Dead Tomorrow

She turned up the hill into their street, then made a left into her driveway, pulled on the handbrake and switched off the engine. As usual it juddered on for some moments, spluttering and shaking the car, and banging the exhaust pipe beneath her again, before falling silent.

The house was a semi in a quiet residential avenue and, like many homes in this city, on a steep hill. It had views, across trees that masked the London Road and the railway line, of some of the swanky, dreamy houses and massive gardens of Withdean Road on the far side of the valley. All the houses in her avenue were of the same basic design: three-bedroomed, 1930s, with a rounded, metalled Art Deco influence which she had always liked. They had small front gardens with a short driveway in front of the attached garage and good-sized plots at the rear.

The previous owners had been an elderly couple and when Lynn moved in she’d had all kinds of plans to transform it. But after seven years here, she had not even been able to afford to rip out the manky old carpets and replace them, let alone carry out her grander schemes of knocking through walls and re-landscaping the garden. Fresh paint and some new wallpaper were all she had managed so far. The dreary kitchen still had a fusty old-people smell to it, despite all her efforts with pot pourri and plug-in air fresheners.

One day, she used to promise herself. One day.

The same one day that she promised herself she would build a little studio in the garden. She loved to paint scenes of Brighton in watercolours and had had some modest success in selling them.

She unlocked the front door and went inside, into the narrow hallway. She peered up the stairs, wondering if Caitlin was out of bed yet, but could hear no sound.

Heavy-hearted, she climbed the stairs. At the top, taped to Caitlin’s door, was a large handwritten sign, red letters on a white background, saying: KNOCK, PURLEASE. It had been there for as long as she could remember. She knocked.

There was no answer, as normal. Caitlin would be either asleep or blasting her eardrums with music. She went in. The contents of the room looked as if they had been scooped up wholesale from somewhere else by a bulldozer’s shovel, brought here and tipped in through the window.

Just visible beyond the tangle of clothes, soft toys, CDs, DVDs, shoes, make-up containers, overflowing pink waste bin, upended pink stool, dolls, mobile of blue perspex butterflies, shopping bags from Top Shop, River Island, Monsoon, Abercrombie and Fitch, Gap and Zara, and dartboard with a purple boa hanging from it, was the bed. Caitlin was lying on her side, in one of the many extraordinary positions in which she slept, arms and legs akimbo, with a pillow over her head, bare bottom and thighs protruding from the duvet, iPod earpieces plugged into her ears, the television on, playing a repeat of a show Lynn recognized as The Hills.

She looked like she was dead.

And for one terrifying moment Lynn thought she was. She rushed over, her feet tangling in her daughter’s mobile phone charger wire, and touched her long, slender arm.

‘I’m asleep,’ Caitlin said grumpily.

Relief surged through Lynn. The illness had made her daughter’s sleep patterns erratic. She smiled, sat down on the edge of the bed and stroked her back. With her mop of short, gelled black hair, Caitlin looked like a bendy doll sometimes, she thought. Tall, thin to the point of emaciation, and gangly, she seemed to have flexible wire inside her skin rather than bones.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Itchy.’

‘Want some breakfast?’ she asked hopefully.

Caitlin wasn’t a full-blown anorexic, but close. She was obsessed with her weight, hated any food like cheese or pasta, which she called eating fats, and weighed herself constantly.

Caitlin shook her head.

‘I need to talk to you, darling.’ She looked at her watch. It was 10.05. She had told them yesterday at work that she would be in late, and she was going to have to phone again in a minute and tell them she would not be in at all today. The doctor only had a short window of time, mid-afternoon, to see Caitlin.

‘I’m busy,’ her daughter grunted.

In a sudden fit of irritation, Lynn pulled out the earpieces. ‘This is important.’

‘Chill, woman!’ Caitlin replied.

Lynn bit her lip and was silent for some moments. Then she said, ‘I’ve made an appointment with Dr Hunter for this afternoon. At half past four.’

‘You’re doing my head in. I’m seeing Luke this afternoon.’

Luke was her boyfriend. He was enrolled in some course in IT at the University of Brighton which he had never been able to explain to her in a manner she could understand. Among the total wasters Lynn had encountered in her life, Luke was up there in a class of his own. Caitlin had been dating him for over a year. And in that year Lynn had managed to extract about five words from him, and those with some difficulty. Yep, yeah, like, you know seemed to be the absolute limits of his vocabulary. She was beginning to think that the attraction between the two of them must be because they both came from the same planet – somewhere at the far end of the universe. Some sodding galactic cul-de-sac.

She kissed her daughter’s cheek, then tenderly stroked her stiff hair. ‘How are you feeling today, my angel? Other than itching?’

‘Yeah, OK. I’m tired.’

‘I’ve just been to see Dr Hunter. We have to talk about this.’

‘Not right now. I’m like cotchin. OK?’

Lynn sat very still and took a deep breath, trying to control her temper. ‘Darling, that appointment with Dr Hunter is very important. He wants to make you better. It seems the only way we may be able to do this is by giving you a liver transplant. He wants to talk to you about it.’

Caitlin nodded. ‘Can I have my earpieces back? This is one of my favourite tracks.’

‘What are you listening to?’

‘Rihanna.’

‘Did you hear what I said, darling? About a liver transplant?’

Caitlin shrugged, then grunted. ‘Whatever.’

9

It took just under an hour and a half for the Arco Dee, making a plodding twelve knots, to reach the dredge area. Malcolm Beckett spent most of this time carrying out his daily routine tests of all forty-two of the ship’s audible alerts and warning lights. He had just completed some maintenance on three, the engine room alarm, the bilge alarm and the bow-thruster failure alarm, and was now on the bridge, testing each of the related warning lights on the panel.

Despite the biting, freshening wind, it was a gloriously sunny day, with a gentle swell making the ship’s motion comfortable for all on board. It was the kind of day, ordinarily, that he loved best at sea. But today there was a dark cloud in his heart: Caitlin.

When he finished the lights, he checked the weather report screen for any updates, and was pleased to see the forecast for the rest of the day remained good. The outlook for tomorrow, he read, was south-west five to seven, veering west five or six, with a moderate or rough sea state and occasional rain. Less pleasant but nothing to worry about. The Arco Dee could dredge in a constant Force Seven, but beyond that working conditions became too dangerous on board and they risked damage to dredging gear, especially the drag head pounding on the seabed.

She had originally been built for sheltered estuary work and her flat bottom allowed her a draught of just thirteen feet fully loaded. That was useful for working in ports with sandbars, such as Shoreham, where at low tide the harbour entrance became too shallow for shipping to pass through. The Arco Dee was able to come and go up to an hour either side of low water; but the downside was that she was uncomfortable in a heavy sea.

In the cosy warmth of the spacious, high-tech bridge there was an air of quiet concentration. Ten nautical miles south-east of Brighton, they were almost over the dredge area now. Yellow, green and blue lines on a black screen, forming a lopsided rectangle, marked out the 100 square miles of seabed leased from the government by the Hanson Group, the conglomerate which owned this particular dredging fleet. The land was as precisely marked out as any farm onshore, and if they strayed out of this exact area, they risked heavy fines and losing their dredging rights.

Commercial dredging was, in a sense, underwater quarrying. The sand and gravel that the ship sucked up would be graded and sold into the construction and landscaping industries. The best- grade pebbles would end up on smart driveways, the sand would be used in the cement industry, and the rest would be either crushed up into concrete and tarmac mixes, or used for rubble ballast in the foundations of buildings, roads and tunnels.

The captain, Danny Marshall, a lean, wiry, good-natured man of forty-five, stood at the helm, steering with the two toggle levers that controlled the propellers, giving the ship more manoeuvrability than a traditional wheel and rudder. Sporting a few days’ growth of stubble, he wore a black bobble hat, a chunky blue sweater over a blue shirt, jeans and heavy-duty sea boots. The first mate, similarly attired, stood watch over the computer screen on which the dredge area was plotted.

Marshall clicked on the ship-to-shore radio and leaned forward to the mike. ‘This is Arco Dee, Mike Mike Whiskey Echo,’ he said. When the coastguard responded, he radioed in his position. Working out on one of the busiest shipping lanes in the world, where visibility could fall to just a few yards in the frequent mists and fogs that came down over the English Channel, it was important for all positions to be noted and updated regularly.

Like his other seven crewmates, most of whom had worked together for the past decade, the sea was in Malcolm Beckett’s blood. A bit of a rebel as a child, he had left home as soon as he could to join the Royal Navy as a trainee engineer, and had spent his first years at sea travelling the world. But, like the others on this ship who had begun their careers on ocean-going vessels, when his first child, Caitlin, was born, he wanted to find work that kept him at sea but enabled him to have some kind of family life.

Dredging had been the perfect solution. They were never at sea for longer than three weeks and returned to harbour twice a day. On the periods when the ship was based here in Shoreham, or in Newhaven, he was even able to nip home on occasions for an hour or so.

The captain reduced speed. Malcolm checked the engine revs and temperature gauges, then glanced at his watch. They would be back in phone range of the shore in about five hours. Five o’clock this evening. The phone call from Lynn had left him deeply disturbed. While he had always found Caitlin a difficult child, he was immensely fond of her and saw a lot of himself in her. On the days that he took her out, he was always amused by her complaints about her mother. They seemed to be exactly the same issues that he had had with Lynn too. In particular, her obsessive worrying – although, to be fair, Caitlin had given them both plenty to worry about over the years.

But this time it had sounded even worse than anything before and he felt frustrated that the call had been cut short. And very worried.

He pulled on his hard hat and high-visibility jacket, left the bridge and clambered down the steep metal steps to the gridded companionway, then down on to the main deck. He could feel the sharpness of the winter breeze rippling his clothes as he walked across to get into position to supervise the lowering of the dredge pipe into the sea.

A couple of his former navy colleagues, whom he met up with from time to time for a drink, joked that dredgers were nothing more than floating vacuum cleaners. In a sense they were right. The Arco Dee was a 2,000-ton Hoover. Which meant 3,500 tons when the dust bag was full.

Mounted along the starboard side of the ship was the dredge pipe itself, a 100-foot-long steel tube. For Malcolm, one of the highlights of each voyage was watching the dredge pipe sink out of sight into the murky depths. It was the moment when the ship truly seemed to come alive. The sudden clanking din of the pumping and chute machinery starting up, the sea all around them churning, and in a few moments water, sand and gravel would be thundering into the hold, turning the whole centre of the vessel, which was the cargo hold, into a ferocious cauldron of muddy water.

Occasionally, something unexpected, like a cannonball or part of a Second World War aircraft or, on one nerve-racking occasion, an unexploded bomb, got sucked up and jammed in the drag