that there’s a steel containment vessel, then a concrete liner. Beneath that, the reactor chamber. And within that, absolutely nothing, nothing at all.
‘How do we get there?’
‘We don’t,’ I say. ‘It’s not our area. I mean there’s a corridor, but it’s locked.’ I pause, and then add, ‘But you know it’s empty, right?’
‘What do you mean?’
I think about this for a moment. I wonder if I’m not supposed to tell her that none of it is real. That the whole thing, as immaculate and perfect as it all looks, is fake. Pastiche, Barbara calls it sometimes. How’s our pastiche today? The production values, admittedly, are amazing. God only knows how much it all cost, enough for a million wind turbines, I imagine. They’ve even done out the walls around the reactor in radioactive paint. And the workers on our screens, for the most part, are just drone robots in hazmat suits. A few weeks ago one of them broke down when there was a crowd of tourists at the viewing screen. It slowed in its movements then ground to a halt, taking on the slightest stoop. A yellow-suited figure standing perfectly still in the middle of nowhere, looking as though time had frozen for it. No one seemed to notice, or else they just assumed it was normal, a scientist lost in thought. Maybe they imagined his hair grey and crazy under the suit. I called Helen from Tech Support and when the visitors had gone she sent out a guy to get it running again.
Still, I would have thought that someone would have told me if I wasn’t supposed to tell Sally about it. I make an executive decision that this is information she needs to know, in order to do her job. I lower my voice, even though we’re the only two people in the control building.
‘It’s not real,’ I say.
‘Well, duh. Everyone knows that. But what do you mean, empty?’
I remember the chamber, just a big empty space, seamless and white-tiled, an inside like the outside of an egg. I remember a low, pervasive hum, soft and calming. I remember liking it.
‘Empty. You know. Like there’s nothing inside it.’
‘Did they tell you it’s empty?’
‘It is empty. I saw inside it when I got here.’
‘Like, completely empty?’
‘Like empty empty.’
‘Hm,’ she says, her frown nestled back between her eyebrows. It fits there pretty well. I don’t meet many girls, it’s true, but even allowing for this, I realise that Sally is what many people might describe as attractive.
Later, we sit for a while and watch the CCTV together, and views of clean corridors where robots pretending to be scientists wobble slowly along. I show Sally how to switch to the outside cameras, with their shots of heather and razor wire. There’s almost never anything of interest on those cameras, unless a protester has trekked over the moor and got caught in the wire and I have to see if someone’s free to go and cut them loose.
‘And then what happens to the protester?’
‘I don’t know. Nothing.’
‘Just point him in the right direction and send him home?’
‘Sure.’
Sally gives me a look.
‘What?’ I say.
‘Never mind,’ she says, and looks around. ‘And that’s it?’ she asks.
‘Pretty much.’
‘It doesn’t sound like fun. You know,’ she says, when I don’t reply, ‘fun?’
‘No,’ I say. ‘It isn’t. Shall I make some tea?’
‘In a bit,’ she says. ‘I’m going to take a look around first, get my bearings.’
I’m a little hurt by the implication that my tour wasn’t up to scratch, but I know how I am when I’m in a new place, so I leave her to get settled in her own way, and I get back to my desk. I message Barbara to tell her that Sally arrived on time, and then I switch back to the camera screens. I click the mouse and flick between views. It really isn’t much fun.
*
Our employers are a group called Low Carbon Fuels, which is a local division of what was once an American corporation, then part of a Middle Eastern consortium, but which is now, as far as I understand, owned by a Chinese conglomerate. I fell into the work by accident: a couple of years ago I was going through a tough time and got into a bit of trouble paying one or two bills, and, eventually, my rent. Due to some things which happened in the past and which I don’t want to talk about, going home wasn’t an option. So instead I covered for a while by borrowing money and moving things around on credit cards. After a sequence of letters with a colour scheme that shifted rapidly from black to red, and came with an increased use of block fonts and underlining (all of which I carefully recycled), they sent some bailiffs round to seize the only asset I owned, which turned out to be myself.
It was at this point that I learned that my landlord and the companies I owed money to were, coincidentally, separate subsidiaries of what was then the American group that used to run Low Carbon Fuels. We’ve since negotiated a payments programme to consolidate my existing debts into one easy monthly payment, converting money owed (of which I had none) into time available (of which I had plenty), and handing myself over to the company for that period to do whatever it was they told me to do. It was either that, they said, or they harvested my organs. I have never been good at telling when people are joking, so it seemed best to go along.
And it’s turned out to be an arrangement that works well. It’s good for me, after all: food and accommodation are provided. I don’t have to pay any electricity bills, and most of the time I don’t have to talk to anyone either. I like having everything looked after, and not having to worry where my next meal is coming from (it’s coming from the snack area). And they like employees they can rely on.
Low Carbon Fuels, of course, due to that accident with the cabinet minister, is well known as one of the companies the government contracts to build fourth-generation nuclear power stations. Except it turns out that it isn’t, and what it actually is, is one of the companies the government uses to pretend to build nuclear power stations. Or rather, to build pretend nuclear power stations. After the last incident, they’re scattering a few of them around the countryside, much as they did with inflatable tanks in the Second World War. As I understand it, they’re built to pretty much the same specification as the real nuclear power stations, so even the people doing the building aren’t able to tell whether they’re working on a fake or the real thing. No doubt the building of actual nuclear power stations is subcontracted to companies whose names I don’t even know, and is done deep underground, well out of harm’s way.
I know all this because Barbara told me about it not long before the plant opened, while she was showing me round. It was my first day at work.
‘Wow,’ I said. And thought it best to add: ‘Don’t worry. I won’t tell anyone.’
‘I won’t worry,’ she said. ‘One of the reasons we like you is that we think you’re very good at keeping secrets.’ She tapped her nose exaggeratedly as she said it.
This seemed like a nice thing to say at the time, and I smiled with her. I’ve thought about it a bit since then, and the more I think about it, the less nice it seems, but I also think that she’s probably right.
Perhaps the strangest thing about this place is that though it’s essentially useless, it is apparently more profitable than the real thing. Once when I was talking on the phone to Kurt from Accounting about where I was up to with my graduated payments programme, we got distracted and he ended up showing off about how
much work it was running the numbers for a place like this. It turns out that although the facility isn’t exactly productive in terms of energy output, due to a liberal spread of solar panels among the roof tiles it barely uses any either. We’re a loss-making institution, still, but the sums involved are pretty minor, and are offset by the gift store and the cafe in the visitor centre, both of which bring in good money.
‘Hell,’ said Kurt, ‘if you factor in decommissioning, and the environmental cost of all the radioactive waste you’re not producing, that place is a gold mine.’
*
Sally settles in well. She’s happy with the night shift, and it turns out she likes tea (though she takes it with too much sugar), which is good because I structure my day around regular tea breaks. We get into a routine of meeting for breakfast (dinner, for her) and then again for dinner (her breakfast). Sometimes she comes to fetch me before she finishes her shift, when I’m still waking up, so we have time to hang out before I take over.
‘Hey kid,’ she says, putting a mug of tea by my bunk. ‘Sleeping?’
This is a trick question, because the only honest answer is no.
‘Well, up and atom,’ she says.
Then after we’ve chatted for a while she settles into bed and starts watching movies. It helps her unwind, she says, though there’s not a great deal to get wound up by. I think the thing with Sally is that she doesn’t much like being alone, and the TV helps. It occurs to me that this may not be the best job for her in the long term, but that’s not something I can control, so I don’t see the point in mentioning it.
‘So how long since the last guy left?’ she asks, one morning.
I shrug. ‘A couple of months,’ I say. It is eighty-seven days and nineteen hours. Not that I’ve been counting, but some events stick in your mind.
‘He just quit, did he?’
I give her a look.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘Not my business. But you’ve been all by yourself since then?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Wow. No days off?’
‘I can’t really afford to take them. There’s nothing to do, anyway. I’d probably just end up watching the screens.’
‘Wow,’ she says again. ‘I’d hate to be here by myself.’
‘There are worse things.’
‘Not for me,’ she says. ‘Leave me here for a week on my own and I’d go crazy. Seriously. You’d find me sleeping with the worker drones or something.’
For me it’s the other way around. I miss the feeling of knowing that there’s no one else near. I like Sally’s company, but there are times when I’d like to be able to choose to be without it. Sally seems to need a lot of conversation to feel at home, and though I do my best to accommodate her, occasionally it’s a struggle. She has picked up on this.
‘Warning,’ she says sometimes, when she wakes me up with a mug of tea, ‘chat mode fully operational. Prepare to engage.’
One day, when the talking gets too much for me, I tell Sally I’ll be back in a few minutes and I wander up to the glass viewing walkway. I look down over the power plant. The morning is murky and grey, but the buildings shine chemical bright. In the gloom behind them are the familiar shapes of the cooling towers, barely visible in the blurring dark. Then out there beyond them only the open moor, then the sombre sea. It’s the saddest place, really; even I can feel that, and I like working here.
I stay there until I’ve restored some of my solitude, then mooch on back to the control room. Sally’s shift is over, but she’s still staring at her screen, a small notepad cupped in her hand and a frown on her face. The instant she sees me she puts the notebook down and starts chatting in my direction. I like hanging out with her, but I wish she’d talk a little less, and smile a bit more.
Sally stays at her monitor all day. She doesn’t seem to need as much sleep as I like to get, but I know from experience that back-to-back shifts like this aren’t healthy. You have to pace yourself, or you won’t last. I start to worry that perhaps she’s already bored in the job. During my break I go to the snack area and get two mugs of tea. She empties three sachets of sugar into hers, plays around with a fourth in her hands while we talk, and then twists that open too and stirs it into the tea. We drink our tea and compare our pills. They look the same, which is reassuring. One of the first things I was made to sign was some kind of indemnification form. I worry about that. I realise that they have to tweak the area’s health statistics – to provide some evidence of increased rates of leukaemia – but I always assumed they’d just fiddle the statistics, rather than the actual rates of leukaemia. Now I’m not so sure. I wonder if there’s a list somewhere with leukaemia quotas waiting to be filled.
‘What do you think they are?’ I ask her.
Sally takes one and instead of swallowing it whole as usual, bites the pill in half. She crunches it between her teeth.
‘Sugar,’ she says, and grins. ‘Definitely.’ She eats the other half.
*
A few days later the chat box pops up on my screen with a message from Barbara. The message reads:
Good morning, Todd! I hope the weather isn’t getting you down. How are things working out with Sally?
I think about this for a while, then I write:
Sally is great. She’s very professional and a pleasure to work with. We’re getting along great.
I consider writing that she doesn’t make the tea as often as I do, but I’m not sure they’ll get that I’m joking. I wouldn’t want them to take it seriously and fire her for not making the tea.
It occurs to me that my problem with establishing whether someone is joking or not might be because I don’t have a very good sense of humour. I’m not sure how easy it would be to tell.
I don’t know why I lied for Sally. It’s true that she’s mostly a pleasure to work with, but I don’t follow everything she says. Last night I had some music playing quietly on the computer when she arrived for her shift.
‘Is that radio active?’ she asked.
‘It’s just the computer,’ I said. ‘I’ll turn it off.’
‘Well, let’s not fall out over it,’ she said.
I stared at her.
‘Oh, brother,’ she said.
I kept out of her way for the rest of the evening.
Also, I don’t think she’s very professional at all. She should be spending most of her time in the control room, sitting at her desk and watching the screens, or if I’m there with her, perhaps chatting a little about what the weather is like outside. In fact what she’s spending most of her time doing is wandering the corridors with a Geiger counter in her hands. I’m not sure where she found the Geiger counter, because I don’t remember there being any Geiger counters. I assume she brought it with her, in her rucksack. She’s been taking long walks through the corridors over near the reactor. I’ve warned her about the radioactive paint, but she’s having none of it.
She waves her Geiger counter at me and it makes a disturbing, lurching, clickety wheeze.
‘Paint,’ she says. ‘Sure.’
*
A week or so later I roll up for my shift and there’s no sign of Sally, just a yellow Post-it stuck on my screen with a note that says: Gone fission. I peel it carefully off the screen so I can get on with work, and stick it to one side.
Two hours later I look at it again, and my heart does an odd double jump of alarm.
In the corridor, the door leading towards the reactor chamber is ajar. It doesn’t seem to have been forced, merely unlocked, and I’m pretty sure that Sally doesn’t have the keys, because I have the keys. I pause at the door. I’ve always been able to go through if I wanted, but I’ve never wanted to. After all, I can always watch it on the monitor. I think about how it looks on the screen, grey and empty, and I think about how it will look with me walking down it. It seems a shame that it will be the most excitement the corridor has seen for ages, and there’ll be no one watching.
‘Sally?’ I call down the corrido
r. The sound makes a thin echo, dying as it goes. I scuttle after it.
At the end of the corridor, the steel door to the reactor chamber is thickly, defiantly shut.
‘Sally?’
There is a long silence and I’m about to give up and go. Then a muffled voice comes from the other side of the door. ‘What?’ it says.
‘It’s me. Hey. Open the door.’
‘No.’
She sounds grumpy, as though she’s sulking.
‘I told you it was empty.’
‘Go away,’ she says.
I think about this for a moment. It seems a good suggestion. I turn round to leave three times, but each time I feel that I’m somehow letting her down. But I can’t quite work out how to express this, and I don’t think my concern is fully communicated by what eventually comes out.
‘What am I supposed to do?’ I say.
‘Do whatever it is you usually do. What do I care?’
There is a pause.
‘You could make me a cup of tea,’ she says.
I walk back through the corridors to the snack area. The air feels unnaturally warm. I wonder if there’s a problem with the heating, if I need to call Debbie in Maintenance. I think it over as I make the tea. I put extra sugar in Sally’s. It sounded like she needed it.
I bang on the reactor door. There’s no reply.
‘I’m leaving your tea here,’ I call. ‘Don’t let it go cold.’
I wait a moment, and then retreat the way I came. If I had a tail, it would be curled between my legs.
I spend the rest of the day watching the cameras showing the door to the reactor chamber. I bite my nails down until the soft flesh underneath starts to ache. Eventually the door opens and Sally comes out, sloping sadly along the corridor, her mug dangling loosely from one finger. She shuts the doors behind her, and tries them to check they’re locked. I give a sigh of relief, exaggeratedly loud, as though just by hearing it I’ll feel twice as reassured. Then, so Sally doesn’t catch me looking at the screens where she’s been, I switch to watch outside. Things are quiet. The heather ruffles in the wind. A grouse flies by.
