Page 105 of The Salt King

There were tiny points here and there, but soft: candles. Now, without electricity, the dark city was tinted red. It took her a moment to see why. She had missed it before, hidden by all the light pollution, but now it was huge and brilliant in the sky. “Wow. Lunar eclipse,” she remarked pointlessly.

He straightened up to look outside, holding the rescued photograph. “Sign of the apocalypse,” he said.

“Sorry?”

“A red moon. Then a solar eclipse.”

“Oh, right,” she said, assuming he meant it as trivia, but she frowned when she saw the blank way he was staring at nothing. He had put a candle on the table between them, and it had made him into an amber-enamelled ghost in the dark. “Sally . . . do you believe in that?”

He smiled thinly. “Believing in Judgement Day is a basic pillar of Islam. It comes with the package.”

“Sounds stressful.”

“People don’t believe in it because it sounds like a good idea,” he said, laughing a little bit and pretending to kick her ankle. “They believe it because it’s, you know. True.”

“Insufficient evidence,” she said, trying to make him laugh more. “Next?”

“You’re one of those people who invites Mormons in and then tells them how their conception of the infinite universe is garbage because of the speed of light, aren’t you?”

Tallis paused, feeling, as she was starting to suspect was normal with Sally, uncomfortably seen. “No,” she tried.

He laughed, and when he stopped, the laughter faded only gradually from the tiny lines around his eyes. The longer she spent with him, the more she was noticing that he did everything much more steadily than most people. He didn’t fidget or shift around, he didn’t flicker awkwardly through different expressions, trying to find the right one. She would have called it zen, but there was something sad about it, as though he hadn’t so much moved beyond all that worry about what other people thought as given up.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have made you stay in the city.”

“No, you were right. I think we’re safer here with the light than in some camp without it.” He swallowed. “Do you think paper will turn faster than a person?”

She tore a strip of aluminium off the wall and gave it to him, for the photograph.

“Thanks.” He set the picture down to wrap it up.

Tallis studied it, wondering who they were. It was a brilliant picture; the lady was looking at the girls, not the camera, and the girls looked like she had just told them a rude joke.

“That’s my mother,” Sally said. “And my sisters.” He folded the aluminium carefully over them. “She was a judge. I was at college here when they started arresting women at home. She should have been eligible for asylum in the U.S., she prosecuted extremists for years, but . . . she couldn’t get to the airport.”

Tallis noticed she had been pushing her fist against her mouth. “What happened to them?”

Somewhere outside, there was a rattle, as if someone were shaking a gutter to try to persuade a kitten out of it. Distantly it was reassuring to know people were still doing ordinary things.

“Don’t know,” he said, and she could hear fossilised pain in it. “I’d be arrested if I tried to cross the border.”

She didn’t say she was sorry, because everyone would have said that, and she doubted it had ever helped.

“People think that you’ll be okay if you’re rich, whatever happens . . . but you’re not.” He smiled slightly. “Which is why I don’t think the apocalypse is going to be about being arrested on park benches.”

Tallis wished she knew what to say, but she hadn’t the faintest idea. The closest to armed conflict she had ever come was an argument with the local council about bin collection days. She was ludicrously insulated, her life small and safe, and there was nothing in it that she could have used to offer Sally anything but the shallowest kind of sympathy.

The rattle came again, and on the edge of everything else, Tallis thought it came from nearer this time: further up the wall. Was something stuck in a . . . Christ, who cared.

“I can’t think of anything to say that wouldn’t be repulsively naive,” she said. “I’ve never even seen anything like that.”

He lifted his eyes. “Don’t be silly. Do you know how good it is, to meet someone who’s never even seen it?”

She nodded once, not believing him at all.

“Well,” he said, “the stove’s fine. Flatbreads and rice and chickpea curry coming soon.”

That sounded like heaven.