H2O (20 page)

“We don't have anything,” said Darius.

I took off my hoodie for her—the kid shied away. I nudged Darius, who offered his sweatshirt.

The kid just stood there…then she kind of wriggled a tiny bit, frowning.

Aaaah!
I
got it! So, old enough to not want to be seen in the nude? How old were kids when they started to care that? Dan was twelve now, and he still didn't seem to care sometimes…but he was a boy, and my brother and a show-off (when he felt like it). So when had I started worrying about things like that?

Darius seemed sort of awkward himself; he folded his lanky arms in front of his lanky chest.

“Turn around,” I said to him.

We turned away to give the kid some privacy.

“Tell her it's OK,” I said. “We won't look.”

“Get changed,” he told the kid.

Out of the corner of my eye, when she had done, I saw her nudge him and hand him her clothes. I took them off him and hung them from the table with plant pots to hold them down.

I turned around. You could see the kid didn't like that one bit, me touching her stuff.

“It's OK,” I said. “We'll get them nice and dry…”

The kid in the
Star
Wars
sweatshirt looked away from me. Not like I wasn't there…like she didn't want me to be there.

OW. And Darling seemed to prefer her to me? Yeah. Nicer to have someone quiet who pets you and gives you treats than a shouty ogre who drags you around all over the place and has thrown you into the back of the car. But I could win that kid over… Like I said, kids LOVE me. I could be great with them…when I wanted to be… So, I saw a massive roll of that stuff they cover plants with—fleece, it's called, like my mom puts on her most delicate, precious plants in winter. Right. I ripped off massive armfuls of the stuff.

“I'm gonna make you a nest,” I told her.

She edged up against Darius. It was going to be hard work, but I WAS going to win her over. I chattered on—quietly—to the kid while I assembled a nest, telling her all about my brother Dan and how he could sleep anywhere because he always built himself a little nest just like Fluffysnuggles—who was safe in his bed and fast asleep already (I added quickly, because really I'd totally forgotten about him and had left him in the car). I told her how maybe we could build a little nest for Darling too, thinking that was bound to get her interested. It didn't, but I went ahead and made one anyway, chattering on about how maybe Darling would like a bedtime story and shall we tell her one and which one shall we tell her? I even put pretty pots of flowers around the nests.

NOTHING. The kid still wouldn't look at me; the kid still wouldn't say a word.

“So maybe Darius would like a story too?” I said.

“Hn,” said Darius.

I eyeballed him viciously, and he came and sat down next to the nest. I sat down too, trying to ignore the waft of stink now that his pits were fully exposed.

(WHOA—NO, NO, NO—WHOA. NO. NO WAY. NO. If Leonie was still alive and if cell phones still worked, I would have texted her immediately to tell her the freaky animaly sweat thing was true—or not. The horrific, sinister enchantment of the Spratt's pits had to fall into the category of things that were TOO weird and TOO disgusting to tell to anyone, even your best friend.)

“It's bedtime,” he told her.

She got into the nest and put Darling down in hers. Whitby tried to muscle in on the whole snugly bed thing, but I pulled him back, and he flumped down on the floor next to me. At least someone liked me.

I chose
Rumpelstiltskin
. I don't know why, because I could hardly remember it, so I kind of made it up a little. The miller's daughter became a princess and nothing too horrible happened to anyone—including Rumpelstiltskin, who said he was sorry and got taken on as a nanny because although he had seemed horrible to begin with and shouted a lot, he was actually really REALLY nice and very VERY good with children.

When I got to the end, I had a total Ruby genius moment.

“Well, now, I wonder what your name is?” I said.

I reeled off the name of every Asian girl I knew, then any old name at all: crazy names, pretty names, boys' names, pets' names, i.e., the kind of thing that would have any other kid in stitches—or at least force them to squeal out, “No! I'm not Malcolm!” or whatever. Even Darius joined in a little, starting with “Thingy?” and “Whatsit?” and then throwing in weird names that sounded pretty much like the sort of fantasy-hero characters Dan gibbered on about: “Are you Thorgarella, daughter of Kriksor?” That kind of thing.

Finally…

“You know what?” I said. “Until we know your name, I think we should just call you…”

“Rumpelstiltskin,” muttered Darius.

I slapped him—then smiled sweetly to make it look playful, because the kid was there.

“Princess,” I said.

I was pretty sure it couldn't have been her name, but I saw her little nose twitch and the tiniest of tiny nearly-a-smile smiles flicker on her lips.

“Night, night, Princess and Darling,” I said and blew them both kisses.

“Go to sleep,” instructed Darius.

The kid tucked herself up in the fleece; Darling—the traitor—nestled in with her.

If this all sounds kind of sweet to you, it really wasn't.

I felt awful. Really, really awful. That kid…that kid being like that, not being able to speak… In a weird kind of way, it got to me as bad as anything I'd seen—and it made me wonder what she'd seen and what had happened to her, because I sort of had the feeling that she could speak, but that whatever had happened was so hideous it had turned her mute. And…you know what else? It made me think of Simon, of all those years he'd spent trying to be sweet to me and me giving him back nothing but a snarl, not wanting to have anything to do with him. I'd had—what?—not even an hour of that from a kid I didn't even know, and I felt useless and frustrated and exhausted. And very, very sad.

So I couldn't leave it at that, could I? I insisted we sing. Darius said he didn't want to do that. The kid—obviously—didn't say anything, but you could tell she didn't want to either. So I sang.

Did I say already? I can't sing.

As soon as I'd got the first warbling word out, I knew I'd made yet another horrible mistake. Not because of the not being able to sing, but because the song was the song my mom sang to me when I was little, the one she wouldn't sing that night when she sat outside the door. “Dream A Little Dream Of Me.” It was the song her mom had sung to her when she was little, that's what she always said. (My mom, she used to change the “me” to “Ruby.” And like the whole thing with the fairies at the holy well, it took years before I realized the truth: the song wasn't actually about me.)

Every lovely, pretty thing in it felt wrong:

There were no stars. (YOU COULDN'T EVEN SEE THE STARS BECAUSE IT WAS CLOUDY AND IT WAS RAINING KILLER RAIN.)

There was no breeze. (THERE WAS JUST KILLER RAIN WHISPERING, “I WANT TO KILL YOU.”)

There was no birdsong. (BECAUSE THE BIRDS WERE TOO BUSY PECKING OUT HUMAN EYEBALLS.)

The next part is supposed to be really sweet, about how you'll dream of the people you love. It doesn't say anything about “EVEN THOUGH THEY'RE PROBABLY DEAD.” I couldn't go on. Not because I was worried the kid would dream about me (or that Darius Spratt would), but because I got all choked silent. I wanted my mom.

Genius, Ruby. You really are a
genius.

The killer rain applauded me, drumming down harder on that thin plastic roof. Now everyone definitely for sure felt like crap; you could just tell. The kid had shut her eyes. She'd shut them like all kids shut them when they're just pretending to be asleep, like: go away. A lonely little tear squeezed out between her eyelashes.

Me and Darius, we divided up the rest of the fleece and wrapped ourselves in it (SEPARATELY). It wasn't cold, not really, but the fleece was comforting. There was this kind of awkward few seconds about where we were going to sleep—well, there was for me—but Darius just cleared himself a space among the flowerpots and laid down on one of the long table things, so I cleared myself a space on the table on the other side of the walkway. I made a little wall of plants so I wouldn't actually have to look at him, but I felt like I really wanted to talk, to talk like I'd talk to Leonie or how I did with my mom sometimes, before Henry was born. To just pour my heart out…but no words would come. We lay in the silence.

“It's a shame it's not a zombie attack, isn't it?” said Darius after a while.

“
Excuse
me?
”

“You know, because if it was zombies—or vampires—we'd sort of know what to do, wouldn't we? Well,
I
would.”

“
I
would too,” I said.

He was right. We would have known exactly what to do. If only it was that simple.

“Or even aliens,” said Darius after a while. “Then we'd just have to locate the mother ship and destroy it. Although I suppose the bacterium is an alien. A very small one.”

“They don't know it's that space-bug thing,” I said. “Not for sure.”

“Yeah they do,” said Darius.

Rain fell steadily on the roof, millions of little wiggly micro-murderers sliding down the plastic.

“Still, I suppose you've got to look on the bright side,” said the Spratt.

“
What
…bright…side?”

The only—THE ONLY—thing I could think of was…that phone bill under my bed? That premium rate rip-off line I called? I am NEVER going to get into trouble for it. Somehow, it didn't exactly seem like a bright side.

“No more school,” said Darius.

“No exams!” I said. Now
that
was good. First time that had occurred to me. Every cloud's got a silver lining. Ha ha ha ha ha.

“I didn't mean that. I was looking forward to them,” said Darius Spratt.

DO YOU SEE? DO YOU SEE WHAT KIND OF A FREAK I WAS STUCK WITH? I sat up so I could get a better look at it too, the Darius freak, but it was too dark to make out anything more than the rough shape of it.

“You're kidding me, right?” I spoke at the shape.

“No. I've worked hard for two years for those exams. I was going to do civil engineering in college.”

“Wow,” I said and lay back down. “Great. That's just great.” I didn't actually know what civil engineering was, but honestly…

“See, that's what I mean about school,” said Darius Spratt.

“Huh?”

“It's full of people like you, isn't it? Clueless bullies.”

“
What?!
”

“Well, you're more of a snob,” he said and yawned. He ACTUALLY yawned.

“
Excuse
me?!
I'm not a snob!”

“Yeah you are. You and your friends. You're, like, sooo super-cool, aren't you? Urh. That Caspar kid—he thinks he's James Dean or something.”

I didn't know who James Dean was either, but I did not like the sound of that. I sat back up to glower at the shadowy blob of the freak in the darkness.

“My
friends
are all dead, Darius Spratt. So's my mom. So's my stepdad. So's my little baby brother. So is…
my
boyfriend
, Caspar.” I'd never called him that, “my boyfriend.” I'd never had the chance to. I caught my breath. “Probably.”

“Yeah, everyone's dead,” he mumbled sleepily.

He rolled over and fell asleep…or at least I think he did, but he could have just been doing some more advanced version of the pretending-to-be-asleep thing.

I lay back down, my brain buzzing, fizzing,
infected
with rage and sadness.

I dreamed about my mom.

Does that happen to you? You dream about the people who have died—only they're still alive, and everything is lovely, or at least normal. And then you wake up, and you wonder how it can be that you saw them, that you heard them, that you touched them… They were there, and now they are gone again. And realizing that makes the hurt stab knife-sharp. I truly don't know what is worse: the nightmares or those dreams.

When I woke up and realized it was a dream, it made me sob. I struggled out of my tangle of fleece. The others were still asleep: Darling with Princess; Whitby, also a traitor, had crept over under Darius's table (probably attracted by the stink). I got up and—truth? I checked on Darius Spratt. I just looked, like you can't help but look at a person sleeping.

. What if he really was the last boy on Earth?

I felt another sob come, and I like to think I wouldn't have gone outside if I'd have thought it was still raining, but the truth is I forgot to even think about that; I just pushed open the door and went out. Then I looked up. The sky looked weird: half of it milky and stripy (cirrostratus fibratus!), half of it yellowy and pale and sickly looking. The sick part was overhead. For a moment I thought some new and dreadful thing was happening to the sky, and I panicked about where the
the sun had gone. Dur. It was dawn; that's all it was. Me and the sun had gotten up together; it was dawn and it was cold. I rescued my fleece bed from inside the polytunnel, wrapped myself in it, and walked up the track.

There was a farmhouse at the top of it; it seemed like there was no one home, but I didn't go closer, and there were cows mooing somewhere just round the corner—which was great; no one would hear me as I howled my eyes out.

The milky stripes had burned away and the sun kept me company, kindly promising a toasty day, as I walked back down the track and opened up the back of the car. That was the first time I saw how mad my packing had been: there was nothing anyone would call sensible, apart from about ten thousand pairs of underwear. It was weird. Having dreamed about my mom, I felt like she was looking over my shoulder, wondering why I'd packed such silly clothes.

“Sorry, Mom,” I whispered.

I changed—right there, on that track—into a looted dress. It was a silver sequiny thing from the evil old hag's boutique, a thing I'd never normally have been allowed. I felt better just putting it on—and, I swear, it was pretty much the most sensible thing I had, apart from some super-skinny skinny jeans I didn't much fancy the effort of squeezing into. I picked up one of the trashy magazines and went back into the tunnel to fix my makeup.

It smelled so sweet in there (despite a whiff of Spratt). The others were still asleep. Only Whitby opened a lazy eye but didn't even pretend to take an interest. I climbed back up among the pots and sat cross-legged in a sea of flowers, flicking through the gossip while I sorted out my face.

Yup, it was still orange. The post-make-out pink chin was pretty much gone. I felt kind of sad about it, even. Gone. My eyes looked piggyish, in need of serious work. I slapped on some moisturizer followed by a mega coat of foundation.

I was a blank canvas. I, me, Ruby stared back at myself in my compact mirror.

I
need
to
get
to
my
dad
, I told myself.
I
just
need
to
get
to
my
dad
.

I sighed…and in that sigh, I became aware of a small pair of eyes watching me—I looked. The kid shut her eyes.

Right
, I thought.
Gotcha
.

I didn't look at her again. I went for it; I put stuff on my face—eye shadow, mascara, blush, lipstick—then I'd change my mind. I'd take it off again. I'd pretend I didn't know which color eye shadow I wanted, which lipstick went best… The kid got up and edged toward the table.
Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha
.

All the while, that place heated up. The warmth of it was delicious, like being on vacation someplace nice.

“Hmmm,” I sighed at the purple eye shadow. I stripped it off.

“If only someone could help me,” I said.

That didn't work.

I tried the gold eye shadow. The glittery, gorgeous gold. I had one eye done when I saw something flitter… I looked up and saw a butterfly.

“Oh!” I said.

I pointed at it, for the benefit of my audience of one.

This butterfly, this white-winged destroyer of cabbages, flitted about.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see my audience of one watching it too.

And then a small thing happened.

There was a click, followed by a
DZZZZZZZZZZZ
—a soft buzzing sound from this box in the corner of the tunnel.

Darling pricked up her ears. Whitby got up from under the table and stretched, then slouched off outside to have a sniff around. Darling tried to follow, but the kid picked her up. My audience increased to two.

OK. I daubed my brush in gold. I was poised, ready to sweep it across my other eyelid, when I heard a funny gurgling sound above me.

I looked up. I saw pipes. In one half of a milli-nanosecond I got it.

Such pretty flowers.

“RUN!” I screamed.

PSSSSSSSSSSSHT!

I leaped off the table, sending pots of flowers tumbling and crashing.

“OUT!” I yelled at the kid, grabbing her and shoving her toward the door—I turned and I yanked Darius Spratt off the table by his tank top. Behind us, water showered down, a shimmering curtain of it moving in on us as—
PSSSSHT! PSSSSSSSSSSSHT! PSSSSSSSSSSSHT!
—one sprinkler after another burst into life, cool air kissing our backs as we ran.

As we reached the door, Whitby blundered into us.

“OUT!” I screamed.

Know what? I didn't hesitate. We burst out of the polytunnel and I went straight for the trunk to rummage for the crowbar because it felt as if we were being attacked, as if maybe someone could have set those sprinklers off deliberately.

“It's automatic,” panted Darius, studying the sky. “It'll be automatic.”

“
You
don't know that!
” I screamed into his face, then carried on rummaging.

“There's a battery.”

“
The
thing
in
the
box?
”

“Yeah. It would be on a timer, wouldn't it?”

My hands found the crowbar even as my brain decided the Spratt was right; those plants were perfect, and like Simon had said about the supermarket flowers, it was too hard to imagine someone thinking,
Hey, the world's in meltdown, but I think I'll just water the plants. Every
day
.

“That water's probably OK too,” said Darius. Satisfied that the sky was OK, he actually looked at me. “It's probably from a tank.”

“Really? Well, why don't you go back in there, then?” I snarled. “And take a shower—because YOU REALLY NEED ONE.”

Whitby bounded around like a puppy, cranked up from all the running around, thinking some brilliant new game was being played. Darling wriggled to join him, but the kid wouldn't let her go. For the humans, the trauma wasn't quite over. Everything in Darius's whole-wheat survival kit was getting rained on in that tunnel. Everything we had to eat and drink (apart from vodka!) was being watered with the flowers. The bag of phones was still in the car, but I'd lost my makeup—that was totally disastrous—and now the kid only had that mangy sweatshirt to wear. But the biggest calamity of all had fallen on Darius Spratt, who had lost his trousers. Dig the underpants, Grandpa.

“I got too hot,” he said, going bright red.

I couldn't help myself; I snorted with mocking laughter.

“Shut up,” said Darius, hiding his modesty.

I tried to control myself as I offered what I had. The skinny jeans were a nonstarter, so it was down to fancy frocks and floaty tops…or a silver sequiny stretchy miniskirt from the same line as my dress.

I cracked up completely when he put it on. How that kid managed not to laugh I do not know—you could see she wanted to.

“I am NOT walking around like this,” said Darius.

Then I realized we sort of matched. I stopped laughing. I didn't want to walk around like that either.

I didn't want to walk around period; we needed gas, or we needed a new car.

“There's a farm,” I said.

And Darius and the kid
couldn't
walk around, period. I had on brilliant killer-heel boots from the old hag's place; their feet were naked. The track looked damp. Drying, but scarily damp. (How much water do you need to touch your body before it'll kill you? Really, how much?) I rummaged around in my bags and plunked down the only spare footwear I had: jeweled flip-flops. The kid seemed to like hers (even though she wouldn't take them off me and had to have them replunked to her by Darius and even though they were a hundred sizes too big); Darius Spratt's hairy-toed feet squashed into the pair I gave him like monster's feet, oozing over the front, the sides, and the back. He looked at me helplessly.

“I am not going to carry you,” I said. “I am SO not going to carry you.”

“Hn,” said Darius Spratt.

I wrestled a belt-leash onto Whitby—he was so giddy from trying to figure out the new game of running and flip-flop throwing, I could just see him taking it into his doggy head to have a little fun with a herd of cows—and we started up the track.

Remember that game you played when you were a kid? When you were only allowed to step on the light parts on the pavement, the parts that were dry, and you weren't allowed to step on the dark parts that were still wet from rain? And you'd have a race with your mom, and before you knew it, you'd be at the place—the library or school—that had seemed so far away? Monster-feet Spratt lurched from one light patch to another, then got stuck.

I had to hoist him onto my back. His arms wrapped tight around me. His hairy legs dangled. Donkey Ruby. In killer heels. Trudging along in a fog of
Parfum
de
Spratte
.

Whitby did go nuts when he saw the cows, and the cows went nuts when they saw us. I had to dump the Spratt in the farmyard because Whitby wanted to say hello to those cows so much he was going to pull me over—and they would have had no choice about the meet and greet because they were shut up in the barn. You could pretty much take that as a sign that there was no one home (or certainly not home and alive), but what proved that was the dogs: two collies chained up right outside the front door, dead. Those collies, by the door, there wasn't even a water bowl for them. I guess whoever had left them there hadn't thought it would be forever.

A better sight was that there was an old worn-out farm truck: open, keys in it. Great. I shut Whitby inside; the kid clutched Darling, so I couldn't do the same with her.

The Spratt picked his way across the farmyard and tried the front door: locked.

“Knock first!” I told him. “You've got to knock first and shout. Tell them we just want help.”

“I don't think there's anyone home,” said the Spratt.

I shoved him out of the way, and I knocked and shouted how we just wanted help—“And we're just kids!” I yelled—though the cows were making so much noise, it was probably pretty much pointless.

We stalked around the house and found that even the farmers had been having a barbecue. In this little yard, at the back, it was still there: half-cooked meat, rained on; bowls of salad, swimming in water; pecked-at soggy bread and chips.
BBQ
Britain
Sizzles.

We had to go in through a window, then let the kid in through the back door. Inside, it smelled bad. Sweet, spicy bad. The fridge was a no-go area, with nothing to drink in it anyway, but they had a pantry with cans of stuff in it. Darius sat the kid at the kitchen table with a spoon and a can of peaches, and the kid sat Darling down on the kitchen table to sniff at a can of sardines I'd opened.