Conrad Williams - One

They searched the cupboards and found some sticks of granulated coffee and a tin of tea bags. Sticks of sugar. A couple of packets of chocolate powder.

'No milk,' Jane said, but Becky couldn't have been happier. She boiled water and made them all hot drinks. They sat around the table. There were another two or three miles in the evening if the rain eased off, but there seemed tacit agreement that they would stay the night here. Aidan, now that the door was locked and he had a mug of hot chocolate, had kicked off his boots and was laying claim to the bunk.

In a cupboard above the sofa they found books, a pack of cards, a board game they didn't recognise and that had no rulebook. They ate heated tins of pork sausages and baked beans on plates with forks, and played snap until the light faded and Adrian was nodding.

Jane undressed him and hoisted him into the bunk, pulled the blankets up to his neck and secured the harness. He lit candles and poured whisky into the rinsed mugs and handed one to Becky.

'Some music would be nice,' she said.

'Not that you're a hard woman to please.'

She laughed and sipped her drink. 'Music, though,' she said. 'I think this must be the longest I've ever gone without hearing any.'

'Yeah,' Jane said. 'Although in my line of work, I have to confess I'm glad for the respite.'

'Your line of work. Diver, right? Sounds interesting.'

'Kind of.' He told her about his work, how it was much like any other hard, risk-filled labour once you got beyond the technicalities. 'Saved my life, though,' he said.

'Fate throws us in or pulls us back,' Becky said.

Jane watched her in the candlelight. She was gazing into her mug as if she might find a solution there. Aidan's breathing was like the soft hiss of an oil burner. It was soothing. It was something to alight upon other than the tragic wail of the wind.

'Do you have anybody?' Jane asked. 'Anybody at all? We could check on them.'

She was shaking her head. 'Even if there were someone, I wouldn't go to them. I don't want to have to remember them dead for ever.'

'It might not be like that.'

'No, you're right. I hope you're right. For you, above all. But I can't hope. It's not in me.'

'Where are your family?'

'Abroad, mostly. I have relatives in Canada.'

'Quite a journey, if you decided to go looking.'

'Yes,' she said. 'Something tells me I'll have a little trouble booking a flight.'

They sat and digested this. It was another jolt; Jane hadn't considered what might have happened at the airports. All that fuel. It didn't bear thinking about.

Becky took a drink, the slightest sip; she'd done little more than moisten her lips. 'I remember one day, our teacher took us to the TV room. We were all excited. No proper lessons. We just get to veg out in front of the box. He put a tape in the machine and switched it on and left the room. He actually left the room. Everyone started monkeying around, and then the programme started. An atomic bomb going off. Mushroom cloud. Buildings turned to dust in the blink of an eye. Everyone went quiet. Sat down. Watched it. It was the mid-1980s. Cold War paranoia. Every siren you heard was a four-minute warning, every plane going over was filled with plutonium.

'There was a woman on the screen who looked like a piece of rubber that has been left too close to the fire. She was writing her story and it was read out to the camera by her daughter. How she became pregnant by an American. There were some living there in Japan before the war started. He was eventually interned. She never saw him again. The daughter was born a couple of months before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The mother worked as a teacher. Towards the end of the war she moved around a lot. She was offered work at a school in Hiroshima.

'She left her daughter at home with her parents, who had moved with her too. They lived in a traditional wooden house near the mountains. Their house overlooked an island. I remember her talking about deer. About how they used to walk through the streets. The mother used to collect wood and bring back fruit for the family breakfasts. Every day she would walk miles to the train station and get a train to the centre of Hiroshima. On the morning of the bomb, she was helping to organise the morning assembly. There was a flash, and the colour of violet. And then she doesn't remember anything until she was aware of something dripping on her face. She thought she was in heaven. There was dust over everything. She could hear singing. Girls singing the school song. Later she realised it was because the children had been forbidden to cry for help. She was able to stand up. The school was gone. She had been standing half a mile from the nuclear blast. She was the only teacher to survive. She tried to save others but the voices singing went out one by one. Four children survived.

'She nearly died. She turned black and her hair fell out. Her nose bled constantly and she was unable to keep food down. All she wanted to do was drink water. She never spoke again. Her vocal cords had been seared together.

'I watched that programme and I could barely speak for a week. It felt as though I had experienced it. And now I have. I have.'

They finished their whisky in silence. Jane was all for pulling up the table and throwing down a mattress but Becky told him not to be silly. They undressed and climbed into the bed. It was cold. She moved against him, her head on his chest, and he was reminded of how long it had been since he had felt someone as close as this.

He somehow fell asleep with the maddening smell of her hair and a hot, chaotic thought of stumbling through limbs, trying to find where his face had landed while fire raged 200 feet high all around him and his son sang a song that turned to ash in his throat.

In the night he turned and saw the face at the window, its lower half concealed by a dirty white mask. The eyes were as black as to not be there, shadows, sockets punched out of coke. Hair lashed the forehead. A hand left a greasy imprint on the glass. Then the face was gone. A lull. It woke him, spooked him. He lay in the darkness feeling certain that if he moved he would tumble into a chasm so deep that it would have no end. He would die of thirst before impact. He reached out and Becky was next to him. She made no sound while she breathed. She responded to his touch, though, rolling over and slipping her hand into the waistband of his boxer shorts. He stiffened immediately, felt the blood leave his head so quickly that an ache took its place as if he had swallowed an iced drink too swiftly. But he was too distracted by the face at the glass to be able to think of anything else. He turned to look at Becky but the darkness wouldn't soften. He edged away and swung his feet to the floor. The motorhome creaked as he picked his way to the door. He opened it and stepped outside. The wheelbarrow carrying their provisions was where he had left it. He wondered if he should have rooted around for his mask and goggles before leaving the vehicle. The sight before him wiped the thought immediately from his mind.

The clouds had parted. There was a patch of the universe visible through it, about the size of a football field. The stars seemed packed within, as though so desperate to be seen they'd shifted their positions. He watched until the cloud knitted itself together again. It was as if it had never happened. The wind stirred his fringe. Soon it might be howling around them again. What was this? Eye of a storm? He could hear thunder coming up from the south. The familiar pulses of silver. It was warmer outside than in. He knelt and placed his hand against the tarmac. Residual heat. He wondered if it was from the event itself. He thought of his parents in their tiny garden, sitting together doing the crossword and drinking gin and tonics before dinner. He hoped that oblivion had reached them as quickly as it had those in Hiroshima. He couldn't cope with the thought of them surviving and struggling.