Storm

by Virginia Bergin

  Dan grins. He’s relieved. He’s so relieved.

  He’s such a beloved brat.

  “The rabbit tasted pretty good though,” he says, strictly for the purpose of shocking me. He dives back down to rummage for Moses.

  “Anyway, you don’t need to tell Dad about all this,” he says from under the sofa, “because he’s scared of snakes and stuff.”

  Snakes?! Excuse me?

  There’s a flurry of activity—the Princess grabs Dan; he looks up, and she points under the sideboard.

  “Moses is so smart,” Dan tells her. “We’ll never get him now.”

  But—oh boy—they are going to try; they reposition, totally caught up in the game of gerbil hunting.

  “Snakes… Dan…snakes?!”

  “Um, yeah…they’re in the conservatory,” he says, grabbing a random guinea pig for the Princess. “She can be yours if you like,” he says magnanimously (good word: means looking like you’re really being kind and generous when it’s really no sweat). He hands the guinea pig over. “What do you want to call her?”

  “She’s not big on names,” I chip in, heading for the conservatory.

  It’s a fairly terrifying sight: there are tanks with creatures I wouldn’t want to touch in a million years…and not even the SAS would go near.

  “Dan, there’s a scorpion in here!” I call in disbelief.

  He doesn’t even answer, too busy giggling in kid mode.

  My brother-brat has amassed a “World’s Deadliest” collection of creatures.

  How—HOW?!—has he been able to do this?!

  Yeah, I am SO going to have to talk to my dad.

  Unable to bear the horror of the conservatory, I wander into the kitchen. Oh, my brother has truly excelled himself. But the first thing I see is my grandma’s cookie tin—and I pick it up and I cuddle it.

  It’s such a sty in that kitchen, anyone would need a cuddle. It takes a few minutes to see the true scale of his stupidity and naughtiness—but you can smell it right away. Above (high, high above) the smell of human and animal food is a jumble of weird, chemically burned smells, more powerful than the stink coming from the front room.

  The kitchen isn’t just an animal-feed restaurant; it isn’t just a Dan snack bar. It’s a lab. The contents of one of those advanced chemistry sets—the kind of thing a kid like Darius Spratt probably had when he was five but is really meant for older teens—are scattered all over the table. And I mean scattered: there’s powder and liquid stuff spilled out of tubes and containers. A mess in which half-eaten packets of cookies and chips lounge. This makes me and the Princess’s science-lab excursion seem as carefully controlled as anything they would dare to do in school. This glass rod, intended for the stirring of lethal boiling mixtures of toxic chemicals, is shoved in a bowl of noodles. My brother has been cooking up instant noodle snacks on top of a Bunsen burner that is connected to a MASSIVE gas canister—in glass beakers that have had knows what in them. It is beside the point that I may have just done a similar-ish thing myself. The beaker I used looked very clean indeed, whereas Dan’s—

  I pick up another beaker that still has knows what still in it; stinky, scorched chemicals coat its sides. I sniff and choke.

  “Ru?” Dan says. He’s leaning against the door; the Princess stands behind him, petting her new guinea pig.

  I shake my head at him, still choking. He shrugs…uncomfortably. He knows this is bad.

  “I’m trying to find a cure,” he says.

  Oh boy, this is worse than bad. On the table, there’s a bottle of clear liquid. On the bottle there’s a label; a label Dan has drawn a skull-and-crossbones on. He has copied it very accurately from the labels on the various other lethal substances.

  “What’s in there?” I ask quietly, pointing at the bottle.

  “Water,” says Dan. He goes into emergency squeak-speak. “I use gloves! I’m really careful! Look!” he squeals, shoving his hands into a pair of proper hospital-type gloves…

  “STOP!” I bellow, before my idiot brother can grab the water. “Don’t you touch another thing in here. Don’t you EVER touch ANY of this stuff again.”

  A distant bell clangs.

  He looks like he’s going to cry.

  The Princess shuffles, bothered by the bell that keeps clanging.

  “What is that?” I ask.

  “Dinner,” says Dan.

  Unbelievable. My dad is letting my brother run wild.

  I AM GOING TO HAVE TO HAVE A SERIOUS CHAT WITH MY DAD.

  “Come on, then,” I tell them, shooing them out of the room.

  I stand, holding the front door open—and holding my temper.

  “You’d better leave Pretty here,” I hear Dan tell the Princess. “She’ll be OK.”

  It’d be hilarious—if I wasn’t so mad. That guinea pig is the ugliest one I ever saw.

  I stalk back to the house, the kids trailing behind me…then Dan comes trotting to catch up with me. “Ru,” he says, “you won’t tell Dad, will you?”

  Honestly, I feel so exhausted and sad just looking at his worried face.

  “No,” I tell him. “But you’re not to touch any of that stuff again, OK?”

  He’s relieved, I can see. Brother-brat beloved nods.

  “We’ll get rid of it. And we’re gonna have to get rid of the scorpion and the snakes.”

  His mouth opens in protest.

  “You can’t keep stuff like that. You just can’t.”

  His mouth clamps shut in a tight line. A further thought looms up in my mind.

  “What do they eat anyway?”

  The tight line of my brother’s mouth wavers.

  “What have you been feeding them, Dan?”

  “Casualties,” he mutters. “From the hamster wars. I wouldn’t kill things, you know that.”

  Yeah, only yourself, I think. Like I want to kill my dad right now. “Get inside,” I tell him.

  He grabs the Princess’s hand, and they run for the house.

  “You’re not the boss of me!” he shouts over his shoulder.

  Brother-brat be-teenaged beloved.

  Dinner is pretty much a rerun of lunch, only, my dad and Tilly-Dilly are now drinking wine, so they’re even more oblivious to the plight of the children around them. Dan is keeping a watchful eye on me, just in case I change my mind and tell on him after all—or make out like I’m going to—which, in our old life, would have been tempting.

  You’d think my dad would use this occasion to consider the responsibilities of his new family, but apparently my explanation for the existence of the Princess is enough for him (“She’s just a kid I found. She’s doesn’t speak”), and even more shockingly, it appears he is in no hurry to listen, with tears in his eyes, to the heart-rending account of my survival—elements of which, like the fact that I am a FREAK, would have to be missed out. I mean, I guess I will tell him that (“YOU SHOULD LEARN TO KEEP QUIET”), but as it’s the sort of thing that’s way off the imaginable scale of terrible things to tell, and as I’m dog dead very tired, I think it can wait until tomorrow. Or the day after. I’ve had enough trauma, and there is no telling how he will react. If I can even get him to listen.

  Tonight, he is listening, enthralled, as Tilly tells us all about a zoo trip she once went on with a bunch of kids and how it all went horribly wrong when one of the kids freaked out on the “treetop” walk climbing thingy and refused to come down the zip-line.

  I am listening to a woman I don’t know, telling a story I don’t care about, from a time that no longer exists. About a subject—fear of heights—that I do not find in the least bit funny.

  Though I am keeping my mouth shut, I am raging internally. Not because it is a really boring story—it is, though my dad seems fascinated—but because I have this weird feeling that the real point of this story is not even
how Tilly saved the day, and isn’t she so marvelous, but what a pain kids are. And what idiots they are. And even though I have just seen for myself evidence of the truth of this, it makes me mad. And when my dad laughs, it makes me furious. Seems to me there might be a lot to be said for being silent like the Princess. Seems to me sometimes it might be better not to speak.

  “Right, bed, then?” my dad says to Dan when dinner is done.

  I expect Dan to kick up; he’d kick up even if it were one in the morning…but it’s only half past eight and it’s not even a school night, is it?

  “Sure. Night,” says Dan, and kisses him AND Tilly.

  He really is a little creep, and I make sure he knows I think that with an “I’m wise to you” stare when he has the nerve to come and kiss me good night too. He grins like a monster at me. Brat.

  “You can sleep in my room if you like,” Dan tells the Princess. “I don’t mind sleeping on the floor.”

  The Princess trundles off after him. You’d think someone would go with them to make sure the whole bedtime thing happens in a sensible manner—but no. My dad is fiddling with the DVD player. He can rig up a generator, but he can’t do basic “Press play” technology.

  “You wanna stay up and watch a movie with us?” he asks.

  This I would have snatched at. This would be such a gorgeous thing…in the past. Right now I would rather eat second helpings of what he just served up for dinner than sit and watch a film with…I can hear her, Tilly, clattering away behind me, clearing up dishes.

  “No thanks, Dad. I’m really tired…”

  BECAUSE I JUST CAME THROUGH MONTHS OF TERROR TO GET TO YOU, I think—and I try to think it hard enough so he comes to his senses and says something a little more meaningful and sympathetic than…

  “OK, night then, Ru,” which is what he actually says.

  He does then manage to tear himself away from fiddling with the DVD player for long enough to give me a kiss. “It’s good to have you home, my lovely girl,” he says, then goes back to pressing the wrong buttons.

  I could sort it out in a second.

  I take pity on him; he is my father after all. I set the DVD up to play. He beams. “Night, Dad,” I say. My heart feels melty and strange.

  “Good night, Ruby,” the Tilly woman dares to say. “We could have a chat tomorrow, if you like?”

  I do not like.

  I squeeze a lemon-juice smile at her for the sake of my dad.

  I’m not in with Dan. I’ve got a room all to myself. I bang on his door as I pass, though, and shout for him to shut up and go to bed, because I can hear him messing about, laughing.

  It goes quiet, and I hear a massive thump!

  I know exactly what he’ll be doing, building himself a Dan nest on the floor—which is just a good excuse to fling bedding around and jump on it.

  Before the rain, I’d be in there doing it too…or when I got older, I’d pretend to disapprove and then—thump!—randomly fling myself down on it too.

  It was really funny.

  Part of the fun was you knew you were going to get told off; only I bet that doesn’t happen much in this house. It is going to tonight. I wait until there’s another massive thump! then fling the door open—for one tiny second, I hear what I couldn’t hear outside: the Princess, making this sweet, soft, breathless giggling. She stops immediately; she’s standing on the bed, about to take a dive into the pile of duvets. The brother-brat has a pillow at the ready, to dump on her when she lands.

  I’m instantly distracted (and shocked) by the state the brother-brat’s room is in. Like really, anyone would think he’d been holed up here for years, not weeks. It is a terrifying boy-mess of items and clothes—and from the smell of it, I wouldn’t be surprised if he has pets lurking in here too. He’s also been having a go at his own graffiti art; the walls are colorfully sprayed with his own name, over and over. Brother-brat’s working on a tag for himself.

  “It’s good, isn’t it, Ru?” he says. “I wanna do the sitting-room wall, but Dad says I’ve got to practice first.”

  “It’s brilliant,” I tell him. “Now, you two! Go to bed!” I shout at them.

  It’s not proper shouting; it’s that pretend shouting parents do—you know, playful with a hint of I-might-flip-out-soon-for-real.

  Dan does a comedy dive onto his nest—but the Princess isn’t ready for this. She just sinks down onto the bed. She thinks I am totally serious. More stuff inside my heart feels strange. I can’t handle this.

  “Night,” I say and shut the door.

  THUMP! Dan flings the pillow at the door.

  I lie on my bed for ages. Even when those kids finally shut up, giggling and bed-bombing, I cannot sleep.

  I just want one night of not thinking. I am safe, I tell myself. I do feel safe. Safe for now.

  This house my dad picked is not a good house. The piece of land it’s on sticks right out into the estuary; there is WAY too much water around, but at least the house is modern, so it’s all double-glazed and sealed up…but, boy, with that oil-fueled stove going, it is HOT. I feel like I can’t breathe. I get up and—it’s raining out. Not pouring down, but feeble stratus-type rain.

  What do you care? Just open the window, freak.

  I take hold of the handle…I twist it open…but I can’t do it. I can’t put my hand out into the rain. That was how my mom died, wasn’t it? Just putting her hand out into the rain. Just trying to help someone.

  I use some random shoe that must have belonged to the people who lived here before to poke the window open. Let the shoe drop out of the window. Deliciously cool air floods in. I breathe. I stare at the rain. It’s falling so quietly.

  Go on, freak, just do it, the rain whispers. Put your hand out. Dare you.

  “No,” I tell it, out loud.

  I go back to bed.

  I can’t sleep.

  It isn’t even proper autumn yet, is it? The summer has been hanging on. There’s only going to be more rainy nights like this—and days. I should be feeling glad, that I am here with my dad and Dan, but when I think about that, when I think about the winter coming, when I think that there could be days on end—weeks!—stuck inside… WHAT IF IT SNOWS? There will be no snowball fights; there will be no sledging; there will just be…more terrible meals with that woman.

  If we can even get food. I’ve seen what my dad has stored, and I have to say that it’s pretty poor. He has clearly not read the SAS Survival Guide. Even his DVD selection is not great. For all his talk about how he’s going to do all this wonderful stuff… I think about what I heard my mom tell my auntie Kate, that my dad was basically just a dreamer. And I’d been so mad about it, so hurt for him because he’d said so many times it was just his stupid job that was holding him back.

  I’m going to be stuck in this house for weeks on end with the brother-brat preferring the Princess’s company to mine, and my dad preferring that woman’s company to mine, watching the same DVDs over and over without even a guinea pig to keep me company because my dad will only try to kill and cook it.

  This is quite bad. See what I mean about apocalypses, and how they can get worse?

  And I could go back down there right now, and I could say, “Father dearest, I am both the secret and the keeper of the secret.”

  And my dad would say, “Huh?”

  And I’d say, “THERE’S A CURE.”

  And I wouldn’t be able to explain it properly, and a whole lot more terrible stuff would start up, and all I want is to be still and quiet and sleep and just not have to deal with another thing.

  So I don’t want to tell them about any of that.

  I could just run away.

  But I can’t run away, can I? Where would I go? In any case, I feel the terrible weight of responsibility—and not just on my shoulders. It crushes my whole body into that bed. If I go, Dan will be
at the mercy of these people—these people being my father and that woman. The Princess too. They’ll be left to run wild without a single clue about how to behave properly and how you’re supposed to grow up—only they won’t live long enough to find out.

  It is possible, I suppose, that my dad is just having a bad reaction to the whole apocalypse thing—that, just like I did, he’s having a temporary phase of not coping. That seems the kindest way to think about it, and not that my dad is a bit of an idiot and a lot of a dreamer and in lurve. I mustn’t think those things, especially the idiot part. After all, I am his daughter, and surely that would only make me a bit of an idiot too.

  By dawn, I have decided how it must be. Until my dad snaps out of it and gets with the program (and gets an SAS Survival Guide), someone is going to have to take charge around here, and that someone is me.

  The freak, whispers the rain.

  “Oh, why don’t you just shut up!” I shout at it.

  My door opens. That woman, that Tilly, comes in. It is too late to pretend to be asleep because she has actually had the nerve to just step right into my room, where I am sitting bolt upright in bed and—and maybe I just shouted so loud that you can still hear it ringing in the air.

  “Are you OK?” she asks.

  I find it hard to speak.

  “I heard you shout…” she says…and—OH NO—she shuts the door behind her and pads across the floor and comes and sits on my bed. OH NO.

  “I’m OK,” I manage to say.

  I know for a fact I can’t possibly look it. I rub my piggy-feeling eyes.

  “Your dad is—”

  “Don’t talk about my dad,” I blurt.

  “He’s asleep,” she carries on gently. “Do you want me to wake him?”

  “No!” I say, horrified. I just want her to go. “I’m fine!” I tell her.

  Her face crinkles.

  “I really am fine! I’m absolutely fine.”

  I curse my own chin for wobbling, my own breath for doing the sucky thing.

  “I’ll get him,” she says, getting up.

  “NO!” I grab her arm. “Please don’t.”