‘And here’s water,’ I pointed out. ‘We can have a bath.’

There were a couple of circular pits in the middle of the street which had collected rainwater. The thing I liked the most about them was you could see the bottom of the pools, and you could see there was nothing bad in them. The water was greenish, but at least there was nothing in there which was going to kill me.

‘What?’ said Lana. ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not washing in the middle of the street. There’s a bathroom shop over there. That’s where I’m going.’

She walked off first towards a large, blue shop front decorated with two faded mannequins, each wearing furry jackets.

‘Oh,’ said James, heading towards a shop called ‘Survival Experts’, and ‘Outdoor Specialists’. ‘Yeah, I suppose we can spend a bit of time in the shops, then.’

In the middle of the street was a large white stand on rusting red poles. It was a map. One of those ones with a useful, ‘You are here’ arrow in the middle of it. At least, that bit would be useful if ‘being here’ wasn’t one of the few things we were sure about. I grabbed Kate and pulled her towards it.

We both walked slowly because, well, it meant so much, didn’t it? I guess maps have always been symbols – a way of organizing the world when it maybe isn’t that organized. A fantasy of places you could go and the way things are supposed to be – as though places and things don’t change. Also, the main reason I walked slowly was because I wanted Kate to figure it all out first because I wasn’t sure I could remember how to read proper writing. Plus, it would mean I could blame her if she got it wrong.

Beads of moisture had leaked into the edges of the map, bubbling and warping the plastic so that it was difficult to see – the sort of reading we were used to. Kate ran her finger over the map, searching round and round, and touching the smoothness of the board. She rested her finger on the arrow for a minute before taking it away again and frowning. The lines on the map, those roads, were very straight and very perfect, unlike the jagged sunken bits of tarmac that led down to the drowned houses and the hidden streets under the water. It took us a few minutes of silence to work it all out, but I think maybe a quarter of the town as shown there was now missing. We didn’t say that to each other, though.