H2O

by Virginia Bergin

  The Chihuahua scrabbled at the kitchen door.

  “Sask!” I shouted at the door, banging on it. “Sask!”

  I knew I shouldn’t be doing what I did next. It’s possible Saskia had just gone out—like me—and would come back and catch me smashing my way into her house…but it was also possible that she was lying inside sick or dead and that was what I’d say to her if she did come back: “I thought you might be lying inside sick or dead.” There was this knee-high concrete Greek lady by the garden pond. She was a hefty girl but manageable. I got hold of her and heaved her headfirst at the kitchen window. Her head broke off. Only one pane busted. Double-glazed…they’re a nightmare, aren’t they? The glass is super-tough and even if you get in lots of practice—which I didn’t feel I had time for just then—it’s still a hard job. I cased my options, like burglars must do—wood-framed patio doors, single glazed, key in lock; the little darling dog scrabbling to get to me.

  “Come here! Come on!” I shouted to her. I lured her back around to the den window. I teased her through the glass, then zoomed back around, and—CRASH!—smashed that bare-bottomed lady feet-first through the patio doors. She was perched on a blob of rock; neither the rock nor the lady’s chunky legs broke.

  Good aim, Ruby! (Can’t wait to tell Dan how I’m practically a professional criminal!)

  I shoved my hand in and opened the door.

  “Saskia?” I called.

  The darling dog came running. I scooped her up before her precious paws could get cut on glass.

  “Saskia!”

  Clutching the trembling pooch, I toured the house. It felt creepy. Saskia had two sisters, and I wouldn’t have known for sure which one of those freakishly neat and tidy rooms was hers if it hadn’t have been for the photos; on the wall, in frames…a ton of photos of Saskia—doing gymnastics, winning stuff, posing on vacation somewhere hot, in a bikini…and that same one of me and Caspar—only it wasn’t of me and Caspar anymore; it was of Caspar and Saskia. I had been cut out.

  Know what I also saw? That I only saw because I just happened to open her closet and the drawers in her dressing table? Saskia’s stuff was gone. She had packed stuff and gone.

  I could have left that dog in that house. I held her in front of my face. How could—HOW COULD—that boyfriend-stealing leave that sweet pooch?

  “Don’t worry, Darling!” I said. “Ruby will take care of you!”

  Petting and fussing over MY dog, I stomped back to the church, put my tiara on, grabbed as much stuff as I could carry, and crunched back up the High Street. I got my bike, put Darling in the basket, and crunched back down the High Street, detoured to load up with yet more ditched booty because I couldn’t bear to leave it, and crunched home.

  Me and Darling, we split right, through the library parking lot. I passed the big fighting man and the woman who had hugged and rocked and kissed him.

  I felt…not a grief thing, exactly, but really, really solemn.

  I stopped in Holywell Park, like me and my mom used to do when I was little.

  There’s a spring there, a holy well; that’s why it’s called that. In medieval times, they believed the water from it could cure lepers—but it couldn’t. There was no cure.

  Now, not even the most desperate leper would want to drink from it.

  Mom said it was a fairy well. When we first came here and I was young enough to believe in fairies, we’d stop by on the way home from the shops and pick a flower—or just a nice leaf if there were no flowers—and leave it for the fairies. If the fairies were pleased with it, she said, they’d leave a flower too…and sometimes they left other things: pretty shells and stones, sometimes ribbons, sometimes little bits of jewelry my fingers ached to touch; sometimes they even left a poem.

  It took me a long time—like, really, an embarrassingly long time—to work out that it wasn’t fairies…partly, I reckon, because we never told Simon about it. He hated that kind of thing, not just because it was a kind of hippie thing (which is what it really was; Dartbridge types leaving offerings for whatever pagan-y water god they were into), but because he also thought all that sort of stuff—tooth fairies, Santa Claus, guardian angels—was…not just silly nonsense, but lies that should not be told to children. What a fun guy, huh?

  The fairy well, it was our secret. Mine and my mom’s. And that, I think, is really why I believed in it for so long, because it was something just for us. I believed in it because I needed to believe in it—like the lepers, I guess.

  Just this last spring, I saw my mom at the well—with Henry. She was holding him in her arms, and I could see her whispering to him—about the fairies, I expect…and I…I felt this awful twisty stab of jealousy. A twisty stab of jealousy and sadness and a knowing that she wasn’t just mine anymore; now she belonged to Henry too…and I did what I think is the most grown-up thing I’d ever done. I wanted to run home and cry. I know that makes me sound like a baby, but it was how I felt. (“She finds change difficult”; that’s what my mom always said about me, so I wouldn’t feel so bad about hating new stuff like Simon, like discovering I had a brother called Dan, like going to middle school, like finding out my mom was pregnant.) (Like trying to survive a global death-fest mega-crisis.)

  I didn’t run home and cry. I picked a flower, and I went to her, and we both told Henry all about the fairies. I leaned my head on her shoulder, and she gave me one of her special kisses, on my forehead, and stroked my cheek. And then Henry started bawling because I wouldn’t let him eat my flower, and we went home.

  I let Darling wander around on the grass while I looked for a flower. I found the perfect one: a single honeysuckle bloom, delicate and sweet-scented. I laid it down on the wall by the well—the other flowers there rain beaten, sun shriveled, and rotten—and I asked the fairies, please, to never forget my mom. To show how much I meant it, I left them my tiara.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  I pushed my bike and my loot home. As I came up the road, it started.

  I heard the terrier’s howl cut through the silence. I couldn’t ignore it anymore. The neighbors’ pets. The neighbors’ pets.

  With a heavy heart, I left my darling Darling and my loot in the stinky house, and went out again to perform yet another charitable act.

  On the way to Whitby the golden retriever’s house, I took the crowbar out of Simon’s backpack, which was still lying in the middle of the road where I’d dumped it. I went to Whitby’s first because I liked him best. I knocked. I called out. The back door was unlocked: Whitby bounded out. He must have barked himself stupid because he could hardly get a sound out, but he almost knocked me over. He was mad glad, crazy to see me…and me, I can say the same about him. (All those years I’d wanted a dog, it wasn’t a dog like Darling; it was a dog like Whitby. Actually, it was Whitby.) I braved the stink in his house to feed him—and, though animals seemed to be OK with it, I just couldn’t give him water from the tap. I went back and got a bottle of fizzy water from Simon’s backpack and gave him that. He lapped and scoffed and lapped and scoffed. And wagged and wagged and wagged his tail. He was ecstatic.

  Then I had this massive guilt attack because I knew the kids that lived (had lived) in that house had a hamster, so I went and got that. I stabbed holes in an old ice-cream carton and loaded Fluffysnuggles, food, and bedding into it. When I got to London, I’d generously give that hamster to Dan. He’d love it.

  I left the door open for Whitby, dumped Fluffysnuggles by Simon’s backpack, and crossed the road to Mrs. Wallis’s house. If I was thinking anything, it was that the joy of seeing Whitby was still alive might make up for whatever had happened to Clarence and Mimi, because I’d already noticed those grumpy little shih tzus weren’t running up and down on the windowsill anymore.

  The front door was wide open. Mrs. Wallis wasn’t home. Clarence was dead, lying there on the kitchen floor; Mimi didn’t look far off. I ran back outside and p
ulled another bottle of water out of Simon’s backpack.

  I poured out water for her, filled a bowl with food.

  “Please eat, Mimi, please eat.”

  She drank, then ate a little, then threw it up. She lay down on the kitchen floor. She whined at me. I coaxed her with food. All the while, I called for the cat—“Ruu-by! Ruu-by!”—but she was a no-show.

  I stroked Mimi. Normally you couldn’t even get near her. I smoothed back her fur from her little face. It was the first time I’d ever really seen her eyes, her sad little brown eyes, and it made it a whole lot harder to think about leaving her…but I had to, didn’t I? I backed out of the kitchen. Whitby was sitting outside the door. His tail was wagging. He had an arm in his mouth—a woman’s arm—the raggedy sleeve of a flowery blouse still on it. Her fingernails were painted a plummy red and she wore some pretty rings.

  “Whitby! No!” I shouted at him. “Leave it!”

  He dropped the arm and lumbered goofily up to me, ready to slobber how he sorry he was all over me. Revolting! I pushed him away. I left him sniffing at Clarence (I hoped he’d remember Clarence had been a friend and not chomp on him too), and I went across the road, knocked, called out, and tried to open the front door of the house where the terrier was now barking like crazy. The door was locked; the back door was locked. I smashed the kitchen window (single glazed) with the crowbar, and opened it. The terrier—whoa! Somehow it managed to leap up onto the draining board, skittering on broken glass, and scrambled out the window—to attack Whitby, who’d come up behind me with the arm hanging out of his mouth.

  You really don’t want to see that kind of thing: two dogs fighting over someone’s arm. It did seem to help Whitby get his voice back though. I shouted at them—zero impact—then realized what a racket we were making. Plus, I hadn’t even realized Whitby had followed me—which I thought was a bad thing. If he could creep up on me, anyone could.

  Someone, anyone.

  I decided I really, really had to go. I felt bad about it, like I ought to go look for more animals to liberate, but I just couldn’t handle anymore charitable acts. I just couldn’t.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  There’s a reason people don’t dye their hair by candlelight, just like there’s a reason people don’t put on fake tan by candlelight either. It is too hard to judge when you’ve got the color right—particularly if you don’t actually bother timing it like you’re supposed to. That night, after my own one-girl riot, and after I’d gone upstairs and cut Saskia out of the photo of me and Caspar (so it was now just me and Caspar, as it should have been) and stuck it back on the wall and kissed him and felt sad (like inexpressibly sad, to the point of any-second-now-I’m-gonna-scream-my-head-off-because-I-truly-can’t-believe-this-thing-that-is-happening-is-happening sad), I had my own one-girl beauty session. All things considered, e.g.:

  • The smell in the house was at a new unbelievable high. (Or low.)

  • I filled up Simon’s hideous pot with lemonade, but those flowers—they looked done for.

  • None of the phones showed any sign of working.

  • I checked the Internet again, then—dur—realized that although the battery in the laptop was still good, the broadband wasn’t working.

  • The whole of Dartbridge was still in pitch-blackness, and the slightest noise made me jump.

  • I was too terrified to have any candles lit apart from one tiny one in the bathroom, and even then I made myself go and stand in the backyard and check and check again that you couldn’t see any light.

  • Though I checked and checked it too, I also couldn’t see any light from any house in town.

  • I nearly made myself sick again on a looted chocolate-spread scarfing binge.

  • In the middle of the night, a plane flew overhead.

  • I couldn’t actually play any music because everything we had to play it on ran off electricity, so I had to go next door again to get the massive battery-operated, old-school boom-box ghetto blaster that Mr. Fitch heaved around the garden with him when he was weeding, so he could listen to brass-band music (which he said the plants liked too) (see what I mean about Dartbridge? Even the most normal people…), and it only worked with tape cassettes, and the only tape cassettes I had were…Mr. Fitch’s brass-band music.

  Yes, all those things considered, me and Darling had a busy girly night that was kind of almost fun…if you ignored the “global meltdown, everyone’s died, I’m all alone, what am I going to do?” aspect.

  In the morning, it wasn’t even vaguely fun. I did, really, actually gasp with horror when I saw myself in the mirror. The makeup I’d messed around with that had smudged itself all over my face in the night was not the problem. That could be (relatively) easily removed; what might not be so easily removed was my streaky all-over orange tan, which clashed pretty badly with my red hair. I’d bleached my hair first; by candlelight it had looked a ghostly, scary white, so I thought I should go for it. Why, oh, why had I chosen red? My mom was right; it really didn’t suit me… And I knew that, even though it was hard to tell when my face was ORANGE.

  I had to wash my face—a lot—immediately. I knew what I would do. I would get Simon’s backpack, and I would use every bottle of water or soda water or tonic water or whatever—whatever was left—to scrub and wash my skin and my hair. (I did kind of know even then that there would be nothing I could do about my hair; I’d put permanent brilliant red on bleached white—only way that would come off was shaving myself bald and waiting for my natural mousy brown to sprout. Or dye it black? Hmmm…)

  I burst out of the house, didn’t even look at the sky (should have). Whitby must have won the arm fight because he was lying outside our gate, still gnawing on his prize. I skirted around him and marched into the road.

  Simon’s backpack was gone.

  No animal could or would take something as big and heavy as that. Only a person could have taken it. A “someone, anyone,” perhaps. I felt fear crackle in my bones.

  “LEAVE IT AND GET IN!” I hissed at Darling and Whitby, who were sniffing Mrs. Fitch and eyeballing each other, as if they were trying to decide whether to share a nibble or a fight. (My tiny girl—she is so plucky!) (My big huggy hound—he knows when to go gentle!)

  I slammed the gate shut. I frightened myself it was so loud—and I looked behind me. I wished I hadn’t; Mimi was sauntering across the road—behind her, the crazy terrier was loitering, like he just happened to be there.

  “GET IN! GET IN!” I hissed at them.

  I held the gate open. The terrier bounded in.

  “LEAVE IT!” I hissed as he sniffed at Mrs. Fitch, then Mimi condescended to enter our garden. “Don’t even think about it,” I growled as she veered off the path toward Mrs. Fitch.

  I held the front door open and all the dogs trooped on in like they lived there.

  I took one more nervous look up and down the street, and then I shut the door.

  I locked it.

  Inside the house, the dogs were already not getting along. Whitby and the terrier had obviously failed to make up after yesterday’s fight and were snarling at each other, debating whether to have another battle, which was making Mimi and Darling nervous and yappy. That’s the way I saw it, but maybe they were just egging them on.

  I might have gone veggie, but my mom and Simon were raging carnivores. There was meat in the freezer—thawing but OK. It smelled fine, not stinky. I shut Whitby in the kitchen with a chicken… I kind of thought it was only cooked bones that dogs can’t eat—isn’t it?—and from the way I’d seen him crunching fingers, I reckoned it was all right. The terrier I lured upstairs with a pack of stewing steak, and shut him in the bathroom. I figured Mimi and Darling would get along. I opened the door to the den, fragrant with my pee bucket, and I tempted them both inside with some lamb chops. As I walked away, I heard Mimi snap. I yanked Darling out and put her with her ve
ry own chop in Henry’s little room…that he’d hardly even ever had the chance to use.

  The crazy terrier got kind of growly when I went into the bathroom, like I’d come to steal his steak. I didn’t dare shout at him in case he got barky, so I ignored him and stuffed a couple of the loot bags with the best of the booty. Then I went upstairs and stuffed another bag with more of my things—including all my photos—and most especially the photo of me and Caspar. I kissed it, ignoring Saskia’s chopped head, which lay on the floor, pouting at me. I might have stepped on it on my way out.

  Hard to know what to pack; hard to know what I was packing for…but does it sound like I was organized? Like I knew what I was doing? I tell you, I couldn’t think straight about what was going into that bag—let alone how that bag and me were going to get to my dad. All the night before, when I’d been supposed to be coming up with Escape Plan B, all I’d come up with was stuff like I prefer glitter to crackle-finish nail polish and super-moisturizing gloss lipstick to frosted.

  I went back down to the bathroom; the terrier had scarfed all that steak and was collapsed out in a “come pet me, I’ll be good now, honest I will” way. I ignored him; I pulled things back out of the bag, so I could fix my face and hair…as much as I could. I scraped the scary red hair back into a topknot (think volcano erupting on top of head) and slathered my orange face with looted foundation. The mascara and the lipstick made it worse: I looked plastic. I looked like a scary dolly. A Halloween bad-dolly special.

  And while I was trying to make myself look half-human and failing, I was thinking, What are you doing? What are you doing?! WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO? And when I’d finished, when I stared at my own bad-dolly self in the mirror, she answered.

  “I’m going to drive,” she said.