The Rain (16 page)

It was easy. He smashed it, he opened it and he climbed in.

I hated that, him being in there and me being outside. If something happened to either of us . . .

I tried not to think about that. Without being told to, I kept watch while Simon ransacked.

He handed me a tin of fruit salad and a bag of ice cubes. At this rate we’d have to break into about fifty houses just to get through a single day. And if we ever wanted to do something
hygienic – like get enough water to actually ever wash again – we’d probably have to break into the whole of Dartbridge. I was just about coping with babywipes but, although
something told me Simon wouldn’t consider it a priority, I was dangerously close to running out of that spray-in dry shampoo stuff. I’d actually had to move on to the blonde glittery
stuff, which was strictly reserved for nights out because if I wore it in the daytime it looked kind of . . . ‘You look like you’ve got dandruff,’ was what Dan said, doing
pantomime choking after I’d sprayed it. Brat. (And, NB, I probably wouldn’t have had to use it in the first place if my mum would actually let me dye my hair.) (And which, NB, I
suspected she would have crumbled and caved on if Simon hadn’t gone and agreed with her the first time she said no.)

Thinking about all that made me completely depressed. In every way.

‘Shouldn’t we leave a note or something?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Simon, climbing back through the window.

I think I kind of glared at him. It could have turned into a row, but – honestly – I was too depressed to bother.

‘Ru,’ he said. ‘I know this feels awful, what we’re doing now, but it’s what we have to do. I don’t think these people are coming home. I think a lot of
people are dead, Ru.’

There: it had been said.

The next house was more difficult, but had much better pickings. It wasn’t more difficult to get into – they’d left the back door open – but . . . it
smelt like our house smelt: sweet and spicy. Thing is, what was in the fridge and the cupboards was so good you didn’t even care: juice, soya milk, bubbly water – and
vino collapso
supremo
, said Simon, stuffing a fancy-looking bottle of wine into his rucksack as I glugged down juice.

The third house, and the fourth? I got over myself. Yes, we still knocked and shouted, but you kind of knew no one would come . . . and though I felt that dread, about what we would find (dead
people), I sort of also felt this weird thrill thing, this weird hungry energy to get stuff. The buzz when you find something. The triumph as our rucksacks filled up.

At the fifth house, it wasn’t so good. The TV was still on, for a start; the same stay-home, remain-calm broadcast playing. That was freaky. We had to shoo the cat out
from the kitchen, from where it was . . . The cat seemed absolutely fine, so I guess nibbling on that body on the floor hadn’t hurt it a bit. We didn’t take stuff from there. We just
left.

How stupid we were. How stupid I was. You need to just take stuff, whatever you can get. People who are dead are dead; they don’t care . . . maybe, even, they’d
want you to take it. That’s what I’d want: take it, and live. And good
luck.

We stepped outside into the lovely warm evening. I felt sick – yes – and I felt something else. I felt angry.

‘Let’s go there,’ I said, pointing at a big house up on the hill.

We had enough stuff, really; there was no need.

‘Well, I suppose we might as well,’ said Simon. ‘Unless you’d rather—’

‘No!’ I said. ‘I’m fine.’

I assumed Simon was going to say ‘Unless you’d rather go home’ – but maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was going to say, ‘Unless you’d rather wait; just sit
here in the sun for a moment listening to the birds sing and then we’ll go home’ or, ‘Unless you’d rather go let Whitby, Mimi, Clarence and that terrier out.’ But
Simon, who always told me what was what and what I had to do, or else banged on at me until I was forced to say it for myself, did not, on this occasion, this one occasion, tell me what I had to
do.

‘OK,’ he said.

I don’t know why he said that. Maybe he’d got into the weird thrill of it too – I sort of felt like he had – or maybe he was thinking that we should
just get as much stuff as we could while we could. I don’t know.

The big house was detached, no cars about. No dogs barking. I had no clue about who lived there, but they must have been minted. It wasn’t just because it was a big house
– I’ve got friends, like Zak, that live in big houses and they’re as scruffy as our little one – it was the way it was: crisp. You know: all primped and prim and proper. A
house without a hair out of place.

We crunched up the drive. We rang the doorbell. They didn’t have a normal ding-dong battery-type doorbell – they had a
bell
bell. A real bell, hanging outside the door. We
clanked on that, then we knocked. What we didn’t do was call through the door. We didn’t say, ‘
Hello?
We’re neighbours!’

It was the first house we had come to where the front door was open. We went inside.

The smell was there to greet us. So was a cat, a little tabby. It came running up behind us from the garden. It didn’t even hesitate; it just purred about us, like we were its owners, come
home to feed it. We stepped inside the house and Simon closed the living-room door – but not before I saw . . . there was a body in the front room with a sheet over it.

We crept through into the kitchen.

It was a super-bonanza. There was a walk-in larder. Inside it: tons and tons of stuff.

They must have been at the supermarket or somewhere like that, because there were boxed packs of water bottles, still plastic wrapped. Juice, long-life milk, soda water, tonic water. Tons of it.
I felt the thirst kick right back in at the sight of it and I swear I could have drunk every last drop. I tell you: looting, fear, rage and grief make you mad with thirst.

‘Bingo,’ said Simon.

As he loaded up our rucksacks and every other bag he could find, I fed the cat. I found the cat food under the sink; I got a plate and dumped the whole can of food on to it. I
mashed it up a bit with a fork. I set it down on the floor and the cat scoffed.

That’s what I remember: the cat scoffing and me thinking I’d done a good deed. Then thinking the cat might be as thirsty as me.

There was a bottle of water on the table, and glasses. I picked up the bottle. I unscrewed the lid; open already. And then I thought,
yeurch
.

I didn’t think the water might be bad, that wasn’t what I thought at all, I just thought that the bottle of water had once belonged to that dead person, and it creeped me out.

It was a half of a half of a half of a second; that’s all it took. I put the bottle down, Simon snatched it up. He’d just hoisted his rucksack on to his back. He snatched up that
bottle and glugged the water down.

‘Let’s go,’ he said.

He stared at me. I stared back. Like he knew; like we both knew. Instantly.

And then he sort of grimaced.

A trickle of blood ran down from the corner of his mouth.

‘Ruby,’ he said. ‘I need to go home now. I need to go home to Becky and Henry.’

He turned and walked out to the front door; he steadied himself on it. He let out a roar and propelled himself off, out, down the drive, towards home. He went like . . . like I’ve seen
marathon runners go; when you can see their whole body yelling stop, stop, stop but they’re just gonna get to that finish line whatever.

I dived back into that kitchen to grab my rucksack. I think a part of me thought he would be OK, so we’d need all that water and stuff that we’d worked so hard to get. I grabbed the
rucksack. I looked up. There was someone standing there.

Posh man. Grey-haired. Primped and prim and proper like his house. Some weird look that was almost like a slow, astonished smile creeping on to his face at the sight of me – and then he
looked at that bottle and that weird look curled up into a miserable frown and turned to stone. Gargoyle face.

You
. I got it; even right at that moment, I got it. He had known the water in that bottle was bad. He had put it there. It had been a
trap.

I plunged out of that house and ran after Simon.

At the end of the drive I looked back; that man was on the doorstep, the cat in his arms.

I followed Simon home. I followed him because whenever I tried to get close, whenever I called out to him, he kept waving me back, to keep behind him, and I was too scared to
disobey. I followed him, whimpering with fright like a dumb dog. I kept looking behind, but the grey-haired man didn’t come. Simon cried out loud; he spat blood, he choked up blood, he sicked
up blood as he went. Halfway along, he stopped, dumped his rucksack, pulled out the bottle of fancy wine and smashed it open on a wall. He swigged from it.

Glass! I thought, But there’ll be glass!

He raised the bottle to the sky, roared, then flung that bottle against the wall so’s it smashed into a million pieces, then he staggered on; I heaved up his rucksack . . . then ditched it
– the weight was just too much to bear.

He got to the house; he got up the stairs; he got to my mum and Henry.

I stood outside their bedroom door. That bunch of flowers I’d left outside, they were wilting, dying. Simon howling in agony. I opened the door. The smell punched me in
the heart.

‘GET OUT!’ spluttered Simon.

I won’t ever forget seeing him like that. At least I didn’t have to see my mum and Henry too. Simon had covered them with a sheet.

I closed the door. I sat outside. The fright in me bit so hard in my guts I felt I could puke too.

‘Ru,’ he called, his voice all twisty with pain. ‘Help me. Get tablets. Get painkillers – get whatever you can.’

I had instructions. I could do something. But tablets? All we had in the house since my mum had chucked the paracetamol to Mrs Fitch was indigestion stuff, hayfever stuff and Henry’s
teething stuff. I knew; I’d looked when I still believed what the broadcasts said about paracetamol.

I went downstairs; I went out the back door. I climbed over the fence that separated the Fitches’ tidy garden from our messy paradise.

The back door was open. I went in. The TV was on, loud, filling the house with advice that was too late for the Fitches. I went through the stink up to the bathroom. Unfortunately, Mr Fitch was
in there. He was the stink. I had to step right around him, thinking that if I touched him I’d die right there with him in their horrible green bathroom. I yanked open the medicine cabinet
and I looted it. There was a lot of stuff in there; stuff I knew – paracetamol, aspirin – stuff I didn’t. Stuff prescribed for Mr Fitch, who had a bad heart; stuff prescribed for
Mrs Fitch, who got worried about Mr Fitch’s bad heart. And a small bottle of brandy, which she told me and my mum she took a tot of every night.

‘For medicinal purposes,’ she said. ‘Just a drop, before you clean your teeth.’

(‘But she hasn’t got any teeth!’ I whispered to my mum. And my mum trod on my toe to shut me up.)

I took the lot; Simon would know what was what.

I knocked on the door. He didn’t answer. I opened the door. His eyes rolled open as I dumped my offerings on the bed. He waved me off. He clawed open boxes; he popped
pills, swallowed, slugged brandy. More and more and more pills. Simon wasn’t going to get better. I wasn’t helping him to live; I was helping him to die.

‘Go away, Ru,’ he managed to say. ‘Go find help.’

I thought he was going to say something else, about what I should do.

‘I love you,’ he said.

Simon fell asleep and he didn’t wake up.

I sat in the kitchen and I glued together that stupid hideous pottery vase thing he’d made. My hands were shaking so much it kept going wrong. When it finally stayed together, I put it in
the sink.

Since that first morning, when I’d gone to fill the kettle and Simon had told me to stop, he’d told me the same thing most times we were in that kitchen, because most times I
forgot.

I forgot. I turned the tap on. Water gushed into the vase for too many seconds before my brain screamed and my hands did something about it. I turned off the tap and backed away from the sink.
The tap dripped into the vase.