Every day is someone’s first day at work. Someone, somewhere trying out their chair for the first time, dispensing their first coffee from the machine, clipping on their name badge and feeling overwhelmed by a sort of self-conscious pride.
Today, her name was Liv McKenna. She’d just turned twenty-five, she’d recently graduated from the University of Birmingham and loved playing tennis; she’d played the cello in a student drama group and in the lonely hearts ad she posted online when she’d moved she’d described herself as classically trained–which was a massive exaggeration, but who cares? She was new to her flat in Ipswich, new at work, and new to the large, light grey control room that looked like the bridge of a spaceship from a seventies sci-fi film.
On the evening of the fourth of December she was starting her first shift at Sizewell, a nuclear power station a hundred miles north of London. The evening when what could never happen, did.