Conrad Williams - One

'It must have done,' Jane said rustily, unable to keep the wobble from his voice. 'What you got there?'

'General Grievous,' Aidan said. 'He's in Star Wars . The third film. My dad won't let me watch it because he says it's too scary. He's got a cough nearly as bad as yours.'

'Your dad?'

Aidan rolled his eyes. 'No. General.'

'It's really good to see you again,' Jane said.

'Do you want a hug?'

'I'd love a hug.'

Aidan came to him and put his good arm around Jane's neck. Jane was unable to stop himself from sobbing. He closed his eyes as the tears came and Aidan patted him gently.

'You might want to keep that cast away from me. I don't want to catch anything nasty.'

'Lick it,' Aidan said, pushing the bandage into Jane's face. They were wrestling happily together when Jane realised they were being watched.

'You need to rest,' Becky said. She was smiling. He smiled too.

'Where are we?'

'Sunny York,' she said. 'You've been asleep for nearly twenty hours.'

'I feel better.'

'You had a chest infection. You were so hot. The sweat was flying off you. It was really worrying.'

'I didn't mean to alarm you.'

'I pumped you with antibiotics. Good that you did this now, while they were still effective.'

'How do you mean?'

'Drugs have a use-by date, just like food. Their efficacy wears off after a while.'

Jane sat in silence, digesting the significance of this. Aidan quietly swapping his attention from one to the other, a trait Jane noticed he fell back on when he was unsure of a situation, or how it might develop.

'I'm moving on,' Jane said. 'I can't stay here.'

'We'll all go,' Becky said. 'No more Scooby-Doo shit, right?'

11. HIBAKUSHI

They talked while the tarmac disappeared beneath their feet. Sometimes when Aidan grew tired Jane would give him a piggyback, or they took it in turns to push him in the wheelbarrow Jane himself had been carried in when he'd been found. Aidan was in there now, asleep, his arms over his head as if he were playing hide-and-seek.

'Where did you find me?' Jane asked Becky.

'We were looking for you. You said you'd stick to the A1. It was Aidan who saw you. Lying on a bench in the Shambles. I thought you were . . . God, this is awful to say . . . just another dead body. But he recognised you even though you'd been . . . swaddled.'

'Swaddled?'

'Wrapped head to toe in blankets. You looked like something parcelled up. Or an offering.'

He didn't like the sound of that.

'After we were attacked . . . after you got away,' he said, 'did you see—'

'Yes, we saw.' And her tone put an end to that.

'I think I'm being followed,' he said.

Jane could see in the shape of Becky's face that she had thought about that, perhaps considered the wisdom of taking to the road with him again. She said, 'We can't be the only ones who made it. There's no telling how many survived, up in the mountains, say, or, like you're hoping, in the tunnels, the Tube. And there's no telling how many of them might be nutcases. Born mad, or turned mad by all this.' She cast her arm at the firestormed city. 'Maybe you are being followed, and maybe they're friendly. But we should suspect otherwise. I don't ever want the decision of how I bow out taken from my hands again.'

They walked in silence and Jane stared at the boy, not knowing how to phrase his next question. Becky noticed it in him and understood what he was working on. 'It's not something we need to discuss now,' she said. 'It can wait.'

He could not help but compare her to Cherry. Cherry's insistence had an edge to it that said, pester me about this at your peril. Becky was firm, but he could see the cracks. There was pleading there. He wondered how Cherry would deal with their situation. He thought about how it might change her. Maybe the cracks in her shell would be showing too by now. It bolstered him a little to think that she might welcome his arrival.

If she survived, kiddo. Big fat if .

The way that decay wormed its way into the structures that people in love built around them. He couldn't pinpoint a moment when he noticed that his and Cherry's lives had soured. He guessed it was the same for all doomed couples; a gradual disaffection. You suddenly found yourself spitting and sneering at each other, arriving at some awful location without remembering the route. You couldn't turn back or consult a map; the road behind you seemed to erase itself. There were other routes, but they never quite arrived back at the place where you were most happy.

Jane remembered being in a pub in Stoke Newington one afternoon. Cherry and Stanley had gone off to visit her parents in Reading. He'd been flicking through a magazine, wondering whether to have another pint or wander down to the Keralan restaurant for lunch, when he noticed a couple sitting on a sofa in a far corner. Something in their body language that wasn't being replicated by any of the other couples caught the eye. A distance. Defensiveness. He was trying to mollify her; everything about her talked of barriers. Crossed arms, crossed legs, her body angled away from him. Her eyebrows knitted, the flatlining mouth. He would say something, his arms open; she would shake her head. He was crestfallen. She was determined.

It was painful to watch, but enthralling too. How did things get to such a point? When did the smiles and the butterflies and the quickening heart become a folding inward? How could something as positive as love become dread? And then Cherry came to his thoughts, reading out the grim list, her breath hitching in her throat as she rushed to get it all out before he could argue a point.

You got older, there were resentments and regrets. You felt stifled, unfulfilled. You felt trapped by the person you'd thought you'd go to the grave with. You were tired all the time. You had more important things to think about than curling up in front of the fire to read or watch a film together, to make love.

He turned away from her furious, strangely triumphant features, and saw the girl stand, shrug away from the beseeching hands. Jane could see this was the final summit, could see it in the crumbled look of the boy. He'd played every card and was left holding the Joker. Sitting near the door, Jane had watched the girl leave. She'd drawn herself upright, lost the tightness that drew her features together before she'd crossed the threshold. She appeared reborn. He wondered if there was another man she was already on her way to. There was a catalyst, he supposed. A sweetener. He considered, idly, on the point of sleep, whether Cherry's head had been turned by someone else, someone closer to home who chatted to her and Stanley, who didn't go off to the rigs every six months. Even now, when he thought he'd been immunised to every kind of pain there was left to know, the thought pierced him. Jane no longer had his map. But he wasn't so desperate to know where he was all the time. The road would take him where he needed to be, as long as he stayed on it and kept the paling sun to his left at dawn, right at dusk. When his watch stopped he felt a blip of panic, but it soon passed. He didn't need to know the time. He didn't need an alarm. It no longer mattered what date it was. It was liberating. He was paring away all the dead wood, the better to focus on his son. Sustenance, shelter and progress, that was what it all boiled down to.

And these shades on your heels. Don't forget them.

Jane ground the thought under his heel and upped his pace. He had developed a feel for distance and wanted to improve his daily mileage after his sickness had reduced him to a snail's meander. Becky didn't say a word but fell in step with him. The jolting of the wheelbarrow eventually wakened Aidan, but he didn't speak either. He watched Jane as if unsure of who he really was, or trying to assimilate him with the thin figure he had spotted on the bench, rattling in his sleep.