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.
‘And I feel fine,’ shouted Simon.
I drank.
Yes, OK, I can say how disgusting that water tasted. Horrible, and also very, very, very good. For just a few moments, the world was brilliant. Nothing happened, you see. The whole world – the whole gone-mental world – just carried on around us; people scurrying through the car park – but you know what? We were OK . . . that feeling, that gorgeous feeling, when you’re thirsty – so thirsty – and you finally get to drink. Aaah!
Then . . . I’d never heard a gun fired, not in real life, but I knew right away that’s what it was. There was this massive shattering crashing sound of glass, breaking, followed by another gunshot.
What happened next, it was pretty bad.
People ran from the supermarket, zigzagging through the car park. Fresh car alarms bursting out all over.
A big fat raindrop fell on the windscreen. I watched it, that single, fat, glassy blob of rain; I watched it splat and slide. Then another came, and another, and another.
‘Lock the doors,’ said Simon.
I couldn’t think how; which button?
‘Your side,’ said Simon. ‘Your lock –’
He reached right over me and hit the lock on my door. SCHTOMP! The doors locked.
The people in the car park were screaming, running for cover – running back to the supermarket, where other people were trying to get out. Screams, shouts, gunshots. People running all over.
BLAM! A woman – a little trail of blood running down her face – slammed against the car. She saw us inside; she tried to get in – back of the car on Simon’s side, a baby seat there.
‘Let me in!’ she screamed.
‘You do not open the doors,’ shouted Simon, his voice hard and cold.
The woman scooted round the car –
BLAM! Her palms slammed down on my window; her face pressed close – the look on it, the terror, the pleading. She could have been my mum.
‘Please!’ she screamed at me.
‘There’s nothing we can do for her,’ shouted Simon. ‘Ruby: there’s nothing we can do.’
All I could do was look at her, tears streaming down my face. Mumbling, ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry.’ Tears streaming down her face: ‘Please, please, please . . .’
She howled with rage, right up against the glass, then smashed her fist against the window. She spat at me – at the glass between us – and stumbled away.
‘Get in the back,’ said Simon, grabbing the bucket on my lap and shoving it down next to his. ‘Get in the back!’ he shouted, yanking me up and pushing me through on to the back seats. ‘Lie down!’
He squashed down on top of me; the two of us crammed in next to the baby seat.
‘Act dead.’
That was what he said. ‘Act dead.’
The gunshots went on. The screaming went on. The alarms, on and on and on. You could hear people pushing past the car; a couple of times someone yanked on a door handle. It was as much as I could do to stop myself from screaming out loud when that happened.
‘Don’t think this gets you out of your revision,’ Simon bellowed in my ear.
My nose was pressed against the back of the seat. I could feel his breath in my ear. I heard the fear in it, smelt the rotten-egg stink of that water.
I thought he’d gone mad.
‘Let’s start with the reasons why Britain’s empire declined in the twentieth century,’ he shouted. He jabbed me, hard, his thumb in my rib. ‘The decline of the empire was caused by . . .’
I was crying – or trying to: no tears would come.
‘The decline of the empire was caused by,’ he persisted.
He jabbed me again.
‘Things that happened in Britain and things that happened in other places,’ I sobbed into the seat.
‘Other places?’
‘Like India!’ I wailed.
‘What happened in India? Come on! I know you know this, Ru.’
‘Gandhi,’ I shouted into the seat.
‘Gandhi? Gandhi who? What? How? Why? This is an essay question, not a multiple choice.’ Jab. ‘Please, Ruby! Think!’
‘The Indian . . . the National Congress was . . . founded in 1885 . . .’
We went through it all: Gandhi coming along, Nehru, Mohammed Ali Jinnah. Simon didn’t know it like I knew it, but that didn’t stop him asking tricky questions, and he knew a lot more about what Churchill and the British government had been up to.
In time, all the people noise stopped. All you could hear was alarms, alarms, alarms . . . and the rain; drumming down on the roof of the car. Hammering down – so loud you could hear it over the rest of the racket. If it had been some old jalopy, like my dad’s, we would have been done for. My dad’s car leaked where you wouldn’t think a car could leak.
It was best not to think about that.
Eventually, the rain stopped – for a while – but we didn’t dare leave the car. Directly above us, the sky was groaning with cloud. Always hard to tell what kind, when you’re cowering underneath it. The sun managed to poke through a bit before it chickened out completely and gave up for the night. The world was soaking wet . . . and people quiet. The car alarms, they went on.
We climbed back into the front seats. For a moment, we just sat.
This is a thing I learned, about alarms. It’s sort of based on Henry’s crying. If you go on hearing it, tuning into it, feeling it, you will go nuts. So you have to find a way to tune out, to not hear it. If you can, you put a pillow over your ears and just pretend you’re crashed out at a really noisy party – but you’ve had a great time, right, so you don’t mind the noise. If there’s no pillow, stuff whatever you can into your ears.
‘Is there any tissue or something?’ I shouted – as you do: parenty people, even in times of extreme crisis, always have that kind of thing.
The parenty people who’d owned that car did. Simon ransacked the glove compartment and found babywipes and sweets. He handed the babywipes and sweets to me and used his penknife to open the tinned pie. He cut his hand doing it.
‘Ru, would you like some of this?’ he shouted, holding out the soggy uncooked pie.
‘It’s OK, thanks,’ I shouted, even though my stomach was growling. I was stuffing strips of babywipe into my ears.
‘I respect your position on vegetarianism,’ he shouted.
Huh?! I pulled the babywipe out of my ears just to be sure I’d heard him right.
‘I said I respect your position on vegetarianism,’ he repeated.
What?! He’d never said that before, not once.
‘Thanks,’ I shouted. I stuffed the babywipe back into my ears, and offered him some. He stuffed some into his ears.
‘But, honey,’ he practically screamed, overcompensating for the ear plugs.
He’d never said that either, not once. Honey.
‘I think right now it would really be OK to eat this. I mean, I think it would really be OK. And I, for one, will never mention it again.’
I hesitated; I was so hungry . . .
‘Even though you wear leather shoes,’ he shouted.
Tchuh! For one microsecond I thought we were teetering on the brink of an old argument. I dunno how I even had the strength left to do it, but I flashed a yee-haa look at him. He was smiling – gently – holding out the pie, streamers of babywipe hanging from his ears.
‘I think all that doesn’t matter much right now,’ he shouted. ‘If you’re hungry, please, eat?’
I peeled off a strip of raw, soggy pastry. It tasted great.
We ate – sweets from the glove compartment for pudding – and I told him my noise-survival theory.
It got dark. It got cooler. There were lights on in the hospital; lights on in the supermarket. You just never saw anyone.
‘Can we go home now?’ I shouted.
Simon leaned over my seat to peer at the sky. Pointless, really, but I’d been doing it too. There were no stars – and the darker it got the harder it was even to guess how thick, how heavy, the cloud was that hid them – i.e. how likely it was that there would be more rain.
‘Can’t we just at least put the heating on?’
‘We’d need the engine on,’ shouted Simon, peering across me.
‘Well would it be OK to do that?’ I shouted.
Simon turned his head, and saw the keys.
‘Well done, Ru,’ he sighed.
He turned the key. The dashboard lit up. It looked extremely beautiful.
In the end, Simon decided we couldn’t start the engine. The noise would be a risk. The sound, even among the alarms, might attract people, he said. I didn’t disagree; if there was any chance that lady might come back . . .
And we couldn’t drive off, could we? We were completely boxed in, stranded in a sea of other stranded cars. Simon said he thought maybe the cars had been left by people trying to get to the hospital that first night, not caring – or not knowing – that it wasn’t that kind of hospital. I wished he’d shut up, because of the baby seat in the back of the car. That was a terrible thought . . . it also freaked me out, thinking how Caspar had been, but I’d seen no blood or anything smeared around the car. Maybe the car had belonged to someone who was just visiting someone, and they’d left the baby at home. Someone visiting someone in a hurry, forgot they’d left their keys in the car. And didn’t come back.
So we froze, but we had the radio. And when we realised there was nothing to be heard but what we’d heard before, we had music. That is to say, we listened to The Carpenters: The Greatest Hits Collection, Disc One. It was the only CD they had.
In the night, Momma Cumulonimbus finally flipped out. There was a huge thunderstorm. A massive scrap in the sky. I hoped those little blobby micro-bugs were getting a battering, getting zapped by lightning and chucked about all over the place, but they probably loved it.
I won’t go on about what it was like, that night; you can think it out for yourself. Add it all up in your head: mother dead + Henry dead + supermarket shoot-out + killer rain pounding down + car alarms blaring on + thunder + lightning + ‘Top of the World’ =
If you don’t know that song, ‘Top of the World’, check it out. Play it over and over and over. Enjoy.
CHAPTER TEN
I woke like you wake when you’re camping: too early, and already too hot. And you haven’t slept a wink, and you’re all bent-up funny and aching from lying on the rubbish, ultra-thin, might-as-well-not-be-there-at-all foam ‘mattress’ thingy through which you could feel every last little hummocky grass/weed/thistle clump on the SLOPE Simon said wasn’t a slope but which definitely was a slope because you’ve been rolling down it all night freezing to death before you were cooked awake by the burning sun – if you hadn’t already been shouted awake by the birds singing.
Only that morning it wasn’t birds, it was car alarms.
How long – I mean really – HOW LONG do those things go on for?!?!?!
(Oh – and you know what else? We had to empty one water bucket into another so I had one to pee in in the back of the car. Lovely.)
Simon had got the baby seat out and that’s where I’d been lying, ‘sleeping’, on the back seat. If I hadn’t been trying to at least pretend to sleep, if I’d been freaking out like I wanted to freak out, I’m pretty sure there would have been more revision, so I kept quiet. Somehow I had, finally, fallen asleep, and now I had woken up.
I sat up. Full grump, I admit it. I’m not all that good in the mornings anyway.
‘Goodbye to Love’ ended and ‘Top of the World’ started over.
Simon was just sitting there.
‘Morning, Ru,’ he shouted.
The windows were misted up on the inside. I wiped one with my sleeve.
‘It’s OK to do that,’ Simon shouted. ‘It’s just our breath.’
That’s when I remembered it: Dew on a damselfly.
And if it hadn’t been OK? Would he have said in time? Everything that was awful and scary flooded back into my head. I looked out of the window. The world outside looked dry, more or less. The sky looked blue, more or less. (Only some cirrus fibratus, most likely: fine streaks of cloud, flicked about on high winds – like Queen Cumulonimbus Capillatus had raked her nails across the sky as she stormed out.)
‘I think we can go now,’ he shouted.
He clicked the handle back, then poked his door open with the umbrella. A few droplets of water fell from the door, from the roof. Rain? Dew? Poisoned? No way of knowing. He made us wait and wait – the alarms, released, blaring – watching each drop until he was sure it had stopped.
The car park; it wasn’t nice. There were a lot of dead people there. Bodies, bloody, lying about all over. As we picked our way through it, you could see what had made that shattering crashing sound, when everything had kicked off: one of the massive supermarket windows was now a pile of glass.
‘Ru,’ he shouted at me, ‘we could go home now, or we could look and see what’s left.’
I really, really, really wanted to go home, but I shouted, ‘OK.’
Simon got the bags, in one of them the precious tiny bit of water he’d managed to leave in his bucket, and we picked our way through it all.
I didn’t think; I just followed. I could do that because Simon was thinking for me.
At the smashed-in doors of the supermarket we stood and listened. You couldn’t hear anything with the alarms going. What you could see, though – that was terrible.
‘Wait here,’ shouted Simon.
‘You can’t leave me,’ I shouted.
You can’t leave me, you can’t leave me, you can’t leave me.
‘If anything happens,’ shouted Simon, ‘you run straight home. You just run.’
The Rain Page 9