‘Ma’am?’ Zoë said, though her throat was so dry that all she could manage was a squeak. The submarine was still drifting around in her head. But the woman was beckoning to her urgently and the little boy – there had been a little boy yesterday, hadn’t there? She almost remembered him – was frowning so hard that his eyes looked like two raisins. ‘I’m waiting to have a submarine,’ she croaked. ‘And to see Mama and Papa. You can … you can stand with me, if you like? Please?’ She reached out her hand to the woman, the only person she had recognised in a whole, lonely day. Then the crowd moved, and the girl behind her shoved her, meanly, in the small of her back. She stumbled forward and as she put out her hands to save herself, she felt herself jerked off her feet, and when she opened her eyes, which she had squeezed shut in shock, she was inside the crowd, and the woman was dragging her by the hand away from the crocodile of children, away from the tent, from the cool water. From her parents.

‘No!’ Zoë screamed and tried to pull free, but the woman’s grip was too strong. She walked quickly, threading through the narrow spaces between groups of people, her little boy trailing from her other hand. ‘I want my mama and my papa!’ Zoë screamed, but the woman took no notice. At last, they came to a place where the throng of people was thinner on the ground. The woman stopped inside a small circle made up of suitcases and Gladstone bags, cloth bundles, a cardboard box wound so tightly with twine that it looked like a ball of wool. There were a few other people sitting around. A small fire was burning in a square made of four bricks, and a hunched figure in black was heating a little copper coffee pot over the flames. The woman sat down heavily on one of the suitcases. At once, her fingers went to Zoë’s sailor scarf. She pulled and tugged at the string of the label and in a few moments it was hanging from her hand. ‘Here,’ she said, handing it to the figure with the coffee pot. ‘Burn it.’ A wrinkled hand took the label and shoved it into the flames. It flared briefly, then was gone.

‘What’s your name?’ the woman asked Zoë.

‘My name is Zoë Haggitiris. It said so on that label,’ Zoë added, goaded on by the fury that had been rising inside her since she had been pulled out of the line.

‘Do you know what else was on that label?’

Zoë shook her head petulantly.

‘And what you were queuing up for?’

‘A submarine! And Mama! And Papa!’