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.