So we shopped. Normally, if I got forced to go shopping, I moaned like . I kind of skulked around the supermarket after Simon and Mum, sighing at all the stuff there was no point even picking up because you knew you wouldn’t be allowed it. Not even one thing as a treat – and definitely, under no circumstances, any kind of cereal with chocolate in it. I picked up two boxes of chocolatey cereal; one the ordinary kind, one with teeny marshmallows. I got those jam-filled things you can shove in a toaster too.
Simon wasn’t watching me . . . but I saw him. He was rummaging in dead people’s shopping trolleys.
‘Look for water, Ru! Look for stuff to drink!’ he shouted, waving a carton of long-life milk at me.
Yes, it was a shopping trip like no other. Stepping over bodies to get stuff kind of puts you off a bit.
In the freezer section, the pitbull lay quietly by its master’s body. Maybe that man had been shot . . . and those kids, with the bumper-bags of sweets, they looked like they must have run out into the rain, then run back to him. Their mum looked the same.
The dog didn’t even lift its head, but let out a little sad growl when it saw me.
‘Come away,’ said Simon.
There was only the bakery section left to visit. The bread was as much use as bread from a toy set: rock hard. You could have killed someone with one of those French sticks.
While I was loading up on chocolate flapjacks – hey, they’re practically healthy, aren’t they? All those oats – Simon made the discovery that ended our shopping trip. Like all good customers we had kept to the parts of the shop that we were supposed to, but Simon pulled open the doors that led to the storage part.
It was all dark. He flicked on the lights: flick, flick, flick, flick. Enough lights to see it had been trashed, cleaned out. There was even a truck still parked in there. Someone, somewhere inside that warehouse, groaned.
‘You !’ snarled a man’s voice. He sounded done-in, though, weak and broken . . . then screechy: ‘You !’
‘Let’s go, Ru,’ said Simon, flicking off the lights. Flick, flick, flick –
There was this clickety-slide-click sound that you only ever hear in films.
Just like I’d never heard a gun fired from a distance, but knew right away what it was, I double-knew what a gun sounded like getting ready to be fired.
And so, again, we ran.
On the way out, without even pausing, I snatched up the best bunch of flowers I could see. Simon, without even pausing, grabbed up our bucket with the measly bit of water left in it.
I wouldn’t want you to think this took any more than a trillionth of a second. There was no discussion. We grabbed and ran. We so ran.
Simon said later it had been a professional job. That’s what he kept saying, that the whole supermarket thing had been a professional job, how ordinary people like us would have left something for other people. I didn’t say what my entire body, kicking up for water, water, water, something, anything, to drink wanted to say: NO I WOULDN’T . . . but he might have been right. There was the truck in the entrance, the truck in the stores and, right where we ran out, weren’t the flowerbeds flattened, the mud churned up, cars biffed out of the way? Before people trundled out with trolleys full of toilet rolls, before people had started hacking the ice out of the freezers, you kind of knew someone else had come and taken the good stuff . . . because I never saw a single person leave that supermarket with even a single bottle of water. I never even saw anyone leave with a trolley full of beetroot and prunes, not even a plastic bag full of them. I never saw anyone leave that supermarket with anything much you could drink. It had gone. It had all gone.
We ran along the whole of Jubilee Road, all of it rammed with cars, alarms bleating and honking, but there wasn’t a single person in sight. No one alive, anyway.
There’s a thing I want to say – once, and not say it again. I want to say it just in case you think I didn’t care or even that – how?! – I didn’t notice. There were bodies – human bodies – everywhere. I don’t even want to talk about them again, how there’s nowhere you can go without seeing them. So they get to be like lamp posts, or doors, or trees; they get to be THINGS that are just there, that you wouldn’t even bother mentioning (unless they get in your way or are especially important). And that sounds dreadful, and I wouldn’t ever want anyone to think that about my mum, but also . . . that is how it is. There are bodies, everywhere, and they are just there. They’re just there.
They’re the dead people. You breathe. You still breathe.
As we turned into the High Street – walking now, gasping – there was this young bloke standing outside The Sun and Moon with a pint of beer in his hand. The kind of bloke me and Lee would have gone all giggly about (before I was in love with Caspar). There was music – some rock thing so loud you could hear it over the alarms – coming from the open door of the pub behind him. He raised his glass at us: a toast.
Simon looked at me; a look that asked, ‘OK if I speak to him?’ I shrugged. I shrugged when really I wanted to say, What, are you crazy?! You want to stop and talk to this guy?! Are you really seriously crazy?! LET’S JUST GO HOME!
But this bloke . . . we were close enough to see that he was crying.
‘All right, mate?’ called Simon in this blokey voice he used to talk to builders, etc., like he was one of them and not a chartered accountant who liked birdwatching.
‘Not really, mate,’ called the bloke.
There sort of wasn’t anything else to say.
‘Don’t bother with the supermarket, eh?’ said Simon. ‘It’s bad there.’
That bloke, he nodded.
‘We’d best be off, then,’ said Simon.
‘Come down for a pint later?’ said the bloke. ‘If you fancy it. I’ll still be here.’
‘Thanks, mate,’ said Simon.
The bloke raised his glass to me, and winked – not a lechy wink, like blokes like that normally did, but a sweet one, like Grandpa Hollis used to do.
‘Wait!’ he called as we walked away. He sat his pint glass down on the doorstep and disappeared into the pub.
I looked at Simon; he shrugged. Uneasily, that’s what I’d say – he shrugged uneasily.
Do you see what had happened already? Where you’d just say hello to another person, or maybe chat with them a bit, this fear thing came. Not even a specific ‘You’ve got a gun’ or even a ‘What if this person is sick?’ fear – and anyway that bloke definitely wasn’t sick and probably, surely, couldn’t have been going to get a gun . . . it’s a ‘What is this person going to do?’ fear.
That was the first time I felt it too: I felt uneasy.
The bloke came back out with a bunch of little bottles of cola.
‘For your girl,’ he said, loading them into Simon’s bag.
His mouth, it twisted up – but tight, so tight, like he was tying a knot in his lips to stop himself from crying.
‘I had a girl,’ the bloke managed to say. ‘Just . . . a little girl.’
Simon took my hand. He gave it a squeeze. We walked away.
‘Don’t forget that pint, then,’ the bloke called to Simon, his voice gone all sobby now. ‘Later. If you fancy it. Or another time.’
The High Street was a tad trashed – and it was completely deserted. We avoided it anyway, turning into South Street, going home the way we had meant to come.
A crow was pecking at the body we’d passed. At his belly, where some other creature – a fox, maybe? – must have stopped for a nibble. The crow flew off as we came close.
‘At least the birds are OK,’ said Simon.
I would have kicked off, like – how could he say such a thing? But it was true: we hadn’t seen a sick or dead animal anywhere. It was only people that had been destroyed.
‘Uh-huh,’ I said.
The sightless eye sockets of the man who was now bird food stared back at me.
And I remembered: he had officially been my fourth dead body. Less than twenty-four hours later
, I had lost count.
My first dead body, Mrs Fitch, was waiting for us in the front garden. Flies buzzed.
‘!’ said Simon, gagging as he pushed me past her and unlocked the front door.
The second he opened the door you noticed it. It wasn’t our wee buckets – they honked a bit but we’d put bleach in – it was another kind of smell altogether; the beginning of a stench I know so very well now, but had never smelt until then. It is strangely sweet. Strangely . . . almost spicy. That makes it sound nice, but it’s not. It was like Mrs Fitch, but stronger. Mrs Fitch and no fresh air.
We bustled into the kitchen, shutting the door behind us, dumped our haul down on the table, opened the garden door and all the windows.
I stood there, holding the flowers.
‘Ruby, I don’t think you should go in that room,’ said Simon.
That was good; I didn’t want to go in that room.
‘I’ll just put them outside the bedroom door,’ I said.
I didn’t move.
‘You don’t have to go up there if you don’t want to,’ said Simon. ‘I could do it.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to.’
I didn’t move.
‘Do you want me to come with you?’ he asked.
I nodded. I felt like I’d felt when we were going to cross the High Street; like a small person.
I followed him up the stairs with the flowers. The smell got worse every step you took. I laid them down by the door and we stood there, mouth-breathing.
This random thought about a kid I knew, a kid in school we laughed at a bit for doing that, drifted into my head. Then came this other thought that really me and Simon must look like we were shocked, that we had our mouths open in amazement, which was about right. Then came another thought that maybe this was what the world was like for that kid, shocking. Or that it all stank or something. And I felt bad for having these thoughts, all these wrong, random thoughts, but they came into my head because I wanted to think them more than I wanted to think about my mother. I did not want to think about my mother.
‘Should we pray or something?’ I asked.
There was a hundred-year pause before he replied.
‘I can’t,’ said Simon.
There was another hundred-year pause. In it, I tried to think something nice about God or heaven . . . but my brain felt as numb as my heart.
‘Nor can I,’ I said.
We went back down to the kitchen. We got all the food out and we actually did eat a little, picking at the kind of junk that normally tastes delicious, the kind you’d cram your face with until you felt sick . . . but I already felt sick, and that food tasted of nothing but thirst and death.
‘We can’t bury them,’ said Simon, suddenly, his face grim.
We hadn’t even been talking about ‘them’, but we had been thinking about them. That is to say, I wasn’t – but I was, if you know what I mean. Every thought I had – like why wouldn’t the kitchen tap stop dripping, like would I ever be able to have a shower again, like how long would the supplies of babywipes last, like whether I’d end up with crusty dreadlocks from not washing my hair – every non-‘them’ thought I had was about them.
‘I would like to,’ said Simon, ‘but I don’t know whether it’s safe; you know – to dig.’
I had a cry then. Sitting at that table, I cried.
‘I’m so sorry, Ru. I’m so sorry,’ Simon kept saying.
‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. I’d never said that before, not once.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I knew what was coming.
Basically, I never wanted to leave the house again. I wanted to curl up, eat junk and wait for the whole thing to be not happening – so I didn’t say a word about it: not about what had happened, not about what would happen. Not about what we should do, about what we could do, about what on earth we were supposed to do.
After I’d cried in the kitchen, we went into the sitting room and closed the curtains and slept for a while. Or I did. When I woke up, Simon was still sitting there in the same place, and it was still the same day and it was still the morning, not even the afternoon.
As soon as I woke, my hands twitched and – I swear – all on their own they reached for the laptop.
‘I checked everything again,’ said Simon, shaking his head.
I put the laptop down. This time the pause was a thousand years long.
In it, I felt as if Simon was watching me and waiting for me to say something, and I knew if I did it would be the start of talking about things I didn’t even want to think about. I could have gone on like that for days and weeks, ignoring even the smell; the smell that you noticed even though you’d think you might get used to it and not notice it any more. I could do that, be the Ostrich Queen of the Universe about things I didn’t want to think about. Revision, for example. Only where normally it’d be Simon or my mum that finally brought stuff up, this time my own body was going to have something to say about it, because we were going to run out of stuff to drink.
The thing is, when we emptied out our haul on the kitchen table, there was nothing to drink. There was the colas and one carton of long-life milk. And the last festering, grimy inch of water in the flower bucket, which I would rather die than – I won’t say that again. Ever. Unless I truly mean it.
I slouched out to the kitchen and got myself a cola. The last cola. I got my toothbrush and the toothpaste from the front room and slouched back into the sitting room.
Simon shook his head a little, pursing his lips at me, as I cleaned my teeth with little precious sips of cola, spitting out into the empty bottle that the cola before the last cola had been in. In the old days (the day before the day before the day before yesterday), that head-shake would have been the start of a yee-haa and a half. Yes, well, maybe I’d care about my teeth a bit more if I didn’t have to wear these train tracks and if you’d just let me get them whitened, etc.
Instead I just smiled back a tiny bit – nervously; I knew what was coming.
Well, not the specific thing that Simon was about to say, which was hideous and appalling.
‘Did you know,’ he said, ‘that you can drink your own urine?’
‘That’s disgusting,’ I said, spitting toothpaste froth into the empty cola bottle.
‘No, really,’ he said, ‘you can. It’s just not recommended.’
I wondered how come Simon would know such a thing, but wee-drinking is probably exactly the kind of thing birdwatchers know about, in case they get thirsty on a long stake-out in a bird hide. ‘The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds does not recommend . . .’
I gulped my cola. I caved. ‘What are we going to do?’ I asked.
‘What do you think we need to do?’
‘Get water,’ I said, because I had no choice. It sounded so simple.
‘Yes,’ said Simon. ‘Where from?’
It felt like a massive trick question. Also not. It felt like . . . like he was nudging me towards what I didn’t want to do more than anything, which was to think.
‘I dunno,’ I said – i.e. I don’t want to think about it.
Simon, he just looked at me, waiting.
‘I don’t wanna go to another supermarket,’ I said.
He nodded.
‘And anyway there’s no point. Because all the good stuff has gone anyway.’
I stopped there. I drained my bottle of cola. I couldn’t help myself; I burped.
‘Pardon me,’ I said.
‘I do, Ruby. Always, for everything,’ said Simon.
The room filled with a sticky toffee ooze of emotion. There was another of those pauses we’d been having; this one was shorter – maybe only fifty years – but it was long enough for me to think NO NO NO NO NO NO. PLEASE don’t start saying stuff because I NO NO NO NO NO NO cannot bear to be hearing stuff. It was like when your grandma has had too much sherry and goes on about how much she loves you (and just so hopes you’ll be OK because it was a terrible thing, yo
ur parents splitting up), or when your dad has had too much wine and goes on about how much he loves you (and never would have abandoned you, but your mother had made her decision) (conveniently forgetting to mention that it was the discovery of HIS secret “love child”, brother-brat Dan . . . beloved . . . that admittedly might have kind of forced her to make that decision) or when your best friend gets trashed and wants to talk deep-and-meaningful (and just so isn’t sure that Caspar is really right for you) . . . and they get all gushy and you just want . . . to not be deep-and-meaningful. NO NO NO NO NO.
‘Well . . . eventually,’ said Simon, and grinned. ‘So what are we gonna do, Ru?’
‘Get stuff from other places,’ I said.
‘Like?’ said Simon.
Stop it, just stop it, I thought.
‘Like other people’s houses,’ I said.
I burped again, deliberately. It was all I had left – to show I wasn’t freaked and to keep the NO NO NO NO NO wall of shut-up strong.
There, I’ve said what you wanted me to say, I thought . . . but for half a second of a second I thought he was going to say no, that he’d come up with another plan . . . that although he, like me, hadn’t seen any of our neighbours since Day One, he was sure they were all fine and no way could we just go busting into other people’s homes.
‘Good thinking, Ru,’ he said. ‘I think that’s the best thing we can do right now.’
So that was it, then. Without actually saying the words, we had both admitted – what? That a lot of people, and maybe even most people, must be dead. Because all our neighbours were . . . and why should our road be any different to any other road? And we’d admitted that we were desperate and didn’t know what else to do, without actually saying that either.
‘But we’ll knock first, right?’ I asked, feeling utter dread about the whole thing. ‘You know, because maybe there’ll be people at home . . .’
‘Yes, of course,’ said Simon, and he went off to get the crowbar from the shed.
For what happened next, I blame myself.
Simon did say I could stay home, and I did think about it. ‘You can’t leave me,’ I said.
We got all togged up all over again (about which I didn’t say a word, even though it was blazing hot and sunny). We stepped out into a kind of silence. That was the most shocking thing. While we’d been inside the house, the car alarms had been stopping, one by one. To begin with, there’d just been this yowling chorus of them – most far from us, but carrying, with the air so still and no wind to beat them back or other noise to fight them. When they started dying off, it got so’s you could hear the individual ones: a fast, high-pitched spaceship weep-weep-weep-weep-weep; a deep honk-honk-honk that came in a pattern, stopping then starting again; a woop-woop, woop-woop that sounded like an American police car. I got to know a whole bunch of those alarms, all of them different – and all of them trying to remind you of what had happened, and that there was a supermarket and a car park and a town full of dead bodies.
The Rain Page 10