The Rain (17 page)

Disgusting. Disgusting, vile, filthy – I grabbed my rubber gloves and I threw every last container full of water out of the kitchen window. I didn’t empty them out; I threw them out
– pots and pans and everything; I poured the last of the bleach all over the floor – but I could not bring myself to throw away that vase. I emptied it and filled it up with a bottle of
tonic water from my ruck-sack. I carried it up the stairs. I put it down and put the flowers in it, willing them to live.

‘Simon?’ I called, standing outside their bedroom door. ‘Simon?’

There was no reply. From the vase, the dark ooze of a leak spread across the floorboards and I stared at it, wondering how many of those disgusting little things were crawling about in it.

The panic I felt, it was the worst kind of panic. Blind panic, that’s what they call it, when you stop thinking completely. I had never, ever felt so alone and so frightened in my whole
life. My brain had no say at all in what happened next, which was probably the stupidest thing I’ve ever done – apart from the thing I’d just done, filling the vase with water,
and the thing after the thing that happened next.

I couldn’t stay in the house another second.

I got my bike from the shed and I set out for Zak’s. I had no water, I had no waterproofs, I had no Indiana Jones goes birdwatching hat . . . I didn’t even have a
umbrella. Ha ha.

I never normally cycled anywhere if I could help it. Leonie and me, we’d cycled over to Zak’s once, the summer before, and it had nearly killed us. The plan was
we’d cycle back, but Zak’s mum ended up taking us home, the bikes in the back of the estate. Simon and my mum didn’t see her drop me off and thought I’d cycled back . . .
and I didn’t put them straight; for weeks I moaned on about how exhausted I was so’s I could get lifts to other places. And after that I moaned on about how dangerous it was. That part
was completely true. Those Devon lanes, they look so lovely, but some right nutters drive along them – and with those high banks and hedges there’s nowhere to get out of the way if
you’re on a bike.

That day, that evening, it was not a problem. I didn’t see or hear a single soul. Not one car passed me. I guess if you actually liked cycling, it would have been lovely: a beautiful
summer’s evening ride in the country. I didn’t really notice that, same way as this time I didn’t really notice the hills me and Lee had had to get off and walk up (moaning). I
didn’t really notice anything until I got to Zak’s and saw the estate wasn’t there. The little zippy car wasn’t there either. What was there was Zak’s dad. It looked
as if he had been there for a long time. Like maybe he had coming running out after the car that night. Best not to think about it, best not to look. Poor Barnaby.

I guess you know what’s coming next. I guess you can guess it. My darling Lee, and most of my other friends were in the kitchen, but not how I had pictured them.

It looked as though most of them had died the way Simon had died. The cups of tea – half drunk, festering, spilt – were on the table still. The coffee never did get
made. Flies that weren’t busy on my friends checked out the toast, the butter and the jam.

I remembered something Simon had said – or rather something he had not said. I’d questioned the thing about the tap water, you see. Yes, but. They didn’t say
anything about that on the TV, but Simon had said he thought it was an obvious risk. How could it be safe? I felt terrible, thinking there must be tons and tons of people like me who wouldn’t
have even thought about it, people who didn’t have a Simon to think for them. But I wasn’t even worried about my friends; I told Simon we’d drunk water from the tap that
night.

‘And it was fine!’ I’d said.

And Simon didn’t say anything. I guess he knew.

You didn’t have to be some kind of detective to work it out. Those glasses of water we’d drunk that night, the water I’d scrubbed my face with, those must have been the last
drops of good water in the taps. What we had filled the kettle with would kill us.

And later, when I thought about it, it taught me another thing: this space thing, you can’t kill it by boiling it.

The radio was still on, telling my dead friends to stay home and remain calm.

If, that night, instead of going live to here and live to there and ‘Ooo! Look who we’ve got in the studio!’ – if, instead of guessing and going on about all sorts, they
had just said DON’T DRINK ANY WATER (AND, BY THE WAY, IT
IS
CONTAGIOUS) . . . maybe my friends, maybe a whole load of other people would still be alive. If Simon had thought of it, I
couldn’t understand why the government or the TV and radio people or whoever hadn’t. If they’d just said that, even if they weren’t sure. If.

I turned the radio off; I could have smashed it.

‘Lee?’ I said quietly, standing as still as she lay.

There wasn’t loads of blood all over her or anything. There was just flies, buzzing. Other than that, Lee – my sweet, darling Leonie Lee – looked like . . . like maybe she was
just messing about. Like we’d done tons of times when we were little. ‘Pretending to be dead’. Like any second she’s just crack up and lose it and laugh.

‘Lee, please get up,’ I said, waiting for the smile to erupt on her sunken cheeks, for her to burst out laughing.

She didn’t. Lee didn’t smile. I was never going to see Lee’s smile again.

I howled.

Still howling, sucking in air like a person with an asthma attack gasps it, I made myself look. I made myself check for everyone. I made myself see . . . what I had missed . .
. just like you’d want to know about a party you’d had to leave.

You would never, ever, have wanted to know about this. This’d be a thing you’d have been glad to miss.

Zak and Ronnie, they’d made it back upstairs. There was dried gore all over the keyboard, so it seemed like someone – Ronnie, for sure – had got back on the
computer, still trying to look for answers where he always looked for answers, on the web. And then? They were curled up on the bed together.

I found bodies all over that house. I found everyone . . . except Saskia. I checked in every room again. I called her name. I went outside and called – I could hardly
bear to look at the hot tub, to think about me and Caspar, and how we had kissed . . . on a beautiful evening just like this, and so totally not at all like this. On a beautiful evening when it
looked like my life was finally going to be brilliant.

I wandered into the barn. There was all our stuff. My bag. My clothes. My make-up. My stupid mobile, battery dead.

I gathered up everyone else’s phones too. I had this idea that people would ring to speak to my friends. Mothers, fathers, aunties, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins. Other friends. And
that it was somehow my duty to tell all those people that all my friends were dead. Like those people – mothers, fathers, aunties, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins, other friends –
would still be alive to tell that too.

There was only one person whose death I wasn’t going to have to explain to anybody: Saskia. Her stuff wasn’t in the barn. Her stuff had gone.

When I went back through the kitchen, I saw Caspar’s phone and MP3, on the floor, next to his jeans. I took them too. And then I did what really was the most stupid of stupidest things I
have ever done.

I cycled home.

Hardly any distance from the house, I realised I was dying of thirst – and it felt like I really was. What I had seen at Zak’s, it was so dreadful, so
stomach-churningly sick-making in every way, that I hadn’t thought to look for anything to drink. So, so stupid. I’d had nothing but a bit of juice and a few ice cubes; I’d cycled
miles on a boiling hot evening, and now I had yet more miles to cycle on a boiling hot night – which was the other stupid part of the stupidest thing; you never travel when you can’t
see the sky. Even when there are stars out – and there were – you can’t see what kind of cloud is creeping up at night – and there was cloud creeping up. The sky, the night,
the
everything
closing in on me.

I could have gone to other houses; there were houses, some with lights on. That didn’t mean much any more. From our kitchen window we’d seen lights on all over; it didn’t mean
people were alive . . . and, even if they were, there was no telling what they might do.

Pain throbbed in my head; my tongue bumped around in my mouth. I remembered the thing Simon had said, about drinking your own pee . . . and I remembered another thing he had said once, a long
time ago, when I was just a little kid. We were on a walk and I was moaning about being thirsty – like about five minutes after we’d set off, probably. What was unusual was we
didn’t have the ten tons of stuff Simon normally took. (I can hear my mum now: ‘Do we really need to take all that?’ and Simon would say, ‘Well, I’m the one
that’s carrying it.’ He was our Sherpa Tenzing. Whenever you wanted something, Simon had it.) Only on that day, he didn’t. It wasn’t a
planned
walk with maps and
stuff; it was a stop-off from a country pub lunch – at which I’d begged for a cola and been given lemonade, like that was somehow better for you. That kind of thing happened a lot.

‘Ru,’ Simon said to me. ‘I’ll show you an old Sioux Indian technique.’

Probably it wasn’t an old Sioux Indian thing at all. Probably it was a birdwatcher’s survival thing. What I don’t think it was was something Simon made up. Simon didn’t
make things up.

‘You find yourself a pebble,’ Simon said, picking one off the ground and rubbing it clean on his trousers, ‘and you suck it.’

He popped the pebble in his mouth.

‘It stimulates your production of saliva,’ he said, rolling the pebble around in his mouth, ‘and makes you feel less thirsty.’

I grabbed the nearest pebble.

‘Stop it!’ said my mum. ‘Don’t teach her that! That could be dirty, Ruby. You might choke! What you need to do is imagine – what would you like to drink right
now?’

‘A cola,’ I said. ‘With lots of ice – and a slice of lemon.’

I can remember even now: I added the bit about the lemon to show how grown-up I was – but the cola? I chose that because they hadn’t let me have one, and I knew for sure that if I
had been allowed one I wouldn’t feel thirsty like I did.

‘So you just imagine that’s what you’re drinking,’ said my mum. ‘You try that.’

I stopped my bike on the moonlit road. I didn’t drink my own pee; I felt like I had no pee in me anyway. I couldn’t see a pebble, so I picked up a small, sharp lump
of road grit. I wiped it a bit and put it in my mouth. I rummaged in my bag and pulled out Caspar’s MP3, fiddled with it in the dark. Music blared – seemed like. For a second, I was
going to skip the track, look for something I knew, when I realised it
was
something I knew. It was Caspar. No band playing with him, just Caspar and his guitar. I looked at the sky
– stars disappearing, moon disappearing – and I cycled on, listening to Caspar’s sweet, snoggy voice singing love in my ear and thinking about an ice-cold cola, with a slice of
lemon.

When I got in, I gulped so many bottles of water I threw up. I threw up until there was nothing left to throw up but bitter, acidy stuff.

I had this terror moment of thinking maybe I was
sick
sick – rain sick – and then I pulled myself together. My head hurt, but I wasn’t about to go see what – if
anything – Simon had left that I could take for that.

I’d called his name, when I got home. An ostrich thing. There’d been no answer. I did not want to go up there and see why. I knew why.

I remembered what my mum did when I got sunburnt (which totally wouldn’t have had to have happened if we’d gone on holiday to proper places and/or they’d just let me get a
decent spray tan, etc.). On the outside, you need to cool the skin; on the inside, what I had, was dehydration. I mixed a bit of salt and sugar with some water and I forced myself to sip, sip, sip
it, even though my stomach was churning and I wanted to gulp it and throw it up again at the same time.

I sorted the phones out, starting with mine. That meant going upstairs, to the attic, to my bedroom, where I hadn’t been – except to grab stuff – for days. I didn’t hang
around then, either. I didn’t want to look at my stuff; my stuff that was to do with the me that had been – and my friends. Most especially the photos plastered all over the walls. Me
and my friends. And most precious of all: me and Caspar – and Saskia, barging into the photo to lean on his shoulder, pouting.

Saskia, who might still be alive.

It was only then that I noticed the rain; coming down on the windows in the roof. Streaming down the windows in the roof. I hadn’t even registered that it had started. I could have been
out in it. I could have died.

‘
you,’ I told it.