CHAPTER 3
10 years AC
‘LeMan 49/25a’ - ClarenCo Gas Rig Complex, North Sea
The catch bell jangled. Jacob looked up from his pack of weathered and faded Yu-Gi-Oh cards to the net cables tied off along the platform railing. They were both as taut as guitar strings and twitched energetically - a sure sign there was enough squirming marine life in the net to make it worth his while pulling it in.
He crawled on hands and knees out of the sheltered warmth of the rustling vinyl one-man tent and onto the grating of the spider deck - an apron of metal trellis running around the bottom of the accommodation platform’s thick support-legs, no more than thirty feet above the endlessly surging swells. The tent snapped and rustled in the fresh breeze as he stood up and leaned over the safety rail.
The sea gently rolled and slapped against the side of the nearest leg, sending a languid spray of suds up towards him, but not quite energetic enough to reach him. He grabbed the winch handle and began to wind the net up, a laborious process that seemed to take ages, each creaking turn on the winch hoisting the laden net just a few inches.
He gazed out at the sea as his arm worked the handle. It was well behaved today, mottled with the shadows of clouds scudding across the sky. He pushed a long tangled tress of sun-bleached hair out of his eyes and squinted up at the platform towering above him. From down here all he could see was a large messy underbelly of welded ribs, giant rivets and locking bolts sporting salt and rust collars, and criss-crossing support struts linking all four enormous support-legs together.
This early in the day, the sunlight was still obscured by the body of the tall, top-heavy accommodation module perched on this platform, like an elephant balancing on a barstool. It towered a hundred and thirty feet above him, a multi-storey car-park on stilts. On top of the module he could see the large circular perimeter of the helipad. Faint rays of sunlight diffused through the safety netting and promised to angle down here to the spider deck come midday, but for now he had to shiver in the accommodation platform’s tall shadow.
The fishing net was out of the water now and he could see amidst the struggling tangle of slippery bodies a healthy haul of mackerel, whiting, sand eel and other assorted specimens of marine life drawn to graze for food in and around the man-made ecosystem below; a thick forest of seaweed that propagated around the support-legs below the sea like a fur stole.
He smiled, satisfied with the haul.
Enough there.
He could finish early, pack up his tent and join the second sitting in the mess. Occasional wafts of chowder and stewed tomatoes had been drifting down from the galley’s open window, accompanied by the faint clink and rattle of cutlery and ladles.
His tummy rumbled for breakfast.
Above him feet clanked across the suspended walkway from the neighbouring gas compression platform - people on their way over for second sitting. Most of the machinery, cooler tanks, scrubbers and pumps that had once been installed over there had been stripped out before the crash when these rigs were being mothballed. Now, about a hundred and fifty members of the community were sheltered on the compression platform amidst a cosy, often noisy, cavernous interior; a rabbit warren of towelling ‘cubicles’, bunks and hammocks, and laden washing lines strung across the open interior space from one gantry to another; a many-layered bazaar of multicoloured throw rugs, bedsheets and laundry.
The second, smaller, compression platform, also stripped from the inside out, played host to another technicoloured shantytown; just over a hundred of them living cheek by jowl in a warm, stuffy, smelly fug. Both compression platforms linked to the accommodation platform overshadowing him. That was home to the most; about two hundred and forty people lived there. The cabins, once designed to keep a crew of fifty in home-from-home comfort, were now cosily filled four to a cabin, and, like the compression platforms, a noisy maze of chattering voices and clothes lines strung across hallways.
Beyond the smaller compression platform was the production platform. It hosted the generator room and the stinking methane room with its digesters full of slurry - a mixture of human and chicken shit - with the chicken deck directly above. No one lived there. It would be a resilient person who could endure both the rancid stench of fermenting faeces and the endless clucking of several hundred brainless poultry.
At the furthest point of the cluster of platforms, flung out at the end of the longest linking walkway, beyond production, was the drilling platform. Just under fifty people lived out there. It was quieter than the other places, and a much longer walk for breakfast, the evening meal and any community meetings that needed to be attended. But it was where those less sociable preferred to bunk.
All five platforms, unique in shape and purpose, were united in one thing, though: they were green. Every walkway, every terrace, every gantry, every external stairwell, every cabin and every Portakabin rooftop was overgrown with potted vegetables, grow-troughs, bamboo frames holding up rustling mini forests of pea and bean climbers. Approaching the platforms from a shore run, Jacob always thought that, from afar, they looked like a sea-borne version of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, a towering wedding cake of rustling green.
He heard his name being called out and looked up, a hand shading his eyes from the pale glow of the morning sky. His mum was leaning over the railing of the cellar deck.
‘Jake!’ she called, her voice competing against the thud and spray of languid swells and the clanking of feet across the walkway above. ‘Good haul?’ she smiled.
‘Yeah, Mum.’
She disappeared back out of sight and then a moment later he saw her making her way down the ladder to the spider deck. She stopped midway - close enough to talk.
‘We’re doing a shore run today. You okay to go with Walter?’
‘Yup.’
‘Go get some breakfast first, love, all right? Walter’s going to lower the boat in about an hour.’
‘Okay,’ he called back.
She gave him a hurried wave then clambered back up the ladder and out of sight.
On her rounds. She was busy paying each platform a visit, checking every deck and walkway of plants, conferring with those tending them, ensuring every chore that needed to be done was being done, settling minor disputes, soothing ruffled feathers and petty egos . . . tirelessly keeping this little world of theirs ticking over.
He shivered as a teasing gust played with his anorak. He zipped it up and resumed winding in his catch, a smile spreading across his face. The shore run was a welcome departure from his daily routine. The foraging trips to the coastal town of Bracton came with much less frequency these days, not like in the early days when they’d first settled on the rigs and needed so many things that they were constantly ferrying supplies from the mainland.
He cherished the trips ashore. An opportunity to explore, to see something other than these windswept islands of paint-flaked metal. He savoured the fading reminders of the past, often wandering a little away from the others as they busily foraged for the things that were needed. He enjoyed standing in the silent high street. The shop signs were all still there: WH Smiths, Boots, Nationwide, Waterstones . . . but the storefront windows were long since gone. If he half-closed his eyes, let them soft-focus, and used a little imagination, he could almost see the high street busy once more; the soft creak of swinging signs replaced with the hum of traffic, the boom of music from the back of a passing car, the pedestrian thoroughfare filled with mums pushing buggies, the jingle of a newsagent’s door opening.
His smile turned into a cheerful grin. ‘Shore run,’ he announced happily, as he hauled the net over the rail, ‘cool.’