The Rain (21 page)

Wow. It was gone. There was a charred black hole where The George had been. Only its beams remained: black bones hanging above a tumble of burnt-up rubble. That place, where I had known for sure
that I was in love, it was as dead as any dead person.

It was hard to carry on after that. I did try. There was this one particular boutique-y shop, the one that had THE best stuff in it and was owned by an evil old hag cunningly disguised as a
super-chic designer model-type woman who hated me and my friends and anyone who was younger than her, the way that sort of woman does when she realises we could easily look better than her if we
only had the right clothes, and who would blast us with death-ray stares and openly persecute us with ‘Can I help you?’-type questions that didn’t mean ‘Can I help
you?’ at all but meant ‘Get out of my shop, you insolent young girl’ whenever we dared to venture into her insanely expensive kingdom of exclusive style, which wasn’t often
but which was often enough for our hungry eyes to have gazed longingly at every item in there.

I emptied a rail of sequined items, grabbed belts that cost a year’s allowance each and stuffed them into three trillion-pound handbags I didn’t even like all that much.

Surrounded by booty, sipping a fizzy organic ginseng drink looted from the designer mini fridge at the back of the evil old hag’s designer shop, I sat on the church wall, practically
panting. Not from the heat – and it was bakingly, dead-body-rottingly warm – but from the mad, dizzy-making thrill of the thing. I could take anything – ANYTHING – I
wanted.

And I’d have given anything to have Lee there with me, so that it really would be proper fun. Everything was dreadful, but there was this. There was this – and no one to share it
with.

I burped.

Except Saskia. See . . . what I knew was that where she lived was just behind the church. I hadn’t even been there, to her house, but Lee had. I’d just go look, that’s what I
thought. I’d just go look.

Truth? I wasn’t even sure how much I wanted to see Saskia, because I felt like there were things I might want to ask that I wouldn’t want to hear the answers to. Not even how she had
got away from Zak’s exactly, but . . . hadn’t I seen Saskia refuse that glass of water Sarah had offered? Had she thought about stuff everyone else was too freaked with panic to think
about? Stuff that not even Barnaby knew? Had she thought about that stuff and . . . not even bothered to tell anyone? Did she just stand around huffing about wanting to go home while she watched
everyone else die?

Her road, it wasn’t nice. It was close to the hospital. Where normally there’d be parking for residents only, it was rammed . . . with the usual. Cars, bodies. I’d dumped my
stuff at the church because I figured I wouldn’t be long. I’d just go look; if I couldn’t find her immediately, I’d go back – immediately.

The thrill of the shopping thing got killed by how that road was, but I got this other buzz on: how you feel when you’re looking for someone, how you just want to know . . . so I picked my
way right down that road, then I turned, I crossed the street and I picked my way back. I wasn’t about to start shouting her name or anything, and I didn’t even know how I’d know
which house was hers . . . until I did.

In the sitting-room window I saw the sweetest, darlingest, snow-white chihuahua you ever did see. Wagging her little tail at me; scratching at the glass with her tiny, mighty paws.

I knew this chihuahua. I had seen this chihuahua. This chihuahua had to be, she HAD to be, the one that belonged to Saskia’s mum. Hadn’t we all ooh’d and aah’d and cooed
over her when Saskia’s mum had come to pick us up from Ronnie’s flop of a party?

She had been called Tiffany – or maybe that was Saskia’s mum’s name?

‘Hello, darling!’ I whispered at her, my heart totally melting.

I ran up to the front door. I rang the doorbell. I shouted through the letterbox.

‘Saskia! Hey, Sask!’

Then, ‘It’s me, Ruby!’ I shouted, when there was no reply.

I went round through the gate to the back.

Saskia’s mum, plus a bunch of other people, were in the garden. They’d been having a barbecue – with a fancy buffet, that had got wrecked. Stuff spilt about all over the place.
Saskia’s mum lying right in the middle of it all. Saskia’s mum, plus dips. That had to be guacamole, right?

The chihuahua scrabbled at the kitchen door.

‘Sask!’ I shouted at the door, banging on it. ‘Sask!’

I knew I shouldn’t be doing what I did next. It’s possible Saskia had just gone out – like me – and would come back and catch me smashing my way into her house . . . but
it was also possible that she was lying inside sick or dead and that was what I’d say to her if she did come back: ‘I thought you might be lying inside sick or dead.’ There was
this knee-high concrete Greek lady by the garden pond. She was a hefty lass but manageable. I got hold of her and heaved her head-first at the kitchen window. Her head broke off. Only one pane
bust. Double glazed . . . they’re a nightmare, aren’t they? The glass is super-tough and even if you get in lots of practice – which I didn’t feel I had time for just then
– it’s still a hard job. I cased up my options, like burglars must do. Wood-framed patio doors, single glazed, key in lock; the little darling dog scrabbling to get to me.

‘Come here! Come on!’ I shouted to her. I lured her back round to the front-room window. I teased her through the glass – then zoomed back round and – CRASH! –
smashed that bare-bottomed lady feet-first through the patio doors. She was perched on a blob of rock; neither the rock nor the lady’s chunky legs broke.

Good aim, Ruby! (Can’t wait to tell Dan how I’m practically a professional criminal!)

I shoved my hand in and opened the door.

‘Saskia?’ I called.

The darling dog came running. I scooped her up before her precious paws could get cut on glass.

‘Saskia!’

Clutching the trembling pooch, I toured the house. It felt creepy. Saskia had two sisters and I wouldn’t have known for sure which one of those freakishly neat and tidy rooms was hers if
it hadn’t have been for the photos; on the wall, in frames . . . a ton of photos of Saskia – doing gymnastics, winning stuff, posing on holiday – somewhere hot – in a bikini
. . . and that same one of me and Caspar – only it wasn’t of me and Caspar any more; it was of Caspar and Saskia. I had been cut out.

Know what I also saw? That I only saw because I just happened to open her wardrobe and the drawers in her dressing table? Saskia’s stuff was gone. She had packed stuff and gone.

I could have left that dog in that house. I held her in front of my face. How could – HOW COULD – that boyfriend-stealing
leave that sweet pooch?

‘Don’t worry, Darling!’ I said. ‘Ruby will take care of you!’

Petting and fussing MY dog, I stomped back to the church, put my tiara on, grabbed as much stuff as I could carry, and crunched back up the High Street. I got my bike, put
Darling in the basket, and crunched back down the High Street, detoured to load up with yet more ditched booty because I couldn’t bear to leave it, and crunched home.

Me and Darling, we split right, through the library car park. I passed the big fighting man and the woman who had hugged and rocked and kissed him.

I felt . . . not a grief thing, exactly, but really, really solemn.

I stopped in Holywell Park, like me and my mum used to do when I was little.

There’s a spring there, a holy well; that’s why it’s called that. In medieval times they believed the water from it could cure lepers – but it couldn’t; there was
no cure.

Now not even the most desperate leper would want to drink from it.

Mum said it was a fairy well. When we first came here and I was young enough to believe in fairies, we’d stop by on the way home from the shops and pick a flower – or just a nice
leaf if there were no flowers – and leave it for the fairies. If the fairies were pleased with it, she said, they’d leave a flower too . . . and sometimes they left other things: pretty
shells and stones, sometimes ribbons, sometimes little bits of jewellery my fingers ached to touch, sometimes they even left a poem.

It took me a long time – like, really, an embarrassingly long time – to work out that it wasn’t fairies . . . partly, I reckon, because we never told Simon about it. He hated
that kind of thing, not just because it was a kind of hippy thing (which is what it really was; Dartbridge types leaving offerings for whatever pagan-y watergod they were into), but because he also
thought all that sort of stuff – tooth fairies, Father Christmas, guardian angels – was . . . not just silly nonsense, but lies that should not be told to children. What a fun guy,
huh?

The fairy well, it was our secret. Mine and my mum’s. And that, I think, is really why I believed in it for so long, because it was something just for us. I believed in it because I needed
to believe in it – like the lepers, I guess.

Just this last spring, I saw my mum at the well – with Henry. She was holding him in her arms and I could see her whispering to him – about the fairies, I expect . . . and I . . . I
felt this awful twisty stab of jealousy. A twisty stab of jealousy and sadness and a knowing that she wasn’t just mine any more; now she belonged to Henry too . . . and I did what I think is
the most grown-up thing I’d ever done. I wanted to run off home and cry. I know that makes me sound like a baby, but it was how I felt. (‘I find change difficult’; that’s
what my mum always said about me, so’s I wouldn’t feel so bad about hating new stuff like Simon, like discovering I had a brother called Dan, like going to secondary school, like
finding out my mum was pregnant.) (Like trying to survive a global death-fest mega-crisis.)

I didn’t run off home and cry. I picked a flower and I went to her and we both told Henry all about the fairies. I leaned my head on her shoulder and she gave me one of her special kisses,
on my forehead, and stroked my cheek. And then Henry started bawling because I wouldn’t let him eat my flower and we went home.

I let Darling potter about on the grass while I looked for a flower. I found the perfect one: a single honeysuckle bloom, delicate and sweet-scented. I laid it down on the wall
by the well – the other flowers there rain-beaten, sun-shrivelled and rotten – and I asked the fairies, please, to never forget my mum. To show how much I meant it, I left them my
tiara.

I pushed my bike and my loot home. As I came up the road, it started.

I heard the terrier’s howl cut through the silence. I couldn’t ignore it any more. The neighbours’ pets. The
neighbours’
pets.

With a heavy heart, I left my darling Darling and my loot in the stinky house, and went out again to perform yet another charitable act.

On the way to Whitby the golden retriever’s house, I took the crowbar out of Simon’s rucksack, which was still lying in the middle of the road where I’d dumped it. I went to
Whitby’s first because I liked him best. I knocked, I called. The back door was open: Whitby bounded out. He must have barked himself stupid because he could hardly get a sound out, but he
almost knocked me over. He was mad, glad, crazy to see me . . . and me, I can say the same about him. (All those years I’d wanted a dog, it wasn’t a dog like Darling, it was a dog like
Whitby. Actually, it
was
Whitby.) I braved the stink in his house to feed him – and, though animals seemed to be OK with it, I just couldn’t give him water from the tap. I went
back and got a bottle of fizzy water from Simon’s rucksack and gave him that. He lapped and scoffed and lapped and scoffed. And wagged and wagged and wagged his tail. He was ecstatic.