Armed with cutlery, bowls, water, and goodies, we trot off to the science labs. It’s all gas Bunsen burners in there, but in the store cupboard (another fire extinguisher job) there’s one of those alcohol burners in among all the stuff that’s used for “Look But Don’t Touch” teaching, just in case the kids accidentally blow themselves or the school up. Superb.
I try to force the kid to put safety glasses on, but she’s not having it unless I do too, so I do. I get us both lab coats too.
See how good with kids I am? See how much fun I can be?
The Princess doesn’t even crack a smile, but I sort of somehow know she’s not un-into it, if you know what I mean. Could be because there’s food at the end of it.
We cook up a feast. She gets hot soup, clutching the glass beaker with a massive heat-proof glove, and I get a glass beaker of water on the boil for a noodle snack.
Afterward, she throws up.
It’s probably just the dehydration and the pigging out on an empty stomach, but still it makes me go a little panicky, worrying that she’s “got something”—not the killer-rain something, but a something something, like kids used to get. I ask her a ton of questions that get no answer. (Does your head ache? Is your throat sore? Do you feel hot? Cold?) I make her lie down in the staffroom under teachers’ coats, giving her a lecture about how didn’t I tell her not to glug so much water, followed by another mini-lecture that goes like this:
“You know, it really would be a lot easier if you spoke to me.”
That’s it. End of lecture.
I plunk myself down. I wait. I know she doesn’t want to go to sleep, but I can see she’s going to fall asleep—fighting it, every snoozy dragging step of the way. I feel like I could sleep too, but I need to stay awake, so I can get on with the other thing I feel I need to do, which is panic. I don’t want the kid to see me do that.
She sleeps…like a princess…silently.
I’ve gotta get rid of her.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
I do not want to be lumbered with a kid.
I mean, I know, to a lot of people I still am a kid…but—uh—you know what? Me and this kid? It is NOT going to work.
I’ve already demonstrated—in a “Stay back, kids, this is dangerous” science-teacher demo way—that I cannot take care of her. I don’t WANT to take care of her. I am way too young for this sort of responsibility.
The whiteboard in the staffroom is filled with hideous staff reminders about exams. I wipe the whole thing clean.
I write on it:
BACK IN 5—RING BELL IF PROBLEM. RX
and I put a massive old school bell on a desk right in front of the whiteboard.
Then I leave, to panic where I won’t disturb her.
I go to the gym—when would I ever, voluntarily, go to a gym?!—and I chuck a ball at a net. At a net; it’s meant to go into the net…but this isn’t PE. This is thinking. I miss hoop after hoop—same way I’m missing thought after thought. In the end, I just kick the thing, hard, against the wall. Still I miss some, but this is how the kicks go:
Kick.
Where now?
Kick.
Home.
Kick.
That’s the first place they’ll look for you.
Kick.
All right. Shut up. I know. I’ll look for Dad.
Kick.
That’s stupid. You know that’s stupid. And it’s pointless. It’s stupid and pointless.
Kick. Kick. KICK. KICK. The ball goes flying. I get it back.
Kick.
Got a better plan?
Kick.
Go back to Xar’s.
Kick.
He scares me.
Kick.
Yeah, but everyone else is OK.
Kick.
Excuse me?!
Kick.
They’re just no good in emergencies, that’s all.
Kick.
I’m not taking the kid there. I gotta get rid of the kid.
Kick.
Really?
Kick.
Yes! Have you seen how the kids are at Xar’s?! Running wild! It’s a completely unsuitable environment for—
Kick.
OK, shut up. I know.
Kick.
Salisbury Cathedral. That’s where I’ll take her. Nice, kind, useless people there. They’ll take proper care of her.
Kick.
You’re really going to dump her?
Kick.
YES!
I give the ball a massive kick—and I miss the ball, again.
We’ve got supplies; we need transportation.
I leave the ball where it is, rolling, lonely in a gym…where it will probably never be kicked again. Slowly, over time, it will go flat. No one is ever going to pump that ball up. (On the positive side, no one is ever going to stand there screaming at a girl like me to “PASS! PASS! PASS!”)
I case the joint; there are cars dumped here—not many, but in any case, they’re all keyless or fuel-less or have dead batteries. I am just about despairing and considering leaving the school grounds to comb through the Marlborough leftovers when… Hurray for school janitors! Rounding the building, I see garages—and in one I see…this funny little three-wheeler flatbed truck. It is worth a try. But it is locked! Boo for school janitors! But there has to be some place where the keys are kept. The garage our getaway vehicle is in has other garages and sheds close by; I investigate them, pull up doors onto smelly goalposts and hockey stuff. One I have to smash open, only to find a Tutankhamun’s tomb of things for the school carnival: tables, streamers, a pirate scene on hardboard with holes where the faces should be, throw-a-wet-sponge-at-the-math-teacher’s face. For fifty pence. Bargain.
I slouch back to the janitor’s garage, just to give the three-wheeler thing a kick.
The keys are hanging on the wall, aren’t they?
My hands are shaking so much, I can hardly get them in the ignition. It purrs into life—purrs? It judders, gnarrs, and whirrs, like a lawnmower. WHO CARES? IT WORKS!
I switch it off. I race back across the playing field. If our PE teacher had been alive to see it, she would have been astonished. And I would have been forced to join the track team—so, hey, one for the list of things I’m glad there’ll be no more of. Being forced to join the track team, not the PE teacher. She couldn’t help herself, I don’t suppose. She just liked PE, and I didn’t.
My genius brain shouts, GET A BETTER MAP!
“’Kay!” my genius self answers.
RUBY THE GENIUS RIDES AGAIN!
Or not… Of all the many, many books they have in the library, there is no road map. I suppose that’s understandable; why would kids need a road map? EXCEPT THIS ONE DOES—LIKE, NOW! I’m rummaging through shelves like a lunatic, desperately flicking through the geography section, tossing books aside (or flinging them, in the case of The Rain Cycle and its depressing blue maps of global precipitation) when I hear the bell I left the Princess with clanging. It is so loud. It is so, so loud. It is louder than the helicopter that is passing overhead. I could run back out to the garages and find something to defend us with—a javelin! They looked good! I should’ve grabbed one! But that bell clangs so loud I feel like I have no time. I grab the biggest, heaviest book I can see—an encyclopedia—and run.
I pelt down the corridor, book raised, ready to strike.
She’s standing there; there’s no one from the army coming to get her. She just woke up and got scared… I see that, I feel that, before I even get to her. And what was I going to do? Fight them off with a hefty book?
I get to her. I do scan the staff room just to be sure.
“I’m sorry,” I tell her. “It’s OK now. I’m here.”
I don’t mention that I am going to ditch her ASAP.
Me and the kid load up the three-wheeler lawnmower-truck thing with supplies. I decide to wait until dark before we leave, so I do end up fiddling around a little with teachers’ makeup, supplemented by more glittery and gorgeous items that must (surely?!) have been confiscated from young innocents like me.
Helicopters and distant truck sounds all day. Can’t be about us, but don’t want to find out for sure. So we wait; then we putter off.
OK, so it’s not that simple. We haven’t got that much gas, but that part’s OK. The lawnmower truck isn’t greedy; it just putters and futters along. It is also a very good thing that Salisbury is still there, clinging to the bottom of the ripped and mud-grubby showroom map. What is not so good is that the useless map only shows us the main roads, so we only know what to avoid and not the roads we should take.
It is a fairly unpleasant experience. My stomach churns with fear the whole way. Thank goodness it is dark because we end up puttering past army camps and camps of the useless. Every time we do that, I think that’s the end of us. We’ll be spotted and dragged back inside that army base…because we can outrun no one. We putter…past an airfield at one point—plane coming in, helicopters unloading people. Busy little bees, the army.
I should try for another car, but I don’t. Too scared to stop.
And if anything, this whole, horrible journey just makes my head know for sure: I cannot take care of a kid.
• • •
Outside a Salisbury fish and chips place, we conk out.
I’ve read you can make a car go on used cooking oil, but I’ve never tried it. I could try now or…
The night is starry and clear. It cannot be that far to the cathedral. I get out. I recheck the sky—all around. I check the kid’s feet, like she’s a pony; her body-bag hoofs are tattered, but I think there are enough layers left to get us where we need to go.
“C’mon,” I tell her.
I offer my hand, but she climbs down alone.
“There’re nice people here,” I tell her.
We pad through silent streets toward the cathedral, past signs that were left out months ago. Sheets with welcome messages carefully written out on them, now rain-run into weeping gibberish. Balloons to say, Hurray! You’re here! You’re gonna be OK!… Yeah, they’re all popped. Hanging limp and tattered.
The kid and I march toward the cathedral—to the people, the useless people, where I once—officially—belonged.
When we reach the green around it, we zigzag through a graveyard of cars to that massive stone building, where beautiful electric lights are no longer burning.
I do not want to believe this is a bad sign. I do not want to believe it until—until we see…
The ancient doors of Salisbury Cathedral are bust in.
Like, smashed.
All dark in there. All dark.
“Hello?!” I called.
We ventured inside.
“Hey?!”
Ahead of us, I saw the tiniest light flickering. We walked toward it, past pews on which all sorts of stuff was dumped—luggage, clothes, and all kinds of random stuff. The leftovers of what had been normal human life.
There was a lady, kneeling down in front of the altar, on which a single candle burned. Next to it, a goldfish in a bowl. Maybe God had been replaced with something easier to care for.
“Margaret?” I whispered.
She looked around. It wasn’t Margaret—a lovely lady I had met once, a long time ago. It was some other old lady.
“Hello, pet,” she said.
She carried on praying.
“Excuse me, but where is everyone?” I asked.
She didn’t answer.
I laid my hand on her shoulder—in a polite, nervous sort of way.
“Excuse me. Where is everyone?”
She didn’t answer. I sank down to my knees alongside her, and I craned my face in front of hers.
“Please…where has everyone gone?”
It took a moment for her to focus on me.
“The army came, pet,” she said, like that explained everything. Which I guess, in a way, it kind of did. “People ran away.”
I thought about the people I had met here. Sagal, in her wheelchair, trying to get out through the parking lot full of cars. Her dad ranting in Somali. Sagal probably finding time to get embarrassed about the whole thing. Whether anyone would have helped them.
I swallowed. I unthought that. I breathed. Plan A thwarted.
I didn’t want to get saddled with an old lady any more than I wanted to be saddled with a kid…but to leave her there? I couldn’t do it.
“Do you want to come with us?” I asked.
She clutched my arm. Stared into my eyes.
“You can bring the goldfish if you like,” I offered.
“Oh no, Trevor’s not mine,” she said. “I’m just minding him for someone.”
I felt my sad heart beat.
“We could just leave them a note about the goldfish. About Trevor. Or…I mean, we could take him with us and—”
“I’m staying put. No offense, but you’re just a little un, aren’t you?”
Lady, I am the oldest little un you will ever meet.
“Let’s face it. Our Trevor’s probably got more common sense. You should get home to your mom and dad. Best place for you.”
I stood up.
The Princess had sat behind us in a pew.
“Come on,” I told her, holding out my hand.
She didn’t take it—not immediately—but she did take it, a little way farther on, as we walked out, down the aisle.
“It’s a disgrace, i’n’t it, Trevor?” I heard that lady mutter. “It’s all just a disgrace.”
I stood at the smashed-in doors. It was all just a disgrace.
I barely looked at the sky. I just walked out, the kid with me. Plan B: Xar’s. He’s a loon, I know, but there are other people there who aren’t (Grace). And there are other kids there. The Princess…she’ll be OK there, for a while. She’ll be OK. I’ll leave her there. I’ll go back and get her when I find a better place—or I won’t need to, because everything’s going to be OK.
Thinking about it, it didn’t seem like a good sign that there was more than one car to choose from on the edge of the giant parking lot. I s’pose it meant that people had kept on coming there, but I s’pose it also meant that people hadn’t left—which you’d think they would have done if the army had come…in the way the army seemed to have come, wrecking those doors.
Anyway, I got us a car.
Flipped open the glove compartment, saw a Carpenters CD. Shut the glove compartment.
CHAPTER TWENTY
I got us to Xar’s.
It seemed so quiet as we crunched up the drive, but I suppose it was pretty early for party people. I thought I saw the downstairs curtains twitch. Then, at one of the big upstairs windows—the biggest—the curtains were drawn back, swept back, like it was a theater. King Xar—in white, um, snug-fitting underpants—stood at the window. I didn’t know what else to do, so I waved. He didn’t wave back. A punky-looking girl appeared next to him. She didn’t wave either, but then Xar said something to her; she turned and shouted something into the house, then turned back and gave me this little wave. That was a welcome, right? I was being welcomed? There was no smile on her face.
Then the massive front door swung open and one of the Court I recognized, this cheerful-looking fashionista girl (in fashionista pj’s) appeared, waving frantically. That was a welcome.
“C’mon,” I told the kid.
“Hi,” said the fashionista as we crunched in over a tarp spread across the hall floor. She seemed a little flustered.
“Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you up,” I burbled. I felt nervous—so would you. I didn’t really see why they wouldn’t want us there,
but it’s a funny old thing, knowing you’ve got nowhere else to go. It is not nice. It is especially not nice when you can feel there is a kid standing so close by you, you can hear her every breath.
I wasn’t even sure whether the fashionista had heard me or not; she just stared at me in the gloom of the hallway. The aftermath of another big party night, I guessed.
“Ladybird…” said Xar, slouching down the stairs.
In another time and another place, I would have been quite distracted. Mercifully, he had put some trousers on, but they were the loose, linen-y, hang-on-your hips kind. Also white. Shirt draped across his arm. Bare chest. Um, tanned. Um, muscly. Um. The guy was hot, OK? A bit scary and weird, but HOT.
“Um,” I said.
“So how’s your little friend?”
“Dead,” I said.
Just then a door crashed open and Grace—lovely, HUGE Grace—came waddling out of the kitchen in an intoxicating haze of TOAST SMELL, carrying a breakfast tray.
“Ruby!” she gasped.
“Grace!” I beamed—but Grace was not beaming; she looked horrified—she looked, pleadingly, at Xar.
My eyes looked lovingly at the breakfast tray.
“The thing is…” I said to Xar. That toast, on the plate, on the tray…it smelled so good.
Butter. Melting. You can get it out of cans, don’t you know? Bread too! Hadn’t I discovered that in the deli in Dartbridge? And gorged myself stupid…ooh! So goooood!
PULL YOURSELF TOGETHER, RU.
“Look, we want to stay here,” I tell Xar, the words bubbling in a pool of drool.
“Sure you do, Ladybird,” he says. “But you’ve got to see it from our point of view. Why would we want you?”
WHAT?! Um—because?! Just because?! Hello—APOCALYPSE? Kindness of your heart?!
“Still, let’s not be rude to our guests, Grace,” he says.
She holds out the tray. Plate on it. Butter dripping. Whole tray rattling.
Uh! I need sustenance!
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