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.