‘I hope they’re not those flesh-eating fish you get,’ she said helpfully.
Dalip knew his salmon from his piranhas, and they looked salmony to him. Slowly, the fish gathered downstream, then moved forward again, slipping between his legs quite unconcerned as to his presence.
He crouched down slowly, like he was in the slips, poised for a catch. He slid his hands into the shallow water, and rested his knuckles on the river bed. Bits of grit, carried by the current and disturbed by the passing fish landed on his open palms.
‘Well, go on then,’ urged the girl, but Dalip was content to be patient and ignored her. He knew how it ought to be done, he’d just never done it himself before. He’d probably get it wrong, too, several times, until he got it right.
‘I’d move back a bit,’ he said, and just then a particularly indolent fish swam across his hands, so slow as to be almost moving backwards. He was never going to get a better chance.
His right hand moved towards his left, briefly trapping the fat, wriggling body between them, but the object wasn’t to hold on to it◦– it was to move it, quickly and cleanly, out of its element and on to land. With momentum and surprise on his side, he threw the fish sideways towards the bank. It broke the surface, thrashing futilely, and flew up towards where the others were standing.
Straight into the sweary girl’s face.
She shrieked and fell over. The fish jerked away, back towards the river, but Luiza pounced and scooped it up, flinging it into the scrub.
‘What do you want me to do with it?’
‘Break its neck, or something,’ he called.
‘You hit me!’ said the brown girl. ‘With a fucking fish!’
‘I did say you should move.’
Luiza was still chasing through the grasses, so Elena went to help: not the prone girl, still wiping slime and scales from her face, but her cousin wrestling the fish.
In the stream, between his bare feet, the shoal had returned after the disturbance, seemingly unconcerned that one of their number was now gasping, open-gilled, on dry land. He was ready to go again.
The girl was lifted to her feet at last by Mama, furious with him, with everyone, while he was on the verge of smiling for the first time since they’d stepped through the Down Street door. He was doing something useful. He was doing something right. He looked at her, her balled fists and narrowed eyes, and perhaps he frowned at her, because she turned on her heel and stamped away.
He returned his attention to the fish, and he lowered his hands gently into the water, ready to catch another. If they could make a fire, then they could eat. Even if they couldn’t, they could still eat, but fire was the next step, and then shelter.
Five minutes ago they had no food. Maybe they’d got lucky, but it was almost as if wherever-they-were was trying to feed them. Perhaps it would give them the other things they needed too. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad after all, making the most of their time before they got to go home.
Another fish lazed its way across his open fingers, and he tensed, the corners of his mouth turning ever so slightly upwards.
5
The East European man had a lighter, a big heavy slab of steel that looked like it had been through a war. It produced a tail of smoky orange flame whenever the flint was struck. He used it to catch alight a pile of dry leaves and twigs, and he’d clearly made fires before: he knew exactly what he was doing, and wasted no effort in telling the others what to do. Despite the exertions and the novelty of the day draining everyone, Stanislav was still working, still breaking fallen branches against his knee, still hauling wood back to the tree line where they’d set up a temporary camp.
Mary didn’t help. She didn’t know how to help. She was a city girl, who knew all sorts of tricks and scams, but none of them seemed useful here, where there were only trees and grass and water and rock and soil and sky.
She knew how to set a fire◦– pour the petrol, throw a match on it◦– but not how to build one out of raw materials, how to nurture it from tiny flame to crackling bonfire, how to feed it and with what. Neither did she know what to do with the fish: it had always come in either batter or breadcrumbs, never glistening and whole, and certainly never at her face.
And neither did the turbaned kid, which was almost gratifying, but Mama did, using a small knife that the kid had. It was blunt, and she’d said so, and he said it was never meant to be used, but she and the Chinese woman◦– Grace◦– went down by the river to ‘clean’ the fish, and by that she had to assume they meant cut them open and scrape their guts out.
That made her queasy, but she was also hungry.
Nothing was making sense to Mary, and the other six survivors seemed to be coping far better than her with what was going on. Even whatever-his-name-was, the kid with the turban, seemed to have shut up about being dead.
So she sat with her back to a tree, like she was in one of the local parks, and watched those around her. That was only good for a while, and she became bored. Little was happening: everyone seemed content just to stare into the fire and feel the warmth of it against their skin. It reminded her too much of the tunnels, and she got up to walk away.
‘Hey. Where are you going?’
Stanislav had the top half of his boilersuit tied around his waist, baring a grey-looking vest spilling muscle and tufts of grey chest hair. To her, it looked grotesque. Old men were supposed to keep everything covered up.
‘You don’t get to tell me what to do,’ she said.
The turbaned kid looked up. ‘I’ll go with her.’ He was still barefoot, but he reached for his socks.
‘Oh, fuck off.’
Stanislav, his stubbly head glistening from work, put the end of the branch he carried on the floor, then pressed his foot against it a third of the way up. It bent, and snapped with a sharp crack. ‘We do not know what is out there. We have seen one monster already, there may be more.’
‘That was in the sea. And I was just going for a walk.’
‘No one will go and look for you when you do not return.’
‘I wouldn’t want them to.’
Stanislav shrugged, reduced the branch further, and threw all three pieces on to the growing pile where they landed in a hollow clatter.
‘As you say, I do not tell you what to do. In return, you cannot expect us to do what you want.’
‘Whatever. Later.’ She walked between the trees, waving her hand over her shoulder.
She’d barely got any distance before she heard footsteps hurrying after her. She didn’t turn around, just kept walking.
‘Haven’t you learned anything from films?’
‘Fuck. Off.’
‘Seriously. We don’t know where we are, we don’t know what’s out there. You can’t just wander off like this.’
There was very little undergrowth: mostly small, thin plants and long looping briars. The leaf litter made every footfall release a deep, earthy scent. The overlapping branches above formed an almost complete canopy, throwing deep shade over everything below. Where a tree had fallen, there was a clearing, bright with sunlight and hazy with insects. They were like islands in a sea of gloom.
She stopped and looked around. She could see tiny flashes of orange boilersuit coming from the tree line, but if she went only a little further, she’d be lost, unable to find her way back.
It wasn’t like a local park at all, with paths and play areas, and a lake with scruffy-looking ducks. This was the wild wood, stretching beyond this point for as far as it pleased. There were no tower blocks on the borders, and the realisation struck her with all the force of a punch to the side of the head.