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 some
thing. 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.
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.
CHAPTER NINE
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.
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