"Are you a psychoanalyst now?" I know I'm overreacting, taking it out on Frank, but I can't stop myself. Luckily he seems to understand that too.
"No, Paul, I'm not. All I'm trying to say is this: stress, lack of sleep, grief, trauma, all those things, they can cause you to hallucinate. As can simply being underground, in the dark, in tunnels. I've been caving once or twice You'd be surprised what… look. All I mean is this. What you saw down there is physically impossible. Right?"
"I know that." I rub my face. "But I saw it."
"I'm not questioning that." I look up. "All I'm questioning is whether it was objectively real. Be honest. What's the most likely explanation? Either the tunnels really did shift and change around like you say, or you experienced a hallucination brought on by your emotional state and the conditions down here. And I don't doubt the narrows themselves could be disorientating too, once you got out of sight of the main cavern. You obviously lost your bearings and were lucky to find your way out again. But out of those two explanations, which makes more sense? Which is more probable? That's all I'm saying."
I bow my head. I have to admit he's right on that one. But that's what really frightens me. Because if you can't trust your own senses, the evidence of your own eyes, what can you trust?
In the cold light of day… I've had the occasional weird experience in my time, and most could be put down to hallucinations, like Frank says about this, or something more mundane. But it helps when you can get away from the place where you saw the weird thing or heard the weird sounds and go somewhere normal, four-square, the land of Starbucks and McDonald's, busy city streets and cars, brand names and day jobs. The cold light of day.
Except that it might still be cold back up there, but light? I think of all the predictions I heard and read, the nuclear winter, the great clouds of smoke and ash blotting out the sun and plunging the world into a new Ice Age. And even if we could get back up there, even forgetting that the radiation would kill us in hours, the world of Starbucks and McDonalds, busy city streets and brand names-it's all gone. The day job, the worries about bills and rent and mortgages, shopping at Morrisons or the local market- it's all gone. There is no normal anymore. The world is what's around us now, wherever we're clinging on to life a bit longer. The world is this cave. And reality… what's reality? Frank's right. We can't trust what we hear or see-with everything we've been through, it'd be a miracle if we didn't see or hear things that weren't there. And it isn't safe to be here. Nowhere is, anymore.
Panic wells up; I fight it down. I know that if I give into it once, that'll be it, nothing will ever make sense anymore and I'll either curl up catatonic or run screaming into the water till I drown to escape the knowledge, or not believe a real danger till it kills me or run to my death from an imaginary one.
So I push it down and instead I let myself realise the magnitude of our loss. Not just Anya, but Poland is gone. Not just the school, the village, Manchester and Salford, but Britain itself in any meaningful sense. America, too? Or-what if the bombs only fell on Manchester? If there weren't any others? It's impossible to say. And impossible to believe.
It's all gone. Names fly past, already robbed of meaning: Adidas, Reebok, Microsoft, BBC, ITV, Sky TV, Sony-all the brand names, all the twenty-first-century totems. They mean nothing now. Will mean nothing to anybody till whatever archaeologists of the future there might be dig them up and mount them in museums, try to decipher what they meant to us.
I can't get a handle on it. Only think of Anya, imagine her there in front of me. And there she is, sitting beside me, whole and unharmed, unmarked. Not burnt up like in my dream, but the Anya I kissed goodbye the morning before the bomb fell. There are now four of us round the fire: me, Jean, Frank and Anya. Jean holds my left hand, Anya my right. She looks at Jean's hand on mine, then up at me, raises an eyebrow. I pull my hand free of Jean's, embarrassed, caught out, almost caught cheating.
"Paul?"
I blink, and Anya's gone. But I can still feel the warmth of her hand where it held mine. Jean. Jean drove her away. I turn to shout at her, then stop myself. She was never there. Never here. It wasn't real, however real it was.
"Paul, are you okay?"
"Yes." I nod, but I'm not. God, how could I be? Come that close to raving and shouting over something that wasn't there. I'm crazy. Or going crazy. But what's crazy? What's not? What's mad and what isn't? How much more food will we find down here? And if there isn't enough to eat-how long before we start eyeing each other like that? Before we're killing each other, smashing each other's heads in with lumps of rock, roasting pieces of each other in our coal fires?
I try not to think about it, but I can't stop. What criteria will we use, to choose who lives or dies? The smaller children are of least use. Will we eat them first? But there's less meat on a nine-year-old kid than on a grown man or woman. Will it be the biggest of us, to go the furthest, last the longest, before we have to do it again? Me? Frank? Jean? Or are we of more value? In what way? We've as little idea as anyone else of what to do next. Hell, Jeff Tomlinson probably has more idea. And we're adults, we're authority, the powers that be, as far as the kids are concerned, who killed Mum and Dad and their friends and brought them down here to this. How long will the shreds and threads of our authority as teachers last? How long before they realise there are more of them than there are of us and like any who hold power, we only do so because they allow it? I see myself, my torso and an arm, all that's left, lying by the fire, flies crawling across my glazed eyes, the gnawed bones of the rest of me in the embers of the fire. Kids' famished faces, eager and greedy and animal, smeared with my blood and grease.
When are you insane? When you think about this? When you imagine it? Plan it? Or when you do it? Or is it insanity, will it be when it comes, or will it be only necessity, need, do or die? Will the mad ones be the ones who won't do it, clinging to an outmoded way, as mad in this time as worshipping the Sun God would be to the people we were last week?
Oh God.
Oh. God.
I can smell the roast pork stink that came off Mr Rutter's corpse, and saliva fills my mouth.
I'm crying. Softly. Again.
"Paul, it's alright." Jean's arms are around me. "It's alright. We've all been through so much. It's alright."
I nod, squeeze her hand. I look at Frank. "Get some sleep," he says. "You'll be okay."
We both know that's a lie. For all of us. "Frank," I say.
"Yes?"
"I still think-the kids mustn't go into the narrows again. Whatever it was in there. If it happened to me… "
"Then it could happen to anyone else." He nods. "Yes. I thought of that too. I just wanted to make sure."
That I knew it wasn't real. I nod. But, of course, I don't know. None of us can, anymore.
Taking Frank's advice, I get some sleep. It's deep and dark and blessedly silent. I wake once, and in the dim emberlight of the waning fire, someone tall is standing over me.
"Wh-"
"Sh." Anya kneels by my head. Warm light glows on her face. She strokes my forehead, my matted hair. "Sh. It's alright, Paul."
"Anya."
"Sh." She bends and kisses me: my forehead, my eyes, my cheeks, my nose, my mouth. The last, long and deep.
At last, she squeezes down next to me and huddles close, kisses me again. "It's alright, Paul. Sleep now."
Polish women, I think, are so beautiful.
And I sleep again.
In what passes for the morning, when some vague consensus of reality is established by enough of us all being awake at once, I have no idea if I was dreaming or not.