The Night the Lights Went Out

by John Eider

I was eventually allowed to sleep unguarded, and quickly found a new berth along the fifth floor corridor and far from the old reception. The town planners and executives who had once worked up there had taken advantage of the large windows and quiet thoroughfares at that level, to fill the places between their drawing boards and desks with potted palms and twenty-year-old cheese plants. Not that I occupied every night there, Mill and I eventually getting to spend time together listening to records, the battery of her player quite flat by the time the Captain eventually turned up with replacements.

  One afternoon she came out to the field my gang was working in, our foreman going with her to the truck our tools were kept in. When I could, I looked up to see them poring over plans. Breaking for a rest (breaks coming every two hours) she came to lie beside me on the hot ground.

  ‘I watched you working,’ she began. It was the first chance we’d had to speak for a while.

  ‘I know, I saw you by the truck.’

  She rolled onto her side to face me, ‘You don’t have to, you know.’

  ‘Don’t have to work?’ I asked, playing her up. ‘I thought that was Jack’s only requirement?’

  At which she play-slapped my arm,

  ‘Work so hard, I mean. You know you are. You’ll overdo it.’

  The fact was, with injuries healed and no more hiking, I hadn’t felt that good for months. But then she went serious,

  ‘I know you’re doing it for me, to impress me, to prove your commitment. You don’t have to though. I know it.’

  Somewhere I heard our foreman talking, and workers rousing themselves to resume, and knew we hadn’t long,

  ‘Look, Mill. Out here in the fields, it gives you time to think.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘I’ve been watching you too.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘All of you, I mean.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Especially you, of course.’

  ‘Well, that’s all right then.’

  ‘But I’ve been here – what? – a fortnight now? I’ve seen a bit of how the place works. You have things running so well, that…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Well, I don’t think you need to be here every day.’

  ‘Oh? Where would you have me go?’

  ‘I’ve been reading Scanlon’s papers,’ I continued in explanation, for she had lent me her copies.

  ‘Go on,’ she said with the air of one who’d perhaps hoped for a few minutes away from the day job.

  ‘The commune runs like clockwork. Your role is purely supervisorial, and Zak handles any difficulties. You could be running five or six such places, you’d only need to spend a day at each.’

  ‘But there aren’t five or six…’

  ‘But there soon may be. Whatever they’re planning, Scanlon and the Government, you need to be involved in. Can’t you see?’

  The foreman’s voice was louder now, and we both rose, she only saying as she went,

  ‘Well, don’t go telling Jack any of this. I don’t want him thinking that you’re stealing me away from him.’

  I knew I’d upset her, but couldn’t work out why. Perhaps because my ambitions for her belittled her already huge achievement of forming even one such commune; perhaps because I hadn’t made my argument personal enough? For though my words had been truly felt, they were also a ploy to get her away. Not away with me exactly, for I’d no idea where I’d be going; but only to have her ties with the commune loosened enough to have her travel somewhere closer to Calais or London or Salisbury or wherever I might ever have a chance of seeing her again.

  To explain this hope, I must go back to go forward…

  When I chose to jump off the boat before it left, and instead to re-approach the commune, even though I was bucking instructions I wasn’t really going Absent Without Leave; for I knew that, were I allowed to stay, or were even taken prisoner, then it would only be a matter of time before Captain Linkater found me there. This meant I wouldn’t get much digging done before he next turned up – which was another reason why I worked so hard when given the chance.

  In fact, it would be almost a month before he and his convoy returned (the reasons for his delay were obscure, but to do with an organised attack on the London base). The Council House commune had long proven their self-sufficiency, and so only received a small emergency ration of corn with each visit. Therefore, it was the other things the convoys brought them which they’d missed most keenly – specialist equipment, scientific data, treats and gifts, weather reports, news of the outside world.

  The Captain brought other bounty too in his Land Rovers and lorries when he at last arrived: new shovels and spades and forks and seeds, to complement those looted from the three local gardening centres and DIY stores whose stock Zak had appropriated; and a whole mini-metrological station to be set up on the roof of the Council House (Mill was very excited about that); and most vitally, news of the European Union’s emergency plan for bringing in Britain’s crop those coming weeks, and replanting early next year.

  The gist of the plan was this, as the Captain explained. With the British Army tied up already, and the French keeping order along their North Coast and refugee camps, it would be the job of the other European nation’s armies and civil bodies – Spanish, Italian, German and Scandinavian amongst them – to fly in and secure vast tracts of British arable land. They would also bring fuel and engineers for the tractors and combine harvesters, support those UK farmers still in place when they began the reaping, and for farms under no obvious control, man the machines themselves. Crops would then be taken to a series of already secured stores and mills for processing, or exported for the same purpose.

  What with the refineries and corporate assets now under private guard, army bases springing up everywhere, and now, as we were hearing, a network being set up for grain processing, I realised just how busy Britain still was – and just how carefully Wareing’s route had been planned for us to avoid running into any of it. But it was the new life springing up that was by then fascinating me: the innumerable communes and safe houses and scavenging gangs that I knew were out there, some of whom I had seen filching crops or rifling houses. I knew that that was where my interests would lead me, even if my studies could only be amateur, conducted in my spare time after being pulled back into Army duties.

  ‘Foreign farmers too?’ asked one of the Organisational Council.

  ‘Farmers? Yes,’ answered the Captain.’ They’ll be flown in literally the day after downing tools on their own farms.’

  ‘And are they expecting resistance?’ asked Jack Berne. ‘Some of our farmers have been guarding their stocks and crops determinedly for months.’

  ‘I think the EU take the view that some resistance is inevitable. We’re trying to have as many native English speakers with the teams as possible. We’ll also push the message from day one that everything grown here will be eaten here, even that which goes abroad for processing.’

  The Captain went on to explain that it was not the act of foreign farmers arriving that was expected to cause a situation with disgruntled locals; rather the moment when the disparate and dispirited for miles around suddenly heard that rarest and most evocative of sounds – motor engines; bringing with them food, freedom, who knew what,

  ‘And so to protect those farming vehicles we’ll need soldiers, who’ll require their own transport… it’s something of a vicious cycle.’

  It should only have been the Organisational Council in these discussions, but with my knowledge of recent events, the fact that Mill insisted, and that Zak had become inured to me by then, I earned a seat at the table. There was also the fact that I had business with the Captain, with whom I spoke privately before he left.

  ‘You’ve been busy I hear?’ he began.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes, it was all over the radio: special boats arranged for the East Coast, arrests in Holland, and a major charity reviewing its operations out there. A shame about Wareing. You’ve gues
sed by now that I..?’

  ‘Alerted the commune to us? Yes, sir, we did figure.’

  ‘A shame all ‘round. But no ill feeling I hope.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Anyway, you made it back to civilisation. Now, I’m not going to step on any toes: I can see you’re making yourself useful here, and you obviously have some kind of arrangement with Millicent. But you are a serving soldier, and an overdue one at that, and in any other circumstances I’d be frog marching you back to base already. So, is there any reason why I shouldn’t be?’

  ‘None, sir.’

  ‘Then you have this evening. Let her know.’

  ‘I wanted her to come too,’ I blurted out.

  ‘I know you did, she told me on the satellite phone.’ (Another technological gift, of enormous use now the satellites themselves had been unscrambled after the storm.) ‘Crofts,’ he placed a fatherly hand on my shoulder. ‘This is not an age for the upwardly mobile, not even the sidewardly so. We both know the perils of venturing even one town along the road. Your hopes for her are noble; and in another age she could of course run half a dozen of these places just as well as one; but not if she can’t travel easily between them.

  ‘Others are already being trained, those who can help being filtered out of the crowds at the feeding stations. Hell, the rest of the world is alive with volunteers bursting to come here. You’ll be useful at my base, if indeed you aren’t wanted for something else by the Major; but she is needed here. I’ll even get you on the convoys to give you the chance to visit her, if it’s in my power.’

  It getting late, the Captain returned to where he and his men were sleeping in their vehicles that night, cradled in the courtyard of the Council House. No need for pretence, I went up to Mill’s room. She was already there, tired after another mammoth Council meeting, asking as I lay down beside her,

  ‘You’ve seen the Captain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He’s taking you with him, isn’t he?’

  I didn’t speak.

  ‘Did you ever see that documentary,’ she asked, ‘the fly-on-the-wall one about that commune in the Seventies? You must have done, they were always repeating it. Remember, they’d set up in some old estate somewhere as it fell apart around them, leaving jobs and modern life behind. But what people remembered it for were the arguments, the endless debates the members had: about whether they should use petrol machines to plough or go even further back into pre-industry and use horses; or whether one of them should be allowed to stay up all hours singing so long as it was only Gregorian chants; or if someone should be kicked out for sleeping with another person’s husband or wife, or whether adultery was even possible in a society of free love; or if they even had the right to vote on anything if there was no property or hierarchy or anyone who had any authority to judge another…’

  ‘Mill, Mill, Mill,’ I interrupted, hating her beginning to sound so upset. ‘What’s up?’

  She continued, quieter now, ‘The thing is, the members of the commune took it all so seriously. To them it was a new way of living; but the audience just laughed, they found it funny.’ She rolled over, in that way she had, to fix me in her gaze, ‘Do people think that of us? The world, I mean. Do they thing we’re silly doing this?’

  Chapter 35 – The Future

  E-Day+2195