He tries to push through the crowd, but no one moves to let him through, no one even seems to notice him. The smells, the strange language, rising and falling in raw cadences of grief, frustration and despair, are overwhelming him. Turning, trying to prise people apart – is he blubbing? He must be – he becomes aware of another sound, not loud, in fact rather weak and thin, but … Someone is singing. Here, in this nightmare. It sounds like a child. Something makes him turn away from the wall of people and shove his way through more legs towards the voice. Perhaps it is because the singer sounds as small and lost as he feels at that moment. He elbows between an old man’s filthy pinstripe trousers and a woman’s once-bright calico skirt and has to catch himself, because he is right at the edge of the quay. A narrow strip of dirty marble is all that separates him from that greasy, rainbow water. But he can still hear the singing, and there, sitting beside an iron bollard with her legs dangling, is a little girl. She has tangled, dark gold hair and the torn and stained clothes she is wearing had once been a sailor suit very much like his own. Face turned towards the open sea, where tawny brown islands are shimmering in the heat haze, she is singing to nobody. Her voice hovers and twists like the murmurations of silver fish that flash deep beneath her dirty bare feet, and pulls him through the crowd until he is looking down at the matted cords of her blonde hair and the blue collar of the creased and grimy sailor suit. With a shock, he recognises her.

‘You were on that boat,’ he says, standing over her. ‘With all those people. I waved at you!’

She turns at his words and raises her face to his. It is sunburnt and dirty: she has cried, and rubbed her cheeks, cried again, until her skin is a hundred shades of dingy brown. She is staring at him so intently that her eyes seem brighter than the dazzling sunshine. They are a clear, mossy green, and Tom’s mind immediately runs across the pigments in his mother’s paintbox. Sap Green, he thinks. ‘Hello!’ he says again. His heart is thumping.

‘Hello,’ she says, in perfect English, though her voice is all scratchy. ‘I have lost my mama and my papa. Have they sent you to get me?’ She is trembling, Tommy notices, but she can’t be cold. The seafront is boiling hot. And she is staring at him with those eyes.