The Rain (3 page)

It wasn’t really lipstick at all; it was my first ever full-blown snogging rash and it stung. It
really
stung.

Nothing I could do about it, so I had a quick scrub at the mascara disaster. Their soap, which wasn’t like the soap we had at home but some organic, lentil-based, grey-green thing, was
useless. It didn’t even foam up . . . so that was it, then: I was half black-eyed zombie, half human cherry. Mortifying. Seriously mortifying.

‘C’mon, get out!’ shouted Caspar through the bathroom door. ‘Molly wants to puke!’

Great. I had to face him knowing what the face I was facing him with looked like. We opened the door and Molly burst in, chundering. Under normal friendship circumstances, it would have been our
duty to stay with her – but, honestly, just listening to her made my own stomach start to heave. It was bad enough looking like a mutant in front of Caspar – I definitely did not want
him to witness me spewing my guts up, so I grabbed Lee’s hand and we went back downstairs.

We passed Zak’s room on the way; him and Ronnie bickering for control of the computer. (‘Why’s it so slow?! Just click there,’ Zak was saying, trying to grab hold of the
mouse. ‘Just click on it!’)

In the kitchen, the radio people had moved on to discussing plants for dry shady borders – which is a serious problem, apparently, and was not nearly as funny as spotty bits. Barnaby
looked as if he was in a trance, staring out of the kitchen window at . . . OK, so now the party had been well and truly spoilt; it was raining. None of us had noticed; why would we? We’d
been too busy laughing our heads off.

‘I think you all need to sober up,’ said Sarah, handing out glass after glass of water. ‘Leonie, can you please put the kettle on?’

‘Yes Sarah Yes,’ Lee slurred, glugging her water.

Barnaby grabbed his mobile phone and started jabbing at it, trying different numbers.

‘
.
.
,’ he said, having trouble getting through.

Then
Gardeners’ Question Time
stopped. It just stopped.

Then
it
started.

‘This is an emergency public service broadcast . . . ’

‘The rain’ – that’s all I remember hearing to begin with. ‘It’s in the rain’, and everyone staring at the radio as if it was a TV.
That’s how hard we all stared at it . . . everyone except Barnaby, who dumped his mobile and went out to try the phone in the hall.

Lee shoved the kettle on the stove and came and held my hand, the one that wasn’t gripping Caspar’s.

‘Ru,’ whispered Lee. ‘Do you think we’re gonna die or something?’

‘No!’ I said.

Of course
no one was gonna die!

My mum was out at the neighbours’ barbecue.

It’s in the rain.

I felt as if I was the last person to get it, what was going on. I stood in that kitchen, shivering – I leaned into Caspar’s body, but even that felt cold –
and finally I sort of started to get it. See, for days there’d been stuff on the news about some new kind of epidemic. Outbreaks in Africa, in South America. Then reports from Russia. Some
new kind of disease thing, deadly . . . but – well, it wasn’t here, was it? Not like the bird-flu thing when Simon (who was probably more worried about the birds) had got into a right
sweat. So had a lot of people. (OK, so had I; it gave me nightmares.) But this? It was so . . .
remote
, that’s the word . . . we never paid it any attention. Ronnie had tried to go
on about it, I remember that, and we had all rolled our eyes and told him to shut up, because it just seemed like another thing for Ronnie to go on about.

‘The rain,’ they kept saying on the radio. ‘It’s in the rain.’

‘I told you so,’ said Ronnie, stomping down the stairs into the kitchen.

He had. He had said: ‘There’s something in with the rain.’ And we’d all gone, ‘Yeah right! Shut up, Ronnie!’ because we knew just what kind of website
he’d have read that on – probably the same one that claimed the Pope had been replaced by an alien (that’s why you never see his legs; they’re green and spindly) – and
Ronnie had gone, ‘No! There is! There’s something
in
the rain. Look!’ and tried to show us this eye-witness video thing on the internet but it had been taken down, which
Ronnie said proved it was true.

‘Shut up, Ronnie,’ someone said.

Lee stared at me. ‘Ru,’ she said. ‘I really am scared.’

She started crying. Other girls were too. I hugged her. I hugged my lovely best friend.

It’s in the rain
.

Saskia swept downstairs wearing one of Barnaby’s shirts like a mini-dress. For a moment, she stared at the radio like we’d done; Sarah tried to hand her a glass of water, but Saskia
shook her head.

‘I wanna go home,’ she announced.

She’s such a . . . not a drama queen, but a . . . she’s not even a spoilt brat . . . I suppose the best way to describe it is Saskia always finds a way to get what she wants.
It’s not even because half the boys in school drool over her . . . OK: ALL the boys in school (because they fancy her or want to be like her), pretty much all the teachers (because
she’s cunningly polite to them and makes a showy effort to understand whatever it is they’re going on about) and a seriously shocking number of the girls (because they also fancy her or
want to be like her) drool over Saskia, and that should be enough to explain it, why Saskia always gets her way, but it’s not. It’s something weirder and darker. Seriously; she’s
like a hypnotist or something, sending out invisible mind rays that zap her victims into doing whatever she wants. But not tonight, Sask! Seemed like no one else but me was even listening to her
anyway because everyone was staring out of the windows at the rain.

It just looked like rain normally looks. You know, drippy.

You could hear Barnaby on the phone in the hall: dialling, slamming the handset down and redialling. He wasn’t calling on a god any more, he was just plain swearing his head off.

‘I said I wanna go home,’ Saskia re-announced.

‘Whatever,’ someone said.

She stormed into the hall to try to get the phone off Barnaby; Zak bounded down the stairs . . . Molly drifting down after him, looking sick as a dog.

‘The internet’s down!’ Zak said. ‘Like the WHOLE of the web just crashed.’

‘Told you so,’ murmured Ronnie.

‘It’s probably just a local thing,’ said Sarah.

Ronnie shook his head in that way that he did to make out he knew stuff no one else did. Molly heaved again; Sarah looked at her in panic.

‘It’s the punch, Mum. She’s just had too much punch,’ said Zak.

People kind of nodded sheepishly, same way you would if someone else’s parents had caught us out.

‘Barnaby,’ Sarah called, rummaging in a cupboard, ‘have we got any coffee?’

Coffee. Even then, even at that moment, I thought that was kind of random. Like that would solve everything. Barnaby wandered in from the hall. He looked . . . grim. That’d be the word.
Grim
.

‘I can’t get through,’ he said. ‘To
anyone
,’ he added, looking straight at Sarah like she’d know who that
anyone
was.

You could hear Saskia back out in the hall; she had the phone to herself then, was dialling and redialling and swearing her head off too.

‘HAVE. WE. GOT. ANY. COFFEE?’ Sarah asked Barnaby.

That seemed to sort of snap him out of it – and a lot of other people too. Girls who’d been crying (because girls are allowed to under extreme circumstances) stopped; boys
who’d looked like they were going to cry got a grip. For a moment, it was just all so normal. A bunch of late-night people getting late-night snacks and drinks. Barnaby found some ancient
coffee beans in the freezer and was pulverising them in an electric grinder thing. Zak sawed into a loaf of their heavy-duty homemade bread. He handed the slices to Sarah, who put them into the
wire thing, to toast them on the top of the stove. I got mugs out; Leonie got teaspoons; other people got other stuff . . . all the stuff you need: teapot, sugar, knives, jams, plates, butter,
milk.

I saw Caspar . . . edging away from us all. I saw Caspar staring mournfully out of the kitchen window.

I went to him.

‘It’s OK,’ I whispered, hoping the darkness by the kitchen door would hide the hideous mess my face was in so we could share a romantic moment.

‘No it’s not,’ he said. ‘That’s my MP3 out there.’

He pointed at his jeans; out on the grass, getting rained on.

‘
this,’ he whispered.

‘Caspar!’

I was so stupid; I whispered it, so’s no one noticed.

‘Chill, Rubybaby,’ he whispered back, and kissed me.

I don’t know whether that kiss was meant to shut me up, but it did. Even with all the freaky horribleness of it all, I still had the hots for him and I still couldn’t believe that
we’d actually snogged – and in front of everyone, which basically meant that as far as the glass mountain of being cool was concerned, I had now developed spider-sucker climbing powers
and had effortlessly scaled to the top. Best not to blow it now by blurting, ‘Ooo! Caspar! No! Zak’s dad said we really shouldn’t!’ at the top of my voice.

He slipped the lock on the door. He grabbed a towel. He held it over his head. He dashed out. I saw him do that. I saw him go out, barefoot in the rain in Barnaby’s kaftan. He dashed back
in again. Slipped the lock back shut. Dumped the towel.

No one else had noticed. And me? I dunno what I thought was going to happen, like he’d just go up in a puff of green smoke or something. He didn’t. He rummaged in his jeans, pulled
out his phone and his MP3, wiped them on his kaftan and waved them at me, grinning.

I felt like an idiot.

‘Cool!’ I whispered. I didn’t know what else to say or do so I gave him this quick, casual peck on the lips and went back to the snack-making . . . so’s I’d look
like
I
was cool (and hadn’t even thought about angsting about anything). Tea! I had to make tea! I had to make a whole lot of tea right now! But the tea was made! OK! I had to
casually butter toast . . . that was good, that was better . . . casually buttering toast.

Barnaby switched the coffee grinder off. It made a racket, that thing. That was fine, because it meant you couldn’t hear the radio. It was also why no one had heard Caspar.