The Rain (12 page)

To get to the supermarket, we’d have to get through all that. Or –

‘We could cut across the High Street further up,’ I said. ‘Just cut across; it’ll be really quick.’

Basically, I’d have marched across the Sahara if I’d thought there was something to drink on the other side. I could feel this disgusting fug of sweat building up inside the
waterproofs, and I’d already wondered if I’d have to survive by licking the inside of my cagoule.

‘Where?’ snapped Simon. Yup: stressed.

That’s the thing about being a teenager, I guess. You know about stuff, you know about places, about shortcuts that adults don’t. They get to drive everywhere; you get told,
‘It’s only a shower’ – i.e. get on with it, go. So you find the quickest way . . . OK, so you also find secret ways . . . OK, and places to lurk. Places without mosquito
alarms, and where you won’t get seen by parents cruising past in cars when maybe you’re supposed to be in double French or PE. Or a super-expensive private guitar lesson, for
example.

My shortcut, it was down this little alleyway. At the end of it you had to cut across the High Street, but not just straight across; you had to turn left, go along a bit and then cut right to
get into another alleyway. I guess Simon must have been thirst-crazy too, because we went for it . . . He gripped the umbrella like it was a club and took hold of my hand.

When I was small, when we first came here, when I first went out anywhere on my own with Simon (which wasn’t for a long time), he’d try to get me to hold his hand to cross the road.
I wouldn’t do it. I’d fold my arms and march across the road alone. If you’d told me one day I’d cross the High Street in broad daylight holding his hand . . . I
wouldn’t have believed you for a second.

I held his hand so tight.

There. That’s a thing I’ve said for my mum. And for Simon.

But honestly – and this is the weird thing – it wasn’t as bad as I had thought it would be. The riot, I mean. Yes, it was like nothing you’d ever seen (well, certainly
not in Dartbridge); there were people running about and smashing windows and nicking stuff and shouting at each other (plus alarms going off) . . . but what you realised in about ten seconds is
that although it’s really scary and about as far from anything normal you would ever expect to see – especially in the hippy capital of the entire universe – no one is in the
least bit bothered about you. Everyone is just doing their own thing; they couldn’t care less about you . . . unless you tried to take their TV or their trainers or their bags of food or
something, I bet. (So that was fine by me, because it wasn’t like anyone in the middle of a riot was going to see me holding ‘Daddy’s’ hand and stop and say, ‘Ruby?!
Oh my
! What ARE you wearing?!’)

Those people there, rioting, they looked like the kind of people you saw every day in Dartbridge. Some of them were just ordinary people; some of them looked like the sort of people who probably
spent a lot of time going to basket-weaving workshops or worshipping crystals in woodland glades. Point is, the hippies and the townies,
everyone
had gone nuts. If it had been organised by
the school, it would have been what they called a ‘group activity’, which meant you weren’t allowed to just stick with your friends but you had to actually
‘participate’ with the sorts of people you’d really rather
die
– I must stop saying that – than participate with.

We cut back down on to the hospital road, which was rammed with stopped cars. On the other side of that was the supermarket.

I guess we’d gone too far to turn back, so we went forward.

You know how a supermarket car park normally is? Everyone circling round like pizza-eating vultures just to try to get parked one space closer to the doors? Well, it wasn’t like that at
all. Cars were parked all over, not neatly in the spaces but jammed in everywhere, none of them moving, no one even packing stuff into them or hooting and tooting to get out. Only dead cars,
abandoned cars – and car alarms, going on and on.

‘Come on,’ said Simon, dragging me through it.

Up ahead, the supermarket looked nuts. There were a lot of people going in and out of it, but it was the biggest supermarket for miles around so that wasn’t unusual. You didn’t
really get how bad it was until you got closer. Then you could see the front doors were all smashed in. And I do mean all smashed in – not just the glass in the doors broken or something, but
the actual doors had gone. A truck was right inside the shop, smashed into the flower display.

Do I even need to say that there was no one at the tills, no one trying to stop or control anything? No, it was a grab-what-you-can job: people laden with stuff . . . but lots of mad, crazy,
what-do-you-want-that-for? stuff. I saw a guy with a trolley full of toilet rolls, two women with a trolley full of washing powder, a kid lugging a basket full of ketchup and icing sugar.

Sounds like crazy fun, huh?

Simon and I, we wandered into all this . . . and it was obvious, right away, that we’d come too late. Somewhere in that shop a dog was barking as we roamed the aisles realising how bad it
was. Where the fruit and vegetables should have been, it was bare. I mean stripped clean, bare-naked bare, nada. Not even a single packet of boiled beetroot left. (Boo hoo.) The dairy bit: the
milk, the yogurt – all of it gone. He took us to where the bottled water would have been: all the drinks, all the juices, everything, gone. From the looks of it the booze was also pretty much
cleaned out, I noticed. We went to the tinned fruit; that was cleaned out too – even the prunes had been taken.

‘I can’t believe this, I can’t believe this,’ Simon kept muttering.

I could. Inside my mouth it was as dry as when you go to the dentists and they put that sucky thing in your mouth so they don’t have to work in a pool of spit. Bone dry. When I stared at
those empty shelves, it was like they’d put that sucky thing right down in the middle of me and sucked up every last drop of moisture in my body.

We didn’t even get to the ice cubes. They would have all been gone, anyway. In the freezer section there was stuff, frozen stuff, melting, chucked all over the floor. Small groups of
people were bent inside the freezers, hacking away at the ice, shovelling it into bin liners that leaked precious water. A woman was on the floor, mopping the water up with kitchen cloths and
ringing it out into a bucket; two little kids stood near, sucking on kitchen cloths, each clutching a bumper-bag of sweets . . . and over them all, tough-looking men stood guard. One had a
frothy-mouthed, mad-eyed, barking pitbull . . . one had a shotgun.

‘We’ll go somewhere else,’ said Simon.

He grabbed my hand and started walking me out, fast. From a display of bargain stuff he snatched up a steak and kidney pie, the kind in a tin.

‘Love these,’ he said.

I never knew that.

As we walked out, past the crashed car, I pulled away from him and picked up the biggest, most expensive bunch of flowers I could see. Just like I’d never seen Simon buy a tinned pie even
though he said he loved them, my mum – who totally swooned about flowers – never bought them. Not for herself.

‘For Mum,’ I said.

Before I realised I might have done a very stupid thing, it turned out I might have done a very brilliant thing.

Simon stared at the bunch of flowers; water dripped from the stems.

‘You watch out for me,’ he said, swapping his shopping bags and the umbrella for the flowers.

He shoved the flowers back into some random bucket. He did the same with other stuff, shifting flowers around so’s he had a free bucket. I got it then. Without making any kind of a fuss
about it, Simon worked round the display, collecting water. Some of the flowers were dead already, sitting in empty buckets; some were wilted, with just a dribble of water left. Some looked pretty
perky and fresh. He worked really slowly and slyly; watching what was going on around him, standing back and looking around from time to time so he just looked like some dumb, confused, scared man,
wondering what on earth was going on. Thirsty people, desperate people, walked this way and that, straight past him. When he’d done with one bucket, he started on another.

And all the while I had this row going on in my head; like, how could he know that water was OK? But it must be OK, or he wouldn’t be taking it.

‘You watch out, Ru! You watch out!’ he hissed.

I was gasping to drink. Pull yourself together, I thought – in Simon’s voice.

I don’t know what made me do it. Too many films I expect; too many scenes in which people need to make a getaway, fast. Dur; we were going to have to walk for it anyway, but I backed up
and looked outside.

Our exit was as clear as it could be; all that was in our way was just people, coming and going. I took my Indiana Jones birdwatching hat off and fanned my face with it. So hot, so thirsty. And
then I looked up.

I don’t know what made me do that, either. I wish I could say I’d learned already how important it is to keep a watch on the sky, but – like using taps – it’s the
kind of thing I forget about a lot more than I should – which is basically NEVER. I looked up . . . into a sky festering with death.

It was the beginning of a storm sky: the raggedy clouds had pigged out and gotten bloated: cumulus congestus, fat with rain. Below these big guys, little sneaky fractus clouds hung about,
probably wondering which side to choose . . . and, in the distance, but already towering miles into the sky, Big Momma cumulonimbus calvus, puffing herself up to make an entrance.

She’s what I would have called a thundercloud – but actually, she hasn’t quite worked herself up enough for that. It’s when she goes into bad hair day mode (seriously
bouffant, with a streaky, icy flat-top) that you know she’s going to lose it big time. Big? By then, she’s the tallest thing on Earth: cumulonimbus capillatus, the thundery queen of all
clouds.

That’s what I know to say now; then all I saw was . . . it really looked like it was going to rain.

I went back inside. I was going to tell Simon about the clouds, but –

‘Give me the bags!’ he shouted.

Other people were shouting too; you could hear it, down where the freezers were. Sounded like a fight breaking out. The dog going beserk. Men shouting; women too. A kid screamed.

I took him the bags; he sat the buckets inside them.

‘Go careful,’ he said. ‘Stay calm.’

We picked up the bags and we walked out, away from the shouting and the screaming. A few steps into the car park, Simon looked up at the sky.

‘
,’ he said.

I thought he’d say we had to go back inside – but you could hear things were really kicking off in there. For a second Simon wavered in the grip of a mind-melt then shouted,
‘Run!’

I thought we were heading for home. I ran, the precious water from my bucket slopping everywhere.

‘Ruby!’ yelled Simon.

I looked behind and saw him standing at the open door of a car.

‘HERE!’ he shouted, ‘COME HERE!’, like I was a dog.

I turned and dived for the car – ended up in the driver’s seat; from the bag, on my lap, stinky water leaked all over my waterproof trousers – which weren’t properly
waterproof at all; I could see the material darkening, the water just soaking on through. The row that had gone on inside my own head came screeching out of my mouth, louder than the racket of the
alarms:

‘
What if it’s poisoned?!
’

I looked at Simon, who was glugging from his bucket.

‘Aaah!’ he shouted, and wiped his mouth, as though it was the best thing he’d ever had to drink. ‘Ruby, I really don’t think this water has been changed in days, do
you?’

‘
But how do you know that?!
’

‘Because, with everything that’s
gone on
,’ said Simon, shouting very slowly, ‘I don’t think anyone would have thought they needed to go and break into the
supermarket and give the flowers some water. In fact, I’m sure of it.’

He didn’t know that for sure; he couldn’t know that. I stared into the bucket in the bag on my lap; it looked worse – so much worse – than pizza, pea and fish-finger
melt-water. AND it stank. AND it was probably teeming with millions of wiggly little space bugs, all waving their tentacles at me, going, ‘Have a lovely drink, Ruby!’, AND I thought
I’d go mad with thirst just looking at it, AND I thought Simon had already gone mad. That’s what thirst does; it gets to a certain point and you’ll drink anything just to make it
stop. You just don’t care any more. That’s why people go crazy in deserts and drink sand, thinking it’s water, or why shipwrecked sailors stuck in lifeboats crack and glug down
buckets of seawater. (Then go mad and end up bumping off their shipmates to gnaw on their bones.) All I could do was stare into that bucket of stinking water thinking, I-JUST-WANT-TO-DRINK.