‘It’s easy as pie.’
‘Rabbit pie,’ James interjects, laughing.
Emma nods. ‘Right,’ she says and, turning, steps back into the house.
Chris reverses the van into the garage. When he opens the driver’s door he is assailed by the comforting smells of oil, creosote, Jeyes Fluid and seasoned wood. He takes the knee pads out of the pouches in his trousers and chucks them on the dash before grabbing the multipacks of baked beans from the canvas bag on the passenger seat and adding them to the towers of tins in the far corner. The baked beans are for himself and the boys. He is storing pinto, cannellini, kidney and black beans for Emma who, unless she changes her mind about eating meat, is more likely to suffer from appetite fatigue in a food shortage. According to his calculations, survival on basic rations for fifty days requires 14 kg of rice and 14 kg of beans per person. This translates to approximately fourteen 4-kg family bags of rice and 150 tins of beans. He wishes rice came in tins, too; he worries about whether the clip-lid dustbin where he stores the bags will prevent damage from heat, moisture and pests.
The back wall of the garage is lined with the old metal shelves he rescued from his parents’ garden shed before they sold up and went to live in the static caravan. Emma sanded the shelves and painted them with bottle-green Hammerite. They hold essential foodstuffs: sugar, vanilla extract, salt, vinegar, brandy and vodka, as well as half-used tins of paint, tubs of nails and screws, balls of string and twine, twist ties, loppers, bow saws, hedge shears, secateurs, fifteen hessian sandbags and a small bag of sand.
As Chris turns, he accidentally nudges a cluster of broom handles and they clatter to the floor. He bends to pick them up. They used to be topped by signs. Emma had a collection – she could have staged an exhibit: ‘Emma Abram, My Life in Protest’. Individually, the signs were a testament to her persistence and optimism. Collectively, they were a catalogue of disappointment.
Chris went with her to a protest once. Drove her because it was drizzling, and he didn’t like the thought of her lugging her homemade sign to the station almost two miles away. It had been a roadside fracking protest. Most motorists beeped in support of the protestors, or protectors, as they preferred to be called. A few, all men, Chris noticed, rolled down their windows, made obscene gestures and yelled, ‘Fuck off,’ and, ‘Get a job.’ When this happened, Emma laughed and blew kisses. Chris had only ever seen minute-long clips of protests on the news, portraying them as exciting and action-packed. God, it was boring. There’d been some bad singing and a chorus of half-hearted slogan chanting which seemed to embarrass Emma, mainly, he suspected, because he was there to witness it. What do we want? No fracking! When do we want it? Now! A little farther down the road a group of scruffy young people in camouflage gear congregated around a green and black flag. An elderly lady in a yellow bobble hat followed Chris’s gaze. ‘They like to stand there,’ she explained. ‘They do their own little protest. Because they’re anarchists, bless their hearts.’ Then she offered him a homemade, dairy-free fairy cake.
Not long later, Emma threw in the towel. Ever the recycler, she dismantled the signs, stacking the broom handles in the garage where they would no doubt come in handy and, the following spring, she used the corrugated plastic boards to cover and warm newly planted seeds as they dawdled in the still-cool ground. Every time Chris went to check on the potatoes he was badgered by a row of remonstrations:
HONK YOUR SUPPORT!
SAFE FRACKING IS A FAIRY TALE
NORTHERN POWERHOUSE SHITHOUSE!
#RESIST!
FRACK OFF!
THERE IS NO PLANET B
SAVE AINSDALE LIBRARY!
SAVE BIRKDALE LIBRARY!
SAVE CHURCHTOWN LIBRARY!
‘Why don’t you keep them safe somewhere?’ he asked, fed up of seeing them. ‘You might need them again, one day. Not the library ones, but the others …’
She wouldn’t, Emma insisted. It had all been a complete waste of time. No one in power cared about literacy and community. Or air pollution and rising global temperatures. They weren’t bothered about the risks of poisoned water, birth defects and cancer clusters. ‘We’re the desolate north,’ she said. ‘We’re nothing to them. We might as well be insects.’
Emma’s giving up niggled at him. Her dropping of everything: the environment, peace, the preservation of public services – it was as if she had unclipped an eighty-litre backpack, chucked it on the ground and walked away. What could he do but pick it up? That’s the way marriage works, isn’t it? There are ecological structures to preserve. If someone takes the bins out for ten years and suddenly stops, the other someone has to do it. While Emma had been doing the worrying, protesting and preparing, he hadn’t had to. Once she stopped, it was up to him. Of course, if she’d taken it more seriously, spent less time on fancy signs, he’d have realised sooner. But he’s got the ‘backpack’ now. He’s better equipped to carry it. Stronger, more determined. And he’s filling it with new worries every day: telemetric readings of concerning activity in the Yellowstone caldera, ice melt in the West Antarctic, the number of harvests remaining – somewhere between sixty and a hundred, depending on what you read.
Chris gathers the broom handles and leans them back against the wall. They feel cold. Not damp, though. He eyes the builders’ bag of wood. Please not damp.
‘Keep it up,’ Chris calls, glancing over his shoulder.
Dylan’s face is scrunched and angry. James is less scrutable, thanks to his sports goggles that look, with their protruding, tinted lenses, like a piece of retro-futuristic technology.
Misty rain hangs in the air like a ribbon curtain. The road, one-track in places, barely two-track in others, is flanked by deep, open drainage ditches brimming with mirror-dark water. The landscape is a splay of plain, occasionally interrupted by clusters of trees that stand like pieces on a chessboard, and telegraph poles, leaning at various angles thanks to the subsidence of the peat soil. The fields are waterlogged. Recent weather has not been kind to the Moss. Thanks to twentieth-century farmers, there are very few hedgerows, and during the dry summers unopposed winds blow away the topsoil. Water from the ditches is pumped on to crops, reducing the water table under the peat. The ground is a metre lower than it was in the 1960s and two metres lower than it was in the 1690s. While the land levels are increasingly lower, and therefore more susceptible to flooding, despite pumping, the tracks and roads, reinforced with hardcore, are becoming incrementally taller.
In the distance, Chris sees a car. He slows, and the lads follow suit. There is no retreat. Where the hardcore ends, the saturated slope of the bank begins. They jog on the spot in single file, heads bobbing like whack-a-moles. Chris starts to say so but stops – Dylan and James won’t laugh because to laugh would be a concession, an admission that this isn’t so bad after all, and they won’t give him that. They are united against him. Earlier, as he passed the porch where they were bent over, tying their laces, he overheard their treacherous grumblings and it pleased him. Chris remembers the moments when he shared a one-for-all feeling with his sister: the mutinous pleasure of being united against a common enemy. He has little choice but to force the lads into this. So many of their friends are unfit, overly attached to their phones and consoles, with little idea of what it is to pit oneself against the world in a physical way. There is no evidence that, left to their own devices, people instinctively do what’s best for them. After Great Uncle Harold had his foot amputated, he persuaded hospital visitors to wheel him outside for a smoke and a Mars Bar. If humans can’t stop guzzling sugar and nicotine to stave off diabetes and early death, how can they be expected to have the self-control and prescience to save the world?