The Rain (2 page)

BOMF! I practically head-butted him as my lips mashed into his. His lips sort of opened a bit and I kind of pushed my tongue into his mouth. I thought that was what you were supposed to do, to
show how passionate you felt or something. Like I said, I’d kissed boys before, and that’s what we had done. It had been fairly disgusting. Kissing Caspar like that wasn’t
disgusting; it was scary, and it felt all wrong. Until . . . I dunno: it just changed. One minute it was tongue-on-tongue combat, the next minute . . .

If this
was
my blockbuster movie, we would pause here. It would be worth a whole scene all by itself, that kiss. We would linger on it for as long as possible. That kiss. Those kisses.
Where does one kiss end and another begin? We just kind of melted into one another. I do know that’s the kind of stupid thing they say in cheesy romances, but we did. That’s what
happened! One minute I was my own clumsy me being, freaking out, and I could feel this divine Caspar being (was he freaking out too?), this Caspar being’s tongue, and the next minute . . . I
dunno . . . it was total –

We didn’t hear the yelling.

Fingers dug into my arm. My lips disconnected from Caspar’s. I turned and –

‘GET OUT!’ Zak’s dad shouted into my face, hauling me from the tub.

And that is when it all began.

Like most people in the country, Zak’s parents had gone to a barbecue that night. That’s the thing about Britain, isn’t it? First glimmer of sunshine, first
lick of heat and everyone goes nuts, strips off and has a barbecue. Doesn’t matter if it looks like rain; we go out and we stay out until the first drop falls. No – it’s worse
than that: it actually has to start chucking it down before people give up and go inside. You add to that a bank holiday weekend – a whole extra day for sunburnt people to lie around wishing
they hadn’t drunk 10 zillion cans of lager and/or that they had cooked the sausages properly, in an oven – and you get . . . well, you get what happened, don’t you?

Zak’s parents weren’t supposed to be coming home, so it was obvious right away that something was wrong because they were back, but it was even more obvious that something was wrong
because they were freaking out. Normally, they wouldn’t have been even slightly bothered about whatever it was we were doing. That was what was so cool about Zak’s; OK, he had the hot
tub and the barn and woods and fields and everything to mess about in, but the really cool thing was that his parents were completely chilled. They smoked joints in front of us – hey, they
even gave Zak weed! – that’s how chilled they were.

Tonight, they were not chilled. They basically went all Simon on us. They herded us all into the kitchen. The only thing that was most un-Simon was that Zak’s dad, Barnaby, kept
swearing.

OK, so this is going to be the only other rule about this story: I will try to be honest; I will try to tell everything as it was, but I will not swear. My mum hated me
swearing – the word ‘God’ included, despite the fact that 1) she said it herself all the time (but denied it) and 2) as far as I can tell everyone else on the planet says it all
the time too. There’s no need for swearing, she’d tell me. Even with the whole world in the grip of a death-fest mega-crisis, she’d say, Ruby, there is absolutely no need to
swear.

Actually, there
is
quite a lot of need for it in this story, and a lot of swearing did happen, but out of respect for my mum I will not write those words. If, like me, you curse all the
time anyway, you can go ahead and add your own swear words, but I hope you’ll understand why I can’t.

I’ll write something beautiful instead. I’ll write ‘
’. For my mum.

‘Oh
! Oh
! Oh
!’ Barnaby kept going.

(The thing is, Zak’s parents were always into some pagan-y religious thing or another, so it’s possible that Barnaby really was calling on some specific god and wasn’t just
generally ranting.)

He locked the kitchen door.

‘You’re frightening them,’ said Zak’s mum, Sarah, but Barnaby wasn’t listening; he closed every window in the kitchen – and when he’d finished doing
that he started closing all the other windows.

You could hear him, banging about all over the house.

We weren’t frightened at all. It was a little weird, but the hardest thing was not to get the giggles – although in my case I had nothing to laugh about, now there wasn’t even
any water to cover me. I did my best with tea towels. All our stuff, everyone’s stuff, was in the barn.

‘Mum, what’s going on?’ said Zak.

‘We’re not really sure,’ said Sarah. ‘Someone Barnaby knows called him and—’

Thump, thump, thump – bang! – thump, thump, thump
, went Barnaby upstairs.

‘Mum?’ said Zak.

Bang! Thump, thump, thump
; Barnaby came back down the stairs.

‘You’d better ask your dad,’ said Sarah.

See now, that
was
kind of weird, wasn’t it? Zak didn’t normally call his mum ‘Mum’; Sarah didn’t normally call Barnaby ‘your dad’. If I
didn’t know Zak was practically immune to a whole lot of stuff that really bothered other people – like being embarrassed by your parents – I would have thought he was freaking
out too . . . but his parents did nutty stuff all the time, and everyone knew they did and usually no one laughed about it much because everyone understood what Zak had to deal with . . . and also
because Sarah and Barnaby were so kind to us.

This latest nutty thing, whatever it was, it was just bad timing, party-wise.

‘Turn the radio on,’ Barnaby told Zak.

‘
Dad?
’ said Zak, but he turned it on anyway.

They didn’t have a TV. Zak’s parents didn’t even have a digital radio; they had the old-fashioned crackly kind. Guess what was on?

Gardeners’ Question Time
.

They were discussing the best methods of tackling blight on roses.

Someone lost it, and giggled. The giggling, it spread.

‘This isn’t right,’ said Barnaby quietly. ‘It should be the news.’

I laughed too; it was impossible not to crack up with Mrs Fotheringay-Flytrap describing the spotty bits on her
Rambling Rector
. . . but you want to know something weird? While I
certainly wouldn’t in a million years have thought, Oh no! This must mean the world as we know it is about to end, I kind of
knew
it wasn’t right too. I didn’t know what
was
supposed
to be on, but I knew
Gardeners’ Question Time
shouldn’t have been. My mum LOVED that programme and listened to it every Sunday. Every Sunday; not on a
Saturday night. Never on a Saturday night. Not exactly scary, though, was it?

‘Go and put your clothes on!’ Sarah snapped at us.

I shivered; Caspar hugged me close. Leonie grabbed my hand.

She
never
snapped at us.

‘They’re in the barn,’ said Saskia – in a really horrible way, like Sarah was stupid.

‘Take ours, then,’ said Sarah. ‘Take whatever you want. Just get dressed.’

Someone muttered something and headed for the kitchen door.

‘Don’t go outside,’ said Barnaby. Loudly, angrily. ‘You do NOT go outside.’

We shuffled out of the room, the whole herd of us . . . On the stairs, someone cracked up and we all had to make a mad dash for Zak’s parents’ bedroom so’s we could laugh our
heads off in private, without hurting their feelings.

‘What the
is up with your parents, man?’ said Caspar.

‘Search me, dude,’ said Zak . . . but he didn’t sound OK; he still didn’t sound OK. ‘C’mon,’ he said to Ronnie – my techiest friend – and
they dived off to Zak’s room.

The rest of us, we played fancy dress with Zak’s parents’ clothes. It was so funny you forgot all the weirdness. Caspar pulled on a kaftan.

‘Ohhm!’ he said, doing this prayer thing with his hands.

I laughed so hard I almost –

‘I need to pee,’ I remembered.

Lee followed me to the bathroom. I went first; I had to – I was bursting. Then Lee went while I surveyed myself in the mirror:
.
So much for the model look. The big, baggy hippy dress was the least of it. My lips, which felt puffy-bruised and tingling from the kissing, looked kind of normal, but I had mascara zombie eyes and
where I’d had bright red lipstick on earlier it looked like it had sort of smeared itself all over my chin; even my nose had gone Rudolf. No hope Sarah would have make-up remover, so I wet a
bit of toilet paper, dabbed it in the soap and wiped at my chin.