Afterlight Read Free Page B

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