The Rain

by Virginia Bergin

  ‘It’s automatic,’ panted Darius, studying the sky. ‘It’ll be automatic.’

  ‘You don’t know that!’ I screamed into his face, then carried on rummaging.

  ‘There’s a battery.’

  ‘The thing in the box?’

  ‘Yeah. It’ll be on a timer, won’t it?’

  My hands found the crowbar even as my brain decided the Spratt was right; those plants were perfect and, like Simon had said about the supermarket flowers, it was too hard to imagine someone thinking, Hey, the world’s in meltdown but I think I’ll just water the plants. Every day.

  ‘That water’s probably OK too,’ said Darius. Satisfied that the sky was OK, he actually looked at me. ‘It’s probably from a tank.’

  ‘Really? Well, why don’t you go back in there, then?’ I snarled. ‘And take a shower – because YOU REALLY NEED ONE.’

  Whitby bounded around like a puppy, cranked up from all the running about, thinking some brilliant new game was being played. Darling wriggled to join him but the kid wouldn’t let her go. For the humans, the trauma wasn’t quite over. Everything in Darius’s wholewheat survival kit was getting rained on in that tunnel. Everything we had to eat and drink (apart from vodka!) was being watered with the flowers. The bag of phones was still in the car, but I’d lost my make-up – that was totally disastrous – and now the kid only had that mangy sweatshirt to wear . . . but the biggest calamity of all had fallen on Darius Spratt, who had lost his trousers. Dig the underpants, Grandpa.

  ‘I got too hot,’ he said, going bright red.

  I couldn’t help myself; I snorted with mocking laughter.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Darius, hiding his modesty.

  I tried to control myself as I offered what I had. The skinny jeans were a non-starter, so it was down to fancy frocks and floaty tops . . . or a silver sequiny stretchy miniskirt from the same range as my dress.

  I cracked up completely when he put it on. How that kid managed not to laugh I do not know – you could see she wanted to.

  ‘I am NOT walking about like this,’ said Darius.

  Then I realised we sort of matched. I stopped laughing. I didn’t want to walk around like that either.

  I didn’t want to walk around full stop; we needed petrol, or we needed a new car.

  ‘There’s a farm,’ I said.

  And Darius and the kid couldn’t walk around, full stop. I had on brilliant killer-heel boots from the old hag’s place; their feet were naked. The track looked damp. Drying, but scarily damp. (How much water do you need to touch your body before it’ll kill you? Really, how much?) I rummaged around in my bags and plunked down the only spare footwear I had: jewelled flip-flops. The kid seemed to like hers (even though she wouldn’t take them off me and had to have them replunked to her by Darius and even though they were a hundred sizes too big); Darius Spratt’s hairy-toed feet squashed into the pair I gave him like monster’s feet, oozing over the front, the sides and the back. He looked at me helplessly.

  ‘I am not going to carry you,’ I said. ‘I am SO not going to carry you.’

  ‘Hn,’ said Darius Spratt.

  I wrestled a belt-lead on to Whitby – he so was giddy from trying to fathom out the new game of running and flip-flop chucking I could just see him taking it into his doggy head to have a little fun with a herd of cows – and we started up the track.

  Remember that game you played when you were a kid? When you were only allowed to step on the light bits on the pavement, the bits that were dry, and you weren’t allowed to step on the dark bits that were still wet from rain? And you’d have a race with your mum and before you knew it you’d be at the place – the library, or school – that seemed so far away? Monster-feet Spratt lurched from one light patch to another, then got stuck.

  I had to hoist him on to my back. His arms wrapped tight around me. His hairy legs dangled. Donkey Ruby. In killer heels. Trudging along in a fug of Parfum de Spratt.

  Whitby did go nuts when he saw the cows, and the cows went nuts when they saw us. I had to dump the Spratt in the farmyard because Whitby wanted to say hello to those cows so much he was going to pull me over – and they would have had no choice about the meet and greet because they were shut up in the barn. You could pretty much take that as a sign that there was no one home (or certainly not home and alive), but what proved that was the dogs: two collies chained up right outside the front door, dead. Those collies, by the door, there wasn’t even a water bowl for them. I guess whoever had left them there hadn’t thought it would be forever.

  A better sight was that there was an old clapped-out farm truck: open, keys in it. Great. I shut Whitby inside; the kid clutched Darling so I couldn’t do the same with her.

  The Spratt picked his way across the farmyard and tried the front door: locked.

  ‘Knock first!’ I told him. ‘You’ve got to knock first and shout. Tell them we just want help.’

  ‘I don’t think there’s anyone home,’ said the Spratt.

  I shoved him out of the way and I knocked and shouted how we just wanted help – ‘And we’re just kids!’ I yelled – though the cows were making so much noise it was probably pretty much pointless.

  We stalked round the house and found that even the farmers had been having a barbecue. In this little yard at the back it was still there: half-cooked meat, rained on; bowls of salad swimming in water; pecked-at soggy bread and crisps. BBQ Britain Sizzles.

  We had to go in through a window then let the kid in through the back door. Inside, it smelt bad. Sweet, spicy bad. The fridge was a no-go area with nothing to drink in it anyway, but they had a larder with tins of stuff in it. Darius sat the kid at the kitchen table with a spoon and a can of peaches and the kid sat Darling down on the kitchen table to sniff at a tin of sardines I’d opened.

  ‘You get scared, you bang your spoon on the table,’ Darius told her, and we went to see what we could get.

  We’d not got halfway up the stairs before the spoon banged on the table. We rushed back in expecting some sort of horror, and instead found an enormous ginger bruiser of a cat sitting on the table, eyeballing Darling.

  ‘Kitty just wants to see what there is to eat,’ I said, and, as Darling hadn’t touched the sardines, I lured the cat off the table with them and shut it in the front room. The kid watched, tight-lipped.

  ‘Dogs don’t like fish,’ said Darius, plonking a handful of dog biscuits that were way too big for Darling on the table.

  I got a rolling pin and gave them a battering – the kid and Darling flinched.

  ‘So she can eat them,’ I said softly, wondering how come everything I did somehow ended up with me seeming like an ogre when all I was ever trying to do was HELP.

  Darling crunched delicately; the kid relaxed and spooned herself another peach.

  Ever worn second-hand clothes? Ever worn them and wondered who they had belonged to? We didn’t have to wonder; there was a couple dead on the bed. I decided I’d rather stick with sequins than the clothes of a dead Mrs Farmer, but Darius didn’t exactly have much choice.

  ‘Can I get some privacy here?’ he said, pulling clothes out of their wardrobe.

  There was no reason to go poking about; I was just looking for the bathroom to see if I could find something for Darius’s pits. I opened a door.

  She was lying on the bed. Her room was just like mine. Same mess of stuff she probably got told off for every day. Clothes jumbled on the floor with her revision: same books, same exams coming up. Same mess of make-up scattered all over the dressing table. Same wall plastered with photos of her and her friends . . . I wondered which boy she had liked. I decided it had probably been the dark-haired one.

  I wondered if she had died before her parents, and had her mum to comfort her, or whether she’d died alone.

  I felt cold then, shivery. I looked in her wardrobe. I took one of her cardigans because I had to; I took a T-shirt for a Princess dress.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said to her. I wanted to do somethi
ng for her.

  It takes a girl to know a girl. I picked out what I knew would be her best dress – this gorgeous lacy white frock she’d probably had to beg to be allowed. I took it off the hanger. I held it by the straps and, careful not to touch her, I laid it on her body.

  ‘That’s a great dress,’ I said. ‘You look really pretty.’

  When I came out of the room, Darius, in jeans, was coming out of the bathroom, spraying stuff into his pits.

  ‘Are you OK?’ he asked as he ditched the empty can of man-spray and pulled on a checked shirt.

  Before I could have some weird random thought about him looking not too repulsive, really, considering, I blanked it by staring at his dead man’s socks. I felt it again, that I really, really wanted to talk. It just wasn’t the time.

  ‘Here,’ I said, chucking the T-shirt at him. ‘You’d better give this to her.’

  ‘I’ll get your skirt,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want it.’

  ‘Ruby?’ said Darius. ‘Are you OK?’

  Shut up, shut up, shut up, I thought. I didn’t know whether I meant him or me.

  ‘Don’t go in there,’ I said, closing the door to her room.

  Apart from there being nothing much but the syrup from tinned fruit to drink, the house was good to us. Very good. It sounds awful – well, it would have sounded awful to the me that used to be me – but they had a big old stove like Zak’s parents had, only even older, and it was still on, so we made a massive pile of scrambled eggs and sat and ate them in the stinking house of dead people. It was the first hot food I’d eaten since . . . that stew Simon had made. Which was . . .

  ‘How long has it been?’ I said out loud.

  Darius didn’t ask what I meant.

  ‘Six days,’ he said.

  After breakfast, we got busy. First we rowed. Darius, dead-man’s sock feet shoved in wellies, wanted us all to get togged up in bin-bag armour and I refused. I had to stand in the yard and shout about how blue the sky was (it was!) before he’d listen. Then I got on with things. I checked the truck, ignoring Whitby’s boomy barks (he wanted out) and the cows’ mooing (I guess they wanted out too). I started it up: over half a tank of petrol . . . I didn’t know how far that would take us, but anywhere out of there was good enough. We raided the house for everything that was useful – and I mean everything: food, waterproofs, more wellies, bin bags, tape, blankets. Tools, a whole bag of them, but no pointless electric stuff.

  Crazy, really. I thought I’d never get us stuck like that again with no petrol, and, the way things were, it seemed like we could pretty much go into any house or any shop and get what we needed. It was just that . . . there’s this fear thing, isn’t there? Every time you go in some place, the fear that there might be someone, anyone there . . . and the other fear, which is really more a fear of yourself, that you are going to see something, yet another something, that will upset you. May Meltdown. So it’s easier – isn’t it? – to stock up.

  ‘We should let them out,’ I said to Darius, looking at the shouty cows.

  ‘Hn,’ he said.

  ‘Well, we should, shouldn’t we? It’s not like any of them are gonna be murderers, is it?’

  ‘Cows kill more people than sharks,’ he said.

  ‘Keep out of the way, then, if you’re scared.’

  ‘I’m not scared; I’m just saying.’

  I was scared too, but another thing I’d learned on Simon’s country walks was how to deal with cows. Mostly they won’t come near you anyway, so you should just ignore them and not crowd them . . . but if they’re frisky or curious, you need to show them who’s boss. You need to act big and stern and noisy. And if you’re really worried you should get a branch or a nice chunky stick. I got a mop from the house.

  Darius brought the kid out to see. (The kid in her new Princess T-shirt dress that was a hundred sizes too big and a pair of wellies that were a hundred sizes too big.) That surprised me – like, why would he do that? – and it annoyed me – like, are they just going to stand there and watch me mess it up? Afterwards I thought maybe he did it so’s she could learn something: either that cows could turn nasty and were best avoided (‘See how they’re trampling Ruby?’) or a thing about handling animals (‘See how Ruby nearly got trampled?’) . . . in both cases, it was not a great lesson.

  As I walked towards the barn, the cows came barging forward. When I got right to the gate they backed up a bit, jostling each other, nervous. I eyed up my escape route, unbolted the gate, swung it open and clambered up on to the fence. The cows did barge out, but in a fairly orderly manner – not quite single file, but almost. They were mooing with delight and pretty darn speedy for plodders. What I hadn’t really thought about was where they would go, but they seemed to know exactly where they were headed. They all turned right and disappeared up a muddy track. Darius and the kid came to see. We walked up the side of the barn and watched the cows speed-plod into a field, fanning out to gorge on the grass.

  There was another thing I hadn’t thought about; they weren’t lady cows, milking cows, they were boy cows. Young boys. I know two (Simon) things about them: 1) a lady cow will just come get you if she thinks you’re messing with her calf, but if her calf has gone she’s probably going to be OK; but boy cows – young boy cows – like to hassle people, for fun . . . and 2) boy cows are only kept for meat.

  So they’d been double saved, hadn’t they? No starving to death in a barn and no one-way trip to Burgersville either.

  The kid climbed up on the fence to get a better look.

  ‘Now they’re happy,’ I beamed. ‘Lovely fresh grass!’

  Princess ignored me, but I knew she’d heard. Some random horrible thought about what it was they were chomping on bubbled up in my head: how wet the grass might be, whether . . . if that thing was in the rain and the grass drank up the rain and the cows ate the grass. Hey, I was veggie, what did I care? But lady cows . . . what about milk and – cheese?! Was there going to be no more CHEESE?! I popped the thought and carried on beaming. I even smiled nicely at the Spratt.

  ‘We could just stay here,’ said Darius.

  Huh? Instant frown.

  ‘We’d have to go and get some stuff to drink, get some more food, but then we could come back and hang out here– just for a few weeks or something . . . until we work out what to do . . .’

  ‘I know what I’m doing!’ I said.

  ‘No you don’t. I mean, you don’t seriously think your dad’s still going to be alive, do you?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  I have only driven a truck that one time; it was old and more clapped out than my dad’s jalopy. It rattled your bones, it crawled along, it guzzled petrol and NO WAY would it have kept the rain out, not for one second. There was moss growing in the little grooves where the windows should have slid open; now you couldn’t even slide them closed.

  Oh, and it was really noisy. That was FINE, because basically I didn’t want to speak to Darius Spratt EVER AGAIN.

  He didn’t even apologise. OK, the words ‘I’m sorry’ came out of his mouth, but they were followed by the words ‘but it’s pretty unlikely he’s alive, isn’t it?’.

  Kid or no kid, I went NUTS. I shouted so loud the cows got spooked and ran across the field. I said every nasty thing to him I could think of. I ranted and raved and stomped about. I think you could summarise what I had to say as ‘HOW DARE YOU?!’, and I think you could summarise what Darius Spratt had to say as ‘I’m just trying to be realistic’ – which apparently involves not caring ONE BIT what anyone else feels.

  It should have ended with me getting into the truck and driving off. That’s what I felt like doing. It ended with me getting into the truck and starting up and just sitting there.

  Please don’t leave me!

  Over the clatter of the engine I couldn’t hear what Darius was saying to Princess, but I had a bad feeling it was basically going to be her decision, whether they stayed or came with me. And as far as that kid was concer
ned I was Rumpelstiltskin, wasn’t I? Not my lovely made-up version, but the shouty, horrible real thing. If they decided to stay, I’d take Darling off her – that’s what I thought. Hey, I could even threaten to take Darling off her unless they got in the truck. I thought that too. I reckon I would have done it, I was that stewed up, when the kid suddenly made this funny little shruggy gesture and trailed towards the truck . . . but not towards the passenger door. Apparently I was too awful to sit next to. Apparently I was worse than the memory of a car crash. Apparently I was now more revolting than death-breath Whitby, whose rear end was already letting us know that the leftover scrambled eggs didn’t really agree with him.

  We rattled on in silence for a while. Every time I accidentally glanced at the Spratt, he was frowning. Seemed as if he was deep in thought about something; how sorry he was, that’s what it should have been.

  ‘NOUGHT POINT TWENTY-SEVEN PER CENT,’ shouted Darius.

  ‘PARDON?’ I shouted back.

  ‘SAY THE POPULATION OF DARTBRIDGE IS APPROXIMATELY TEN THOUSAND. I MEAN, IT CAN’T BE THAT MANY, BUT IF YOU INCLUDED THE CLOSEST VILLAGES IT PROBABLY IS. SAY THERE WERE TWO PRISONERS ALIVE IN EACH CELL, PLUS US . . . THAT’S TWENTY-SEVEN. TWENTY-SEVEN PEOPLE LEFT MEANS NOUGHT POINT TWENTY-SEVEN PER CENT SURVIVED.’

  I drove, I just drove. I was just a girl, out for a drive, on a lovely sunny day.

  ‘SAY THE UK POPULATION IS SIXTY-THREE MILLION,’ bellowed Darius, ‘THAT MEANS . . . THERE’S APPROXIMATELY . . .’

  An age went by. Like I say, I was just a girl, out for a drive, on a lovely sunny day.

  ‘ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY THOUSAND AND ONE HUNDRED PEOPLE LEFT,’ shouted Darius triumphantly.

  I gripped the steering wheel.

  ‘DOES THAT SEEM ABOUT RIGHT TO YOU?’

  ‘WHATEVER,’ I shouted.

  ‘NO, BUT DOES IT?’

  ‘NO! ACTUALLY, NO! YOU DON’T KNOW. THERE COULD BE TONS OF PEOPLE. THEY COULD BE HIDING. THERE WAS A BLOKE AT THE SUPERMARKET AND THERE WAS BLOKE AT THE PUB.’