Саймон Морден - Down Station

‘We can all see this, right? We’re all seeing the same thing.’

Mama nodded, her hands on her hips. ‘I reckon we are. What’s your name, young man?’

‘Dalip,’ said Dalip. It was about the only thing he was certain of at that moment.

‘My parents called me Noreen,’ said Mama, ‘but everyone calls me Mama.’

‘Do you know what happened?’

‘Well now,’ she said. ‘I can’t explain any of it. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.’

He looked at his hands, opened and closed his fists, watched his fingers curl and straighten. Every scald and blister told him it did happen, and that he wasn’t dreaming.

‘Oh, come on.’ Mama nudged his arm. ‘Your friend’s right. We should find somewhere to stay, and worry about where we are later.’

‘He’s not my friend. I’d never met him before tonight. Last night. Before the shift started. He’s just someone who was told to look after me.’

‘Then he’s done a good job, yes? He looked after you just fine.’

‘I suppose.’

‘Well, then.’ She looked around her, and co-opted the other women into the conversation. ‘We should stay together, at least till we get to go home. We’d all better follow along now.’

To pre-empt any more of his angst, she set off after Stanislav, and there was nothing for it but to go with her. They walked as a knot of orange, none of them feeling brave enough to spread out across the plain.

He didn’t know much about plants or birds, but there was nothing unusual about the ones he was seeing. The seagulls? They had seagulls in London, and the ones here looked like those. The small brown bird that the girl had disturbed? He hadn’t got a good look at it, but it wouldn’t have been out of place in a nature documentary. The grasses were blue-green, the leaves on the stunted bushes similar, and he thought he could remember a geography field trip where they’d been shown salt-adapted vegetation that resembled what he was seeing.

Perhaps they were just somewhere they ought not be, and they’d got there by some weird physics. Everything seemed disconcertingly normal. Apart from the sea-monster. What was he thinking? There was an actual sea-monster. He hadn’t imagined it. This wasn’t any place that had ever been covered by the Natural History Unit of the BBC.

A thought struck him, morbidly funny: it’d be a privilege to end his time there being chased across a primeval landscape by a pack of allosaurs.

‘What? Why are you laughing?’

Dalip coloured up, and stared firmly at the rough ground. He didn’t have much experience talking to women. His mother and grandmother, yes, though his Punjabi was frankly shocking. Teachers, yes, but there was no question of any sort of social relationship. Doing an engineering degree was not-quite-but-almost an all-male affair.

The one who’d spoken to him was just smaller than him, with a wave of black hair with reddish highlights that may or may not have been cosmetic, and the beginning of crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. She wasn’t Anglo◦– he didn’t have the skills to tell from where. Her… friend? Sister? She looked similar, though she wore her hair so that it shielded her face from view when she turned.

‘Why am I laughing? Because I was wondering when the dinosaurs were going to turn up and eat us.’

She was looking at him, trying to work out whether he was serious or not. He still wouldn’t make eye contact.

‘Why dinosaurs?’

‘Because it’s as likely as anything else that’s happened.’ There didn’t seem to be any giant footprints or egg-shells the size of saucepans, but who knew? He risked a glance at her, and quickly turned away again. He couldn’t age her. Twenties, thirties, maybe. Wiry and strong. Confident. ‘Are you scared by all this?’

‘Scared?’ She wondered for a moment. ‘I do not know. I was scared, very scared in the tunnels. I thought I was going to die. And now? We might be safe, so I am less scared.’

‘But we don’t know where we are.’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes it does.’

‘When you thought you were going to be burnt alive, did you think being anywhere else would be better?’

‘Yes, that’s what I thought.’

The ground beneath them was becoming increasingly gritty and damp, and where they’d walked pooled with water. The river channel had split into wide, shallow streams, with thousands of sand banks and islets between them. As the tide came up, as it was presumably doing now, the rivers went into reverse.

He bent down and put his injured hand in the clear water. It was cool, and when he let a drop fall into his mouth, it was somewhere between salty and sweet.

‘Then that is where we are,’ she said. ‘Perhaps because we wanted it badly enough, it happened.’

Dalip didn’t live in a world where wishing for something really hard worked. Ever. The only thing that ever worked was diligence, perseverance, and a willingness to be humiliated over and over again until it came right.

‘That’s just…’ He glanced up, at the river, the forest, the mountains, the sky. None of it made any sense, and perhaps it didn’t matter who was right. Stanislav had insisted that all that counted was what he was going to do now.

‘Luiza,’ said the woman. ‘This is my cousin, Elena. Where are you from?’

‘Dalip,’ said Dalip. He wasn’t used to introducing himself to people◦– that was his mother’s job◦– but she wasn’t there. ‘I’m from Southall. You?’

‘Romania.’

‘Okay.’ He didn’t know much about the place, and where they were born seemed a strange thing to discuss. None of them had been born here.

The sweary girl was down in amongst the river channels, every so often kicking a plume of water into the air where it broke and fell. She stopped, and shouted, and pointed.

Stanislav was up by the tree line, exploring the edge of the forest, and Mama and the other woman were a little way behind, in easy conversation.

The girl didn’t seem to be running away from anything, and her shouts were more indicative of something interesting than something terrible: Dalip, Luiza and Elena were closest, so they arrived first.

She was pointing down, at the water. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘look.’

It took a moment to see past the rippling surface with its bright reflections, and not so far as the granular, speckled river bed.

Fish. There were fish, and not just one or two, but dozens of silvery, speckly fish that almost merged in with their surroundings. They were big, too, the length of Dalip’s forearm and lazily swimming upstream with the seawater current at their tails.

Once he’d got his eye in, he could see there were hundreds, in every river channel. But where the girl saw novelty, he saw food. He had no net◦– no one had a net, or a line◦– but the fish were thick enough to walk on. And he’d seen that documentary, the one where the brown bears in Alaska waited for the sock-eyes to swim back to their spawning grounds. When they did, the bears could simply reach in and take what they wanted, flicking them up and on to the bank.

He could do that. It shouldn’t be that hard.

He sat down and wrestled his boots off, the thought that he might not be able to get them back on briefly crossing his mind.

‘What’re you doing?’ said the girl. ‘Getting yourself one of those fish pedicures?’

‘No. I’m getting us something to eat.’ He scrunched his toes in the soft grit and waded out mid-stream. The water rose up to mid-calf, and predictably, the fish scattered at the intrusion.

‘You’ve scared them all off,’ said the girl. She seemed to be happy at his failure.

‘Just wait,’ he said. His feet were cold, and he didn’t have a coat of shaggy hair like those brown bears. He’d lose feeling in them soon enough.