The Rain

by Virginia Bergin

  They said the space thing was a kind of polyextremophile because, unlike your regular extremophile, there were tons and tons of things it couldn’t care less about: heat, cold, radiation . . . but what it was really, really pleased to see after all that time stuck in a hunk of rock in space was water. It likes water A LOT.

  It breeds in water. Not breeds, exactly; it likes itself so much it just makes more of itself. It replicates. It replicates really fast. Like – ka-boom – one minute there was a smashed-up asteroid’s worth of bacteria, and the next minute the whole sky, our beautiful sky, was teeming with them. Riddled with them. Swarming with them. The clouds were poisoned.

  I never really thought of the rain as being beautiful. If it ever got clean again, I would go out and dance in it. I would love every single precious drop.

  It’s only a shower. It sure is, Mum! Why I just adore the rain!

  Get on with it. Yessir, Mr Simon, sir! No problem!

  Every single precious drop of rain got contaminated. And every single precious drop fell to Earth.

  When the rain touches human skin . . . there are a few moments when nothing happens – when, perhaps, you might even think that you will be OK. Then it starts: a rash . . . that burns . . . that burns so bad you will want to scratch the skin from your own body. Do that – and you won’t be able to stop yourself – and you’re just helping it along. It starts to chow down into your flesh. It doesn’t care about the pain if it gets snarled up around your nerve endings. It is very aggressive. It attacks anything in its path; it is up for a fight. It is determined to get what it wants – and what it wants is to burrow its way into your veins, into your arteries, into your blood.

  That’s what it’s after. Your blood. They think it’s the iron; that it likes to snack on iron – and, boy, after all that replicating it was starving hungry.

  Depending on how much you’ve been exposed – if, say, you got drenched with water from head to toe – the first blast of pain as the bacteria elbow their way past each other to the all-you-can-eat buffet inside you can be enough to send you into total catastrophic shock. If so, you will die very quickly. If that happens to you, you’re lucky – same as if you go and drink it; that’s just like flinging open the front door to your insides and saying, ‘Come on in!’

  If you just get a few drops of water on your skin – like my mum – you will die more slowly. Though if you are tiny, like Henry . . . the beloved . . . it will still be quick.

  It’s a really fussy eater: it only likes your red blood cells. It’s so happy to be inside you – gorging – after millions and billions of years of hungry thirst. It helps itself to the most juiciest parts of you, replicating super-fast as it gets its strength back, barging its way right into your blood cells, making more and more and more of itself until – POP! Your cells just burst.

  The inside of your body is exploding, cell by cell.

  There is nothing – NOTHING – to be done. It laughs in the face of antibiotics. No medicine on Earth can save you; there is no cure. They advised paracetamol, for the pain. Aspirin, apparently, just brings on more bleeding. So they advised paracetamol.

  HA! It does nothing.

  And, when it was all too late, they said victims – or anyone suspected of sickness – should be quarantined for twenty-four hours. This is a joke, and in two ways:

  1. ‘quarantine’ makes it sound as if you might come out alive (you won’t); and

  2. I’ve never seen or heard of anyone who lasted longer than three hours. Max.

  I suppose the other way in which quarantine is a joke is that you can’t get it from having a sick person just breathe on you or something. It can’t get into you through your lungs. Incredibly, I’m with the space bug on this one; before I dropped biology we did ‘the respiratory system’ and I didn’t get it either.

  To get sick from a sick person, you have to actually get the sick person’s blood on you, on your skin. Or a dead person’s? I don’t know. Who would know? That, like a lot of other stuff, isn’t exactly the kind of thing anyone’s going to be in a rush to test out.

  (I mean, really, what kind of an idiot would think, ‘Hmm, I wonder if this lovely fresh apple I just picked is OK? Maybe I’ll take a great big bite and see . . .’)

  In fact, there’s plenty of stuff people don’t know (even if they say they do), so my advice would be . . . well, Simon said it on his list. Don’t do this, don’t do that. Otherwise, basically, you’ve had it.

  To anyone living in the future my advice would be that if there’s an asteroid heading towards your planet, either blow it up when it’s NOWHERE NEAR your gravity, or else move planets.

  Is there anything positive to add? Apart from no one is ever going to find that phone bill under your bed or make you walk anywhere ever again when it’s chucking it down?

  Yes! IT COULD BE WORSE!

  It could be, apparently. There’s moisture in the air, isn’t there? There are teensy droplets of water everywhere. I don’t just mean when you get dew or condensation or stuff like that; I mean really, really teensy droplets that you can’t even see. Simon showed me a picture in a newspaper once: Dew on a damselfly. I remember precisely which kind of wee winged beastie it was because although I just said, ‘Oh wow, yeah,’ or something like that when Simon showed me, it was so OH WOW! YEAH! I looked it up on the internet myself after. It was ay-may-zing! This little boggle-eyed alien-looking critter covered – COVERED – in teensy weensy globules of water.

  A while after this whole thing started, I remembered that picture. I remembered it and it made me paranoid for about five minutes . . . but then it made me understand what Simon said the scientists had been going on about: that you’ve gotta get hit by a certain number, a certain volume, of bacteria to get got, otherwise your body can fight back. But what that certain number is? You can add that to the list of things only an idiot would try to figure out.

  Drip. Drip. Drop. Dead.

  That’s it. That’s all I’ve got to say.

  Hold on; if there’s one thing they tried to drum into us at school – and actually there were about five million things they tried to drum into us, day in, day out – it’s that it’s no good just repeating facts. No, for top marks it is important not just to bleat what someone else has told you, but to show that you are capable of actually thinking about what it is you have learned.

  Sooooo . . . in conclusion . . .

  What I think, really, is that this should have been the moment in human history when teenagers should have taken over the Earth (a bit like they said cockroaches would do in the event of nuclear war, but obviously we’re a lot nicer than cockroaches).

  Think about it: we don’t like to go outside when it’s raining; we don’t like drinking water (it’s boring); we don’t like eating fresh fruit and vegetables (because the THEY are always going on about how we should).

  We’d have had to have got over the need to shower – but, frankly, I hadn’t used soap on my face for at least a month (since Lee read an article that said it gave you premature wrinkles) and I can fully vouch for the cleansing properties of babywipes. The showering: we would have got over it. We would have had to. We are, actually, very capable of adapting.

  If this sounds like a joke to you, read on and think on . . . because the other thing about us teenagers is that we’re much, much nicer people than most adults.1 Our world would have been a better world.

  OK, that’s my take on it. It’s probably not quite right, but mainly it probably is. I’m giving myself another A*.

  CHAPTER SEVEN – PART TWO

  We watched the broadcast thing a few times. There was a pause when it got to the end and then it would start over again. I asked Simon some stuff; he answered – when he could answer. There was so much stuff he didn’t know, that no one knew. The main question, I guess, was what was going to happen next.

  I’m glad no one could answer that. I wouldn’t have wanted to have known.

  You know what it reminded me of, though, E
mergency Public Service Broadcast Number Two? It reminded me of the way how, when you’re in trouble and you know it, you kind of go easy on the basic facts. That’s Emergency Public Service Broadcast Number One; you’re cornered, so you’ve got to fess up . . . but it’s much better to keep the fessing to a minimum to avoid a full parental freak-out. You want to hold off blurting the further details – well, for as long as you can, really. That’s Emergency Public Service Broadcast Number Two; what you confess when there’s no longer any point in denying stuff. The worst example I can think of is this girl at my school who basically got caught with a boy so she had to admit they’d done the deed (when they’d actually been doing it for months). Her parents went nuts about EPSB No. 1; they went so nuts she didn’t actually get round to telling them the second part (EPSB No. 2) until they found the pregnancy-testing kit in the bin . . .

  Let’s just take an easier example:

  EPSB No. 1: ‘OK, so I’ve just come home in an outfit I didn’t leave the house in . . . so I might as well tell you I went to a party.’

  (‘OK, you’ll have noticed anyone who got rained on has got sick, so we may as well tell you: it’s in the rain.’)

  EPSB No. 2: ‘I think I might be sick in a minute so you may as well know that at that party I drank some punch – with gin in it.’

  (‘You may have noticed some people are dead, so we may as well tell you it’s fatal. Oh! You’ve got it too? Shucks! We may as well tell you: it’s contagious.’)

  You’d think you’d get your head round it, hearing the same thing again and again – there’s an initial freak-out, then people get over it – but somehow Emergency Public Service Broadcast Number Two got worse the more times you heard it. And it wasn’t just because my mum and my Henry were dead – that was bad enough – it was because it made you start thinking about . . . stuff you couldn’t even begin to start thinking about - say, like, e.g., whether the world was ending. So I tuned out.

  It must have been too much for Simon too because, not long after, he put the DVD back on. The history thing had got up to World War One; I told Simon we weren’t doing that at school so he put the bird thing on instead, but really it was because it was too horrible to look at: all those people dying. He left me watching a thing about woodland birds while he went and messed about with the radio in the kitchen. He kept it so quiet I couldn’t hear whatever it was people were saying. There was music sometimes; I don’t know what. I wasn’t even listening out for it. I wasn’t listening to the bird thing either, and not even to the rain. I was thinking about my mum, and about Henry, my dearest babiest brother-brat beloved.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In the morning, it was sunny, like it had been for so many days before the rain came. It was sunny and the sky was blue; the kind of blue that makes you forget there’s even such a thing as rain. The kind of blue that made you think it was all over.

  Before I remembered it was supposed to be a bank holiday, I had this one random thought – really so stupid and silly but also kind of almost funny – that Simon was actually going to say I had to go to school . . . really, I could almost just imagine it! Look, Ruby, I know you’re upset and some terrible things have happened, but we have to get on with things (‘It’s only a shower’) – plus you’ve got your mocks coming up (he was obsessed with exams) and, after all, what would your mother want? Etc., etc., etc.: GO TO SCHOOL.

  Then we put the radio on. It wasn’t over.

  The same emergency broadcast played over and over. Simon turned it down, but I’d already tuned out, same way you would if it was some blah-blah thing about politics (or Gardeners’ Question Time). That was how to deal with it.

  The thing that was less easy to deal with was the thirst. The day before, I hadn’t really noticed it so much, not after I’d seen Mum. That next day . . . best way to describe it is: you know how it gets when you really, really fancy someone, when you’re basically totally in love with them? Well, it was like a horrible version of that. I COULD NOT STOP THINKING ABOUT HOW THIRSTY I WAS.

  (And you know how if you can actually SEE the person you fancy it makes it even worse and you keep wanting to look at them? Felt like every other second I found myself staring at the little mini poisoned sea of pots and pans and jugs of water in the corner of the kitchen.)

  I had to close the fridge door quickly to avoid the terrible sight of Henry’s teething rings. There was nothing to drink anyway. The orange juice was long gone; that last tiny drop of milk was off and I’d already scraped the freezer clean of ice. Completely; I’d even found a pizza – they never bought pizza – stashed (as in hidden from me) under the peas and the broad beans in the freezer drawer that had all the veg in it, where no one in their right mind would go rummaging. Through the little plastic window they put so you can see they’re not lying about how good the pizza is, I saw it had gathered a massive layer of frost on top, so the sneaks must have had it stashed for a while. I picked off the frost and boiled it in the kettle with the tinchy bit of melt-water I’d thawed off the peas. The tea, Simon had said, savouring the taste like a chef would, tasted of oregano . . . with a hint of fish. He was right; I’d also found half a box of frost-furry fish fingers and carefully scraped the little spikes of ice off them.

  We had one tin of fruit left: strawberries. Simon wanted to give them all to me and even though I wanted them all I made him split it. He gave me more, though; I saw him do that. I mashed mine up in a cup. I slurped as slowly as I could, pretending I was having a smoothie, as we watched the town from the kitchen window, taking it in turns to zoom in on the action with his binoculars.

  In some ways, the outside world looked normal. Mainly that was because what you can see from our kitchen window is rooftops and trees; when all the leaves are out, when all the plants are sprouted, you can’t really see down into the streets (where there were dead people); you can’t see down into the beer gardens of pubs (where there were dead people); you can’t see into people’s homes (where there were dead people) and you can’t really see into people’s back gardens. If you could have done, you would have seen what I’ve seen a million times since: dead people sprawled around barbecues. So, yes, it all looked normal. The trees and plants seemed to be OK; nothing looked withered or sick or dying. Birds flew in the sky. It looked like a nice, normal day . . . except – even with the windows still tight shut – you could hear it wasn’t right. There were alarms going off all over the place and . . . you could see the car park behind the library. Cars were coming and going; not tons like there’d normally be, going round and round looking for spaces, but there were some cars. People were coming and going. That was where the normal bit stopped.

  The people in the car park, they weren’t just your regular shoppers; they were staggering back from town with bags and bags of stuff, trolleys even. Not just food, either; all sorts of tons of stuff, like it was Christmas or the January sales. A man and a woman had a massive flat-screen TV in a trolley; it tipped over in the car park and the TV smashed. They went off again with the trolley, but I didn’t see them come back. Then a couple of blokes got into a fight and this woman started jumping about all over the place, waving her arms – screaming at them to stop, probably, or screaming for help.

  And all the while the radio was on: the emergency broadcast quietly telling people, over and over, to stay home and remain calm.

  Remain? Doesn’t that sort of make it sound as if people were calm and had to stay that way? When exactly did they think people had been calm?!

  ‘Oh, for crying out loud,’ said Simon, disgusted.

  He put the binoculars down and went out of the kitchen; I heard him tramp upstairs to use his bucket in the bathroom. I picked up the binoculars.

  From a distance, the fight had just looked a bit silly: pixie men scrapping; pixie lady jumping. Close up, it was fascinating, in a nasty sort of way. I almost cheered when the smaller bloke managed to knock the bigger guy down – but the bigger guy didn’t get back up.

  That car park,
didn’t Simon always go on about how it was a disgrace? Full of potholes that were now full of water. Water that was now full of death.

  You could see the big man clawing at his arm, then wrenching his whole shirt off, his body bloody where he’d hit the ground.

  It turned out the woman was with him and not the other bloke; she ran to him.

  Don’t touch him! Don’t touch him! Don’t touch him! I thought, even as she slumped down and cradled his head like it was a baby.

  Don’t touch her! Don’t touch her! Don’t touch her! I thought, even as the big man reached up his hand . . . to push her away? She grabbed his bloody hand in hers; she – NO! NO! NO! – kissed it.

  Stay home, remain calm.

  The woman bent over the man, kissing and kissing his lips; not snogging, not one long kiss, but kisses and kisses and words in between, saying stuff, her body rocking; her hand going from his head to rake at hers – at hers, where her face had turned bloody – and back to his, stroking his cheek. Kissing him, rocking him, saying stuff.

  Love stronger than pain. In the car park behind Dartbridge Library.

  ‘We need water,’ said Simon, bustling back into the kitchen. ‘I’m going out.’

  I put the binoculars down.

  We kind of had a row then. It wasn’t one of our old rows; this was a very new kind of a row.

  There was no shouting, for a start. There had been no shouting (except about the tap and that) since I’d seen my mum. The high horses did get saddled up, but very quietly, with no yee-haa. Simon didn’t want me to go with him because he was worried it wouldn’t be safe. I didn’t say I knew it wasn’t safe because I’d just seen two people dying (probably) in the library car park. In any case, that was other people. That wouldn’t happen to us. I point blank refused to stay home alone.

  You can’t leave me, you can’t leave me, you can’t leave me; that was all I had to say about everything he said.