The Rain (24 page)

‘What ARE you doing?’ said Darius, ripping away the plastic from his face so he could have a better nag at me.

Whoa. Me, Darling and Whitby turned round to get a good look at the newcomers. Whitby, the big dope, seemed none the worse for his car fight and lurched towards them to say hello; the kid
– and gutless Darius! – flattened themselves against the seats like Whitby was some sort of savage beast.

I grabbed Whitby’s collar. ‘Stay!’ I commanded (like I had some sort of control over him).

Yeah, and what are YOU doing? I thought. Hiding in the staffroom until teacher comes and tell you what to do?

‘I’m going to London,’ I said.

Annoyingly, Spratt didn’t fall to his knees and beg to come with me – which would have been hard, sitting on the back seat of a car with Whitby within savaging distance, but you know
what I mean.

‘What for?’ he said.

‘My dad lives there,’ I said. It sort of hurt a bit to say it out loud. I got hold of some random sob that wanted to come out and I stuffed it back down.

He thought about that for a moment.

‘Hn,’ he said. There was another tedious pause before,

‘I don’t think going to London’s a very good idea,’ he added.

Whoa No. 2. Now I was not asking whether he thought my plan was a good plan or not, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned (the hard way) from going on ‘social media’ and
that, it’s that you sometimes have to just hang on for one second before you blast off some kind of devastating response to rudeness and cheekery from someone you don’t really know all
that well – particularly if you want something from them, like an invitation to a party or something. So I buttoned it – though obviously mentally toying with various devastating
responses, blending them with colourful choices from the tempting palette of swear words I like to have available at all times.

‘But I suppose we might as well come with you for a bit, then,’ said Darius, after another age.

‘Yeah, sure, whatever,’ I said.
You can’t leave me
.

‘Just until we decide what to do,’ said Darius.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘course.’

Until they decided what to do?
They?
Did that BBK ever even actually speak?

And how they nearly came to NOT be in the car ten minutes later was like this:

‘Maybe you’re letting the clutch out too quick,’ said Darius when we stalled for the second time on the Ashton Road roundabout.

It was about the five hundredth helpful tip he’d given me in the last mile – after he’d whined about there not being enough room in the back and couldn’t he just take out
the baby seat –
Henry’s
seat – and I’d said no. No way, no. And don’t lean on it like that either.

‘You need to change up a gear. Put it in second!’

‘Do you want me to drop you somewhere?’ I snapped. ‘Like here?’

‘I’m just trying to help,’ said Darius.

‘Yeah?! Why don’t YOU drive, then?!’

‘I can’t,’ he said. That figured. Probably he still rode a bike with stabilisers or something. ‘I’m not allowed to right now.’

‘
Allowed?!
Hello?! Allowed? Guess what, Darius Spratt . . .’

Saying his name shouldn’t have mattered ONE BIT, but I knew as soon as I’d said it – like, YEURCH! He knew I knew his name.

‘I’m not
allowed
to drive either!’ I yelled.

The BBK rustled a bit.

Not in front of the kids, huh? I stalled the car, flung open my door and got out. I breathed for a second – for not enough time at all – and I knocked on his window and beckoned him.
I beckoned him like one of Dan’s gaming fantasy-hero types challenges a victim to a fight.

He got out.

‘This is not a good idea, Ruby,’ he said, looking at the sky.

It’s fairly humiliating to have to say this, but the cloud army had kept up with us. It was as if we hadn’t moved at all.

‘What are you, my
dad?!
’ I blurted. The weird thing was I meant Simon, and not my
dad
dad, who would basically never say something like that. No matter. I raged on.
‘I’m not
allowed
to break into police stations! I’m not
allowed
to break into shops! Or other people’s houses! I am not allowed to STEAL DOGS and I am not
ALLOWED
to dye my hair RED.’

Before he could get one word out about that, I finished my hissing, spitting rant: ‘In fact, I am not
allowed
to do anything!’

‘I’m epileptic,’ he said.

What?!
What?
You what?!
My mouth gaped open and shut, open and shut, like a goldfish. Beanpole Boy turned crimson.

There was this really terrible, awful pause. Then we both looked at the sky and got back in the car.

‘I like your hair,’ he said quietly. ‘I think it could really suit you. The thing is—’

‘I know my face is a bit orange, all right? I know,’ I snarled.

I started up the engine and we lurched off down the road. Darius Spratt leaned forward to speak to me.

‘So the thing is I was going to ask have you got anything to eat or drink, Ruby?’ he said. ‘It’s just I had a look in the back and . . .’

We stopped in Ashton village, on the pavement, right outside the shop. The door was wide open. When I took my hands off the steering wheel they left behind serious
driver’s hand sweat.

We got out; the cloud army was behind us now. I gave the Spratt this big, fake smile, one I usually saved for Simon on the rare occasion that he got something wrong. Triumphant, with a hint of
withering smugness.

The shop had not been looted like the shops in Dartbridge; nothing was smashed. Stuff had been taken, but the shelves weren’t stripped bare and nothing had been left strewn about on the
floor. No windows had been shattered by bullets; no dead people lay about. Probably the people who had come there had even paid for what they had taken because there were little piles of money left
on the counter by the till.

Ashton village; that’s the kind of place I would like to live some day, a place where people don’t go NUTS and trash stuff and threaten to kill each other, etc., etc., just because
the world is being destroyed by a killer space bug.

‘Wait a sec,’ said Darius.

I dunno where he went, off foraging for more backwash peanuts, I expect. I didn’t pay attention – like normally I wouldn’t pay attention to newspapers either, but I got kind of
mesmerised
by them. It was just weird: Saturday 23 May – all of them. There was some National Health Service scandal thing splashed all over the big papers, but the little ones all
stuck to the main story: ‘BBQ BRITAIN SIZZLES’ (with a picture of the outline of the country burned on to a giant greasy sausage); ‘MAY MELTDOWN’ (Morris dancers in
swimwear). Then the news had stopped.

The magazines were still current, though . . . I loaded up with every fat, glossy, drool-worthy, style-soaked magazine I had never been able to afford . . . and some celebrity dirt-dishing mags
I probably could have afforded, but wouldn’t have been caught dead buying – even though what was in them was, like, totally fascinating and you desperately wanted to know about it.

Darius came back. He had stuff. (Healthy stuff.) For a moment he just stood next to me; I thought that in spite of the fact that he was Nerd Beanpole Boy we were somehow sharing some weird
moment, about how everything had stopped and seemed like it never would be the same again. I bit my lip; I kind of wanted to say something about it all, but I didn’t know what . . .

‘They didn’t even get the weather right,’ said Darius.

‘They never do,’ I said. I swear those Simon words came out of my mouth without even calling in on my brain.
I
didn’t pay any attention to weather forecasts; I just
moaned when it was rainy or cold and was glad when it was sunny.

‘Still, I suppose we ought to take some papers,’ he said. ‘To show our kids.’

WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?!

I looked at him in complete and utter horror.

‘I don’t mean
our
kids,’ he said, turning crimson again. ‘I mean
kids
kids . . . any kids . . . kids in the future.’

‘Oh,’ I said. If I hadn’t been orange already, I think it would have been obvious that I had gone bright red too. Did he seriously think that I had seriously thought . . . that
I would EVER . . .

‘I mean, these papers might be worth something one day,’ he said. ‘But probably not . . . it’s not like there won’t be tons of them left. Dead people don’t
buy papers.’

I looked at him again then, ready to tell him that was a horrible thing to say – YEURCH!!!! He was looking up at the top shelf, at the bare-boobied-and-bottomed smut-fest magazines even
polite Ashton villagers must have read . . . and the stuff no one in their right mind would want to read, like
Trainspotters Monthly
, or whatever. He reached out and took the last –
hey, probably the ONLY – copy of
New Scientist
.

‘Oo, great,’ he said, eagerly leafing through it.

I mean really – REALLY – is there no end to the monstrous cruelty of the universe? I truly was in the company of a nerd. Possibly the last boy on Earth . . . and he was a nerd. Not a
geek – geeks were useful and cool and kind of hot – but a nerd. A deeply unsexy nerd who had just thought I had thought – really, I can’t even repeat it.

That snapped me to my senses; for the sake of the BBK I scooted round the shop; I loaded fizzy drinks, chewy sweets, rubbishy chocolate, crisps and bubblegum into one of their plastic bags. For
the sake of shocking Darius Spratt, I also took a packet of cigarettes.

‘Ready?’ I said, grabbing a lighter and testing it.

‘Yeah,’ he said. He closed that pervy science magazine and stuffed it down the front of his bin-liner. ‘Ruby,’ he said, ‘would it be OK to put the big dog in the
back? It’s just I think . . . maybe it’d be better if the kid sat in the front.’

‘Yeah, sure, whatever,’ I said, casually loading a bottle of vodka into my goodie bag.

Outside, there was a bit of an alarming sight. The cloud army had gained on us; advancing relentlessly. A fresh battalion was sliding into position below the others, massing overhead. Until you
have to pay attention (or die), you don’t realise that: how scarily fast some clouds move. When it feels like it, altocumulus stratiformus is particularly nippy. It’s a sprinter.

‘
!’ I said, and dragged Whitby out of the front seat.

Darius helped the BBK to take his place, getting her to climb across the gap so she wouldn’t have to get out of the car, while I attempted to bundle Whitby into the boot. The Spratt
climbed into the back seat.

‘Come on, Ru!’ he had the nerve to shout at me.

The lid of the boot clunked down on Whitby’s big dumb head; I wished it was Nerd Boy’s. By the time I’d got into the driver’s seat, Whitby was already blundering his way
out of the boot.

‘Aw! He likes you!’ I sniggered, as he tried to barge his way on to Darius’ lap.

I didn’t laugh when Darling scrambled out of my lap to get to the BBK – and that was before the snacks came out.

I dumped my bag of goodies down (on top of Fluffysnuggles), started up and lurched out into the road.

‘Help yourself,’ I told the kid.

It was a no-contest. She chose my selection of delights over the wholewheat things Darius had got. Fizzy drinks and crisps and sweets disappeared into the black plastic.

‘Can’t she take that stuff off?’ I asked.

‘We’d better wait until we’re safe,’ said Darius.

That was news to me: I thought we
were
safe. My passengers didn’t seem to notice how skilful my driving was getting. None of them. Darling rustled about on the BBK’s lap and
got fed tasty junk morsels.

‘That’s bad for her,’ I said.

‘It’s bad for her too,’ said Darius, meaning the kid.

From the corner of my eye, I saw the BBK do what I would have done. She fed stuff to Darling anyway, pretending it was an accident when it so wasn’t. Whitby refused Darius’s more
wholesome offerings, and poked his stinky head over the gears so the kid could feed him rubbish too. I didn’t go on about it.

What with the kid being mute and Darius being Darius and the world having been destroyed, the general conversation wasn’t up to much either.

‘So how come you’re not dead, then?’ I asked, by way of an ice-breaker. You know, the kind of question you ask someone when you don’t know what else to say. I’d
seen my mum do it a thousand times, ask people, ‘So how was your journey?’ or ‘So how do you know Mr and Mrs Such-and-Such?’ Even if the answer was totally embarrassing
– like ‘I live next door’ or ‘Actually, I
am
Mrs Such-and-Such’ – it was OK; people’d just laugh and have another drink and ask the same question
back.

My ice-breaker, it was rubbish. The second I asked that question, the most horrible thing happened. I felt everything that had happened and everything I felt about it come welling up inside me.
It felt like . . . like a tsunami coming, carrying everything – EVERYTHING – with it.

I felt myself choke. I turned the choke into a cough.

‘Just lucky, I guess,’ he said. ‘You?’