I didn’t gloom out about what had happened to the world, I worked out where I was in it. I matched up what I could see with MG Man’s map book. I was on Primrose Hill. The helicopter was in HYDE PARK; I REPEAT: HYDE PARK. All I had to do was get there. It didn’t look so tricky. I’d just cut through Regent’s Park. Easy-peasy.
One thing . . . the day was lovely. The sky, it was blue. It was blue except for the cloud I hate most. There is no reason to hate it; it isn’t going to rain on you. It doesn’t even mean rain is on its way. I hate it because I remember I noticed it that day, and now I know its name: cirrus uncinus. High streaks of thin, wispy clouds . . . with claws reaching down. A demons’ sky. Ghost demons. Coming to get you.
I speed-walked down the hill. Wasn’t it so weird? It was so weird, wasn’t it? Don’t panic, Ruby, don’t panic; it’s all going to be fine. This place that would have once been full of people, now so empty . . . so empty . . .
‘I spy,’ I started up with myself, ‘something beginning with R.’
Road – clogged with dead cars and dead people, the me that was frightened said.
I refused to say ‘W’ (Water! It’s poisoned! It’s poisoned!) as I walked across the bridge over the canal. ‘I spy, with my little eye, something beginning with Z,’ I got in quickly, before the me that felt frightened could butt in. It didn’t do much good.
ZOO! Zoo! And what about the poor animals?
Hadn’t I been past London Zoo so many times with Dad, me on my own with him, or me and Dan with him, begging to go in? We were always on our way to somewhere else; same this time: I had to get on.
‘I spy something beginning with . . . F.’
FB! Flowerbeds! Your mother loved flowers! Your mother is DEAD. Your dad is –
‘R!’ I said, to shut myself up.
I stuffed my empty box of ice-pops into a litter bin and started on the next box.
Rubbish! Rubbish! Rubbish!
‘T!’ See how pretty they were, the trees? How the light shone through them?
G! G! shouted the me that was frightened. G!
There they were: two giraffes snacking on trees. Giraffes in the middle of a London Park. Some kind someone, anyone, must have set the animals free.
It was, I think, the most amazing and beautiful sight I had ever seen – or ever will see. I’ll never get to Africa, but I have seen that now: giraffes, right in front of me, snacking on trees.
Oh wow.
Even though I had to realise immediately that I had no phone to snap ‘selfie with gee! raffes’ on, no web to post it on and anyway all the people I wanted to tell about it to were dead, my heart – which had been sunk deep in my chest, worrying and scared – lifted up.
Oh wow.
Chomp, chomp – rip – chomp; it was so quiet I could hear their gentle little mouths working. Tails swishing – just a bit – big brown eyes looking – just a bit – at the human girl passing by.
I had these thoughts – strange, but not scary – about how maybe there’d be so few people left now that the animals would set up a human zoo and bring their animal children to stare at us and tell them in Animalese to shush and not frighten us, and give us mobile phones to play with and feed us on tinned stuff and bottles of cola. Yikes! And try to get us to breed! Imagine spending the rest of your life trapped in a cage with Darius Spratt, being forced to try to like each other.
On the other side of the park, I walked down a long city street towards Hyde Park. Whenever I passed a clothes shop, I thought about the state my dress was in – ripped up, filthy – and how the boots that weren’t my boots were: tatters of plastic bags hanging off them. They didn’t even fit me, had rubbed my feet into blisters. But mainly I tried not to think about anything. I am so very good at that. It’s a skill, actually. It really is. You probably know that. One day, all the people who have survived should have the Ignoring Things Olympics. If I am alive, I might win . . . but I have a weak spot.
OXFORD STREET
Look; it wasn’t like I could hear helicopters in the park; it wasn’t like it was about to rain; it wasn’t like I didn’t have HOURS left, probably, to get to the ‘COLLECTION POINT IN HYDE PARK. I REPEAT: COLLECTION POINT IN HYDE PARK’.
It was like . . . I’m fifteen years old; I only just got to be fifteen years old. My clothes were in tatters, my feet were bleeding, rubbed sore. My face was naked. I looked a state; I felt a state.
I crunched over broken glass into the valley of temptation.
Ten minutes. Just ten minutes. Dad would understand. I could get something for him. Ten minutes. Five.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
I picked the biggest and best department store I could find, strode on in through a shattered window and I shopped until I dropped.
There were other shoppers in there. First one I saw, I froze in panic. She just nodded at me, said ‘Hi’ and carried on browsing.
Next one I saw, I nodded at, said ‘Hi’.
Third one I saw, in men’s ties, I just ignored. Not in a nasty way; we were just browsing – we had no reason to speak.
I got my dad a really good tie, a bunch of really good ties. Silk ties. I’d never seen him wear a tie, but.
A long time later, I swanned out of a changing room in exactly the kind of insanely gorgeous super-expensive designer frock I wanna wear to the premiere of the never-to-be-made blockbuster of my best-selling book – and froze. There was someone hogging the mirror, twirling about, this way and that, in an incredible frock – in a hideous colour: orange. Don’t you just hate orange?
‘What do you think, darling?’
I thought it was Naomi Campbell. I pretty much knew it couldn’t have been, but that is what I thought. She made everyone I had ever known, every person I had ever seen, including every person in King Xar’s court, look . . . shabby, and ugly. Apart from my mum, if you know what I mean. This person, she was THE most gorgeous thing ever. Wondrous to behold. Glowing with extreme loveliness and beauty. If she’d had a wand I would have sworn I had surely met a fairy godmother, one I wanted for my very own.
So she had seen me. Also she wasn’t a she. She was a he.
There was a bloke in Dartbridge who wore women’s clothes, but he just looked like . . . a bloke with a beard wearing women’s clothes. This person, THE most gorgeous person I had ever seen in real life in my life, looked . . . AY-MAY-ZING. He/she had been on a make-up binge too, but he/she was a lot better at it than me. Great, GREAT sweeping eyelashes. Shimmering, perfect lips.
I could have bolted. I looked about. There was this couple, miles away in the knicker department; the bloke sat flicking through a magazine while the woman pondered sexy-looking corsets . . . but other than that, me and the most beautiful person on Earth seemed to be alone.
‘Maybe a different colour?’ I said.
He/she gave me a long, hard, pouty stare – but a much better long, hard, pouty stare than I could ever do – then looked back at him/herself in the mirror.
‘Hmmm, you’re probably right,’ he/she said.
He/she picked up her enormous (DESIGNER!) handbag, hoisted it on to his/her slender shoulder and skimmed, with elegant manicured nails, through hangers.
I looked to see where the emergency exit was, where the little white man was running now.
‘What do you think about this?’ he/she said, holding up something: a green shapeless frock that could have looked brilliant on, or could have looked –
‘Hn,’ I said.
‘Isn’t it?’ he/she said. He/she released the frock from her fingers; it dropped to the floor.
‘I’m Diana. From Knightsbridge,’ she said, extending her hand to me.
There was something so – SO – elegantly sophisticated about her, I just couldn’t help but take that hand. I thought that – maybe – it trembled slightly.
‘I’m Ruby,’ I said. ‘From Dartbridge.’
‘Enchanté,’ breathed Diana, gently squeezing my hand.
She let my hand go and flitted, like a
beautiful butterfly, to another rail.
‘Diana?’
‘Yah?’ she said, wandering off to look at shoes.
I wanted to talk. I – randomly – wanted to talk. No, Ru, I told myself. Not now.
‘I have to go,’ I said.
‘Sure,’ she said, jamming a shoe on to her foot.
‘I’m going to Hyde Park,’ I said.
‘Sweet-cakes,’ said Diana, gracefully flinging the shoe across the floor, ‘you don’t want to go there.’
‘Why not?’
‘Army, darling. Army.’
She flitted on to another display. Me and my bags of loot clumped after her.
‘I wish they did half sizes. You just know they won’t. Why does NO ONE do half sizes?’
‘What’s wrong with the army?’ I asked.
‘Uh!’ said Diana, like the army was the worst thing she could think of. ‘What’s right with them?’ she fumed, trying to get her foot into a shoe that was too small. ‘They’ve been rounding everyone up, haven’t they? What are they doing with them?’
She flung the shoe across the floor.
‘Helping them?’
‘Yah, right! How come it’s all come-to-mamma now? I mean, sweetie, think about it! These people – the army, the gov-ern-ment – didn’t even bother telling people . . . anything. Not one word that would have saved a body’s life!’
The angrier she got, the more her accent kind of bounced around. These words crept in that sounded more like the kind of South London gangsta-rapper thing Dan tried to do; only with Diana, it was like that was what she was trying not to do.
She looked up at me. She sighed a mighty sigh.
‘What else could they do, I suppose? I expect that’s what they’ll say, anyway. There was hardly going to be enough bottles of bubbly to go around, was there?’
She delved in her designer bag and handed me a glass (DESIGNER!) bottle of fizzy water.
‘At least now there’s plenty,’ she said.
I’d been too busy shopping to notice how thirsty I was. I opened it and drank it down.
‘For as long as it lasts,’ added Diana with another sigh.
‘Oh! Sorry!’ I said, thinking I’d deprived her.
‘No, no, no,’ she said, waving my words away with her beautifully manicured hand. ‘Plenty more where that came from . . . for now. What I meant was,’ she said softly, ‘it won’t last forever, will it? And then what, eh?’
I burped. ‘Pardon me,’ I muttered. I hadn’t thought about this. I hadn’t thought about any of this. Only about the Spratt and his tablets, about my train tracks – and even those things I hadn’t exactly thought about, not really.
‘Doom . . .’ she sighed. ‘Hey-ho. I’ll tell you what, we simply shan’t talk about it, eh? We don’t want to go getting ourselves all miserable, do we?’
‘No . . .’ I said. ‘Diana?’
‘Yah?’
‘My dad’s there. At the army place.’
She fixed me with her fairy-godmother gaze. Magicking everything.
‘I’m sure it’s all perfectly charming,’ she said. ‘I’m sure it’ll all be fine.’
‘I will say one thing, though, sweetie,’ she added, examining a crocodile-skin-look red ankle boot. In spite of the magicking I kind of wished she wouldn’t say another word, but she chucked the boot aside and advanced upon me. ‘I think we need to do something with your hair.’
Huh?! One minute we were discussing the hideous mess the world was in, and now the hideous mess of my hair.
‘I mean, if you’re going to do red – and, frankly, I think you may need to have a rethink on that . . .’ she said sternly. ‘Do you mind?’ she asked, and before I could say that, yes, actually, I did mind, she’d liberated my hair from its elastic band. ‘IF you are going to DO red, you need to DO red.’
Before I could protest, she mussed up my hair and steered me to a mirror.
‘Uh,’ she sighed, gazing at me with me. ‘What DO they teach you in – where is it you said you were from?’
‘Dartbridge,’ I said. ‘It’s a little town in—’
‘Shh! Sweetie! Concentrate! Absorb!’
Diana tipped a ton of stuff from her handbag and did stuff to my hair.
I really, seriously, did not recognise myself. I’d already tinkered about with make-up so my face didn’t look so scratched-up-with-hints-of-orange, and now: there I was, in an amazing dress, with amazing hair, looking amazing.
‘Shoes,’ muttered Diana. ‘You need the right shoes.’
I had quite a fantastic pair of platform sneakers on already.
‘I should go,’ I said.
‘What are you?’ asked Diana. ‘A four?’
‘Five,’ I said. ‘But—’
‘Wait!’ commanded Diana, stalking dramatically back into the land of shoes.
She found what she was looking for and put the box in a bag for me.
‘They’ll be perfect,’ she said and air-kissed me. ‘Mwah! Mwah! Go knock ’em dead, sweetie.’
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘De rien!’ said Diana. ‘De rien!’
‘Thank you,’ I said again. I didn’t know what else to say, so I kissed her – for real – on the cheek . . . because she was beautiful, because she had made me look amazing and because, if I could ever have a fairy godmother, I would wish for one who looked just like her. Just looked, mind; the general somewhat bossy attitude was a bit too much. My fairy godmother would have to dote on me, be forever gentle and kind.
‘You take care, girlfriend,’ she whispered.
A big, fat tear slid down her beautiful cheek, right through the lipstick mark I’d left where I’d kissed her.
I left. I wasn’t going to cry and wreck two hundred pounds’ worth of make-up. I had no reason to cry anyway. I was going to see my dad.
In the next ten minutes, when I stepped out from designer world and crunched back down Oxford Street into real life, I went from feeling like I looked a million dollars to feeling like I looked like a bit of a twit. A bit of a Darius Spratt. Glamour plus army does not go.
There was this makeshift, razor-wired army post and polytunnel-type space tent in the middle of the park. Men in white bio-onesies, masks, guns. No one shouted; no one waved. They couldn’t not have seen me. I waddled up to them in my dress, weighed down with bags.
‘All right, love?’ said one of the men.
He opened the wire and I went into their compound.
‘I need to get to Salisbury,’ I said.
‘Well, you’ve come to the right place, then,’ he said. ‘Take a seat.’
There was a handful of other people like me there too, sitting on plastic sheets on the grass. Most looked like they’d also got side-tracked on Oxford Street, dressed up to the nines in whatever took their fancy, surrounded by millions of shopping bags. One woman wore a ton of diamonds. I mean, I really think those might have been real diamonds – they kind of looked different to the bling I’d picked up – and she kept clutching her neck, checking her ears.
A few of those people nodded vaguely at me. Mainly they just stared at the floor or at the sky, waiting.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I did what they were doing. I waited. I’m going to see my dad.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Me and my two million bags of designer loot sat in front of them, this woman and this man – in normal clothes – sitting behind a desk. The woman had a notepad. The man had a laptop. The army had electricity.
I waited for a bit while the woman muttered stuff to the bloke and folded her notepad so she had a clean sheet of paper.
I didn’t mind waiting. I’m going to see my dad.
The first helicopter ride I’d ever had hadn’t lasted very long. We got dumped in another park – somewhere beyond the traffic jams, I suppose – put on to a coach, then dumped in this stinky hangar with a ton of other people, where everyone had spent hours and hours shuffling forwards and backwards in this long (stinky) zigzag
queue. Reason for the shuffling about was quite sweet, really; every time a new bunch of people arrived, those in line already let anyone who was old or sick or had little kids get to the front of the queue. Quite sweet – and totally rage-making. Some people lost it; some people shouted – or muttered to anyone they thought might listen – about who they were and why they were there and why they should be at the front of the queue. I kept my cool, though. I’m going to see my dad.
When it really was my turn, the door slid open and I stepped out into the light. It was blinding, dazzling, after the darkness of the hangar and it wasn’t even proper daylight; it was plasticly blurred through some kind of army polytunnel that led from one building to the next.
‘This way,’ said a soldier, and I followed his voice, blinking, into the next building, into a room – the room where the woman and the man sat. Two soldiers stood at the back – but slouching, like they’d had a long wait too.
‘Do you want a drink?’ the woman behind the desk asked.
There was one small plastic cup of water on that table.
‘No thanks,’ I said, even though I was dying of thirst. I’m going to see my dad.
The woman asked questions; the man typed my answers into the laptop. It went OK at first: name and address. I got my own date of birth wrong first time they asked – not because I was so impatient and excited, which I was – but because I went into fib autopilot. It’s just what you do, isn’t it, when someone in authority (like the shopkeeper you’re trying to buy cider from) asks you to confirm the date on the fake ID that’s not even yours. (Lee – darling – will it even matter now if I say it belonged to you?)
I corrected myself and they carried on.
Was I accompanied? Did I have a parent or other relative with me?
‘No,’ I said. ‘But I think my dad’s here.’
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