One

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.