THE LUCKY ONES
I remember taking the kids on holiday to Wales one summer. We’d spent a long, idyllic sunny day on the beach: blue sky, hot sun, beautiful countryside. Then we drove a few miles down the coast and reached Port Talbot, site of the one of the biggest steelworks in the world. The contrast between the landscape we’d driven through and the industrial works we found was vivid and startling, and that set me thinking... what if the steelworks was all that was left? What if the factory – which, perched on the shore, looks to all intents and purposes like an oily, self-contained city in itself – outlasted everything else? I was approached to write a story for a collection called Dead Water , and I immediately thought back to my trip to Port Talbot. So the location was set, and a less
