Page 104 of The Salt King

He blinked. “You—really?”

She held up the shopping bag, feeling guilty. What if that boy had been taking it home for his family?

Sally started to laugh. “What was I worried about? Who needs money when you’ve got a Ninja Tallis who steals from horrible teenagers?”

“Were they horrible? What did they say?”

He told her.

“I did the right thing,” she concluded.

So Sally climbed on a chair, and they began to coat the west-facing wall with foil. It seemed so mad and insufficient, the idea that aluminium would help even a little—there would be people making honest-to-God tinfoil hats now. But the wall was small, the ceiling low, and within a few minutes, with foil left to spare, they had filigreed over the jungle-themed wallpaper until it looked like a mirror. Once it was done, they both stood in front of it, and Tallis didn’t think either of them knew what to do now. When she aimed her phone out the window and leaned out to the west, the salt light was closer to the city. It was moving in a solid cloud, like a sandstorm.

In the reflection in the foil, she was much shorter than she always imagined herself; a head smaller than Sally. Much older, too. She realized he had seen her looking and hunted frantically for something else to take an interest in. She settled on a framed picture of a woman about her age and two little girls. Sally had taken it off the wall and propped it against a skirting board.

“Right, cooking,” Sally decided. “What have we got. Chickpeas. Great—flour! Oh, we’re going to be fine.”

“Can I help with anything?” Tallis asked, freshly awkward. When had she last visited somebody’s house? She couldn’t remember. She went to the pub sometimes after work, or out to restaurants or cafés, but . . . she didn’t see anyone at home.

She didn’t know anyone well enough.

“Of course you can’t do anything, sit down and get warm. The heating should be coming through now.”

She perched on one of the armchairs and watched him in the foil reflections so that she wouldn’t stare straight at him.

When she was his age, she would have been paralysed at the prospect of hosting somebody unexpectedly with no chance to tidy up or to scream into a cushion first. But Sally looked happy, setting a copper kettle on the stove and measuring loose tea into a silver strainer shaped like a lemon. The tattoos on his fingers carried on up his wrists. He was all contrasts, she thought suddenly. He had strong hands, like a rock climber, but those tattoos were delicate. He looked as though he spent his whole life traipsing around outside, the old jacket getting more and more sandblasted, the sun bleaching more light patches in his hair—she would have thought he was one of those loud-laughing boys who hollered at each other across streets—but when he spoke, it was steady and quiet. There was a stillness in him. He went down fathoms deep, to where there were no currents.

He saw her looking, and she dropped her eyes, pretending to be looking at the picture.

“Tea bags are full of microplastics,” he said—he must have thought she was having opinions about the strainer—then laughed at himself and held his hands up. The kettle whistled, and he held it in the air to wait for it to stop bubbling, then poured the water out in a cloud of steam.

She checked the salt light again.

“Fuck,” she said.

“What?”

She showed him. It was rolling in like fog; much less than it must have been at the centre of the blast, but noticeable, and it was already in the graveyard just outside.

They both snapped to the east side of the room, away from the silvered wall. Sally snatched up the picture of the lady and the girls and sat with it flat against his chest.

She kept the phone trained on the west wall, dark for now, but she could almost feel the light billowing closer, scalp crawling. If this was it, if this was the exposure that killed them, then surely she should say something, but she couldn’t think of anything that wasn’t either glib or reprehensible. She had an unbearable need to tell him that he was the most quietly extraordinary human being she had met for decades, but that would do nothing except ensure that Sally died feeling repulsed and embarrassed—if perhaps glad he would turn to salt before he had to tell her to get out of his house. Almost equal was the need to disguise that, and say something idiotic, like that it had been nice to work with him. Crushing banality to end a crushingly banal life.

No. The best and only thing she could do now was to say nothing. Wasn’t your strength measured by what you could carry without breaking? And this was nothing new. She had carried it often before. However badly that old musculature wanted not to take the weight again—it could.

Sally was praying.

The lights fluttered. Tallis’s phone screen distorted too, and just before it died, it showed them the thinnest vapour of salt light seeping into the room through the corner of the ceiling. Right across the city, spread below them down the punishing hill, the lights went out in blocks, first those further away, then closer, closer. Then the lights in the cemetery. Then their own. The hum of the oven died. For a few seconds the darkness was total, but gradually she started to see the outlines of the furniture, the concertina camera on its tripod, the shine of the copper kettle and the flicker of the gas flames on the stove. There was light from somewhere; red and cold.

Tallis dug her nails into her palm, daring them to start crumbling into salt, waiting to feel that vile stiffness through the roots of her hair, to feel sick like Veronique had. It didn’t come.

Sally breathed out, half voiced, high. Very carefully, he was unfastening the back of the picture frame to get to the photograph inside.

“This has to be minimal exposure,” Tallis murmured, examining a light bulb as well as she could. “No salt in the electricity. Glass isn’t discoloured.” She realized she was pushing her fingertips through the roots of her hair again and snatched her hand down. She wasn’t going to turn to salt. The archaeologists had felt ill; she felt fine.

“For how long?” Sally said towards the window.

“I don’t know. But . . . other people are okay. Look.”