Nuclear Family

By Chris Towndrow

Successful businessman David Bradshaw has created a nuclear shelter for his family. It’s the ideal survival capsule. When the bombs drop, they are safely cocooned underneath their country home.
What David hasn’t catered for is unforeseen circumstances, and the challenges of the family dynamic.

He and wife Mary look on as their children, twentysomethings Tom and Holly, succumb to the stress of the situation by regressing into childish squabbling.

For Holly, it is perhaps understandable, as she’s missing the social life that has defined her recent years. She’s in denial about the likely end of the world as she knows it. Her underlying health condition also makes it paramount that they find a habitable outside world as soon as possible.

Tom, however, is in a worse position. The secret he carries makes this forced proximity almost unbearable. His anger and despair threaten to have all four inhabitants at each other’s throats.
And then the unexpected happens...

Their futures will be more different than they could ever have imagined... if they can all make it out alive.

A post-apocalyptic drama of family, love, secrets and survival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chris Towndrow
• Release date: Sep 10, 2023
• ISBN: 9781739230685

Chris Towndrow

Chris Towndrow has been a writer since 1991.He began writing science fiction, inspired by Asimov, Iain M Banks, and numerous film and TV canons. After a few years creating screenplays across several genres, in 2004 he branched out into playwriting and has had several productions professionally performed. This background is instrumental in his ability to produce realistic, compelling dialogue in his books.His first published novel was 2012’s far-future, post-war space opera “Sacred Ground”. He then changed focus into Earth-centric, near-future sci-fi adventures, and the Enna Dacourt pentalogy was completed in 2023. In a similar vein, “Nuclear Family” was a venture into post-apocalyptic fiction.He has always drawn inspiration from the big screen, and 2019’s quirky romantic black comedy “Tow Away Zone” owes much to the films of the Coen Brothers. This spawned two sequels in what became the “Sunrise trilogy”.His first historical fiction novel, “Signs Of Life”, was published by Valericain Press in 2023. With a number of excellent reviews, this Western romance has been his most popular title.In 2023, Chris returned to his passion for writing accessible humour and will devote his efforts to romantic comedies. Three such scripts are currently in development.Chris lives on the outskirts of London with his family and works as a video editor and producer. He is a member of the UK Society of Authors.

Book preview

Nuclear Family

NUCLEAR FAMILY

Chris Towndrow

Valericain Press

Copyright © 2023 by Chris Towndrow

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

Valericain Press

Richmond, London, UK

www.valericainpress.co.uk

Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

Nuclear Family / Chris Towndrow. -- 2023 ed.

Paperback: 978-1-7392306-7-8

eBook : 978-1-7392306-8-5

For my family.

1

Tom watched the man’s hand and sensed victory.

He held out a palm. ‘One thousand, seven hundred. Pay up.’

The man counted out the notes and deposited them in Tom’s hand.

The gamble was paying off. All that money. He looked at the pile on the table. Thousands and thousands.

And it meant nothing. Not a single fucking thing. It was merely paper. A mass-produced multi-coloured collection of pointless shit. Even if it had been real money, thousands of pounds, it would still be worthless.

The man pushed his remaining scraps of paper towards Tom. ‘I resign.’

‘You can’t give up. You’re not broke,’ Tom snapped.

‘Almost. I see no point in carrying on.’

‘Come on, Dad,’ Holly said encouragingly.

‘Let your father do what he wants, Tom,’ Mary said.

Tom eyed the three of them, snorted and confetti-ed the notes onto the table. ‘You’re right. Who gives a fuck?’

‘Tom!’ Holly’s tone was condescending, maternal.

He hated that. Always better-than-thou. Innocent.

He was fed up with her endless upbeat personality. Even now. Even here, for fuck’s sake. Perky nature, perky smile, perky tits.

Big sisters: what a waste of oxygen.

He shoved back his chair. ‘Take my stuff, Dad. I don’t care.’ He picked up the small red playing pieces and lobbed them at his father. ‘You’re good with houses. Have some more.’

‘Tom,’ Mary cautioned.

‘Let him go, love.’ David laid a hand on his wife’s shoulder. ‘He’s not angry at me.’

Tom froze. He wanted to say that he was angry with his father. Yet, it was pointless—the anger and saying so. Misplaced. Emotionally and logically wrong on many levels.

Dad wasn’t accountable for money being worthless—whether it was Monopoly money or actual pound notes. Dad wasn’t responsible for it all being a waste of time, this sitting around and making nice like a loving family, as if there was nothing wrong.

Dad wasn’t to blame for the end of the world.

Tom turned and left them to it.

‘Come on,’ Mum said to Holly. ‘Roll the dice.’

He walked the two short, bare corridors to his windowless room.

Not a bad space for impromptu incarceration: Miles Davis poster on the wall, a hand-me-down double-bed, basic wardrobe and drawers. Still, most of his clothes lay on the floor—who gave a shit how he lived? They’d have no visitors, and the other three could jog on.

What raised it above the ambience of a prison cell were the few possessions he’d begged to bring in. They were a thin line separating him from insanity.

He tapped a silent C on the small synth keyboard, debating what to do. Then he swept up the guitar from its stand and thumped down onto the edge of the mattress.

He picked at the strings in turn. An impulse flashed through him—to smash the fucking thing into splinters—but he rescued his future self by taking a calming breath. The mood would pass—it had done so many times in the past six interminable days.

As he strummed a few chords, he considered working on the love song. The song he’d never sing to the person it was written for, or even to an audience. Ever. There was no audience. Or, at least, no semblance of a society that would demand music to ring throughout the desolation above his head.

It was a good song, too. Wasted, though, like everything.

He fine-tuned the strings. Needed a different key. Better to work on the other song. Another that nobody would ever hear. At least that one was cathartic. Holly might find it amusing—certainly relevant—if she ever gave a damn about his work, which was doubtful.

Fuck This Shit was a working title. He didn’t anticipate it changing, yet held onto a glimmer of hope—a weak candle in a gargantuan black cave—that either life might become marginally less shit, or his attitude to it would be less fuck-strewn. Maybe, in the infinitesimal chance that they walked out of this and found others inhabiting the wasteland, he’d tone down the lyrics, possibly rewrite them to be even more on-point, but still have the killer melody.

Even busking would be better than nothing, if people had money. If money was still worth anything. If people had an ounce of compassion in their heart for a clearly talented, probably starving, and definitely down-on-his-luck musician.

Tom Bradshaw: guitarist and lead singer of the band who never was. The band that stood on the verge of a record deal when fate intervened.

Fucking nuclear war.

Fuck that shit.

His fingers moved to the tune in his head. The un-amplified strings flicked the air without the vigour he craved—but it was better than nothing. Better than silence and indolence. Better than the probable deathly quiet of the world above.

He shuddered, the pictures in his mind’s eye sending ice through his very marrow.

Up there, a corpse, or down here, playing fucking board games with your family?

A close call.

Music swung the balance in favour of life. Ultimately pointless—true, but a way to fill hours which crawled past, punctured with the routine of sleeping and eating, the necessity of pleasantries, and the welcome embrace of fractured sleep.

The bedroom door opened.

‘Mum won,’ Holly said.

‘Whoop-de-fucking-do.’

She sat down hard on the bed. Her blue eyes punctured his sneer.

‘Remember that we’re alive because of them. Show some fucking respect and appreciation.’

He gestured around. ‘Yeah. It’s great. Pretty soon, Riley will be knocking on the door, asking for his life back.’

‘What’s got into you?’

He met her gaze, which was no chore, however far into any particular bout the siblings were. He kept his voice even yet laced with acidity.

‘I want to plug the amp in, but you’ll all get pissed off. I’m fed up of fucking Monopoly. I want nachos.’ He thudded the guitar onto the duvet and sprung up. ‘Oh, and IT’S THE END OF THE FUCKING WORLD! Did you not notice?’

She tucked her perfectly brushed blonde hair behind one ear. Her chest rose and fell with commendable, measured calm.

How does she do that?

‘It won’t be long. Just hold on, Tom.’

‘Won’t be long?! Until what? We can go to the pub, have a refreshing pint and get on with things again? Wake up, Holls!’

She sighed hard, and stood. ‘I know you’re fed up. Just don’t take it out on Dad, okay? We have to make the best of this. We’re lucky.’

‘I didn’t ask to be in here.’

‘You’d rather be outside?’ Her mouth hung open, a gentle sheen of lipstick still redundantly beautifying a face only three other people saw—or would probably ever see.

Why couldn’t she read the situation? Makeup!? Here? Now?

‘Yes,’ he replied.

‘You are so fucking ungrateful. You’ve lived off Dad for long enough, and now you want to take the easy way out and throw your life away? Can’t wait a few weeks until it’s safe?’ She shook her head despondently. ‘Treat it as a holiday. I am.’

He scoffed. ‘You’re even more bored than I am. Admit it.’

Her eyes darted, but she didn’t meet his words head-on. ‘At least I’m smart enough to realise that’s a damn sight better than the alternative. You’re used to being inside, cooped up with your music. I’m not. I’ve got a job. A social life. If I can cope, you must be able to. Make a fucking effort.’

‘How can you be so chirpy all the time? After the shitting holocaust? Ooh, look, some rotting, irradiated corpses! Let’s Insta that!’ He rolled his eyes with excess theatre.

Her lightly-powdered nose wrinkled. ‘Fuck off, Tom.’

‘Well, what do you want me to say? That I’m like a pig in shit?’ He closed his eyes. ‘Even a joint would be a start. Take the edge off.’

She clasped his arm. ‘We’ve got our stuff. We’ve got breath in our bodies. Food. Water. Power. Shit—we’ve got sleeping pills to make the nights easier. Jesus—how can you be angry with more than most people dream of—even in their normal life? There are three hundred bottles of wine down the hall! Stop looking on the bad side of everything. Please?’

‘Stop seeing the downside of nuclear war?’ He shook his head. ‘Fuck, I worry about you sometimes.’

‘Good. ’Cos I do about you.’

‘Yeah, a real Florence Nightingale bedside manner,’ he sniped.

She waved it away. ‘Why do I bother?’ she mumbled.

‘Look—’

‘Just… try. Please. It’ll be over soon. And don’t piss off the parents.’

‘Or what? They’ll ground me?’

A smile flickered on her lips. ‘Gallows humour. Better than no humour at all. Right?’

He blew out a gale of a sigh, slumped to the bed and tugged the guitar across his lap. ‘I suppose.’

She scanned the room. ‘At least you’re not gouging five-bar gates into the walls.’

‘Doesn’t mean I’m not counting.’

She replied with a noncommittal throaty noise.

‘Night,’ she murmured.

‘Night.’

He watched her go. He enjoyed watching her go. Not the act, the movement. And hated himself for it.

Because, of course, life wasn’t bad enough already.

2

Tom fumbled around with the melody of Fuck This Shit for half an hour. Then, when his temper had evened, he returned to the lounge area and muttered an apology to unarguably his elders and certainly his betters.

He’d never achieve what they had. The career path had been a long shot anyway, but now it was even more unlikely than a hail of warheads had seemed only a week earlier.

Mum gave him a hug, Dad accepted the apology gracefully, and the duo padded off to bed.

Tom eased onto the sofa, drained the last inch in Mum’s wine glass, and gazed around, listening to the gentle hum which pervaded the shelter, signifying that things were working. Survival was in progress.

They were lucky: he didn’t need Holly to point it out. He knew full well what the alternative was. Could he help it if sometimes he wished for it? Survivor’s Guilt—wasn’t that the term? Except it didn’t feel like guilt. He had plenty of other guilt anyway. No, this felt like a major fucking pain in the arse. The worst. The pinnacle. The nadir of humankind equalling the zenith of hopelessness.

At least you know you feel like that. You’re aware.

That’s positive. That’s the first step.

Whoop-de-fucking do. What’s the next step?

Get over it—that’s what Holly would say.

She hasn’t got a fucking clue.

He dutifully turned off the lights, went to the single communal bathroom, washed his face and brushed his teeth like a good boy, then towelled the dregs of water from his unkempt beard.

Living at home again, essentially. Twenty-one and under the family roof. Making nice and doing what’s expected—well, up to a point.

At least Mum’s doing your laundry.

He sniffed his T-shirt.

It’ll last the night. Not tomorrow, though.

Holly was right—we do have unbelievable luxury. We can do laundry, for fuck’s sake. Eat hot food. Not have to shit in a bucket.

His gaze flicked to the ceiling.

Unlike some.

He shivered.

He took a piss, flushed, then switched off the light and walked to his room.

Dad had said that doors should not be barricaded, and he’d not had locks installed. There was no telling what emergencies might befall them, and they should be ready to move around at a moment’s notice. Be rescued. Whatever.

If we need to be rescued from a nuclear shelter, things must have got pretty bad, huh? was what Tom had said—gracious and understanding as ever. What was he supposed to say—You mean I can’t even lock my door and have a wank to take my mind off the death of humanity??

Probably best not.

Moot anyway. He didn’t feel like it tonight. Holly has pissed him off too much.

If I walk past her room tomorrow and she’s whistling Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life, I’ll have to smash something. The problem is that almost everything here is mandatory for our survival. I’ll have to ask Dad whether he’s got any wine under twenty quid a bottle, then work out how to smash that without getting an earful from Mum.

God, I wish I could plug the amp in. Even for five minutes.

Why let me have it here if you won’t let me use it? You might as well have installed a glass roof with a painting of blue sky, happy birds, and pretty blossom drifting on the fucking breeze.

He ran his fingers pensively over the guitar, gently plucked each string, then set it on the stand that Mum and Dad had bought for his eighteenth.

See—give with one hand, take with the other. Maybe I should get Holly to petition them to let me use the amp? After all, she’s the one venturing that we live as normally as possible and wear our frown upside down. They can’t berate me for being fed up and then stop me from trying to be less fed up. It’s not fair.

‘God, I sound like a teenager. What a fucking mess.’ He slid under the cover.

‘"Yes, but an alive mess",’ he chirped quietly in his best Holly piss-take.

He pushed his head deep into the pillow and eyed the stark ceiling. His soul ached.

She can’t be right—can she? There can’t be a crumb of comfort amidst this shitshow?

Can there?

He turned off the light. The darkness was oppressive and portentous, as every night. Worse than a dungeon or a haunted house. Worse than a coffin—which he’d not seen the inside of. Not yet.

It was dumb to be afraid, in this safest of all places, especially when the worst event imaginable had already fucking taken place.

How could life go downhill? How could the apocalypse out-apocalypse itself?

It couldn’t.

Yet he still trembled like a five-year-old crouching under the kitchen table while the big boys ran around with pellet guns, yelling and laughing.

He wanted it all to stop. There was always a way to make that happen. The only thing missing was courage. Yet, he didn’t even have the courage to speak his mind and expose his darkest secret, so he’d never have the balls to do anything extreme.

He listened to his breathing. In… out. In… out.

Day Seven after the war, and you’re still processing oxygen, Tom Bradshaw.

Look on the bright side of life, huh?

The clouds churned, malevolent molten slate.

His steps were trance-like.

The first thing was the smell—a cocktail of burning, rotting, dusty, putrid, stomach-churning foulness.

Nothing was more than one storey high. It was nine-eleven replicated as far as the eye could see. Vehicles were strewn like toys, carcasses of metal. Concrete had been powdered, glass shattered then fused into grotesque lumps. Water ebbed feebly from a severed main. Flames licked at empty windows.

The silence was otherworldly. No buzz, no birds. No engines, no sirens, no footsteps. No clang, chatter, horn, drill, drone or yell.

The ground was still, no faint undulation from the Tube beneath his feet.

Surely there was life here? Perhaps those on the edge of the precipice of existence, their final breath not yet upon them. Close by, even, in one of the myriad crushed buildings. An office worker pinned beneath a joist, her chest filling with blood. A man who’d reached his pristine new supersaloon in the underground car park, now unconscious from the pain of having both legs severed and thankfully unable to witness his own end.

A million people wasting away as the radiation consumed them.

His feet sloughed along the buckled roadway.

Who lay untouched, like him? Where were the pockets of those who had resisted fate, the seeds of a new dawn? The city had shelters—that was certain.

And life down there?

He couldn’t imagine being able to cope. If his head hadn’t exploded when the blast swept through, it would have done under the pressure of close-quarters confinement.

Sleeping on a wafer-thin construct, cheek-by-jowl with other souls. Sleeping? A baby crying all night. Some fucker chattering away, failing to understand common decency. The guy with the missing hand moaning constantly. The shrewish woman crying at a subsistence level. The young lovers seeking out the darkest corner yet failing to mask the sounds of their intermittent screwing.

If that didn’t make him want to find a sliver of glass to rip across his wrists, what if he wound up in the same hellhole as Simon Wells? Five minutes in the pub, listening to another treatise on the benefits of road cycling, would be like a cherub’s song compared to enforced proximity, interspersed with the guy’s learned thoughts on the behaviour of the ruling powers who’d brought this circumstance upon them.

Simon would get it first—a rapid thrust through the sternum, followed by Tom’s own swift exit, a pointlessly delayed meeting with his maker—whatever misguided, cloud-residing, all-seeing fuckwit had deemed it necessary to subject the young man to a few more days misery, rather than having the decency to kill him outright in the city’s annihilation.

Indolently, Tom looked up from where his gaze had fallen on his dust-caked trainers as they pushed onwards.

In the middle of the street—or what remained of it—stood a column of white light.

His brow buckled.

The impossible, foreign entity would stop a sensible soul in his tracks. Tom’s steps continued, left over right. He cocked his head, tried to draw structure out of the formless pedestal of fuck-knows-what.

As his distance to the object shrank, the thing grew a height—under six feet. It crystallised a shape—wide at the top, slim where it met the tarmac. So wide at the top. A T-shape, almost.

But features? He stared, the ruined vista surrounding them now unimportant, expected, pedestrian.

Humanoid, yet with something that didn’t fit. The shimmering didn’t help, but he was sure there were flowing robes. At the top was a head, so at the bottom must be feet? At the side, though?

Wings?

Fuck.

He tried to focus, to throw contrast into this blob of white.

He moved ever closer, an automaton, a wind-up toy.

Yes, they were wings, jutting from the shoulder blades as expected. Expected? Only if this was an angel, and if angels were real, which they weren’t, so this couldn’t be one.

Except it was.

The wings undulated. It had a face—this thing which couldn’t be an angel because no such thing existed, although it did. It was female. Calm, attentive, striking.

It didn’t matter how close he was to it—there was no point trying to judge distance, or even examining whether he should still be walking—because he could see its features.

Her features.

So clear now, so familiar.

His eyes widened, body struck rigid as he gulped in a breath of air.

It woke him like he’d been hit by that pulverising hell-bringing blast wave. He startled himself with a gasp, opening his eyes to the room’s cold darkness.

Sweat leached into his T-shirt. He clenched his fists.

‘Get the fuck out of my head,’ he whispered through gritted teeth.

Pointless. She’d be there tomorrow, large as life this time, and for fuck knew how many more days.

Was death worse than this?

3

Holly rifled through the disappointing selection of garments in her plain pine wardrobe. As a change from jogging trousers, she chose jeans. While they were less comfortable, they lent a sorely needed air of normality: she never spent a week in joggers, not even on holiday.

She pulled them on, bloused her shirt, and grabbed the spartan makeup bag. Standing in front of the cheap mirror on the wardrobe door, she applied the minimum garb required to lift her spirits and give a veneer of presentability.

As she dabbed the hint of blusher, her hand fell still, musing on Tom’s laissez-faire, almost caveman approach to confinement and personal grooming. She sighed, without knowing why she bothered. He’d never change—the post-teenage teenager with an entire bag of chips on his broad shoulders.

Why couldn’t he see the merest sliver of hope? Why did he have to lash out at every opportunity—to make her the villain of the piece?

It’s not the real Tom, she told herself. None of us is the real ‘us’ at the moment. We’ll get past this. We have to. Nothing says that we’re the last four humans on Earth—whatever Tom thinks. The world has hunkered down before, survived before. Dad said the radiation will dissipate, and then society will rebuild. People will gather, talk, socialise.

She smiled. The joy of social interaction couldn’t return fast enough. People need people; it’s immutable.

Meanwhile, she had to make do with the hand she—they—had been dealt. Part of that was rationing of water. She’d argued—no, queried why restrictions were needed. Their store of bottled water would have made Oxfam proud, and they were doubly blessed that the shelter was built into a hillside adjacent to an underground spring. Tom didn’t seem to get this kind of thing—they had running water! In nuclear bunkers across the country, thousands of poor souls were brawling over bottles, or venturing out to seek puddles where irradiated rain had probably collected.

They had a flush toilet, for Christ’s sake! Never were four people so lucky—yet Tom treated it like the end of the world.

She chuckled at her poor analogy.

Yet, Dad had insisted they be as parsimonious as possible in their consumption of water, power, and supplies. The future was unpredictable, which meant showers every other day, and short ones. She ran fingers through her blonde, shoulder-length hair, trying to make it presentable. If the world was unpredictable, rescue could occur at any stage.

Equally, catastrophe might arrive without warning.

Either way, she’d want to meet the event with clean pants and decent hair.

Who really was out there? Had the warheads inflicted a scratch, an open scar, or a fatal wound?

Holly packed away the makeup, grabbed her phone, and sunk onto the edge of the bed. She glanced towards the door, turned her back, and unlocked the device.

She waited.

No bars of 5G appeared. No curves illuminated on the Wi-Fi fan. No notifications pinged.

Still, she opened her email, waited for no new messages to arrive, then closed the app.

She checked all four social media accounts. None loaded.

The definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting a different result. Except she wasn’t mad. Not yet. Just lonely.

One day, the internet would reboot, and her life would re-ignite. It hadn’t happened yesterday. It wasn’t today. It could be tomorrow. Unlikely, but it wouldn’t stop her checking. People were out there—they had to be. The alternative was unthinkable.

Pensively, she rubbed a fingertip on a corner of the phone’s case.

She opened the Photos app, thrust her index finger across the scroll bar, and the image stream whirred past. It slowed and stopped on a random image from some time past. It was a selfie—the odds being what they were.

She lingered, trying to place the event in her mind, then swiped forwards, forwards.

Her mouth curved up in recollection of the girly evening out.

She swiped on, skipping many images, resting on a few.

A shot of her with Nadine. She hit the Delete key. Three swipes forwards, and there was another. Delete. If the best of Holly’s life was behind her—and she refused to admit it was a possibility—then memories of good times were a lifeline for whatever the future held. Such memories were tarnished by the antics of that bitch Nadine, so the faster she was erased from Holly’s conscious, the better.

She scrolled on, through Christmas with the family, a legion of evenings out, work parties, trips to the beach, a rare shot of her with Tom, him pulling goofy cross-eyes—which made her smile…

Onwards through a better past, the antithesis of the present.

She stopped, finger hovering.

James.

How had this photo escaped the Delete spree of a few weeks ago?

It was a couple selfie, with him closer to the lens. She remembered the occasion. The fuck-up hadn’t happened by then. She still loved him, despite his faults. Then he torpedoed himself in the foot.

Her fingertip ran over his face. He was still cute. Plus, her hair looked very fine in that pose. Was it sensible to erase the last vestige of that ten months of her dating life? Was his failing really so unforgivable?

Yes. Yet…

Her stomach gurgled.

She glanced at the bedside clock: 09.12.

With a sigh, she locked the phone and checked her reflection in the mirror. Perhaps she should wear her hair across, like in the photo?

Who’d care? Not James, even if she wanted him back, which she didn’t. He’d been in London that day.

So he was dead.

A few weeks ago, she’d have delighted in that fact. Now? She didn’t know how she felt. Perhaps lost, adrift without company. All she had now were one sibling and two parents. They would have to do.

Hopefully, for only a few more days.

She left the bedroom.

Mum and Dad were nearing the bottom of their habitual bowls of muesli. Beside them lay two unmatched plastic cups containing an assortment of pills.

Tom, being a heathen, was munching through cornflakes. He offered a nod of greeting, a trickle of milk soaking into his face fuzz.

Holly longed to creep into his room one night and clipper him into respectability. It couldn’t be avoided or helped—the hint of maternal instinct in the older sister. He should be lucky that she gave a fuck—which balanced the fact that he appeared to give zero fucks about most things, especially now.

Someone—probably Mum—had set out Holly’s bowl, spoon, and—lovingly yet annoyingly in equal measure—the one pill.

Holly was twenty-three, independent, salaried and knew she had to take her fucking medicine. The consequences of not doing so were as clear as the spring water in the three drinking glasses. Even so, there was no point in telling Mum she needn’t have bothered. The woman was merely trying to do her part. How hard must it be for her down here? Mary seemed to sail on serenely like a swan, possibly relishing being hastily and recalled to her duties as housewife and mother. Yet, she couldn’t be entirely immune to the feeling of claustrophobia and calamity.

‘Did you sleep alright?’ Mum asked.

‘Not too bad.’ That was Holly’s catch-all, which covered everything from a very disturbed night to a decent slumber. If it was the latter, she didn’t want to admit to it in case the others had fared worse. Or perhaps they were all wielding the British stiff upper lip?

In fact, it had been the best night so far. It required the ideal amount of Chateau Expensive, minimal factors to explicitly rile her, and the sleeping pill taken at the appointed time. On the fifth night, she’d even had a dream, which was a welcome change from the first three nights plagued by nightmares.

She shook her head to dismiss the images which began to appear in her mind’s eye.

‘If you mix the lacto-free with the long-life, it makes the long-life taste less shit.’ Tom jabbed a finger at the two cartons on the table.

Dad sighed and shot his son a glare.

‘What?’ Tom replied. ‘Just saying.’

‘Do you want to pop out and see if you can find anything better? Maybe some brackish water, or an irradiated cow to milk?’

‘I only… I was just being helpful to Holls.’

‘Hmm,’ Dad replied obliquely.

‘Mixing is a good idea, David,’ Mum said. ‘We’ll run out of lacto-free first, but it was wonderful of you to notice that it lasts longer than regular semi-skim and is not as… different as long-life.’ She laid a hand on Tom’s. ‘He is as indebted to you as any of us. Aren’t you?’

He clattered his spoon into the empty bowl. ‘Of course.’

Holly poured the suggested blend over her