Amber Warning by Sarah Butler

A band of persistent and heavy rain will move northeast across the country. The rain will be accompanied by strong southeasterly winds bringing difficult driving conditions with surface water and spray on the roads. Isolated flooding from small watercourses is also possible. The strongest winds will be along the coasts with gusts of 60-65 mph in places with disruption to transport, including ferry services, likely.

I.

With perhaps the risk of more persistent rain

Ulverston: Heavy Rain. 8°, feels like temperature 4°. Precipitation probability 90%. Visibility: Very Poor.

‘What’s the worst that could happen?’ Mike said, turning his head back towards Lou as he walked. He was wearing old leather boots, a pair of ripped jeans and a tired waxed jacket, the hood pulled up over his blond hair. City man turned country gent. The cloud was so low they could see only each other and a narrow patch of peat bog.

‘We could die.’ Hurrying to catch up with him, Lou slipped, her foot sinking into cold dark water which darted over the lip of her boot. ‘Fuck.’ Shefelt it seep into her sock, chilling her skin.

‘We’re not going to die; we’re in the Lake District,’ Mike said, still walking.

‘I’ve got a wet foot.’ She could feel her heart, thundering now beneath her rain-beaded coat, her not-quite-thick-enough jumper, her too-short T-shirt.

Mike laughed. ‘No one’s ever died of a wet foot.’

Lou glared at him and then looked to either side, straining her eyes in an attempt to see: nothing but the faint shape of a rock; clusters of grass jewelled with water; dark damp ground. Their shoes sank into the wet moss, two squelching rhythms, not quite in time.

‘We can’t see,’ she said, and heard her voice career upwards a little. ‘We haven’t got a map.’ She swallowed. Or a compass. Or food. Or water. They’d planned a two hour stroll, but they’d been gone three hours already; spent half of that wandering about in thick cloud. She wanted to be back at their tiny rented cottage with its smoky fire and chintzy curtains. She wanted a Amber Warning Sarah Butler Weatherfronts: Climate change and the stories we tell 7 book and a cup of tea and a packet of chocolate biscuits.

‘A map wouldn’t help in this lot anyway,’ Mike said.

‘So what? We call mountain rescue?’ They had no reception. She’d already checked her phone, its little symbol whirling at the top of the screen, looking for a signal.

‘It’s fine. It’ll clear.’ Mike was drawing ahead, his shape fading into the thick grey. ‘I’m pretty sure we just keep heading this way. There’s a road and a pub, that’s what Stu said: up onto the ridge, keep left down towards the forest, then you’ll hit the road and the pub’s half a mile from that.’

‘So are we left?’ Lou could feel sweat prickling her armpits, but she was cold at the same time. ‘Is this even a path?’ She felt like someone had blindfolded her and spun her around until she felt sick.

‘A pint of beer and a steak and kidney pie, that’s what I’m having.’ Mike drew away, walking more quickly across the boggy land, stretching his stride to move from one dry hump of grass to another. A hill loomed out of the cloud for a moment, a brief jagged outline. Then it disappeared, and the rain started to come down heavier.

They had both agreed – a weekend in the Lakes would do them good: get away from the house and all the jobs that needed doing; away from their computers and emails and job worries; they’d be able to relax, to talk about things that needed talking about.

‘We’re lost in a fucking bog and you’re thinking about beer.’

She saw Mike’s shoulders lift into a hunch.

‘It’s three o’clock,’ she said. ‘This rain’s getting worse. And we’re probably just walking round in circles.’

He stopped abruptly and Lou nearly crashed into him; she backed away to a firm bit of ground.

‘What do you want me to do?’ he said. ‘Panic?’

‘I’m just trying to say, I’m scared. It’ll be dark in an hour and a half, and we don’t know where we are. We should have set off earlier.’

Mike shook his head. ‘Don’t start.’

The rain had found a route in around the collar of her jacket, she could feel it cold on her neck.

‘I’m just saying, if we hadn’t spent all that time faffing about –’

‘So it’s my fault then?’ He gestured to the cloud, the rain, the wet ground.

She wanted to go home. That’s all she wanted. Four walls, a roof, a fire, a cup of tea; nothing complicated.

‘You said we didn’t need a map.’ Lou folded her arms, squeezed herself tight. She willed the cloud to clear but it looked thicker than ever and the rain was getting heavier, making pock marks in the puddles.

‘I told you, a map’s no use in a cloud anyway.’

‘But we don’t know where we are. We’ve no reception. We’re fucked.’ She felt the tears crowding up from her chest and tried to swallow them away.

Mike lifted both arms and then dropped them again. ‘I don’t know what you want, Lou.’ She wanted to be safe, warm; she wanted to know where she was.

‘And the thing I really don’t understand is how come I’m the one who always has to fix everything?’ Mike went on. ‘The leak under the sink. The car. Your laptop. Your career crisis.’ He counted them off, releasing a finger for each thing. Only his little finger remained bent into his palm. Lou looked at it and thought, our relationship. They’d drunk two bottles of wine the night before, but had talked about nothing but TV programmes and their friends new babies; they’d fallen asleep without even trying to have sex.

Mike sighed. ‘I’m doing my best, Lou. I’m trying to be positive.’

‘We need to think.’ As a kid, her mum had told her to stay still if she ever got lost and the one time it had happened she’d done just that: a forest of unknown legs, and then a face she didn’t know, are you lost, love? A woman trying to take her hand and Lou saying no, I have to stay here, I have to stand still. It had worked. Her mother’s legs breaking through and her arms reaching down and scooping Lou up, hugging her long and tight, saying, you’re safe, it’s all right darling, you’re safe. She wished they could just stand still and that someone would come and find them.

‘I’m cold, let’s walk.’ Mike hugged himself and twisted from left to right. Lou had a sudden image of him lying on the wet ground, curled up like a child, his face almost blue from the cold, and the thought of it made her heart skitter against her ribs.

‘We need to go down, yes?’ she said.

Mike raised his eyebrows.

‘And right now we don’t know which way’s down?’

Mike shrugged.

‘So.’ Lou took a shaky breath and stared into the dense white of the cloud. She could hear the whisper of rain on the grass, and below that, a faint sound of running water. ‘So we look for a river,’ she said.

‘A river?’

‘Water goes down.’ Lou pulled her shoulders back a little and tried to ignore the icy wind which felt like it was reaching into her bones. ‘If we go down we can get out of the cloud, and Stu said to go down, didn’t he?’

Mike nodded. ‘He did.’ ‘So come on.’ Lou reached out her hand. Mike took it, their fingers interlacing, cold and wet against each other, and they set off step by awkward step, over a landscape neither of them knew.

II.

Some heavy bursts of rain possible

Norwich: Heavy Rain. 11°, feels like temperature 7°. Precipitation probability 90%. Visibility: Moderate.

Rosie’s sister always emailed before she phoned – it was part of their ritual: working out the time difference; checking they’d both be in. Rosie would hover in the hallway a good ten minutes before their agreed time and pounce on the phone as soon as it rang.

Today though, there was no prior arrangement, and Rosie almost didn’t pick up – the only other people who called her landline were trying to sell her double glazing or solar panels. She had double glazing, and her house didn’t get enough sun for panels, but that didn’t stop them from phoning. ‘

He’s gone.’ Hannah’s voice, crackly with tears. ‘Rosie, he’s gone. He’s left me.’

Iain. Hannah had met him on the internet the year the two sisters lived together in a tiny attic apartment in London, drinking gin and tonics on their minuscule balcony and sharing job worries, relationship worries, money worries. Hannah had met Iain. Rosie had met Jon; which hadn’t lasted either, but at least there were no marriage vows or kids to complicate things even further.

Rosie wanted to crawl into the phone receiver; she wanted to wrap her arms around her sister, smell her shampoo, feel her hair tickle her face. She moved her hand over the lamp that sat next to the phone. It was shaped like an egg. ‘What happened?’ she asked.

‘What didn’t happen?’ Hannah sounded tired. She wouldn’t have slept. Rosie pictured her in the house she’d only ever seen in photos, pacing the rooms, trying not to wake Billy. ‘It’s been bad,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

‘And Billy?’

‘He’s still asleep.’ Hannah drew in a shaky breath. ‘He’s going to wake up and his dad’s not here. That kind of thing screws people up.’

‘He’s got you,’ Rosie said. ‘He’ll be fine.’

‘I’m a mess. He shouldn’t see me being a mess.’

Rosie needed to be there. She needed to be able to get on her bike and cycle to her sister’s house, give her a hug, make her cups of tea, sandwiches, talk through what she’d tell Billy and then be there for her nephew to say all the things he wouldn’t say to his mother. Except she’d only met him twice and he was eight already; even if she was there he wouldn’t talk to her: she was a stranger.

Hannah started crying. Rosie lowered herself onto the hallway carpet, her back against the wall and listened to her sister sniff and gasp for breath, to the little animal moans and the rustle of a tissue. It had been raining all day. Rosie could see a slice of dull grey sky through the glass above the front door; could hear the tap tap of the rain, and the gurgle-rush of the gutter.

‘I’m sorry,’ Rosie said. ‘Hannah, I’m so sorry.’ She listened to her sister blow her nose, over there on the far side of the world, and thought, for a soaring moment, that now Hannah might come home. Now they might be able to be sisters again; proper sisters.

‘It’s raining,’ Rosie said.

‘Yeah?’ There was a hint of homesickness in Hannah’s voice.

‘The leaves are almost gone,’ Rosie said, then thought perhaps that was too depressing a thing to say.

‘A good season for mourning,’ Hannah said.

Rosie looked at the hallway mat – rough brown, dotted with bits of dry mud; a tiny yellow leaf; a dropped receipt. ‘Do you think you two might sort it out?’ she asked. Hannah said nothing. Rosie thought about her bank account. She had a couple of thousand saved, and three weeks leave still unplanned for. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine herself walking through Heathrow – fluorescent lights and polished floors, glistening shop fronts, digital departure boards. But she’d made a promise; she’d said she wouldn’t.

‘I miss you,’ she whispered into the receiver.

She heard Hannah sniff and swallow, and pictured her sister nodding with her face scrunched tight.

Rosie had made the decision years ago. Too much information, she’d joked to Hannah at the time, once you know what all those emissions are doing, you can’t just ignore it. That was before Iain; before Hannah had sat at Rosie’s narrow dining table, toying with a glass of wine, and said she was moving to Australia. Rosie had laughed, because it seemed impossible, ridiculous, unfair. I’ll come back and visit, Hannah had said; we’ll see each other.

‘It’s like everything’s fallen away,’ Hannah said; her voice sounded distant. ‘All those plans we had. For Billy. For the house. For us. We’re supposed to be going on holiday next month. Jamaica. It’s all booked.’ She paused. ‘Maybe you could –’

Rosie held her breath. Maybe she could. It had been easy enough the first few years, when Rosie had hardly enough money for rent never mind flights to Melbourne. Hannah did come back, once a year, and each time it was like they’d never been apart. These days it was more complicated – Rosie had a good job, money in the bank and no commitments; Hannah had a family, an extension, marriage problems.

‘No, of course,’ Hannah said. ‘I’m sorry Rosie, I just –’

Rosie dug her fingernails into the hard brown hallway carpet. She wanted to tell Hannah that she dreamt of her as you might dream of a dead person, howling dreams full of grief that left her wrung out, the sense of loss clawing at her insides.

The rain was coming down harder now, hammering at the house, the wind rattling the windows and the letterbox. It had been Jon who’d started it – all those books and websites about carbon emissions and drought in subSaharan Africa; climate change workshops and late night discussions; and Rosie’s rising sense that this was real and important and that she had no choice but to do something. They’d promised each other they’d never fly again. It was almost as though they were getting engaged – a giddy sense of power and commitment. And then Jon had gone – the way all of Rosie’s men seemed to – but climate change wasn’t going anywhere, and so she’d kept her promise, even when Hannah moved to Melbourne; even when Billy was born. And Hannah said she understood.

‘It’s going to be all right, Hannah,’ Rosie said.

‘I want to die.’

Rosie heard her own breath come in a gasp. ‘You do not want to die.’

‘It’s all gone.’

Rosie shook her head, pressing her lips together. ‘It’s not gone,’ she said, keeping her voice steady. ‘It’s just changed. It’s just different.’

‘It’s over.’

Rosie watched the rain shooting against the windows; listened to the wind trying to break into the hallway. ‘Do you remember that time you wanted to get a tattoo?’ she said.

‘What?’

‘You wanted a tattoo on your shoulder.’

Hannah let out a quiet huff of a laugh. ‘Every end is a new beginning. Wise before my time, is that what you’re saying?’

‘I was going to have the same one.’

‘And we chickened out at the last minute because Mum would have thrashed us into next week.’

‘I was glad,’ Rosie said. ‘I was scared of it hurting.’

‘Me too.’

Rosie cradled the plastic receiver in both hands and listened to the coming storm. She wished they had had the tattoos: black cursive letters along the line of their shoulder blades, two mirror images on either side of the world.

III.

Further showers, some heavy, are expected

Brighton: Light shower day. 13°, feels like temperature 9°. Precipitation probability 50%. Visibility: Good.

To everyone,

Snails come out when it rains.

DO NOT STAND ON THE SNAILS.

Thank you,

Katie

Katie examined her handiwork. She had written ‘to everyone’ because if she’d listed all the people in the block, there wouldn’t have been enough room for the important bit, plus she didn’t know how to spell everyone’s name. Her plan was to Blu-tack the letter to the front door. Her dad would probably get cross because of the paint, but she’d explain how important it was and even if he didn’t agree the damage would already be done and so he’d let her leave it up.

It had been raining since lunchtime. On the way to the funeral, Katie and her little brother Jon had sat in the back of the car and played raindrop races. Each had to pick a drop at one side of the window and then see which one reached the other side first. Sometimes the two drops joined together, which made it a draw. They did the whole game silently, because you are not supposed to talk at funerals, or in the car on the way to funerals, and so they kept score on their fingers and mouthed ‘mine!’ ‘yours!’ to each other, not letting their breath turn into sound.

Katie sucked her red felt tip pen and screwed up her face, thinking. After the part that said DO NOT STAND ON THE SNAILS, she added: They will die and they have done nothing wrong. There was a bit of her telling her not to write this because of the funeral, but then another part of her thought that that was exactly why she should write it. Death is with us all, that’s what the man in the church had said, and then something about a valley of shadows. She’d heard Mrs Flynn from across the road tell Katie’s mum the kids were too young to be at a funeral. Katie’s mum had said they had to learn about death sooner or later, but Katie knew it was because the girl who usually babysat had the flu.

They hadn’t spoken on the way back from the funeral either, but then they went up to Mr Moran’s flat and everyone was talking, loud enough to make your ears hurt. Talking, and eating little sandwiches cut into triangles and drinking wine out of plastic cups. It was weird being in Mr Moran’s flat because a) Mr Moran was dead and b) it was exactly the same as their flat – the same shaped rooms in the same order – but totally different: full of old man furniture and dusty black and white pictures of people who were probably dead as well.

There had been only four children there: Katie and Jon, and Danny and Zac – the twins from the ground floor who had just started secondary school and loved to torment Katie with tales of what lay in wait for her: teachers and toilets and cross country and exams.

They had all clustered by the front window of Mr Moran’s living room and watched the rain splatter the glass and dance off the car roofs below. Katie declared that she thought it was cool how the water had evaporated out of the ocean – which they would have been able to see if it hadn’t been raining – and gone up into the clouds; was now falling onto their block, and then would run back towards the sea down the drain outside. Zac rolled his eyes and called her a swot. But it’s all connected, she’d insisted, isn’t that cool? He’d snorted and said the only good thing about rain was stamping in puddles and skidding in wet mud.

‘Where’s Mr Moran?’ Jon asked.

Katie pointed at the grey sky and said, ‘Up there, I think. In heaven.’

‘Duh,’ Danny said. ‘They’ve burnt him.’

Katie glared at him.

‘They have. In the crema-’ He hesitated, ‘the fire thing. You get burnt, or you get buried. My dad says heaven’s something people made up to make themselves feel better.’

Jon slipped his tiny hand into Katie’s.

‘You shouldn’t try and scare small people,’ Katie said sternly.

Danny shrugged.‘I’m just saying the truth.’

Then the wind started howling, rattling the windows and whipping the leaves into wild dances on the street below; Zac and Danny started making motorbike noises and running in circles with their arms stretched out and their mum came and took them both home.

*

Katie carried her letter and the Blu-tack to the communal front door and stuck it as high as she could reach, squishing her finger into the corners so it would stay on. She wished she’d put some glitter round the edge – and maybe drawn a picture of a snail as well, but it felt too late now. She should have said something when everyone was up in Mr Moran’s flat; made an announcement. Except the problem with adults is that they weren’t very good at listening. Every time it rained she told them to be careful, and every time she found dead snails on the path up to the house – cracked shells and squashed, slimy bodies. She had tried making a line down the path with bits of gravel from the garden: snails on the left, humans on the right – like they did with bikes and people in the park – but neither the snails nor the humans took any notice and pretty soon her neat gravel line had disintegrated. It was like neither of them cared, she thought, like the snails didn’t care about dying and the humans didn’t care about killing them. Still – she stood back to admire her letter – Miss Hanley said you had to try your best and keep trying your best even if you weren’t sure it was going to make any difference; she said that that was the only option available.

IV.

It is likely to remain unsettled

Aberystwyth: Heavy shower day. 10°, feels like temperature 7°. Precipitation probability 70%. Visibility: Moderate.

It was blowing so hard Anton could barely keep hold of the balloon; had to press it against his chest while he checked the box was securely attached, and then hold it there as he waited for the numbers on the tiny plastic alarm clock to reach 11:00.

He wasn’t an outdoor kind of a person. He had tried to compose an email to that effect, without saying no, I won’t do it. But Professor Shaw hadn’t seemed to notice, and had simply sent the name of a town, an address where Anton could pick up the equipment, a map and a set of instructions. So here he was, sat on the crest of a hill above the town whose name he had no idea how to pronounce. Scrubby grass. Scattered stones. Sheep droppings. At the airport train station he’d pointed to the name in his notebook and asked for a single ticket. It was a nice enough place, hugging a curved stretch of coastline and then reaching towards the lower slopes of the surrounding hills. The buildings were grey and severe looking, but with an elegance he appreciated.

He thought of Galati, the wide Danube creeping through the city, the constant fumes from the steel factory, his parents’ apartment block with its view of another apartment block.

Staying wasn’t an option. He’d tried to explain it to his mother but she just cried and threw up her hands and wouldn’t listen. There’s nothing for me here, he said, but she took it the wrong way, saying, I’m here! Your father’s here! We are nothing?

At 10:59, Anton loosened his grip on the balloon so only his fingertips pressed into its surface. He waited, glanced into the murky sky, and then let go. The orange globe bucked from side to side, as if trying to free itself from the radiosonde, as if it couldn’t quite decide which way to go. He watched it rise and rise, its path smoother the higher it got, until it was a tiny orange dot in amongst the clouds; until it was gone. He spent the next couple of hours setting up his camp, waiting for a lull in the wind before he attempted to set up the tent – a befuddling arrangement of yellow fabric and thin poles which he wasn’t entirely sure he’d got right. When he’d run out of pegs and decided it would have to do, he sat down and unwrapped one of the big bars of chocolate he’d bought near the train station.

‘Hi there!’

Anton looked up to see a young woman in a red anorak striding across the field towards him. He wanted to slip inside the tent, pretend he hadn’t heard her, but she was waving now. She’d seen him look up, and so there was nothing to do except wave back.

‘Camping?’ she said, eyeing his tent whose open door was flapping in the rising wind.

‘Field campaign,’ Anton said, aware of his accent. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.

The woman frowned and looked around. ‘Isn’t that an army thing?’

‘It is for balloons,’ he said, pointing at the pack of orange balloons and the canister of helium he would use to inflate them. ‘To measure weather.’

The woman’s forehead smoothed out. ‘Serious?’

He was serious. Corina was always telling him so. I love it, she said, I love that you care about tornadoes and cyclones, and all that big stuff. He’d shown her some data he was working on once and she had leafed through the printed pages of numbers and laughed. What is this? He had tried to explain – about clouds, about ice particles, about rime-splinters, about trying to find a model that could work out what was happening up there. He had told her that when he thought about the earth he thought about the surface – where they were – and then about this grid of almost-cubes reaching up and up and up into the atmosphere. She had tried to listen. She had tried to understand.

‘We send up every three hours,’ he said to the woman. ‘To collect the data.’

‘Can I watch?’

He wanted her to go away. He didn’t like people watching him work; it made his fingers feel thick and clumsy. But he shrugged, and the woman sat down next to him.

‘I’m Natalie, by the way,’ she said, reaching out a hand.

He took it, briefly, and thought he should offer her some chocolate.

‘It’s not really the weather for it, is it?’ She had her knees hugged to her chest, the wind dancing her hair against her cheek. He saw she had dark brown eyes, the colour of rich soil. ‘I guess that’s what you want though, weather,’ she said. ‘My dad used to say that – there’s a lot of weather on the way.’

‘There is always weather,’ Anton said.

‘I know, but – ’ She shook her head. ‘Never mind.’

*

Yesterday, he had been at his parents’ flat, enough food for twenty people crowded onto the table, and just the three of them sat around it, none of them inclined to eat.

‘Why do you care so much about this weather?’ his mother had asked.

Anton had turned to his father, a scientist himself, by training at least, but he had simply shrugged and said, ‘She is upset. You are our only son.’

‘What is so important about the weather?’ his mother kept on. ‘Why is the rain, and the clouds, more important than family?’

‘It’s my job.’ It was more than his job, but he didn’t know how to explain it to her, and she wasn’t listening, she was just talking. ‘It’s important,’ he tried. ‘For the future. Things are changing. We need to understand what’s happening.’

‘The future.’ She almost spat the words at him. ‘And what is the future with my son gone, and no grandchild?’ She glared at him. ‘That poor girl. Two years you string her along and then there’s the weather job and you drop her, you go.’

Corina had cried too, but said she understood. She had a sick father and a wayward sister; she was tied. And he didn’t want to be tied any more. This was his break. This was his new start. He might be sitting in a muddy field in a country called Wales, but that was temporary, the rest of it – the new job, the cloud chamber, the conferences, the discoveries, the respect – was just around the corner.

*

The woman, Natalie, sniffed. ‘You can smell the rain coming,’ she said.

‘That’s ozone.’ She frowned, then said, ‘The Ozone Layer,’ as if she was talking to herself. ‘Have we finished ruining that now?’

Anton laughed as he tied the small white radiosonde with the antennas and sensors sticking out from its sides underneath the next balloon. ‘Have we finished ruining that now,’ he repeated under his breath, nodding. ‘That is good.’ He fixed the balloon to the helium canister and turned the valve until it hissed. The balloon slowly swelled between his hands.

‘You ever inhaled that stuff?’ Natalie asked, and then put a squeaky voice on, ‘My name is Natalie! What’s your name?’

He smiled to himself, but when he looked up she was staring at him like it was his turn to speak. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Anton. I’m Anton.’

‘And what kind of data do you get?’

The balloon bucked against his stomach. He turned off the valve and eased the plastic free.

‘Temperature, pressure, humidity, wind velocity.’

‘All the way up?’

‘Exactly.’

‘Why?’

Anton checked the radiosonde was securely attached. He looked out over the town towards the white breakers drawing lines across the sea and the distant rain starting to blur the hills around them. ‘We need to know what’s happening,’ he said. ‘We can work out how things operate, and then we can predict how things will change.’

‘You’re a fortune teller?’ She laughed.

Anton swallowed back his irritation. ‘We collect data, we make models, we test the models.’

‘You guess?’

‘Not guess.’

‘You make an educated guess?’

*

What will happen to us? Corina had asked him, the two of them lying in bed together, her tracing a finger over his chest. What he should have said was, we’re over; I’m moving on; the weight of evidence suggests I’m not coming back. Instead, he’d put his palm against her cheek and said, I don’t know.

*

‘I almost didn’t come,’ he said to the woman, Natalie.

‘Sorry?’ She frowned.

‘To here. To the UK.’ He had stood in the airport with his suitcase and watched the digital clock on the departure board click through its numbers. He wanted this, he’d told himself, he had worked for this, planned for this, fought for this. But he stood and watched the departure time get closer and closer and thought that he was risking everything for something he might not like, that might not work out.

‘I almost missed my flight,’ he said.

‘God, I always do that. My dad calls me Little Miss Last Minute.’

He’d run in the end, his shoes squeaking against the polished airport floor; arrived at the gate sweating and out of breath and almost too late to board.

‘I’m not very good with not knowing what will happen,’ he said, and then pressed his mouth shut because he hadn’t meant to say such a thing.

Natalie looked at him for a moment, and then said, ‘Nobody is.’ She pulled herself to her feet and held out her arms. ‘Can I let it go?’

It was against protocol. Anton scanned the field, as if Professor Shaw might pop up from behind the stone wall, finger wagging. The rain had reached them, soaking Natalie’s hair against her scalp, tap-tapping on the tiny yellow tent.

‘I’ll do it properly,’ she said. ‘I promise. I’ll do exactly what you tell me to do. I’d like it – to be part of your experiment, to be the one who set this one off to collect its data.’ She smiled, and Anton found himself smiling back; found himself holding the balloon out towards her. Her hands butted up against his as she took hold of it.

‘We have to wait until 14:00 exactly,’ Anton said.

Natalie nodded and then looked at him expectantly. The rain intensified, drumming an unsteady rhythm on the balloon’s surface.

‘You won’t let go until 14:00?’ Anton said.

‘I promise,’ she whispered. Anton slowly released his grip, his hands sliding over the wet plastic. He took a small step backwards. Natalie held the balloon confidently.

‘One more minute,’ Anton said, ‘And then lift your arms, hold it steady and then let it go.’

At 14:00, Natalie did as he instructed. The balloon hesitated for a moment, then caught the breeze and was up and away, rocking from side to side as it rose.

Natalie stood with her head tipped back, watching it.

‘They put cameras on some of them,’ he told her. He’d seen footage from one – starting with blurred images of the ground, of a man’s face, of nearby trees, and then rising quickly, a set of fields, a small town, the view widening and broadening to take in mountains, a lake, clouds. And then up and up and up, the earth getting smaller and less detailed, the sun brighter and fiercer, until you could see the curvature of the earth, the clouds like scrunched tissues scattered across it.

‘We’d be in the pictures,’ she said.

‘There’s no camera on that one.’

‘Yes, but imagine if it could see us,’ she said, still looking up. ‘Natalie and Anton standing on a hill in Wales.’

‘Getting smaller and smaller,’ Anton said.

‘Like dolls.’

‘Like ants.’

‘Until we disappear,’ Natalie said.

Anton swallowed. ‘Until we disappear.’

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