H2O (28 page)

I picked the biggest and best department store I could find, strode on in through a shattered window, and I shopped until I dropped.

There were other shoppers in there. First one I saw, I froze in panic. She just nodded at me, said “Hi,” and carried on browsing.

Next one I saw, I nodded at, said hi.

Third one I saw, in men's ties, I just ignored. Not in a nasty way—we were just browsing. We had no reason to speak.

I got my dad a really good tie, a bunch of really good ties. Silk ties. I'd never seen him wear a tie, but…

A long time later, I sailed out of a changing room in exactly the kind of insanely gorgeous super-expensive designer frock I wanna wear to the premiere of the never-to-be-made blockbuster of my bestselling book—and froze. There was someone hogging the mirror, twirling about, this way and that, in an incredible dress—in a hideous color: orange. Don't you just hate orange?

“What do you think, darling?”

I thought it was Naomi Campbell. I pretty much knew it couldn't have been, but that is what I thought. She made everyone I had ever known, every person I had ever seen, including every person in King Xar's court, look…shabby and ugly. Apart from my mom, if you know what I mean. This person, she was THE most gorgeous thing ever. Wondrous to behold. Glowing with extreme loveliness and beauty. If she'd had a wand, I would have sworn I had surely met a fairy godmother, one I wanted for my very own.

So she had seen me. Also she wasn't a she. She was a he.

There was a guy in Dartbridge who wore women's clothes, but he just looked like…a guy with a beard wearing women's clothes. This person, THE most gorgeous person I had ever seen in real life in my life, looked…AH-MAY-ZING. He/she had been on a makeup binge too, but he/she was a lot better at it than me. Great, GREAT sweeping eyelashes. Shimmering, perfect lips.

I could have bolted. I looked around. There was this couple, miles away in the underwear department; the guy sat flicking through a magazine while the woman pondered sexy-looking corsets. But other than that, me and the most beautiful person on Earth seemed to be alone.

“Maybe a different color?” I said.

He/she gave me a long, hard, pouty stare—but a much better long, hard, pouty stare than I could ever do—then looked back at him/herself in the mirror.

“Hmmm, you're probably right,” he/she said.

He/she picked up her enormous (DESIGNER!) handbag, hoisted it on to his/her slender shoulder, and skimmed, with elegant manicured nails, through hangers.

I looked to see where the emergency exit was, where the little white man was running now.

“What do you think about this?” he/she said, holding up something: a green shapeless thing that could have looked brilliant on, or could have looked—

“Hn,” I said.

“Isn't it?” he/she said. He/she released the item from her fingers; it dropped to the floor.

“I'm Diana. From Knightsbridge,” she said, extending her hand to me.

There was something so—SO—elegantly
sophisticated
about her, I just couldn't help but take that hand. I thought that—maybe—it trembled slightly.

“I'm Ruby,” I said. “From Dartbridge.”

“
Enchanté
,” breathed Diana, gently squeezing my hand.

She let my hand go and flitted, like a beautiful butterfly, to another rail.

“Diana?”

“Yah?” she said, wandering off to look at shoes.

I wanted to talk. I—randomly—wanted to talk.
No, Ru
, I told myself.
Not
now
.

“I have to go,” I said.

“Sure,” she said, jamming a shoe onto her foot.

“I'm going to Hyde Park,” I said.

“Sweet cakes,” said Diana, gracefully flinging the shoe across the floor, “you don't want to go there.”

“Why not?”

“Army, darling. Army.”

She flitted on to another display. Me and my bags of loot clumped after her.

“I wish they did half sizes. You just
know
they won't. Why does NO ONE do half sizes?”

“What's wrong with the army?” I asked.

“Uh!” said Diana, like the army was the worst thing she could think of. “What's
right
with them?” she fumed, trying to get her foot into a shoe that was too small. “They've been rounding everyone up, haven't they? What are they doing with them?”

She flung the shoe across the floor.

“Helping them?”

“Yah, right! How come it's all come-to-mamma now? I mean,
sweetie
, think about it! These people—the army, the gov-ern-ment—didn't even bother telling people…anything. Not one word that would have saved a body's life!”

The angrier she got, the more her accent kind of bounced around. These words crept in that sounded more like the kind of South London gangsta-rapper thing Dan tried to do; only with Diana, it was like that was what she was trying not to do.

She looked up at me. She sighed a mighty sigh.

“What else could they do, I suppose? I expect that's what they'll say, anyway. There was hardly going to be enough bottles of bubbly to go around, was there?”

She delved in her designer bag and handed me a glass (DESIGNER!) bottle of fizzy water.

“At least now there's plenty,” she said.

I'd been too busy shopping to notice how thirsty I was. I opened it and drank it down.

“For as long as it lasts,” added Diana with another sigh.

“Oh! Sorry!” I said, thinking I'd deprived her.

“No, no, no,” she said, waving my words away with her beautifully manicured hand. “Plenty more where that came from…for now. What I meant was,” she said softly, “it won't last forever, will it? And then what, eh?”

I burped. “Pardon me,” I muttered. I hadn't thought about this. I hadn't thought about any of this. Only about the Spratt and his pills, about my train tracks—and even those things I hadn't exactly
thought
about, not really.

“Doom…” she sighed. “Hey-ho. I'll tell you what, we simply shan't talk about it, eh? We don't want to go getting ourselves all miserable, do we?”

“No…” I said. “Diana?”

“Yah?”

“My dad's there. At the army place.”

She fixed me with her fairy-godmother gaze, magicking everything.

“I'm sure it's all perfectly charming,” she said. “I'm sure it'll all be fine.”

“I will say one thing, though, sweetie,” she added, examining a crocodile-skin-look red ankle boot. In spite of the magicking, I kind of wished she wouldn't say another word, but she chucked the boot aside and advanced on me. “I think we need to do something with your hair.”

Huh?!
One minute we were discussing the hideous mess the world was in, and now the hideous mess of my hair.

“I mean, if you're going to do red—and, frankly, I think you may need to have a rethink on that…” she said sternly. “Do you mind?” she asked, and before I could say that, yes, actually, I did mind, she'd liberated my hair from its elastic band. “IF you are going to DO red, you need to
DO
red
.”

Before I could protest, she mussed up my hair and steered me to a mirror.

“Uh,” she sighed, gazing at me with me. “What DO they teach you in—where is it you said you were from?”

“Dartbridge,” I said. “It's a little town in—”

“Shh! Sweetie! Concentrate! Absorb!”

Diana dumped a ton of stuff from her handbag and did stuff to my hair.

I really, seriously, did not recognize myself. I'd already tinkered about with makeup so my face didn't look so scratched-up-with-hints-of-orange, and now, there I was, in an amazing dress, with amazing hair, looking amazing.

“Shoes,” muttered Diana. “You need the right shoes.”

I had quite a fantastic pair of platform sneakers on already.

“I should go,” I said.

“What are you?” asked Diana. “A four?”

“Five,” I said. “But—”

“Wait!” commanded Diana, stalking dramatically back into the land of shoes.

She found what she was looking for and put the box in a bag for me.

“They'll be perfect,” she said and air kissed me. “Mwah! Mwah! Go knock 'em dead, sweetie.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“
De
rien!
” said Diana. “
De
rien!
”

“Thank you,” I said again. I didn't know what else to say, so I kissed her—for real—on the cheek…because she was beautiful, because she had made me look amazing, and because, if I could ever have a fairy godmother, I would wish for one who looked just like her. Just
looked
, mind; the general somewhat bossy attitude was a little too much. My fairy godmother would have to dote on me, be forever gentle and kind.

“You take care, girlfriend,” she whispered.

A big, fat tear slid down her beautiful cheek, right through the lipstick mark I'd left where I'd kissed her.

I left. I wasn't going to cry and wreck two hundred dollars' worth of makeup. I had no reason to cry anyway. I was going to see my dad.

In the next ten minutes, when I stepped out from designer world and crunched back down Oxford Street into real life, I went from feeling like I looked a million dollars to feeling like I looked like kind of a twit. Kind of a Darius Spratt. Glamour plus army does not go.

There was this makeshift, razor-wired army post and polytunnel-type space tent in the middle of the park. Men in white bio-suits, masks, guns. No one shouted; no one waved. They couldn't
not
have seen me. I waddled up to them in my dress, weighed down with bags.

“All right, love?” said one of the men.

He opened the wire, and I went into their compound.

“I need to get to Salisbury,” I said.

“Well, you've come to the right place then,” he said. “Take a seat.”

There was a handful of other people like me there too, sitting on plastic sheets on the grass. Most looked like they'd also got side-tracked on Oxford Street, dressed up to the nines in whatever took their fancy, surrounded by millions of shopping bags. One woman wore a ton of diamonds. I mean, I really think those might have been real diamonds—they kind of looked different from the bling I'd picked up—and she kept clutching her neck, checking her ears.

A few of those people nodded vaguely at me. Mainly they just stared at the floor or at the sky, waiting.

I didn't know what else to do, so I did what they were doing. I waited.
I'm going to see my
dad.

Me and my two million bags of designer loot sat in front of them, this woman and this man—in normal clothes—sitting behind a desk. The woman had a notepad. The man had a laptop. The army had electricity.

I waited for a while while the woman muttered stuff to the guy and folded her notepad so she had a clean sheet of paper.

I didn't mind waiting.
I'm going to see my
dad.

The first helicopter ride I ever had didn't lasted very long. We got dumped in another park—somewhere beyond the traffic jams, I suppose—put onto a bus, then dumped in this stinky hangar with a ton of other people, where everyone had spent hours and hours shuffling forward and backward in this long (stinky) zigzag line. Reason for the shuffling about was quite sweet, really; every time a new bunch of people arrived, those in line already let anyone who was old or sick or had little kids go to the front. Quite sweet—and totally rage-making. Some people lost it; some people shouted—or muttered to anyone they thought might listen—about who they were and why they were there and why they should be at the front of the line. I kept my cool though.
I'm going to see my
dad
.

When it really was my turn, the door slid open, and I stepped out into the light. It was blinding, dazzling, after the darkness of the hangar, and it wasn't even proper daylight; it was plastickly blurred through some kind of army polytunnel that led from one building to the next.

“This way,” said a soldier, and I followed his voice, blinking, into the next building, into a room—the room where the woman and the man sat. Two soldiers stood at the back—but slouching, like they'd had a long wait too.

“Do you want a drink?” the woman behind the desk asked.

There was one small plastic cup of water on that table.

“No thanks,” I said, even though I was dying of thirst.
I'm going to see my
dad
.

The woman asked questions; the man typed my answers into the laptop. It went OK at first: name and address. I got my own date of birth wrong first time they asked—not because I was so impatient and excited, which I was, but because I went into fib autopilot. It's just what you do, isn't it, when someone in authority (like the shopkeeper you're trying to buy beer from) asks you to confirm the date on the fake ID that's not even yours. (Lee, darling, will it even matter now if I say it belonged to you?)

I corrected myself, and they carried on.

Was I accompanied? Did I have a parent or other relative with me?

“No,” I said. “But I think my dad's here.”

“And your mother?” the woman asked.

They made me tell them; they made me give the names and dates of birth of my mom, of Henry, of Simon. Of the “members of my immediate family” I knew for sure were dead. Henry's date of birth, I knew. Mom? Simon? I couldn't get it right; I knew when their birthdays were—the dates and months—but which year? I had to tell
them
how old they were and let them work it out.

“Sorry, I'm no good at math,” I said.

That woman, she sort of smiled at me.

“So, you're not good at math…but are you good at other things in school”—she glanced down at her notepad—“Ruby?”

I shrugged. I couldn't think why she'd be asking something like that. What did that matter?

“You just need to answer honestly,” she said. “This isn't a test.”

Funny thing was that
that
was exactly what it felt like.

“I do OK,” I said. “I mean, I'm not all that good at that much. I do OK in English. I like art.”

“And outside school? What do you like to do?”

Why was she asking me this stuff?

“Same like anyone,” I said. “Just hang out with my friends, I guess.”

“No hobbies?” she asked.

“Not really,” I said. I definitely didn't want her asking about those guitar lessons.

And then she asked a bunch of other questions. These got really specific. Had I come into contact with any infected water? Had I come into contact with anyone who had come into contact with infected water? Had I eaten any fresh fruit or vegetables? Had I drunk any fresh milk? Eaten any fresh meat?

“No,” I said. Confidently. I wasn't stupid, was I?

The man hit a key on the laptop, like he'd been hitting a single key on the laptop for the last ten minutes. All those questions and he hadn't typed anything I'd said in; he'd just hit a key.

“Thank you, Ruby,” said the woman. “You can go.”

All the way through that test they said wasn't a test, I'd held on to my shopping bags. I stood up.

“Can I see my dad now?” I asked.

“He's not here,” said the woman.