The Carbon Diaries 2015

by Saci Lloyd

  Wed., Jan. 14

  I woke up this morning and it was freezing, freezing cold. I’m only allowed heat on in my room between 7 and 8. I went and looked at the Smart Meter in the hall. It’s this thing that tells you everything that’s going on with energy in the house. Even for our one hour of heat, Dad’s locked the bedroom temp at 15°C. What a joke—it’s not even enough to melt the frost on the windows.

  Thurs., Jan. 15

  There’s heavy snowstorms all over southern Europe.

  Fri., Jan. 16

  I’ve been given an essay to write by next Friday for AS Critical Thinking: Write an informal personal review of an aspect of your home-life environment in the light of the new carbon-rationing system.

  Whoever thinks this stuff up (Crit Thinking teacher, Lisa Bell) definitely needs more sex. She’s got to be frustrated. Otherwise why would she want to punish innocent teenagers so badly?

  Mon., Jan. 19

  The blizzards in Europe are getting worse—and spreading north. Italy has just lost all its electricity. The news showed this footage of the Vatican going black, window after window. Later, they started up emergency generators so they could power up the pope saying something into a microphone in Latin to a bunch of cardinals. Whatever.

  Tues., Jan. 20

  We had a power outage in the night. The house is so cold now, it feels like 200 years of evil chill creeping into my bones. Reminds me of the Great Storm. Power outages give me the creeps—you know when you go to switch the light on and it’s dead? It was so freezing I went shopping to Waitrose with Mum and Dad just to keep my blood moving.

  Super-strange experience. It was all dark in there cos they’d switched off loads of lights and the aircon and those fans that waft baking bread smells around. It was just like a big warehouse. It was pretty funny, all the nice middle-class people pretending they weren’t panic buying and that it was completely normal for them to be pushing six carts around, totally bulging with stuff. The staff kept making people put things back at the checkout cos they’d gone over their CO points.

  My mother nearly had a fight with this other woman over a multipack of garlic and basil passata.

  They both put their hands on the box at the same time and gave a little jerky tug and then went Excuse me, followed by another tug and an Aha, ha, ha, knuckles starting to whiten around the cardboard edges. Then my mother really went for it.

  “I wouldn’t insist normally, but this is one of the few foods my daughter”—stroking my hair—“can eat—she has an acid deficiency. Her skin comes out in boils if she gets low.”

  The other woman backed off like a defeated animal in a nature program.

  Thurs., Jan. 22

  Italy has only just got its power back. They’ve found out the cause of the blackout—a tree fell on a live cable on the Swiss border. A bloody plant wiped out a whole country for 60 hours. Loads of old people have died. So strange. I never knew that cold could kill people like that. France is under deep snow now, and it’s coming our way.

  We had a Sunday roast, the first one ever. Mum is so desperate for everything to be normal, and even Dad joined in. He came into the kitchen rubbing his hands going, “Mmm, that smells good,” like he was a dad in a happy family sitcom.

  Kim refused to come out of her room and eat with us, even though my father begged her. This is unusual cos normally she softens up for him, if a crocodile can soften. Finally Mum lost it. She shouted from the kitchen: “I’ve spent the whole afternoon cooking this dinner for you, so you can at least have the manners to come and eat it.”

  Kim’s door opened for a second. “Don’t pretend you did it for me. You did it for you. You make me sick!” Slam!

  The really annoying thing about Kim is although she’s a total bitch, she is also the most honest person I’ve ever met. She’s raised her game to a whole new level right now, though—basically used the cancellation of her gap year to New York to start a war against my parents. They’re doomed.

  As a special Sunday treat, we watched separate movies in separate rooms. That was so the best thing about unrestricted carbon. The freedom.

  I don’t know if our family can survive being together.

  Fri., Jan. 23

  I woke up to bright sun glinting off snow. I had a stab of fear when I first saw it, but then it was just so pretty. We had a wicked snowball fight out in the Yard at break. Claire got stuck in an elevator in John Lewis cos of a power cut last night. Serves her right for being middle class! She had a group of people gathered round her in AS Energy Saver class.

  “Yeah, I was trapped for three hours. Felt like a lifetime.”

  “Din’t you shout an’ all?” this kid Nathan asked. “Man, I’d be screaming like a girl if I was boxed in like that.”

  Everyone laughed cept Claire.

  “Nate, don’t stereotype me. Course I shouted to begin with, but my throat just gave out, my knuckles were bleeding from knocking. . . . Nothing worked.”

  “So what you do?”

  “I had my smartphone, remember?”

  “Yeah, but you say before you got no signal in there.”

  Claire raised an eyebrow. “But I still had battery. So I took it off my wrist and held it up against the speakerphone in the elevator—and played my ring tone again and again . . . and finally, finally, this security guard heard it and rescued me.”

  Nathan whistled. “Nice work, girl.”

  Claire glanced at her cell phone. “Maybe. But I can’t ever hear that tune again. I’ve killed it dead.”

  Then Gwen Parry-Jones walked in and the room went quiet. She is dead thin, like those women who run marathons for fun. The lesson began, and she was striding about the front of the room when who came slinking in 20 minutes late but Ravi Datta. My ears buzzed. Is that normal?

  GPJ made us get into pairs and color in and fill in the numbers on a diagram about the Gulf Stream cooling down. Ravi did his with some random girl on the other side of the room. Lucky cow. I did mine with Zafran, who’s got, like, 3 brain cells in his entire being. He did the coloring in.

  Another power outage. What’s going on? When I got home, Dad was listening to the news on a windup radio Mum gave him 4 Xmases ago that’s never come out of its box before. The bulletin was about emergency power-saving measures the government’s going to bring in. Basically, they’re going to make businesses cut back to a 4-day week to save power. Dad flicked the radio off.

  “Christ, they haven’t done that since the miners’ strikes in the eighties.”

  I ran out of the room. Both parents going on about the miners! If they don’t watch out I’ll be a damaged child.

  Mon., Jan. 26

  Massive snowstorm last night. It’s knocked out loads of power lines across the country. I never knew cold could be this bad. It hurt to get out of bed this morning. The news is full of the blackouts; they are saying the electricity grid is old and completely messed up cos the private companies have been bleeding it dry since forever. No one’s got any answers. Just arguing—nuclear this, renewable that. Blah, blah.

  I only just made it out of the house. Dad had to shovel snow away from the door so I could get my bike out.

  He frowned. “Are you going to be okay?”

  I looked down the road. “Yeah, as long as I follow the car tracks.”

  I wobbled off, trying to look cool cos I could feel him watching. It was all going good until I hit the corner of the high road. I braked for a dog, skidded right across a junction, and came off hard on the pavement. I got straight back on, though, it’s like I need to be with the others in school right now. No cutting for me. On some back roads I had to get off my bike and clear a path thru the snowdrifts.

  My Design Tech class is packed out. Last term there was only 6 of us. The reason I took DT in the first place was so I could fix my bass amp, but now everyone’s doing it—dropping stuff like philosophy, sociology, art—and picking up more practical stuff. Dave Beard, the DT teacher, looked like he was going to cry.

>   It was dark by 3. I pressed my face up against the window to see thick snow falling out of a grey sky. When I pulled back I saw all of us reflected—we looked dead little. And when the lesson was over, you could see no one really wanted to go home.

  I put on my jacket slowly so I could listen to Ravi talking to Dave Beard.

  “I measured the power voltage at home last night. It’s at 150/160 volts instead of 220. They are cutting us so deep.”

  Dave shrugged. “But what can they do? There’s not enough fuel to fire up the power stations. The Danish are still piping it to us under the North Sea, but the French aren’t letting any under the Channel. They’re under a meter of snow themselves.”

  “What happened to our own gas off Scotland?”

  “All gone . . . We import it all now—and our storage facilities are tiny. The U.K. only keeps about 11 days’ supply for the whole country. Some European countries keep as much as 50, 60 days.”

  Ravi swept his fringe back. “But, if they knew this was going to happen—why didn’t they do something?”

  “Good question. The new nuclear stations are delayed because of all the protests; offshore wind’s only giving us 30 percent, hydrogen’s still a nice dream for the future. We’re addicted to oil and gas, Ravi. And the drug’s running out.”

  “Then let’s all go to Ibiza,” Nathan cut in. “Everybody’s having a nice time there.”

  Dave laughed. “Yes, but how long d’you think the Spanish are going to let a bunch of lazy British carbon-clubbing rebels stay?”

  “For as long as they paying in cash.”

  “Ah, but I’ve heard that the government is going to freeze their bank accounts. All U.K. citizens are on rations.”

  Nathan flipped his fingers. “Heavy.”

  “There’s no escape, Nathan.” Dave sighed. “For good or for bad, we’re all in this together.”

  Finally did something normal tonight. We had our first band practice of the new world order in Adisa’s garage. On fire—wrote a monster new tune, real old skool, Minor Threat style. I got on this hooked-up bass riff and then Claire totally screamed over the top.

  I ain’t got no energy

  for your messed-up world

  I ain’t got no energy

  for your stupid mi-i-nd games

  I only got

  syn-ergy

  un-predictability

  ex-plosivity

  so don’t you dare mess with me!

  God, I wanted to sing so badly, but there’s no way Claire’s gonna hand over that mic. Sometimes I write lyrics and give them to her and she goes, “Cool” and puts them into her back pocket, which is like a black hole for rhymes cos no line I’ve ever written comes out alive again.

  It all got a bit hectic in the end, though, and Stacey, the drummer, hurled her sticks at the garage door—but instead of bouncing off metal they bounced off Adisa’s mum’s chest, who’d just come in with Coke and potato chips. His mum is Nigerian and she’s got presence, if you know what I mean. She breathed deeply and muttered something about white people’s music.

  At the end everyone made a vow to give up 10 points a week to power up the band. I felt dead emotional when I said my vow. This band’s my lifeline. I don’t know how we’re going to keep going, though—a screaming, Straight X punk band isn’t anybody’s idea of important right now.

  I’ve just had a strange thing happen. I was on my way home from practice, walking down icy Blackheath High Street when everything just died all around me. All the streetlights, the shop lights. It’s the first time I’ve been outside when it’s happened. I was by an Internet zone and the monitors went black. The strange thing is nobody reacted for ages. It felt like I’d dropped into a dream.

  The cut went all the way across South London. Before, it’s only been in a few small neighborhoods. The power’s back on now, but I still feel kind of shaky, like something’s changed underneath.

  Tues., Jan. 27

  Mum flung open my bedroom door this morning.

  “Darling, the Met Office are saying the worst is over!”

  I lifted my head from the pillow. Her eyes were full of tears. “It’s going to start clearing up from tomorrow! Can you believe it?”

  In a word, no. When’s the weatherman ever been right? I didn’t share these black thoughts with my mother. She can’t cope.

  5:30 P.M. I’m really struggling with this Crit Thinking bollocks and it’s got to be in tomorrow.

  11 P.M. Done!

  I showed it to Dad. He tore his eyes away from his laptop screen, scanned my page, and sighed. Heavily.

  I think he might be going thru the male menopause. His neck and face keep going flushed and then he blows his breath out really sharply—like the time when he stayed underwater for too long in the Red Sea and had to be rescued by 3 gorgeous Swedish babes who were floating, topless, nearby. He told us later that he’d been following a beautiful shoal of angelfish and dived down too deep. Uh-huh.

  Wed., Jan. 28

  I was at Adi’s this afternoon when the power went out again. One power station’s gone down and the others are running at half speed cos there’s not enough fuel. It’s amazing how quick you get used to stuff. 2 weeks ago it would’ve been freaky, but this time we just sat around and jammed for a bit and then, when it was too dark to see anymore, we wrapped ourselves up in blankets and sat out on Adi’s porch and watched the stars, all glittering, imagining ourselves back in the day, surrounded by forest and wild animals.

  On the way home I knocked on Kieran’s door but no answer, even though I could hear his cat, Gary, purring on the other side of the door. Gary only purrs when Kieran’s home—he’s a very codependent animal. I was about to turn away, when something made me knock again. I heard a groan from inside. I pushed the door open. Kieran was sitting in the gloom, with his feet in a washing bowl.

  “Look at them,” he whimpered. “Blisters the size of saucers.”

  “Kier, what happened?”

  “Got caught in the blackout, darling, on the top floor at Foyles on Charing Cross Road. The whole of the West End went out, like someone’d thrown a tin of black paint over us all.”

  I perched on the edge of his sofa. “Why didn’t you stay in the shop?”

  “Well, at first it was kind of panicky and everyone wanted to get out of the building—you know, like it was a terrorist attack. But once I’d groped my way down to the street, everyone was going no, no, it’s just a blackout.”

  “But how did they know?”

  Kieran shrugged. “Dunno, cos there was no TV or radio. It was weird, Laura. After the first shock wore off, things went kind of really peaceful. No one was yelling or screaming, just swarms of people in the streets, all moving like lemmings to the bridges. I crossed the river at Westminster with thousands all around me. It was complete gridlock until I got well south, cos the traffic lights were out.”

  I glanced down at his red feet. “You walked all the way home?”

  “No-o—I hitched a ride once I got to Lambeth, but only as far as Camberwell, cos the guy ran out of gas and all the pumps were down. I tell you, I just wanted to get home so badly.”

  “It’s going to be all right, isn’t it?” I said. “I mean, this isn’t the—”

  Kieran took my hand. “Come on, it’s going to be fine. It’s just a few power outages. But can I let you in on a secret?”

  I nodded.

  “I think that was the most beautiful I’ve ever seen London. The moon was massive, the stars were so clear . . .” Kieran’s face twisted into a strange smile. “And it was so magnificently quiet.”

  Thurs., Jan. 29

  I’m starting to get scared. There was a line outside Tesco’s supermarket for bread, like in the war. It’s still bitter cold. I can’t remember what it’s like to be warm.

  February

  Sun., Feb. 1

  Stacey came around to mine for a wash. She lives on the 12th floor and they’re not getting any water cos there’s not enough power t
o pump it up there. The government’s holding it back for priority places like Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Greenwich.

  “Man, if this carries on I’m gonna mess up a kidney or something so I can get on to the ward,” Stace muttered, teeth chattering as she threw freezing cold water over her face.

  Mon., Feb. 2

  I’ve just found out that the hydrogen are releasing early tickets at Shepherds Bush Empire on Tuesday. I am so going—they’re basically the coolest band in London. They’ve taken over a gigantic warehouse in South London and hooked it all up to hydrogen fuel cells. They don’t tour so the only way to see them is to go down to the warehouse.

  I’m gonna ask Adi if he wants to come and get the tickets with me. I’m not going to tell my parents I’m going across town, though, they’ll freak, with all the blackouts.

  Tues., Feb. 3

  All the local shops have run out of candles, so everyone’s going to All Saints Catholic Church on the edge of the Heath to buy them. If someone is old or sick, the priests give them candles for free. I went down there for Mum this evening after school and it was so surreal—the giant arches flickering in the dim candlelight and all the people huddled together at the altar for their candle ration. Hypocrites. When did we all last go to church?

  Another weird thing I’m noticing is people walking around just talking to themselves. Coming back from the church I saw 3 or 4 old women wandering down the road or standing in their doors, chatting away to no one.

  Wed., Feb. 4

  11 P.M. Oh, God. Oh, God. Me and Adi got trapped on the tube in rush hour.

  We’d jumped on the train in such a good mood cos we’d got the hydro tickets and then it happened—just after Marble Arch. We were squeezed up right against the doors and the train was going dead fast, rattling and shaking along, and then suddenly vooom! Blackout and engine dead. The train didn’t stop, though—we rumbled on down the tunnel, like the brakes were messed up, too. Everyone was screaming and trying to get on the ground, but there wasn’t enough space. I was going please make it stop over and over in my head, but we just kept on and on. I thought we were gonna die. And then, finally, a massive screech of brakes, sparks, and a burning smell filled the car—and we screeched to a stop.