The Rain

by Virginia Bergin

‘Think,’ I said.

  ‘About what?’ he demanded.

  ‘About me,’ I said. Said? Any second now I could feel I was going to be forced to shout a bit, just to make him lay off.

  ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Think.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘ME. Leave me alone, Simon – I’ve got it, all right? I have to think!’

  ‘About?’

  ‘Survival!’

  ‘Whose?’

  ‘MINE!’ I shouted. I hated him then, more than I had ever done. ‘MINE! ME!’

  He let go of my face.

  The house was still quiet. I’d shouted and the house was still quiet.

  ‘Mum?!’ I shrieked.

  Shrieked; that’s a word for a kind of scream, isn’t it? Not some great howl of a scream, when you know, but the kind of scream you make when –

  ‘Think!’ Simon shouted, trying to grab my arm.

  I was too quick for him. I stormed up the stairs; I flung open the door to their room.

  Oh . . . oh . . . oh . . . I saw my mum.

  She was just lying there, curled round Henry, like she might be asleep. The bed-clothes were all rumpled up. I didn’t fling myself at her, in case she was just sleeping. Yes, I still thought that was what it could be.

  ‘Mum?’ I said.

  The way she was lying, on her side, she had one arm stretched out across the pillow. Her hand was all bloody. The blood had soaked into the pillow. Her other hand, not bloody, lay on Henry’s tummy. He was lying on his back, completely still. Only the tiniest little red sore on his cheek.

  ‘MUM?!’

  Simon’s hands snatched round my middle and pulled me back. He pinned me to him.

  My scream died in the air; it died and joined all the other screams. They live like ghosts, like echoes in the minds of the living.

  My scream burst out and died and my lungs refused – refused – to suck in air. I wanted to stop, to die with that scream.

  ‘Breathe, breathe, breathe,’ Simon kept saying. He was crying. He would not let me go.

  Then it comes. Your lungs suck in air; your body decides for you. You will live.

  You’re one breath away from her, then two, then three, then four, then five.

  Mum, I am still breathing.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I don’t know how we got back downstairs. I was sobbing, that I remember. Wailing so I could hardly breathe. But I did breathe.

  What I kept trying to say, over and over, was that I knew why. I knew what had happened. Hadn’t I seen the tablets fall? My mum must have reached out into the rain to throw the box to Mrs Fitch. Poor stupid Mrs Fitch.

  Why hadn’t I realised? Why hadn’t I shouted? Why hadn’t I thought?

  And then what? Had she known right away? No . . . or else she wouldn’t have touched Henry. Oh, she would have stroked his little face. Not even enough to wake him. Just the softest touch on his cheek. She did it to me, still; even if we’d rowed I’d pretend to be asleep just so she’d do it . . . the softest touch and a little kiss.

  For the rest of that day, it rained. Simon and me, we set up camp in the sitting room, made Dan-nests there. I guess neither of us wanted to be alone.

  I’ll tell you the bits I remember, but – really – how it all went, what we said and did, it’s kind of muddled.

  What I do remember, more than anything, was stuff about sound, the torture of it. To begin with, he turned the TV off. Fine, because who would want to see that? Even though it had been on mute anyway, those pictures – I dunno – they kind of made noise . . . because of how horrible they were, I suppose. But when the TV was off, all we had was the rain. I couldn’t listen to that . . . but whatever we tried to stop it with – music, a DVD – none of it was right. Cheerful stuff, sad stuff, silly stuff – whatever we tried seemed so wrong, so angry-making . . . and unless you had the volume up, right up, deafeningly up, you could still hear it: the rain.

  So we watched boring stuff. Simon had tons of it. It’s almost enough to make me laugh – but not quite – that I sat through a boxed set of birdwatching DVDs and this history series he’d bought and been trying to force me to watch for weeks because he thought it would help with my revision.

  Ha. I thought history was boring, and now here I am writing my own.

  Simon would be pleased, I think.

  We talked – not much, but also a lot, if you see what I mean. We talked in little bursts, about Mum, about Henry, about what had happened. And then we’d have to stop for a bit, because it hurt too much.

  All the while, everything we said and did, I kept thinking about my mum and Henry upstairs. I couldn’t stop seeing them in my head.

  I got angry with him. I wanted to know why he hadn’t called me, why he hadn’t let me say goodbye. He told me he hadn’t known. He’d heard Henry. He’d thought it was the teething. He was about to go up there with one of Henry’s teething rings from the fridge, but then it had stopped. After that he heard nothing, thought it best to let them sleep. He’d stayed up the rest of the night watching the news, trying to get back on to the internet, trying to phone people. When it got to 7 a.m. and Henry still hadn’t piped up, he went upstairs to check on them. It was too late.

  But why had he left me to sleep and then sat me at the kitchen table with his stupid list when –

  ‘I was trying to think about what your mother would have wanted,’ he said.

  How she had kept quiet, I don’t know. I just can’t even imagine. Most people I’ve ever heard with the sickness scream and groan and . . .

  ‘Why didn’t she call you?’ I said.

  I said it in the middle of a thing about wetland birds. Marsh warblers.

  ‘She would have been worried about giving it to us,’ said Simon, staring at the screen. Then he looked at me. ‘She would have been worried . . . If I got sick, there’d be no one to look after you,’ he said.

  He did shout at me a few times. Just ‘RUBY!’. Mainly for going to turn the tap on. Once for nearly knocking a jug of water over. When that happened again, he put on rubber gloves and carefully shifted all the jugs and bowls and pots and pans of water into the corner of the kitchen and fenced them off with chairs and the bin. I don’t know why he didn’t just chuck it all down the sink; too splashy, I guess. Or because that would somehow feel like setting it free. So there it sat: our little poisoned sea. I hated the sight of it.

  I wanted to ring my dad.

  ‘Everything’s down, Ru.’ That was all Simon said. He passed me the phones anyway: the landline, his mobile, my mum’s mobile.

  I tried my dad; I tried Leonie. I didn’t know anyone else’s number by heart; that wouldn’t have mattered because my mum and Simon had pretty much all our relatives and most of my friends’ parents’ numbers on their mobiles, but there wasn’t even a dial tone. No sound at all on both their mobiles, and just a single endless beep on the landline.

  ‘What about email?’ I said. ‘We can email people.’

  He gave me the laptop too. He hadn’t shut the internet off. The internet was down. I kept trying: the laptop, the phones. I don’t know how long I tried for – a long time, while the TV bloke rattled on about the Tudors and Stuarts. They weren’t even on our syllabus. Nor was the Civil War, which is what the TV bloke was going on about when Simon took the computer and the phones off me. I didn’t kick off. I was crying.

  ‘They might be trying to get through to us too,’ he said.

  He laid his mobile, my mum’s mobile and the regular phone on the windowsill, in front of all the family photos. The laptop he put on the coffee table.

  ‘We’ll try every hour,’ he said.

  We did. We took it in turns. We ended up not even telling each other that nothing had changed.

  Sometime during the afternoon there was a really loud bang – like an explosion, I guess, in the town. We both jumped up and ran to the kitchen window. You could see nearly the whole town from our kitchen: the castle, the church, the housing e
state that spread up the hill east of the river where Leonie lived.

  There were flames and smoke coming up from the High Street. A fire in the rain.

  Simon opened tins of fruit, poured out the juice and gave it to me.

  ‘Where do you think that is?’ he asked me. ‘The George?’

  You could see, working it out from the rooftops, that it must have been.

  ‘Such a shame,’ muttered Simon.

  Dartbridge is ram-packed with old buildings. Medieval stuff; even the dentist’s has got gnarly old beams on the ceiling. (I’ve spent a lot of time looking at them.) Probably if it had been any other old building in town I might have thought a stupid building didn’t matter, not now, but it wasn’t any other building. I wanted to tell him that The George was where the second most amazing moment of my life had happened prior to the all-time number-one kissing amazing moment that had happened at Zak’s party. I wanted to tell him that was where Caspar had looked up at me, when he was playing his guitar, and that I had felt myself fall in love on the spot.

  We stared out at it. There were no sirens.

  I said it then: ‘Simon, I’m really scared.’

  He led me back into the sitting room. I sat in my nest; he sat on the sofa.

  ‘Shall I make us something to eat?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  This is a thing to know, a thing I have learned, about what fear and grief and horror do. They mash you up from the inside out. They twist you, and they break stuff inside you. They tear stuff out. They get whole brains, whole hearts, in their hands and they crush and crush.

  ‘Can I come and sit with you?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes. Of course,’ he said.

  And for the first time ever I snuggled up to Simon on the sofa.

  I thought how pleased (and shocked) my mum would be, and I cried.

  I felt so small. Littler – younger – than even before I knew Simon. I felt as tiny as Henry. Tinier. I didn’t want to cry, I wanted to bawl. For my mum.

  When it was dark, Simon did make some food.

  ‘I’m going to make a stew,’ he said.

  He made stews when we went camping. ‘Comfort food’ was what he called it. They were horrible – and, as I once pointed out, if we went on the kind of holidays everyone else got to go on, you wouldn’t need comforting. Even my mum laughed.

  ‘Do you want me to help?’ I asked.

  You can imagine how often I would have voluntarily helped Simon make one of his hideous stews, but I sat and peeled vegetables. I didn’t want to be away from him.

  Normally, even on a campsite he’d drain and wash the kidney beans or whatever, but now he slopped the whole tin into the pot.

  ‘Won’t that taste disgusting?’ I said.

  ‘No choice, Ru,’ he said. ‘I’ll spice it up with something.’

  He had his back to me as he opened the cupboard where the herbs and spices were. He rummaged, opening unlabelled jars and sniffing, and his head turned a little. I saw tears on his cheek; one slid down and I saw him lick it from his lips.

  ‘I could murder a cup of tea,’ he said, turning back to the cooker to tip random stuff into the pot and stir it. He wiped his face on his sleeve.

  I saw the list he had left on the table:

  THINK

  I went to the freezer. I got the ice cubes and popped them into the kettle. Didn’t look like enough, so I chipped off ice from inside the freezer, crammed that, my hands numbed dead with cold, into the kettle.

  I plugged the kettle in and flicked it on.

  ‘Earl Grey, peppermint, or builder’s?’ I asked. Like my mum would ask.

  It took three boils to make it. All that ice and just enough for one cup. Simon chose Earl Grey. We both knew why; that’s what my mum liked.

  The stew was horrible. Simon stopped me from tipping salt all over it, and on to the baked potato that went with.

  ‘It’s dehydrating,’ he said. ‘And it’s bad for you, anyway.’

  I gave him a look.

  ‘It’s what your mother would say.’

  I couldn’t really eat it. I mean, you wouldn’t really want to, but I sort of knew I must be hungry, even if I didn’t feel it.

  ‘She’d also say, eat up,’ said Simon.

  ‘I can’t,’ I said.

  From the looks of his plate he couldn’t either.

  ‘Simon, are we going to die?’

  He didn’t answer for a bit, then he laid his knife and fork down. He said, ‘I don’t know.’

  That was how we came to turn the TV back on, to find out. He said if it upset me I was to just say, straight away, and he’d turn it off. I know what he was expecting – the same thing I was expecting: hospital shots of people dying, the TV people going on and on about it. In a way, what there was instead was worse. I just didn’t realise it at first.

  The scary pictures had gone, so had Studio Woman and the Manchester and Edinburgh Men. Everyone had gone. Instead there were just words on the screen, and someone reading them. For a second I thought it was some kind of documentary thing, the sort of thing that bores me stupid, until Simon flipped through the rest of the channels. They either came up as blank fuzz or showed the same thing: EMERGENCY PUBLIC SERVICE BROADCAST. But it was different to the first one. Were we having ANOTHER emergency?

  (No, we weren’t . . . It was just what they should have told us in the first place, but I’ll get to that.)

  You know what Simon said? ‘If only we had satellite . . .’

  Know what I nearly said? ‘Like I asked!’

  I had. I’d asked about a million times if we could at least just get a package with the music channels, said it would help me learn guitar. It might have done.

  He got the radio then, plugged it in and crept across the dial – yes, that’s right: about the only thing we had in common with Zak’s family was we weren’t even allowed a digital radio either. It was crazy-making, the sound of the radio, with the TV going as well. Then he hit a crackly station playing that ‘It’s the End of the World As We Know It’ song and turned it off.

  ‘I’ll try later,’ he said, looking all anxiously at me.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘I get it. It’s really bad, isn’t it?’

  But I didn’t really get it. I think I thought . . . I dunno, that Studio Woman and the Manchester and Edinburgh Men had all gone home – because you would, wouldn’t you? You’d want to be with your family to check they were OK and stuff, or help them, or just be sad like we were if they weren’t OK and you couldn’t help them.

  Thinking that made me choke up. Thinking that made me think how my mum was upstairs and –

  ‘Shall I turn the TV off as well, Ru?’ Simon asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s fine.’

  ‘It’s fine.’ Can you ever imagine such a stupid thing to say?

  Nothing was fine.

  If you’re reading this, you know what they were saying on TV and on the radio. (Unless you were some kind of really strict hippy, without even a radio . . . or a nun or a monk? I’ll bet they’re not allowed TV, not even for educational purposes, just in case they’re tempted to switch channels, watch wanna-be talent shows – and spend the collection money or whatever voting on rip-off rate phone lines.) (Like I did.) (I don’t even really watch those programmes, not really) (I was bored.) (It was almost an accident.) (The guy looked liked Caspar.) (Mum and Simon were out.) (Every time.) (Including when I also voted for that girl.) (She kept crying and stuff and not realising she was brilliant, so I practically had to give her a vote – even though I knew there was zero chance she would win.)

  (The phone bill – which I cunningly, scarededly intercepted – is still under my bed.)

  I am going to write it down anyway, what was said about the rain. I am going to write down everything I know about what was happening, because maybe someone should . . . and because maybe I need a break from thinking about what that was like: me and Simon in the sitting room and my mum and my Henry upstairs dead
.

  THE RUBY MORRIS KILLER RAIN SUMMARY

  So, this is the Ruby Morris Killer Rain Summary. This is what they said on the TV and the radio. This is what I heard, plus what Simon told me he’d heard, plus the things Simon worked out all by himself . . . plus a bit of the stuff that I got to know and hear about after. This is, I think, as much as anyone knows.

  To begin with, they said they didn’t know really know for sure what was causing it, but some people – not just any people: scientists – thought it was to do with the asteroid. That when it had been blown to smithereens it had made a bit of a mess. Tons and tons and tons and tons of rocky mess. After a while – like, nearly seven years – the mess got to Earth. It got sucked here by gravity and – Pop! Pop! Pop! – the mess of rocks got into the Earth’s atmosphere, making a really gorgeous firework display that you could see pretty much everywhere on Earth – except boring old Dartbridge, where it was cloudy and no one got to see a thing. A few big chunks did fall to Earth and, before there was no one left alive to row about it, some of the scientists and politicians were having a right old scrap about what exactly had happened to those bits of asteroid. I don’t suppose it really matters. You see, the rest of the mess had been blown into even tinier smithereens . . . of dust . . . that got spread about all over the sky.

  Everyone knew about the dust. It was the dust that made the sunsets everyone had been ooh-ing and ahh-ing about; the kind of heavenly sunset there’d been on the night of Zak’s party. Yup: doom written right across the sky and everyone going, ‘Ooo! Isn’t that lovely?’ and taking photos of it, most probably.

  Selfie with sunset and sausage. Having a lovely bank holiday weekend.

  What no one knew (probably; Ronnie would disagree) was that there was something in the dust: a tiny weird space thing. A bacterium. A thing that had lived inside the asteroid for millions – maybe billions?! – of years. They didn’t know how it did that, but apparently even some bacteria on Earth, extremophiles, that’s what they said they were called, can survive for endless centuries – for, like, forever. Can survive how and where no normal living thing could: gobbling sulphur in boiling hot springs, for example, or at the bottom of the sea, or in the armpits of certain boys.