Conrad Williams - One

Nance's body glittered with dust. She resembled an exotic dancer with sequinned flesh, pumped up and ready to do her shift at the pole. Her breath came quick and shallow. Jane took off his coat and put it around her shoulders. She didn't make any attempt to squirm away. She turned quickly, within the temporary circle of his arms, and pressed her body to his. He held her, conscious of Chris's incredulous expression. He wondered if he would say something. There was that strange feeling with Chris, that he was involved in some silly domestic game of one-upmanship. He had the slouched, downturned look of someone who is in a perpetual sulk about one thing or another. It was an insult to the people who had died to see him here now with the pilchard lip, deflated by Nance's need. He couldn't realise that it was directionless. If it had been the Yorkshire Ripper standing here, she'd have fallen into his arms instead.

Jane led Nance back up the beach, away from the sea. Chris followed, dragging his heels. Jane held Nance by the arms while Chris dressed her. She had slackened somewhat, but her eyes still ranged across the horizon. It reminded him of Treasure Island , a book that had terrified him as a child. She was Billy Bones keeping constant watch for the seafaring man with one leg. By the time Chris had pulled her coat on and zipped it up, glancing at Jane as he did so as if to show him that this was his woman and she was now closed to him, Nance had lowered her gaze. She was shivering. Jane turned away. His eye caught the trembling line of tobacco sky to the west. The colour had deepened since dawn, and it had spread. He chewed his lip over it. Maybe it was another wave of poison, or fire. They would not escape it this time.

'I think we should get back on the road,' he said. 'We should try to find some shelter.'

'We'll never swim again,' Nance was saying. 'No sandcastles. No ice cream if you're good. Playtime's over, isn't it? We all have to wear serious faces for the rest of our shitty little lives.'

Jane was about to try to bring the subject around to Newcastle, to retrieving his pack, anything, when they heard the whistle.

It was an SOS. Three short blasts, three long blasts, three short blasts. Jane thought he could see its author, standing against the volcanic fist of rock beneath Bamburgh Castle. What about me? he thought bitterly. What about someone answering my mayday?

He left Chris and Nance to their inevitable row and trotted through the slag towards the figure. The shrill blasts of the whistle were becoming more frantic, now delivered to him so clearly that the blower might have been standing nearby, now whisked away by the wind so that their patterns became lost. He saw the figure, a white head on a thin blue body, slump to its knees. The whistle stopped. When Jane reached him a few minutes later he saw it was an old man. He did not look up, even as Jane's feet crunched loudly towards him. Jane turned back and Chris and Nance might well have been infected by all the obsidian on the beach and become glass sculptures; they had not moved from their original positions. He could see the ovals of their faces turned towards him as if waiting for some signal from him to animate them again.

Jane wondered if the man would not look at him because of how alien he must seem. His breath sucked and rattled behind the bicycle mask like in a child's nightmare. The man still had the whistle in his mouth and it tooted pathetically as he exhaled. He let it fall from his lips. He said, 'She's dead.'

'Who's dead?'

'Ella, my granddaughter.'

Jane didn't know what to say. He was itching to get away, to retrieve his rucksack and get back on the roads and rails south. Every minute spent putting sticking plaster on wounds here meant another minute away from the needs of his boy. He sensed movement and turned to see an elderly woman making her uncertain way down the mounds of bare land abutting the castle ramparts. The oldman stood up and went to her. They bussed against each other, like clouds, yielding, finding each other's shape with the surety that comes from years of companionship. Jane envied them that. He and Cherry had been together for seven years. Prior to that, his longest relationship had fizzled out at three. He had longed for the kind of security he could see being played out here in front of him, albeit born out of grief.

'Where was your granddaughter?' Jane asked.

The old man cast a glance up to the battlements, but either the light or the painfulness of glimpsing the place of her death caused him to avert his gaze. 'She was playing. We said it was all right. You shouldn't clip a kid's wings, despite all the paedophiles and murderers. You can't stop a life from being lived.' He choked a little on the irony of his words. 'It's all right, Brendan,' the old woman said.

'Anyway. We were down in the castle keep. She said she wanted to go and have a look at the view. Angela here, she's got emphysema. She's not in great shape at the moment. I didn't want to leave her on her own and she couldn't climb to the top. So I told Ella she could go on her own as long as she was careful. She was a good girl and I knew she wouldn't cause any bother.'

The old man didn't go on. He kept opening his mouth to say something, and then there'd be a quiver in his face and he'd shut it again. His eyes were large and pale grey and very wet, like something from a fishmonger's slab. His skin was blotchy and sagging; his hair blown by the wind into a shivering grey meringue. His wife was huddled into her coat. Her lips seemed too loose for her face. They gathered together, a smudged scarlet slick. She kept pursing them, as if she were sucking at a sweet, or keeping badly fitted dentures in position. Most likely, Jane thought, she was trying to keep the lid on her rage or her grief. There was an almighty storm piling up behind those defences. Jane closed his eyes. The more survivors he came across, the more stories like this he would have to listen to.

'We felt the heat down in the keep,' Brendan said. 'I mean, the chappie, guide fella, had only just told us the walls were ten feet thick, and we felt it. Like an oven it were. He took off as soon as he heard all the screaming. I never saw him again. We just sat in the keep, huddled together, shouting Ella's name. We got drowned out by the roar of this thing. Like a jet engine at full throttle right next to your ear. I thought we were going to die.'

The old woman put out her hands as if she were about to grab her husband's face. Her eyes widened. She was snatching at her breath. 'Oh, Brendan, what about Anne and Stephen?'

'Oh, bloody hell,' Brendan said. 'Bloody, bloody hell.'

It turned out that Anne and Stephen were Ella's parents. They had gone to The Lakes for their wedding anniversary. Brendan and Angela, Stephen's parents, had offered to look after Ella for the weekend.

'She was only six,' Angela said. 'She was going to be seven next July.'

Jane said he would go to the battlements to find the body. Angela blanched and shook her head. Brendan touched Jane's wrist. 'Thanks, son. But I've been out there. I've seen . . .' He glanced at his wife and checked himself. 'Nothing could have survived.'

'We did,' Chris said. He and Nance had somehow made it across the glass without Jane hearing, or more likely he'd been so horribly engrossed in Brendan's tale that he'd not registered their approach. Jane shot Chris a look now and the two of them shared secretive glances. They'd obviously made up on their way back. Chris put a protective arm around Nance. Jane felt like telling him that he was welcome to her.

'I'm heading for London,' Jane told Brendan. 'These two are coming with me as far as Newcastle. We're hoping that whatever hit us – meteor, solar flare . . .'

'Wrath of God,' Chris said.