She looked at the number on the display, it was Dad again.

‘Dad, you okay? It sounded like something was going on over th—?’

‘Leona, listen to me. I haven’t got much charge on my phone. I . . .’

‘Dad, I was so worried about—’

‘LISTEN!’

She shut up.

‘Do not go to our home. It’s not safe! Do you understand?’

‘What? Why?’

‘I haven’t got time to explain. It’s going crazy here, my phone could cut off at any time. Look, I might be wrong. I probably am, but just to be safe . . . get Jake, get some food and water, you know what kind of food. Tins. And then go to Jill’s.’

Jill was a friend of Mum’s, she lived alone three houses down on the opposite side of their leafy little street.

‘Jill’s? Why?’

‘Just do that will you? Stay away from home. Go to Jill’s instead.’

‘But why Dad?’

‘I haven’t got the time. Where are you right now?’

‘I’m just letting myself into my digs, I was going to pack some—’

‘Oh for Christ’s . . . Leona, get the hell away from there!’

‘What?’

‘Please, do me a favour and leave right now.’

‘Dad? What’s going on ? You’re scaring me.’

‘Leona, leave RIGHT NOW—’

The call disconnected.

She stared at the door in front of her for a moment, suddenly very wary of what might be inside. Her key had been poised inches from the lock when the phone rang. It was still hovering inches away now. There was no ambiguity there. Dad said to ‘get the hell away’ from her digs. If he’d said that in any other way; a nagging, hectoring tone, a snotty irritable voice, his softly-softly do it for me voice, she would probably have decided to tune him out.

But he’d said it in just the right way to scare the shit out of her.

Leona put the key back in her pocket, turned as quietly as she could on her heels and took the stairs quickly down to the front door of the building.

She crossed the room and knelt down beside him. ‘Dan. Wake up, Dan,’ she said quietly.

He stirred almost immediately, stretching, squawking out a strangled yawn and then rubbed his big blue eyes with the backs of his hands.

Leona had to ask him a favour. She had to try. Walking briskly back across the centre of town she had tried the Virgin ticket line only to find out that for some unspecified reason, there were no trains down to London. She’d had the same luck with Express coaches. Oh God, she hated that she had to ask such a big favour, with them only being an item for what . . . no more than 24 hours? Not that they were officially an item yet. It’s not like any of it was official - they were both sort of still finding their way through whatever it was they had going together.

‘Dan?’

‘Yeah,’ he muttered sleepily, reaching out with one hand and cupping her small chin in it. ‘Ask me anything you want, sexy babee,’ he added.

‘Dan, I need a favour. A really big favour.’

Oh crap, here goes. And if he says ‘NO’ you know you can’t really blame him.

‘Could you drive me to London?’ she blurted, wrinkling her face in anticipation of his answer. It really was unfair to ask him like this, and she really did feel like a selfish, needy cow for—

‘Sure,’ he muttered sleepily.

Daniel drove on quite happily nodding his head to the music, trundling uncertainly along in the slow lane as his van, an ancient-looking rust-encrusted Ford given to him by his foster mum, struggled doggedly to achieve a steady sixty miles per hour.

As the A11 merged into the M11, they managed to overtake a surprisingly long convoy of army trucks. Daniel counted twenty of them, all of them full of soldiers, some of whom had spotted Leona in the passenger seat as they passed by and waved, grinned and made some crude and suggestive gestures towards her. She stared rigidly ahead, determined to ignore them.

It wasn’t until they eventually hit the M25 and the outskirts of London that either his patience finally ran out, or the idea occurred to him to actually ask. He turned the music down.

‘Why are we going to London anyway?’

Leona sighed. ‘Dan, you’re going to think I’m a bit mad.’

He smirked, ‘I know you’re mad.’

So, she wondered, how do I begin?

‘Have you seen the news?’

Daniel shook his head, smiling goofily. ‘Uh . . . no, not recently. It’s all ugly old members of the government humping office staff, and losing lots of money, isn’t it?’

Leona ignored his joke. ‘Well, give me an idea of the last news you saw or heard?’

He was silent for a moment, giving the question serious consideration. ‘Last time I was home, I guess,’ he pursed his lips, counting silently, ‘yeah . . . about five weeks ago, I saw some.’

Leona shook her head. ‘My God, we could be facing the end of the world, and you wouldn’t have the first idea, would you?’

Daniel thought about that for a moment, before turning to look at her, still smiling. ‘Are we?’ he asked.

Leona shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I really don’t know.’

The last track on the CD came to an end, and he reached out to restart it.

‘Can we put the radio on?’

‘Sure,’ he said, ‘I s’pose I better find out if the world is ending, huh?’

As they began to negotiate the increasing traffic heading west across the north of London, Leona hopped from radio station to radio station, dialling through inner-city urban stations pumping out R&B without a care in the world. They caught several news bulletins on Radio 1, and then she tuned to Radio 4, a station she wouldn’t normally touch with a barge-pole, except today. They had some experts in the studio talking with great solemnity and concern about the developing global crisis and more specifically, about the lunchtime announcement the Prime Minister was scheduled to make.

Leona’s navigation left a lot to be desired and they struggled to find the correct way off the M25 to head down to North Finchley, where Jake’s prep school was located, doubling back on to the ring road several times before they found the right junction to come off at.

‘So, what . . . we’re suddenly going to run out of electricity or something?’ asked Daniel, after listening to a heated exchange between a couple of guests on the programme they were listening to.

‘Yeah,’ she replied, ‘I think that’s what’ll happen.’

He hunched his shoulders, ‘Oh, okay. Not so bad then, I suppose. I thought we were—’

She looked at him in astonishment. ‘You’ve gotta be kidding me?’

Go easy on him, Dan’s not had the five-year oil paranoia crash course, that you have.

‘Uh no, I’m not kidding . . . am I?’

‘Dan, running out of electricity is just one thing. Do you know what else it really means - running out of oil?’

He thought about that for a moment. ‘Hospitals and stuff? Shit, UEA would have to close as well, right?’

She gestured towards a road sign. ‘There, left at the traffic lights. That takes us south towards North Finchley. Anyway, no it means much more than the university closing. God, much more.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘No oil means so much more than no petrol for your car, or power for your . . . for your guitar amp.’

With a sudden realisation it occurred to her that she sounded so much like Dad. Even her barely detectable inherited accent was coming through more strongly.

‘Dan,’ she continued, ‘it means no bloody food, no water—’

‘Uh! No food? No water? How’s that then? It’s always pissing down in England, there’s water everywhere! And food, shit, there’s loads of it around.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah. I mean, it’s all farms and fields out there, once you get out in the countryside. That’s all food isn’t it?’

‘Some of it is food. But not nearly enough.’

Daniel laughed out loud. ‘What’s this all about? There’s some, like, riots on the other side of the world and suddenly you’re telling me we’re all going to be starving over here?’

Leona said nothing and looked at him.

Daniel laughed some more, and then turned to look at her. His smile slipped quickly away when he saw how intense she looked.

‘Oh come on,’ he said after a while.

‘Daniel, my dad’s an oil engineer. And for the last few years, you know what? All he’s talked to me and Mum about, is how one day the oil might suddenly be stopped from flowing. At first it was a little frightening. He’d be telling us this stuff, how easily, you know, society would fall apart, what could start it all happening . . . the warning signs. And he was so paranoid too, Dan. Talking about all this crap and then saying we should keep it to ourselves.’

Leona laughed. ‘As if I was going to spout that stuff to my mates at a party. He was so secretive about it all, he . . .’

‘Well anyway, it all started getting very boring. And for the last couple of years I started to think of Dad as a tediously paranoid dick.’

She looked out of the window at the street, clogged with cars nudging slowly forward amidst a soup of exhaust fumes shimmering in the mid-morning warmth, pedestrians passing by seemingly without a care in the world and enjoying the sun, the shop fronts on either side full of goodies at bargain-basement prices . . . an electronics store, with several forty-inch plasma screen TVs in the window all showing some monster trucks racing around a dirt track.

‘And this morning I discovered, after all this time . . . that maybe he wasn’t.’