One

'People survive,' Jane said.

'There's nothing we can do.'

The old woman drifted away, so slowly that he thought he could still feel her fingers leaving him even though she now had her back to him and was moving off towards other loners, other groups of crying survivors at tether's end. He stayed where he was for a while, thinking about women and why the Skinners took them. He assessed the damage to his body and realised that while he was in no fit state to play frisbee, he could maybe walk a few miles and see what was what. He imagined talking to Stanley about it, the complication of explaining Becky to him. The concept of a new mummy, a second mummy. Getting him to understand that they were having a baby. Trying to make him see that this was a good thing. He believed he would not have to talk him around that much. Stanley was a good boy. He liked people. Although he had only been at school a short time, he seemed to make friends easily, much more easily than Jane had when he'd been that age. School in the 1970s was difficult, especially at the rough northern comprehensive he'd had to survive.

He wandered down to the shore, standing a good distance back from the treacly tide. The ancient bones of fish lay all around him. Now he could see the raft, a darker shape, lenticular on the surface. How many people had died in the building of that thing? He doubted he would have the guts to go wading through that caustic soup, and he was mildly amazed by the thought, given that he had spent so much of his adult life submerged in water. He turned back and walked up the shingle to a group of men hunched over square billycans, Sporks clenched in grimy fists. They glared up at him guardedly, shoulders drawing in, protective of their food.

'I'm going to find Becky,' he said. 'I wondered if you might come with me.'

'Where is she?' asked one of the men. He had shaved his head badly; it was blue, nicked and slashed all over with cuts that had become infected. The swelling had wormed down across one eye. Lines of gravy on either side of his mouth gave him the look of a ventriloquist's dummy. The rain began to fall again. Another man, deep within his fur-lined hood, began swearing, covering his can with a gloved hand.

'We're eating, friend,' he said.

'There's a woman been taken by those bastards,' Jane said. 'She's pregnant.'

'She's gone,' the man said, scooping thin brown liquid into his mouth. 'You the father?'

'Yes.'

He shrugged. 'You ought to take care of your women better,' he said.

Jane made to swipe at him but the bald man stood up and put a hand on his injured arm, squeezed, dug his nails in. Jane cried out.

'Want me to set fire to your other arm? Give you barbecued wings?'

Jane turned away. Didn't anybody care any more? He tried talking to the medics, but they shooed him from the forest of sucking wounds and slashed limbs. Everyone was staggering around, or so exhausted that they were lying in shingle, many of them partially submerged, as if the beach was steadily, stealthily, sucking them down. He saw two men pull free of some people wearing medical aprons and pound across the shingle, aiming for the sea. The medics went to pursue, but they gave up pretty soon. You ran only when you had to; it was better to preserve your energy. Everyone stood and watched the men as they crashed into the surf, one slightly ahead of the other. The man at the rear surfaced fast and back-pedalled out of the water, spitting and hawking, wiping his hand repeatedly across his mouth. The man in front of him did not come up.

The survivor stood yelling the other man's name – it sounded like 'Paul' – and made to re-enter the water a few times. But then he gave up and sat down on the shingle. After a while, when it was clear that the medics had given up on him and that his friend was gone for good, Jane crunched through the gravel towards him.

The man was crying. His clothes were soaked on his body, the colour leaching out of them on to his skin.

'What happened?' Jane asked. He sat down carefully a couple of yards away. The man didn't seem to register his presence. He was sobbing quietly, his eyes screwed up, wet. He had an injury. His shoulder was a shining curve where something had scraped it. It was sore-looking. Infected, too. It was kind of encouraging to know that microbes had lived on, no matter how damaging they might be to the body. It pointed to a future of returning life. Maybe.

'He's gone,' the man said. The way he said it made him sound as if he was ten.

'Who's he?'

'My dad,' the man said. He wore jeans with an ID patch on the left thigh. It read: Sutton.

'He drowned?'

'I don't know. He just slipped out of sight.'

Jane put his hand to his face and swore softly. He didn't know how many hours had passed since he'd woken up. He felt it could have been days.

'We were going to swim to the raft,' the man said, his eyes strafing the shore. 'We were going to cut it free and fuck the fuck off. Sick of hanging around. Waiting for people to turn up. Too many people get here, they said they'd start some fucking lottery to decide who was in the first bunch to leave. Fuck that. We were here first. Me and Dad. First.'

His voice became strangled. He screamed and pounded his fists into the shingle. He collapsed into it and quietened down. Jane thought he might have gone to sleep. After a while, he pushed himself up into a sitting position and stared out at the water.

Jane talked to him. They talked for a long time. They talked about fathers and sons. They both cried. Sutton was known as Loke. His real name was Eddie, but he'd always been called The Bloke by his dad and gradually, as all names seemed to do, it got whittled down over time.

'I don't know if the raft is the answer, Loke,' Jane said. 'It's given people hope. Maybe that's the thing that matters. I just can't see what it can offer. You untie it. You launch it. You go where?'

'Anywhere is better than this,' Loke said.

'Is it?'

Loke nodded, wiped the tears away from his face. He was gradually cleaning his hands with that water. 'I don't want to be pissing into the pebbles when the Skinners finally suck all the meat off the bone of the big cities and come down here to pick their teeth with what's left of us.' 'What if you go to France, or Holland, or wherever, and it's the same? If it's worse?'

'Dad's gone. It doesn't fucking matter. I don't care one way or the other any more. I just want some kind of result. I want to force the issue. I want to be a catalyst.'

He looked out to the water as if he was considering charging back in to make some attempt at rescue. Perhaps it bothered him that he'd given up so easily. Jane wanted to put an arm around him, to tell him that it was all right. Things had changed so much, it was hard enough to keep track of it, to keep ahead mentally, let alone react quickly enough when something horrible happened right in front of your eyes. Everyone had a tale to tell. Tragedy had not spared a single person. He didn't need to say a word.

'So you'll stay?' Loke asked him.

Jane found himself nodding although he had not come to any kind of decision. He had walked all this way to be with Becky. Maybe because there was some decision brewing to try to persuade her to stay in the UK. The thought of her on some rickety floating island with a baby inside her was unbearable.

If it's a boy . . . and it is a boy, I know that, I know . . . we'll call him —

'But what will you do?' Loke persisted.

'We'll keep going. It's all we've ever done. We'll fight them on the beaches.'

'Jesus. You must have kids. You must be a dad.'

Jane nodded again, and was able to smile. 'I was, I am. And will be again,' he said.

'I never had kids,' Loke said.

'It changes you,' Jane said. 'You lose your ego. You realise that life isn't just all about what you want, what you can have, or take. It's a good feeling. You slowly pull your head from out of your arsehole. You make sacrifices, and you do not resent it. Not one bit.'

'Yeah, well. Maybe now's not the best time to become a dad.'

Jane nodded. He hadn't really thought a great deal about that. The shock of the news had blinded him to