One

Nance was naked, standing at the edge of the black froth of the breakers. Her feet were bleeding but she didn't seem to notice. They approached her carefully. Chris said her name but she didn't turn around. Her hair was lashing around her face. They couldn't see her eyes.

'I'm going for a swim,' she said.

Jane said, 'Not a good idea.'

Chris touched her on the shoulder and retracted his hand quickly, as if he'd been burned. Jane saw his confusion. He didn't know how to deal with her. She was wild, you could see it in the sweat that swicked off her, creamy as that of a racehorse. It was in the tension of her muscles. Jane reached for her arm and she was hot iron. She pushed him away. Her body gleamed as if she too had been turned to glass in the furnace of the beach.

'Nance,' he said, trying to keep his voice low and calm but able to be overheard above the torment of the waves and the howl of the wind. 'Nance, look at the water. Look at the steam coming off it. Look at the bodies. You go in there and you won't come out again.' Jane had never seen the sea appear so impenetrable. It looked as though it wore a skin, shining and thick, that would need to be pierced before you could submerge yourself. It was the molten tar that ran off the roads into the gutters. There was no sense of depth. You couldn't see the shadow of bladderwrack within it, or of sand churned up from the bed.

Nance's body glittered with dust. She resembled an exotic dancer with sequinned flesh, pumped up and ready to do her shift at the pole. Her breath came quick and shallow. Jane took off his coat and put it around her shoulders. She didn't make any attempt to squirm away. She turned quickly, within the temporary circle of his arms, and pressed her body to his. He held her, conscious of Chris's incredulous expression. He wondered if he would say something. There was that strange feeling with Chris, that he was involved in some silly domestic game of one-upmanship. He had the slouched, downturned look of someone who is in a perpetual sulk about one thing or another. It was an insult to the people who had died to see him here now with the pilchard lip, deflated by Nance's need. He couldn't realise that it was directionless. If it had been the Yorkshire Ripper standing here, she'd have fallen into his arms instead.

Jane led Nance back up the beach, away from the sea. Chris followed, dragging his heels. Jane held Nance by the arms while Chris dressed her. She had slackened somewhat, but her eyes still ranged across the horizon. It reminded him of Treasure Island, a book that had terrified him as a child. She was Billy Bones keeping constant watch for the seafaring man with one leg. By the time Chris had pulled her coat on and zipped it up, glancing at Jane as he did so as if to show him that this was his woman and she was now closed to him, Nance had lowered her gaze. She was shivering. Jane turned away. His eye caught the trembling line of tobacco sky to the west. The colour had deepened since dawn, and it had spread. He chewed his lip over it. Maybe it was another wave of poison, or fire. They would not escape it this time.

'I think we should get back on the road,' he said. 'We should try to find some shelter.'

'We'll never swim again,' Nance was saying. 'No sandcastles. No ice cream if you're good. Playtime's over, isn't it? We all have to wear serious faces for the rest of our shitty little lives.'

Jane was about to try to bring the subject around to Newcastle, to retrieving his pack, anything, when they heard the whistle.

It was an SOS. Three short blasts, three long blasts, three short blasts. Jane thought he could see its author, standing against the volcanic fist of rock beneath Bamburgh Castle. What about me? he thought bitterly. What about someone answering my mayday?

He left Chris and Nance to their inevitable row and trotted through the slag towards the figure. The shrill blasts of the whistle were becoming more frantic, now delivered to him so clearly that the blower might have been standing nearby, now whisked away by the wind so that their patterns became lost. He saw the figure, a white head on a thin blue body, slump to its knees. The whistle stopped. When Jane reached him a few minutes later he saw it was an old man. He did not look up, even as Jane's feet crunched loudly towards him. Jane turned back and Chris and Nance might well have been infected by all the obsidian on the beach and become glass sculptures; they had not moved from their original positions. He could see the ovals of their faces turned towards him as if waiting for some signal from him to animate them again.

Jane wondered if the man would not look at him because of how alien he must seem. His breath sucked and rattled behind the bicycle mask like in a child's nightmare. The man still had the whistle in his mouth and it tooted pathetically as he exhaled. He let it fall from his lips. He said, 'She's dead.'