The Rain (15 page)

I stood there, holding the flowers.

‘Ruby, I don’t think you should go in that room,’ said Simon.

That was good; I didn’t want to go in that room.

‘I’ll just put them outside the bedroom door,’ I said.

I didn’t move.

‘You don’t have to go up there if you don’t want to,’ said Simon. ‘I could do it.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to.’

I didn’t move.

‘Do you want me to come with you?’ he asked.

I nodded. I felt like I’d felt when we were going to cross the High Street; like a small person.

I followed him up the stairs with the flowers. The smell got worse every step you took. I laid them down by the door and we stood there, mouth-breathing.

This random thought about a kid I knew, a kid in school we laughed at a bit for doing that, drifted into my head. Then came this other thought that really me and Simon must look like we were
shocked, that we had our mouths open in amazement, which was about right. Then came another thought that maybe this was what the world was like for that kid, shocking. Or that it all stank or
something. And I felt bad for having these thoughts, all these wrong, random thoughts, but they came into my head because I wanted to think them more than I wanted to think about my mother. I did
not want to think about my mother.

‘Should we pray or something?’ I asked.

There was a hundred-year pause before he replied.

‘I can’t,’ said Simon.

There was another hundred-year pause. In it, I tried to think something nice about God or heaven . . . but my brain felt as numb as my heart.

‘Nor can I,’ I said.

We went back down to the kitchen. We got all the food out and we actually did eat a little, picking at the kind of junk that normally tastes delicious, the kind you’d
cram your face with until you felt sick . . . but I already felt sick, and that food tasted of nothing but thirst and death.

‘We can’t bury them,’ said Simon, suddenly, his face grim.

We hadn’t even been talking about ‘them’, but we had been thinking about them. That is to say, I wasn’t – but I was, if you know what I mean. Every thought I had
– like why wouldn’t the kitchen tap stop dripping, like would I ever be able to have a shower again, like how long would the supplies of babywipes last, like whether I’d end up
with crusty dreadlocks from not washing my hair – every non-‘them’ thought I had was about
them
.

‘I would like to,’ said Simon, ‘but I don’t know whether it’s safe; you know – to dig.’

I had a cry then. Sitting at that table, I cried.

‘I’m so sorry, Ru. I’m so sorry,’ Simon kept saying.

‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. I’d never said that before, not once.

I knew what was coming.

Basically, I never wanted to leave the house again. I wanted to curl up, eat junk and wait for the whole thing to be not happening – so I didn’t say a word about it: not about what
had happened, not about what would happen. Not about what we should do, about what we could do, about what on earth we were supposed to do.

After I’d cried in the kitchen, we went into the sitting room and closed the curtains and slept for a while. Or I did. When I woke up, Simon was still sitting there in the same place, and
it was still the same day and it was still the morning, not even the afternoon.

As soon as I woke, my hands twitched and – I swear – all on their own they reached for the laptop.

‘I checked everything again,’ said Simon, shaking his head.

I put the laptop down. This time the pause was a thousand years long.

In it, I felt as if Simon was watching me and waiting for me to say something, and I knew if I did it would be the start of talking about things I didn’t even want to think about. I could
have gone on like that for days and weeks, ignoring even the smell; the smell that you noticed even though you’d think you might get used to it and not notice it any more. I could do that, be
the Ostrich Queen of the Universe about things I didn’t want to think about. Revision, for example. Only where normally it’d be Simon or my mum that finally brought stuff up, this time
my own body was going to have something to say about it, because we were going to run out of stuff to drink.

The thing is, when we emptied out our haul on the kitchen table, there was nothing to drink. There was the colas and one carton of long-life milk. And the last festering, grimy inch of water in
the flower bucket, which I would rather die than – I won’t say that again. Ever. Unless I truly mean it.

I slouched out to the kitchen and got myself a cola. The last cola. I got my toothbrush and the toothpaste from the front room and slouched back into the sitting room.

Simon shook his head a little, pursing his lips at me, as I cleaned my teeth with little precious sips of cola, spitting out into the empty bottle that the cola before the last cola had been in.
In the old days (the day before the day before the day before yesterday), that head-shake would have been the start of a yee-haa and a half. Yes, well, maybe I’d care about my teeth a bit
more if I didn’t have to wear these train tracks and if you’d just let me get them whitened, etc.

Instead I just smiled back a tiny bit – nervously; I knew what was coming.

Well, not the specific thing that Simon was about to say, which was hideous and appalling.

‘Did you know,’ he said, ‘that you can drink your own urine?’

‘That’s disgusting,’ I said, spitting toothpaste froth into the empty cola bottle.

‘No, really,’ he said, ‘you can. It’s just not recommended.’

I wondered how come Simon would know such a thing, but wee-drinking is probably exactly the kind of thing birdwatchers know about, in case they get thirsty on a long stake-out in a bird hide.
‘The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds does not recommend . . .’

I gulped my cola. I caved. ‘What are we going to do?’ I asked.

‘What do you think we need to do?’

‘Get water,’ I said, because I had no choice. It sounded so simple.

‘Yes,’ said Simon. ‘Where from?’

It felt like a massive trick question. Also not. It felt like . . . like he was nudging me towards what I didn’t want to do more than anything, which was to think.

‘I dunno,’ I said – i.e. I don’t want to think about it.

Simon, he just looked at me, waiting.

‘I don’t wanna go to another supermarket,’ I said.

He nodded.

‘And anyway there’s no point. Because all the good stuff has gone anyway.’

I stopped there. I drained my bottle of cola. I couldn’t help myself; I burped.

‘Pardon me,’ I said.

‘I do, Ruby. Always, for everything,’ said Simon.

The room filled with a sticky toffee ooze of emotion. There was another of those pauses we’d been having; this one was shorter – maybe only fifty years – but it was long enough
for me to think NO NO NO NO NO NO. PLEASE don’t start saying stuff because I NO NO NO NO NO NO cannot bear to be hearing stuff. It was like when your grandma has had too much sherry and goes
on about how much she loves you (and just so hopes you’ll be OK because it was a terrible thing, your parents splitting up), or when your dad has had too much wine and goes on about how much
he loves you (and never would have abandoned you, but your mother had made her decision) (conveniently forgetting to mention that it was the discovery of HIS secret “love child”,
brother-brat Dan . . . beloved . . . that admittedly might have kind of forced her to make that decision) or when your best friend gets trashed and wants to talk deep-and-meaningful (and just so
isn’t sure that Caspar is really right for you) . . . and they get all gushy and you just want . . . to not be deep-and-meaningful. NO NO NO NO NO.

‘Well . . . eventually,’ said Simon, and grinned. ‘So what are we gonna do, Ru?’

‘Get stuff from other places,’ I said.

‘Like?’ said Simon.

Stop it, just stop it, I thought.

‘Like other people’s houses,’ I said.

I burped again, deliberately. It was all I had left – to show I wasn’t freaked and to keep the NO NO NO NO NO wall of shut-up strong.

There, I’ve said what you wanted me to say, I thought . . . but for half a second of a second I thought he was going to say no, that he’d come up with another plan . . . that
although he, like me, hadn’t seen any of our neighbours since Day One, he was sure they were all fine and no way could we just go busting into other people’s homes.

‘Good thinking, Ru,’ he said. ‘I think that’s the best thing we can do right now.’

So that was it, then. Without actually saying the words, we had both admitted – what? That a lot of people, and maybe even most people, must be dead. Because all our neighbours were . . .
and why should our road be any different to any other road? And we’d admitted that we were desperate and didn’t know what else to do, without actually saying that either.

‘But we’ll knock first, right?’ I asked, feeling utter dread about the whole thing. ‘You know, because maybe there’ll be people at home . . .’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Simon, and he went off to get the crowbar from the shed.

For what happened next, I blame myself.

Simon did say I could stay home, and I did think about it. ‘You can’t leave me,’ I said.

We got all togged up all over again (about which I didn’t say a word, even though it was blazing hot and sunny). We stepped out into a kind of silence. That was the most shocking thing.
While we’d been inside the house, the car alarms had been stopping, one by one. To begin with, there’d just been this yowling chorus of them – most far from us, but carrying, with
the air so still and no wind to beat them back or other noise to fight them. When they started dying off, it got so’s you could hear the individual ones: a fast, high-pitched spaceship
weep-weep-weep-weep-weep
; a deep
honk-honk-honk
that came in a pattern, stopping then starting again; a
woop-woop
,
woop-woop
that sounded like an American police
car. I got to know a whole bunch of those alarms, all of them different – and all of them trying to remind you of what had happened, and that there was a supermarket and a car park and a town
full of dead bodies.

It’s not like you ever give any thought to what a town sounds like – you don’t; why would you? – until it stops sounding like a town. When we went outside there was no
people noise whatsoever. There was just birdsong, loud like you never hear it.

A second later, when the gate clanked shut, there was another sound, which was dogs barking and whining. Dogs barking and whining inside houses. I heard the howling of the terrier that lived at
the end of the terrace; I could see Mrs Wallis’s grumpy shih-tzus, Mimi and Clarence, at the sitting-room window, a low line of nose-slime smeared on the glass where they had been running
back and forth on the windowsill, yapping. Her Siamese cat was upstairs, calmly watching us from the bedroom window. (She was called Ruby, which freaked me out when she went AWOL at night and Mrs
Wallis wandered up and down the street going, ‘Ruuuu-by! Ruuuu-by!’) You couldn’t see Whitby, the golden retriever at the corner house, but you could hear his big boomy bark
somewhere inside.

What you could not hear – or see – was any of their owners.

The part of me that knew their owners were dead wanted to say to Simon, ‘Stop, let’s rescue the poor pets!’ But I wanted to believe those people were still alive, that even if
they weren’t there right now they’d come home and be really upset if their pets were gone, so I said nothing.

We walked on, rucksacks on our backs. I felt like a criminal and we hadn’t even done anything yet. I said I didn’t want to go in our neighbours’ houses; I didn’t want to
go in any house that belonged to anyone I knew, not even people I didn’t
know
know, but just knew from seeing them about. That pretty much ruled out the whole of our road. There were
other houses we could go to, down the town end of our road, but I didn’t want to go there; I didn’t want to go anywhere close to the shops, where there might be other people about
– people going crazy, people with guns. So we went the other way.

Simon stopped outside a house towards the end of our road.

I shook my head. ‘Not this one,’ I said.

I didn’t know the people there at all, but I could picture them: this un-Dartbridge-like couple with smart suits, shiny cars and no kids. So we headed off our road, up another road. He
stopped outside the next house. I didn’t know who lived there. There was no car outside; no dog barked, no cat watched. I’d run out of reasons to say no.

We went up to the front door. Simon knocked.

We stood for a while, the afternoon heat baking down on us. Simon knocked again. No one came.

Simon got the crowbar out of his rucksack, put on a pair of super-tough gardening gloves.

‘Can’t we just call them first?’ I whispered. I was so worried there would be someone in that house. Someone alive. Or dying, but alive. ‘I mean, they might be in. They
might just be scared.’

‘OK, Ru,’ said Simon.

He bent his head down, lifted the letterbox and shouted.

‘
Hello?
’

When there was no answer, he gripped the crowbar.

‘Once more?’ I said.

Simon bent his head down to the letterbox and opened it. He peered in.

‘
Hello?!
We’re neighbours!’ he called.

No reply.

He looked at me; I nodded. He smashed the glass in the door.

That smash; it was so loud. It felt like the whole of Dartbridge would hear it.

‘If someone comes,’ he said, ‘you run home.’

It seemed a little late to be saying that kind of stuff, but maybe that smash had freaked him too. It felt like you could still hear it, echoing across the whole town.

He reached his hand in and tried to open the door. He couldn’t.

I’d been learning a lot of stuff about Simon, how clever he was; what he wasn’t clever at, at all, was breaking into houses.

‘We’ll go round the back,’ he said.

Really, that was what we should have tried first. We went round to the side of the house. We tried the back door – it was locked – so we peered in through the kitchen window.