Zoë decided, because it seemed like the most sensible thing to do, that the boy had never really been there. But if he hadn’t been, why did she miss him? If no one had left her, why did she feel left alone? She noticed that the water had a nasty smell, of fuel and rotten things, so she got up and followed the woman and the boy, because … She could not have said. Perhaps because she was almost sure that they, at least, were real. But the two strangers had vanished into the crowd. Besides, it was soup time. She thought she might see the woman in the queue, but she didn’t appear again.

Zoë had only just woken up on the third day when she heard voices, amplified by megaphones, booming hollowly across the harbour. Pushing out from under the heavy, salty-damp tarpaulins, she peered out at the crowd, which at night transformed itself into something else, a dense, stationary maze, as if the people were heavy thread embroidered in strange patterns onto the fabric of the harbour, knots and circles and wheels of sleeping or fretting people. Now they were hauling themselves shakily to their feet and the pattern was unravelling. The tinny megaphones were shouting about children, as far as Zoë could make out. There were lots of children on the docks – hundreds, probably. Zoë had seen plenty of others like her, alone, with labels fluttering from their clothes. Some of them had formed themselves into little gangs, others wandered around, eyes huge and red with tears. None of them looked like the sort of children Zoë would have been allowed to play with back in Bournabat. None of them looked like the sort she wanted to have anything to do with now, because they seemed to belong there, in a way: ignored by the grown-ups, they slipped through the crowds in little packs, stealing any bit of food left unguarded, mocking the children who still held on to their parents’ clothing or sat, protected, within the many little castles of piled-up suitcases and bags. She didn’t want to belong here. She didn’t want to play with children of whom Miss Butland would most certainly have disapproved.

She saw grown-ups, the clean ones, the ones with armbands and clipboards, walking through the crowd, pointing to children, beckoning them. There was already a crocodile line of staggering, sleepy children behind each grown-up. A stocky woman with round glasses hooked across her doughy face spotted Zoë, smiled perfunctorily across the heads of a group of huddled old women and summoned her with a brisk wave of her hand.