Down Station

4

Getting off the beach meant taking the long route along the shoreline into the next bay, where the unclimbable rock cliff gave way to a shallower slope, and the boulder-jumping to clattering over a series of stepped pebble banks.

The sea monster didn’t put in another appearance, despite Dalip’s constant attention.

His boots were mostly ruined, the already inflexible soles robbed of any cushioning by being melted flat. The outer covering had gone at both toes and heels, with the curved steel inserts showing through. He’d emptied them of water and wrung his thick socks out, but he’d had no choice but to put them on again, wet. It made it difficult to walk. They were already rubbing, and he’d have blisters soon.

Stanislav, despite having all the same problems and injuries, seemed to be immune to their effects. He strode out, greeting each new vista with undisguised glee, even though the landscape appeared devoid of any sign of human activity.

Dalip trudged up the loose bank at the back of the bay, stones rattling under his feet and sliding down the slope behind him. Stanislav was already at the top, hand shielding his eyes from the glare of the bright sky, scanning inland.

‘Can you see anything?’

‘Lots of things.’

He was right. There was a great deal to see: to their left, there was a high ridge that ended as the sea-cliff, and started in a tall mountain in the far blue-hazed distance. Ahead was a broad valley, a river cutting and recutting its way across the flat land in a series of braided channels. To their right, hills, backed again by more than one mountain peak.

There were short scrubby bushes up the slope to the headland, mixed in with one or two stunted trees. Inland, the trees grew taller and more numerous until they became a forest.

There were no houses, no walls nor fences nor fields, no roads nor tracks nor paths, no cows nor sheep nor pigs nor goats, no structures close by nor far away, no spires of smoke nor mechanical sounds. It was just them, and the wind, and the birds overhead.

And the sea monster behind them. Dalip looked over his shoulder, just to make sure.

‘Where is everyone?’

Stanislav frowned. ‘What do you see?’

‘Nothing. There’s nothing at all.’

‘Then what do you think?’

‘That there’s no one here? That can’t be true.’

‘So you know where we are?’

‘No.’

‘Then how do you know that it cannot be true?’

Dalip pressed his hands together, felt the burns and scalds, felt the clarity of his pain. ‘Do you know where we are?’

‘All I know is that we are somewhere which has big snakes swimming in the sea. Have you heard of a place like that?’ Stanislav watched for his reaction closely.

‘There is nowhere like that. Not…’ Dalip gave up. He wasn’t going to say it. He wasn’t going to let the words come out of his mouth.

And yet the landscape was untouched, wild, untamed. There were impossible creatures abroad. They’d arrived by stepping through a door, from the Underground and into the sea. A door that had more or less disappeared as soon as they closed it. He was right: there was nowhere like that.

‘I must be dead. Or dreaming. Or I’m unconscious somewhere. In hospital, in a coma.’

‘You think? Okay. Say it is so. What are you going to do now?’

Dalip was suddenly, painfully aware that he had an audience.

‘What am I going to do?’

‘Yes, you. So you are dead, or asleep, or whatever. You are still here.’ Stanislav stamped his foot, releasing a shower of pebbles. ‘I am here. She is here.’ He pointed to the girl with the light brown skin who liked saying ‘fuck’ a lot.

‘Yes, but…’

‘We are all here. While we wait to wake up, or for our souls to be collected, we must choose what to do next.’

It was him and Stanislav on the shingle bank, the others arrayed around them. Dalip felt the wind tug at the material of his boilersuit: yes, drying it out, but he was getting cold. And now that he’d stopped running, he was tired, and just a little hungry.

He shrugged. ‘A cup of tea would be nice.’

Stanislav looked momentarily nonplussed. ‘Tea. You expect to find somewhere that serves tea?’

‘It’s as likely as anything that’s happened since it all started burning. So, yes. Tea. I’ll have a biscuit too, while we’re at it.’

‘I cannot see a tea shop.’

‘Then I suppose we’ll have to make our own.’ Dalip waved his hands in the direction of the river. ‘There’s water. If we can start a fire and build a shelter and find a tea bush… I don’t know what I’m saying anymore.’

‘Shouldn’t we,’ said the brown-skinned girl, ‘you know, be looking for help?’

‘Where from?’ Dalip beckoned to her. ‘Come up here and tell me where help’s coming from.’

She scowled, and marched up to the top of the bank, knocking his hand out of the way when he reached down to assist her. ‘I can fucking manage, all right?’

Confronted with the same blank canvas of sky and land, her scowl deepened.

‘Anyone got a phone?’ she asked.

No one had, because they were back at either Leicester Square or Hyde Park.

‘Fuck,’ she said.

‘Got yours?’ Dalip asked.

‘Fuck off.’ She whirled around, looking for something, anything she recognised. Then she ripped off her grimy bandanna, threw it on the ground and stormed away, down the bank and away from the sea. Scrubby, heavy-headed grasses whipped at her legs, and she disturbed a nesting bird which flew up with a flutter and squeak. It made her jump, and she flailed at it to fend it off before realising it was just a bird and it wasn’t going to hurt her. ‘Fuck,’ she bellowed, and kept on walking.

Dalip bent down to retrieve the strip of red cloth.

‘How can you just accept this?’ he asked of Stanislav.

‘I am alive. I do not know how or what or where or why. But I am alive.’ He turned to look at the sun. ‘We have a few hours before it gets dark. We should find somewhere to spend the night now, and worry about what to do later.’

He set off, roughly in the same direction as the girl, leaving Dalip behind.

Dalip helped haul the big black woman called Mama up to the top then, out of courtesy, the three other women. They all stood together for a moment, watching the two orange-clad figures slowly recede into the distance.

‘We can all see this, right? We’re all seeing the same thing.’

Mama nodded, her hands on her hips. ‘I reckon we are. What’s your name, young man?’

‘Dalip,’ said Dalip. It was about the only thing he was certain of at that moment.

‘My parents called me Noreen,’ said Mama, ‘but everyone calls me Mama.’

‘Do you know what happened?’

‘Well now,’ she said. ‘I can’t explain any of it. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.’

He looked at his hands, opened and closed his fists, watched his fingers curl and straighten. Every scald and blister told him it did happen, and that he wasn’t dreaming.

‘Oh, come on.’ Mama nudged his arm. ‘Your friend’s right. We should find somewhere to stay, and worry about where we are later.’

‘He’s not my friend. I’d never met him before tonight. Last night. Before the shift started. He’s just someone who was told to look after me.’

‘Then he’s done a good job, yes? He looked after you just fine.’

‘I suppose.’

‘Well, then.’ She looked around her, and co-opted the other women into the conversation. ‘We should stay together, at least till we get to go home. We’d all better follow along now.’

To pre-empt any more of his angst, she set off after Stanislav, and there was nothing for it but to go with her. They walked as a knot of orange, none of them feeling brave enough to spread out across the plain.

He didn’t know much about plants or birds, but there was nothing unusual about the ones he was seeing. The seagulls? They had seagulls in London, and the ones here looked like those. The small brown bird that the girl had disturbed? He hadn’t got a good look at it, but it wouldn’t have been out of place in a nature documentary. The grasses were blue-green, the leaves on the stunted bushes similar, and he thought he could remember a geography field trip where they’d been shown salt-adapted vegetation that resembled what he was seeing.

Perhaps they were just somewhere they ought not be, and they’d got there by some weird physics. Everything seemed disconcertingly normal. Apart from the sea-monster. What was he thinking? There was an actual sea-monster. He hadn’t imagined it. This wasn’t any place that had ever been covered by the Natural History Unit of the BBC.

A thought struck him, morbidly funny: it’d be a privilege to end his time there being chased across a primeval landscape by a pack of allosaurs.

‘What? Why are you laughing?’

Dalip coloured up, and stared firmly at the rough ground. He didn’t have much experience talking to women. His mother and grandmother, yes, though his Punjabi was frankly shocking. Teachers, yes, but there was no question of any sort of social relationship. Doing an engineering degree was not-quite-but-almost an all-male affair.

The one who’d spoken to him was just smaller than him, with a wave of black hair with reddish highlights that may or may not have been cosmetic, and the beginning of crow’s feet at the corners of her eyes. She wasn’t Anglo◦– he didn’t have the skills to tell from where. Her… friend? Sister? She looked similar, though she wore her hair so that it shielded her face from view when she turned.

‘Why am I laughing? Because I was wondering when the dinosaurs were going to turn up and eat us.’

She was looking at him, trying to work out whether he was serious or not. He still wouldn’t make eye contact.

‘Why dinosaurs?’

‘Because it’s as likely as anything else that’s happened.’ There didn’t seem to be any giant footprints or egg-shells the size of saucepans, but who knew? He risked a glance at her, and quickly turned away again. He couldn’t age her. Twenties, thirties, maybe. Wiry and strong. Confident. ‘Are you scared by all this?’

‘Scared?’ She wondered for a moment. ‘I do not know. I was scared, very scared in the tunnels. I thought I was going to die. And now? We might be safe, so I am less scared.’

‘But we don’t know where we are.’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘yes it does.’

‘When you thought you were going to be burnt alive, did you think being anywhere else would be better?’

‘Yes, that’s what I thought.’

The ground beneath them was becoming increasingly gritty and damp, and where they’d walked pooled with water. The river channel had split into wide, shallow streams, with thousands of sand banks and islets between them. As the tide came up, as it was presumably doing now, the rivers went into reverse.

He bent down and put his injured hand in the clear water. It was cool, and when he let a drop fall into his mouth, it was somewhere between salty and sweet.

‘Then that is where we are,’ she said. ‘Perhaps because we wanted it badly enough, it happened.’

Dalip didn’t live in a world where wishing for something really hard worked. Ever. The only thing that ever worked was diligence, perseverance, and a willingness to be humiliated over and over again until it came right.

‘That’s just…’ He glanced up, at the river, the forest, the mountains, the sky. None of it made any sense, and perhaps it didn’t matter who was right. Stanislav had insisted that all that counted was what he was going to do now.

‘Luiza,’ said the woman. ‘This is my cousin, Elena. Where are you from?’

‘Dalip,’ said Dalip. He wasn’t used to introducing himself to people◦– that was his mother’s job◦– but she wasn’t there. ‘I’m from Southall. You?’

‘Romania.’

‘Okay.’ He didn’t know much about the place, and where they were born seemed a strange thing to discuss. None of them had been born here.

The sweary girl was down in amongst the river channels, every so often kicking a plume of water into the air where it broke and fell. She stopped, and shouted, and pointed.

Stanislav was up by the tree line, exploring the edge of the forest, and Mama and the other woman were a little way behind, in easy conversation.

The girl didn’t seem to be running away from anything, and her shouts were more indicative of something interesting than something terrible: Dalip, Luiza and Elena were closest, so they arrived first.

She was pointing down, at the water. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘look.’

It took a moment to see past the rippling surface with its bright reflections, and not so far as the granular, speckled river bed.

Fish. There were fish, and not just one or two, but dozens of silvery, speckly fish that almost merged in with their surroundings. They were big, too, the length of Dalip’s forearm and lazily swimming upstream with the seawater current at their tails.

Once he’d got his eye in, he could see there were hundreds, in every river channel. But where the girl saw novelty, he saw food. He had no net◦– no one had a net, or a line◦– but the fish were thick enough to walk on. And he’d seen that documentary, the one where the brown bears in Alaska waited for the sock-eyes to swim back to their spawning grounds. When they did, the bears could simply reach in and take what they wanted, flicking them up and on to the bank.

He could do that. It shouldn’t be that hard.

He sat down and wrestled his boots off, the thought that he might not be able to get them back on briefly crossing his mind.

‘What’re you doing?’ said the girl. ‘Getting yourself one of those fish pedicures?’

‘No. I’m getting us something to eat.’ He scrunched his toes in the soft grit and waded out mid-stream. The water rose up to mid-calf, and predictably, the fish scattered at the intrusion.

‘You’ve scared them all off,’ said the girl. She seemed to be happy at his failure.

‘Just wait,’ he said. His feet were cold, and he didn’t have a coat of shaggy hair like those brown bears. He’d lose feeling in them soon enough.

‘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.