‘Stanley,’ he gasped, trying to focus on Becky’s features. She leant down towards him and the face he had fallen in love with found clarity. It was stippled with sweat that clung like small beads to skin greased with diesel. Her eyes were wide and brimful of concern. She kissed Jane and held him. ‘We’re close,’ she said, but he didn’t know if she meant their relationship, or their proximity to some kind of end. ‘Don’t leave me now.’
‘I saw Stanley,’ he said. The boy’s name was like a living thing on his tongue. It reanimated him. He hurried Becky towards the raft. Someone was blowing a horn. Fighting was breaking out at the water’s edge. People were being dragged off the raft, or pushed on. Human chains clung to it, desperate to be a part of this maiden voyage.
‘They’re going to leave.’ She sounded panicky; relieved.
‘Not without you,’ he said. ‘I promise.’
They splashed through the surf, Jane grimacing inwardly at the warm, viscous beat of the tide against his legs. Someone swung an arm his way; he pushed Becky to one side and ducked. His attacker bowled over into the water and was lost under dozens of thrashing limbs. Jane didn’t see him resurface. They kept being repulsed at moments when it seemed he might get Becky onto the raft. Her boots squealed against its lip – ‘Hook a leg on!’ – but others scrambled over her, causing her to cry out as her knee threatened to bend the wrong way. She tumbled back against him, her head dipping under the waves. He bent to retrieve her and almost lost his footing as more people charged into him. He felt himself crushed against the edge of the raft, and it, drawn by the tide, was dragging up the shingle, rising out of the sea. Screams from the far edge of the raft. He imagined people tipping off the end. The balance was screwed. It was going to come ramming down on his head and that would be that. Something would have to give and Jane saw it would have to be him. He sucked in his breath and ducked underwater. He had not let go of Becky and could feel her thrashing beneath his fist. The raft came back down and jerked to the right. The hull tore into his back and he cried out. Panic leapt around inside him as he sought the surface again, but the raft had slid across his exit routes.
He readjusted his grip on Becky, and on his dread, and struck out deeper, away from shore and the forest of legs blocking his progress. He turned left and kicked. Feeling above him with his free hand for the edge of the raft. He thought it might never come, but it did, and he hauled Becky coughing and spluttering from the water. It filmed his eyes like oil; he could feel it in his mouth like the residue of a pastry saturated with lard. They were both sick as they splashed from the water, around fifteen yards away from the worst of the squabbling. People were dying. Jane shouted at them, an incoherent bellow of anger and frustration.
He wheeled around at the sudden crunch of approaching footsteps, ready to launch his forearm into whatever face came at him, but it was Loke, his nose and mouth bloodied. He looked tired, hunted. Jane supposed they all did.
‘I couldn’t stay,’ he said. ‘It was getting very, very nasty out there.’
‘It’s all right,’ Jane said. ‘Mission accomplished. Becky? Meet Loke.’
They all turned to watch the raft. Another horn blared through the grey nets of retreating dark; Jane couldn’t see the player. It would be dawn in an hour or two. He envied them their place on the raft at the same time that he was secretly thanking whatever invisible guardian had kept him from that insane binding of waterproofed wood and tarpaulin. He heard the ‘chunk’ of an axe as it bit through the ropes attaching the raft to land. There was a great cheer, subsumed by an even greater caterwauling of dismay. The raft slid slowly away from the shore.
Becky began to cry.
‘It’s all right,’ Jane said, without conviction. He placed a hand on her belly, imagined it swelling, becoming a curve that arrived almost by stealth but then could not be ignored. He imagined the baby’s hands reaching for them, the knock of its limbs and the faint tremor of its heart.
‘They’ll come back. They’ll come back.’ He kissed her cheek, the top of her head.
He stepped away from Becky, drew Loke in towards her. He touched Loke’s arm. ‘Look after her for a moment,’ he whispered.
He turned towards the headland and the cottages that dogged the coastline for half a mile or so. The figure had moved this way. He crunched towards the flimsy buildings. Many had been turned to so much driftwood by the Event, or the winds that it had created. His ears were pricked, listening out for Becky’s voice. If she called him back, he would go to her. This would stop, if she decided it. But she didn’t call him. He did not look back.
Over the years he had tried to project the babyish face of his son on to a fifteen-year-old boy. A manchild. He had never been able to do it. Trying to imagine that face without its remnants of baby fat, the pudgy cheeks and wide eyes, the trim, pouting bow of his mouth, was beyond him. Further, he didn’t like to do it. It was negating who his boy really was for some fantasy that could never even approach the truth. The likelihood, although he baulked whenever he confronted it, was that he would walk straight past Stanley in the street. The difference between the baby and the five-year-old was greater than he perceived. Add another ten years and you had a new person, in effect. Maybe the shape of the eyes remained, but there was a change in the bone structure, a moving away from the infant that made you strangers, no matter how tight these factions of the family.
Movement now, up ahead. A shifting of shadow around the edges of a stoved-in cottage, window frames gone, door blown in by the wolf that was the wind.
A whimper turned his head. He saw someone duck out of sight beyond the dry gardens and their blasted configurations of sea kale and yellow horned poppy, santolinas and crambes. Starfish lay around his feet as if the heavens had turned to stone at the insult to the world and had fallen on this spot. He had to step over a wreckage of railway sleepers and shattered floorboards, downed telegraph poles and great cairns of bleached crab carapaces. It was like walking a moonscape infected by dreams of violence and perversion.
There was a slight incline up ahead, a dip that exposed the rear of the cottage and a hole dug into it, leading to deep shadow beneath the building itself. He saw the figure hunker down and wriggle into the hole. He felt a jerk in his chest at the sight of blue and white striped pyjamas, his son’s favourite pyjamas. He was sure of it.
I luff these jim-jams, Daddy, they’re all warm and soft and make me look like toofpaste…
‘Stan?’ he called out, and he ignored the thickening pain in his jaw, the fresh seep of blood from his ruined gums. The swelling had puffed his left eye almost completely shut. He could still see through the right, just, a blurred, splintered view. He supposed he would have to cut into an eyelid to reduce the swelling if it blinded him completely.
‘Stanley?’ He strode towards the house, ignoring any pretence he’d made at caution. ‘It’s me,mate. It’s Dad. Don’t be scared.’
He slithered down the shingle into the dip and leant close to the hole. He could see nothing in there but the pure black of childhood nightmares. But then there was a flurry of movement. The grimy striped swatch of his pyjamas shifting back and forth beyond the edge of the hole, settling now, his back to Jane. The whimpering continued. Cold, afraid, alone for so long.
‘Hey,’ Jane said. Tears were forming. He could almost feel the slender bones under his fingers, the shivering of his boy. ‘I’ll make you warm. I’m here, Stan. Dad’s here. I never left you, you know. I’d never let you go. Come on.’ He was finding it hard to keep his voice level.