The Rain (11 page)

In some ways, the outside world looked normal. Mainly that was because what you can see from our kitchen window is rooftops and trees; when all the leaves are out, when all the plants are
sprouted, you can’t really see down into the streets (where there were dead people); you can’t see down into the beer gardens of pubs (where there were dead people); you can’t see
into people’s homes (where there were dead people) and you can’t really see into people’s back gardens. If you could have done, you would have seen what I’ve seen a million
times since: dead people sprawled around barbecues. So, yes, it all looked normal. The trees and plants seemed to be OK; nothing looked withered or sick or dying. Birds flew in the sky. It looked
like a nice, normal day . . . except – even with the windows still tight shut – you could
hear
it wasn’t right. There were alarms going off all over the place and . . .
you could see the car park behind the library. Cars were coming and going; not tons like there’d normally be, going round and round looking for spaces, but there were some cars.
People
were coming and going. That was where the normal bit stopped.

The people in the car park, they weren’t just your regular shoppers; they were staggering back from town with bags and bags of stuff, trolleys even. Not just food, either; all sorts of
tons of stuff, like it was Christmas or the January sales. A man and a woman had a massive flat-screen TV in a trolley; it tipped over in the car park and the TV smashed. They went off again with
the trolley, but I didn’t see them come back. Then a couple of blokes got into a fight and this woman started jumping about all over the place, waving her arms – screaming at them to
stop, probably, or screaming for help.

And all the while the radio was on: the emergency broadcast quietly telling people, over and over, to stay home and remain calm.

Remain?
Doesn’t that sort of make it sound as if people were calm and had to stay that way? When exactly did they think people had been calm?!

‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ said Simon, disgusted.

He put the binoculars down and went out of the kitchen; I heard him tramp upstairs to use his bucket in the bathroom. I picked up the binoculars.

From a distance, the fight had just looked a bit silly: pixie men scrapping; pixie lady jumping. Close up, it was fascinating, in a nasty sort of way. I almost cheered when the smaller bloke
managed to knock the bigger guy down – but the bigger guy didn’t get back up.

That car park, didn’t Simon always go on about how it was a disgrace? Full of potholes that were now full of water. Water that was now full of death.

You could see the big man clawing at his arm, then wrenching his whole shirt off, his body bloody where he’d hit the ground.

It turned out the woman was with him and not the other bloke; she ran to him.

Don’t touch him! Don’t touch him! Don’t touch him! I thought, even as she slumped down and cradled his head like it was a baby.

Don’t touch her! Don’t touch her! Don’t touch her! I thought, even as the big man reached up his hand . . . to push her away? She grabbed his bloody hand in hers; she –
NO! NO! NO! – kissed it.

Stay home, remain calm.

The woman bent over the man, kissing and kissing his lips; not snogging, not one long kiss, but kisses and kisses and words in between, saying stuff, her body rocking; her hand going from his
head to rake at hers – at hers, where her face had turned bloody – and back to his, stroking his cheek. Kissing him, rocking him, saying stuff.

Love stronger than pain. In the car park behind Dartbridge Library.

‘We need water,’ said Simon, bustling back into the kitchen. ‘I’m going out.’

I put the binoculars down.

We kind of had a row then. It wasn’t one of our old rows; this was a very new kind of a row.

There was no shouting, for a start. There had been no shouting (except about the tap and that) since I’d seen my mum. The high horses did get saddled up, but very quietly, with no yee-haa.
Simon didn’t want me to go with him because he was worried it wouldn’t be safe. I didn’t say I knew it wasn’t safe because I’d just seen two people dying (probably) in
the library car park. In any case, that was other people. That wouldn’t happen to us. I point blank refused to stay home alone.

You can’t leave me, you can’t leave me, you can’t leave me; that was all I had to say about everything he said.

Also, even then, maybe especially then, I still thought that if I went with him I might be able to get him to take me to Zak’s. I would see my friends, I would get my phone.

I really did think this. I really did think all my friends would still be at Zak’s, wondering whether they should go out or not – although stuck in the country like that they
wouldn’t know that no one seemed to be paying the slightest bit of notice to what the broadcast was telling people. And maybe they’d know how Caspar was. I had seen what had happened to
my mother, and to Henry, and to the car-park people, and to Mrs Fitch, and still I had this thought that Caspar would still be alive. I suppose you could say it was more of a hope.

By the time me and Simon had finished having our new not-a-row row, clouds had begun to appear in the sky. Not big clouds, not rain clouds, but gangs of little raggedy
clouds.

Some kind of altocumulus type, I now think they must have been, but I can’t remember whether they were castellanus (raggedy at the top) or floccus (raggedy at the bottom). Little raggedy
clouds.

‘Ruby,’ said Simon. ‘I have to go
now
.’

‘You can’t leave me,’ I said. For the zillionth time.

Simon caved. He had to: I would not be left alone.

‘Don’t look,’ he instructed as he opened the door.

He didn’t say what at; I knew. I looked anyway. There were flies all over the mess that had been Mrs Fitch’s face. I felt . . . what I would come to feel a lot, for a while; this
thing I didn’t even know what to call back then, this wave of grief and shock and horror – not so much for Mrs Fitch, in truth, but because Mrs Fitch made me think about my mum.

Not even out of the garden gate, and all I wanted to do was go back and hide in my duvet and watch
Birds of the British Isles
until it all stopped.

The gate banged shut and I heard them: the neighbours’ dogs. Alarms screeching and squealing up from the town, and still you could hear them. Dogs that wouldn’t normally be bothered
about the bang of a gate being bothered about it.

We got in the car and got as far as the end of Cooper’s Lane. It was like the traffic jam that had been there on the night Zak’s mum drove me home hadn’t budged. In fact, most
of it probably hadn’t. It took a few moments to realise that most of the cars heading into town weren’t moving at all, were just stopped still, abandoned – or worse . . . there
were people in those cars and the people weren’t moving. In between the stopped cars came the cars of the living, horns honking pointlessly as they tried to find a way through. There were
cars stopped on the other side too, coming out of town, but fewer of them.

‘Perhaps we’d better walk,’ said Simon, jamming the car into reverse.

We went back home.

We had one last not-a-row row, a mini one, right outside our garden gate.

‘Ruby,’ he said. ‘I really want you to stay home.’

You can’t leave me, you can’t leave me, you can’t leave me; and all the while the alarms going, the sirens going, the neighbours’ dogs barking, the buzz of flies . . .
the little gangs of poisoned clouds snuggling up together, getting just a little thicker and fatter and sinkier.

I won the row that wasn’t a row, but I paid a terrible price for it. Even though it was totally obvious it wasn’t going to rain any time soon, Simon made us go back into the house
and get togged up in wellies, waterproof trousers and double cagoules. He told me to put the hood up on my cagoule, then produced one of his ‘Indiana Jones goes birdwatching’ hats.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No way. I’d rather die.’

I didn’t mean I’d rather die as in killer-rain die, I just meant . . . whatever it was I used to mean when I said stuff like that. He slapped the hat on my head, then cruelly
tightened the hood of the cagoule.

I was outraged by the horror and shame of it, but I couldn’t say anything, could I? Yes I could! I loosened the hood from my mouth and scabby chin.

‘Well, what are we going to do about our hands?’ I said.

I only said that to point out the pointlessness of it all, not so he’d go and get washing-up gloves for us both.

He dangled them in front of me.

‘If you’d rather not,’ he said, ‘we can both stay home and die of thirst.’

I did feel that was somewhat unnecessarily brutal, but I put the accursed gloves on and retightened the hood of the cagoule. The less you could see of my face, the less likely it’d be that
someone would recognise me, with any luck. Simon handed me Mum’s massive umbrella.

‘I’m not putting it up,’ I mumbled through the cagoule.

‘Right,’ said Simon. ‘But if I say you need to, you do it.’

‘’Kay,’ I mumbled.

We marched back out of the gate and he opened the boot of the car and handed me the shopping bags; you know, those big ‘green’ long-lasting ones people use – because they fit
so well in the back of a car, Ronnie said, meaning there was nothing eco about them.

‘So you do what I say, when I say, young lady.’

‘Yes,’ I said. It came out all loud and wobbly, so it sounded about a micro-millimetre off a yee-haa yes . . . but – truth is – I was scared.

It was baking hot and I was sweating by the time we’d walked about three steps. By the time we hit the footpath that led from right by our house into town, I was sweating
even more – and I got more scared.

What you might need to know at this point is that Dartbridge is basically the hippy capital of the universe. It is drowning in tie-dye and organic vegetables. People walk barefoot through the
streets not because they are poor, but because they want a closer connection to the Earth (despite the fact that there’s a ton of tarmac on top of it). Even the graffiti, which looks kind of
cool, is hippy; this squiggly symbol for peace gets spray-painted everywhere. Dartbridge, Ronnie said, was ‘A place so laid back it was practically comatose.’

Below the alarms and the sirens and the car horns, you could hear . . . not just shouts and screams, but the sound of things – glass – smashing.

‘Is it a riot?’ I asked.

I’d seen stuff like that on TV before. It happened in other countries mainly, but also in the UK when people were annoyed about stuff the government was doing – which Ronnie said
would happen a lot more often if people knew what was really going on.

‘A riot in Dartbridge? I don’t think so,’ said Simon. ‘People are just panicking a bit, I expect.’

We didn’t go the way we’d usually go, straight into town via the library car park. Simon split right, along the back road, South Street. Fine by me, because I
didn’t want to go anywhere near The George. Not so fine was . . . there was a bloke slumped up against a wall. Looked as if he’d just fallen asleep there. Like a drunk bloke might,
snoozing in the sun.

‘Don’t look,’ said Simon, but I did.

He wasn’t snoozing. His face was all bloody and his eyes were gone, holes where they should have been. I didn’t know it then, but that’s what birds do, peck out the bits that
are easiest to get their beaks into. Nice.

In all my life up until the day before I’d never seen a dead person. Not counting the car-park people – which I didn’t like to do, because I hadn’t actually seen them
die, had I? Like Caspar, it had to be possible that they’d be OK – I’d now seen four dead bodies.
Four
.

Ha ha ha. That’s pretty funny, huh? Do you see? I was still counting.

And . . . does it sound too weird to say it? I felt glad that my mum was at home with Henry, not lying in the street – or in her nightie in someone’s front garden, like Mrs
Fitch.

Simon was wrong. It was a riot.

South Street goes along next to the High Street then curves in to meet it. As we walked towards the noise, you had this little view – a tiny street’s width – of the High
Street. And across this little gap, people – not tons of people, but little flurries and spurts of them – were going back and forth, some walking, some running, some shouting. Some with
scarves tied across their faces like it was a proper riot or something. Some pushing trolleys, most carrying all sorts.

So what we’d seen in the car park, it wasn’t just some random thing – it was what was going down.

‘We’ll go to the other supermarket,’ said Simon, staring at the little snippet of riot.

That was another moment when I (sort of) realised how serious it was. We basically never much went to ‘the other supermarket’, aka ‘the good one’. In my house, if there
was something from ‘the other supermarket’ in the fridge – or sneaked into the freezer like the pizza – it was unusual, as in Shocksville unusual, and also a cause for deep
joy. Lee’s family went there all the time and always had tons of brilliant stuff to eat – like ice cream, for a start, and snacky things you could microwave in seconds, chips included.
Pretty much everyone else’s family shopped there too, at least sometimes. Even Zak’s.

We back-tracked and cut around along Snow Hill, weaving our way along the back streets until we’d nearly reached the river. Up ahead, you could see the junction where the end of the High
Street meets a bunch of other roads: the bridge road from the east end of town where Leonie lived, the road that led into town from the seaside places like Paignton and Torquay and the road that
led to the hospital and the supermarket.

That junction was rammed with dead cars, with live people, with rage – you could hear it from where we stood: screaming, shouting, fighting and the police, in a car, stuck in the middle of
it, lights flashing. There was a policeman on the roof of the car with a megaphone, telling people to Go Home, Go Home, Go Home.

Simon looked . . . like he looked when he got landed with Henry having a bawling fit. Upset, confused and panicked. Stressed out, but trying not to show it.