The one who’d been at the bus stop before, the thin one. “Met” wasn’t exactly the word for it. She was in the supermarket, and so was he. He’d stopped at the fish counter to admire the mackerel, all striped and shiny and neatly packed into their skins without a pucker or a ruck, and he noticed her at the next counter, buying salami. She seemed to do a lot of shopping. She was buying a pile of salami. There must be loads of people in her family. There were, he realized then. The smaller children were with her again, only they had multiplied. There were dozens of them. Well, four. Their hair was all soft and springy-looking and no-colored, but it hadn’t been combed, so it sat like tousled nests on their heads. Some of them had knitted cardigans on, and their shorts were long, for shorts, and very pale, as if they had been washed a lot. Three of them wore pink plastic sandals and one wore blue Wellingtons. The girl herself wore a sundress with a flouncy skirt and flip-flops, but it was cold in the supermarket because of the food, and Jake shivered just looking at her, even though he was wearing a thick sweater that one of his grandmothers had brought him back from a holiday and had a picture of a football stadium—unidentified—on it.
