The Rain

by Virginia Bergin

  ‘And your mother?’ the woman asked.

  They made me tell them; they made me give the names and dates of birth of my mum, of Henry, of Simon. Of the ‘members of my immediate family’ I knew for sure were dead. Henry’s date of birth, I knew. Mum? Simon? I couldn’t get it right; I knew when their birthdays were – the dates and months – but which year? I had to tell them how old they were and let them work it out.

  ‘Sorry, I’m no good at maths,’ I said.

  That woman, she sort of smiled at me.

  ‘So, you’re not good at maths . . . but are you good at other things in school –’ she glanced down at her notepad – ‘Ruby?’

  I shrugged. I couldn’t think why she’d be asking something like that. What did that matter?

  ‘You just need to answer honestly,’ she said. ‘This isn’t a test.’

  Funny thing was that that was exactly what it felt like.

  ‘I do OK,’ I said. ‘I mean, I’m not all that good at that much. I do OK in English. I like art.’

  ‘And outside school? What do you like to do?’

  Why was she asking me this stuff?

  ‘Same like anyone,’ I said. ‘Just hang out with my friends, I guess.’

  ‘No hobbies?’ she asked.

  ‘Not really,’ I said. I definitely didn’t want her asking about those guitar lessons.

  And then she asked a bunch of other questions. These got really specific. Had I come into contact with any infected water? Had I come into contact with anyone who had come into contact with infected water? Had I eaten any fresh fruit or vegetables? Had I drunk any fresh milk? Eaten any fresh meat?

  ‘No,’ I said. Confidently. I wasn’t stupid, was I?

  The man hit a key on the laptop, like he’d been hitting a single key on the laptop for the last ten minutes. All those questions and he hadn’t typed anything I’d said in; he’d just hit a key.

  ‘Thank you, Ruby,’ said the woman. ‘You can go.’

  All the way through that test they said wasn’t a test, I’d held on to my shopping bags. I stood up.

  ‘Can I see my dad now?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s not here,’ said the woman.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Short chapter, that one was. Short and bitter. Bitter like the acidy stuff you sick up from your stomach when there’s nothing left inside you to sick up.

  I was led out into another room. They fingerprinted me, they photographed me. I’d seen that stuff too, on TV. The flash of the camera made me snap out of it a bit and I tried to ask about Dan, about Grandma Hollis, about Nana and Gramps, about Auntie Kate about Uncle James . . . about the Spratt.

  ‘They’re not here,’ said a soldier.

  ‘Turn,’ said the photographer.

  ‘But—’ I said.

  ‘Turn!’ barked the soldier.

  The photographer glanced over his shoulder at her.

  ‘Turn,’ the photographer said, more softly.

  I turned; he snapped my picture.

  ‘But—’

  ‘You’re all done,’ the photographer sighed.

  I’d heard them. I heard them like I heard Darius say my dad was dead. I heard them and I refused to believe. All dead? Not all dead. All done? Not all done.

  They led me out into another yard through another army polytunnel and dumped me on another coach.

  ‘You took your time,’ said some rude woman as I plunked myself and my bags down in the first free seat.

  I was numb. I couldn’t think where my dad could be. I don’t mean that I was actually thinking about that, about where he could be; I mean I just couldn’t think. I couldn’t think, and I felt as if I could hardly move.

  I only remember two other things about that wait on the coach. Two other things:

  1. We were there so long people chatted to the soldiers on the coach – who weren’t proper soldiers, it turned out, but ‘Reserves’: people who were soldiers at the weekend and stuff, for a hobby; people who were maybe accountants like Simon the rest of the time. (Can you imagine? Surrender or I’ll miscalculate your tax! Sorry, Sarge, but we’ve had to cancel the invasion because someone has spotted a rare species of bird nesting on the battlefield, etc., etc.)

  2. Looked to me like those army people had taken all the water. Trucks pulled up, supplies got unloaded into a hangar. Food – yes – and about a million bottles of water, and a lorryload of huge plastic tanks in which yet more water sloshed. One plastic cup, they’d offered me, one measly plastic cup. I bet it was the army that had cleared out the supermarket in Dartbridge. I bet it was.

  I wished I’d drunk that measly plastic cup of water because that coach was only half full and it seemed like it’d be days before they filled it up. It was an age before the next person got on – the next two people: this girl in a headscarf who was lifted out of her wheelchair and carried on to the coach by this bloke. This bloke who was her dad. I’d felt sorry for her the second I saw her, not because she was in a wheelchair but because her dad looked like some kind of religious type, beardy and serious and smocked. (There was a girl in my year at school whose dad was a vicar [beardy and serious and smocked] and she got no end of teasing and hassle for it.) I’d heard them in the queue, a couple of people behind me, the dad going on in some foreign language and the girl getting so annoyed with him she burst out in English, ‘Dad! Abo! Please! It’s not as though I’m sick, is it? Please don’t make a fuss!’

  Me and my bags shifted back a seat before the dad could ask me to and the girl could tell him again not to make a fuss. I did not want to hear that.

  Do I even need to say how much I wished my dad was there, making a fuss?

  After that, they seemed to decide that was enough people, even though the coach was only half full. One of the soldiers did a head count like it was a school trip or something and they shut the doors. Then they opened them again to let this other bloke on board. A doctor, must have been; white jacket and stethoscope and a look on his face like he’d just had to tell someone they had a week to live.

  ‘Cheers, guys,’ he said, flashing an ID at them. He said ‘Cheers, guys’ like Simon would say it. I’m just like you, really I am.

  We drove out through a different exit, a different set of gates. There was another small gathering of people outside them, like there had been when we arrived. They were angry; they were shouting – I couldn’t hear what. I didn’t much care. Same as when we’d arrived, soldiers in bio-onesies cocked rifles at those people so’s they could get the gates open. This time it was to let the coach out.

  We went down a road; we went down another road. We stopped outside another camp. The doors opened.

  ‘Cheers, guys,’ said the doctor-man again as he got off.

  I looked out of the window. There, queuing outside a building in the camp, I saw Darius Spratt.

  I didn’t want to punch him.

  ‘DARIUS!’ I screamed, hammering at the window. ‘DARIUS!’

  I saw him turn. I saw him look. I saw him not see a thing.

  ‘DARIUS! DARIUS! DAAAAAAAAAA-RIUS!’ I tried to storm off the coach, but the two soldiers blocked my path.

  One shook his head at me.

  ‘Please!’ I shouted at them. ‘That’s my friend! Please!’

  That’s how desperate I was; I called Darius Spratt my friend.

  Second time – AND LAST.

  Their faces were stone.

  ‘He can’t see me! He can’t see a thing! He’s lost his glasses!’

  ‘Just sit down, love,’ said the other soldier.

  ‘Please!’

  ‘For ’s sake,’ said the woman who’d been rude to me, standing up . . . but she wasn’t saying it at me – she was saying it at the soldiers.

  ‘Come on, mate,’ said a bloke, getting out of his seat. ‘Show the girl some pity.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said another bloke, standing, ‘show some pity!’

  That soldier, the one who’d told me to sit down, he cocked his rifle.


  ‘SIT DOWN!’ he said.

  And that’s what everyone did. Everyone. You don’t argue with a gun, do you?

  I sat there shaking – with rage, I think. I wished I had a bucket full of wee to chuck in their faces. I wished my Halloween Bad Dolly self would come. I wished I could be Saskia; a girl like Saskia would know what to do.

  ‘What’s your name?’ asked the SIT-DOWN! one.

  ‘Ruby,’ I said.

  The other, quiet soldier muttered something and went out and said something to the ones guarding the gate.

  They looked at me, my hands pressed to the window mouthing, Please, please, please!

  Eyes got rolled, but one of the guards sauntered across the yard, got blind Darius and brought him to the gate.

  The SIT-DOWN! soldier nodded at me over his gun – I sprang up out of my seat, down the steps and ‘Darius!’ I screamed, and I ran for that gate and flung myself at it:

  BOMF!

  He was there. He was right there. My hands panicked. They sort of grabbed through that gate at Darius – and his hands, Darius Spratt’s hands, they panicked back.

  I felt tears sting at my eyes and Nerd Boy went all blurry.

  And I thought . . . and I thought . . . that Darius was all I had left. And that was how it was now. That was just how it was.

  ‘Ruby!’ he gasped, all choky-throated, like maybe that’s how it was for him too.

  ‘Darius!’ I sobbed. I couldn’t help myself – no more than I could help how my hands grabbed. I was ready to talk now; I was ready to tell how it had been. That it had been bad, Darius. And I would hear – and I would listen – to how bad it had been for him. I would listen. We were all we had left.

  ‘Hey, Ru!’ said a familiar voice.

  BOMF!

  My hands fell away from Darius Spratt.

  ‘Hey, Sask,’ I said.

  There she was, looking just fresh and perky and as if everything was normal.

  ‘You look amazing!’ she said. ‘Are you OK?’

  ‘Yeah . . . yeah . . . I’m fine,’ I said, swiping tears off my face.

  I couldn’t have looked that amazing because I saw, on the back of my hand, that my tears were mascara black. I had to look better than her, though. I had to.

  ‘Oh my ! It’s just been so totally awful, hasn’t it?’ gushed Saskia.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, smoothing my hair, smoothing my dress, smoothing myself.

  ‘Is your family—’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, before she could go on about it.

  ‘Mine too,’ said Saskia.

  There was an awkward moment, during which I could have said I knew that, about Saskia’s family, because I’d seen them spread about the back garden with the guacamole, and that – by the way – I’d broken into her house and seen the photos in her bedroom and taken her mum’s dog, which she had cruelly abandoned, etc., etc.

  ‘Luckily, I found Darius!’ she trilled. The way she said it reminded me of that American Mom character she’d played in their spoof washing-powder ad. Perky? Super-perky!

  She slipped her arm through his.

  ‘We’re engaged,’ she said.

  This explosion of a laugh filled my cheeks, half spat out through my lips.

  It was a joke, right? It had to be a joke.

  Like her arm was a hook, the Spratt-fish dangled limp on the end of it.

  I couldn’t help myself; I looked at Darius Spratt. This weird, wobbly, pleading smile slunk on to his face.

  ‘Ruby,’ he whispered, staring straight back at me.

  What had happened in the spongy-snake cupboard was not staying in the spongy-snake cupboard; it was flashing before my eyes.

  My brain could not process the unimaginableness – the unimaginable, unbelievable, outrageous, horrific horribleness – of such a thing. My jaw dropped open from the weight of the words of horror and disbelief that filled it. YOU WHAT?! I wanted to shriek. AS IF! I wanted to shriek. I could have shrieked those words and about a trillion other things, none of them nice. I spoke one. One word.

  Oh, I am so proud of myself for that one word. I – truly – am RUBY the GENIUS.

  ‘Congratulations,’ I said.

  ‘Ru!’ whispered Saskia, almost managing a giggle. ‘It’s not, like, for real or anything. We totally just had to! They keep kicking people out of here and . . .’ She gasped then. She actually gasped. ‘Ru-by!’ she shrieked. ‘Do you, like, LIKE him?’

  The quiet soldier lost it. ‘Come on!’ he said. He sighed . . . like this, the most mortifying and appalling and . . . soul-wounding . . . situation on Earth was the most boring situation on Earth. He grabbed my arm and he pulled me back to the coach. I did not resist. Someone had to stop it. Someone had to stop . . . all that.

  I don’t mean that, about the soul-wounding. It just felt like it was at the time. It was an extreme time. During which extreme things happened. I was very traumatised and confused.

  ‘My dad is alive,’ I shouted over my shoulder at Saskia, and at Darius Spratt. ‘MY – DAD – IS – ALIVE.’

  Saying that? It was better than swearing. It was the best and the most triumphant thing I could say, the best and most triumphant thing anyone could ever say: YOU ARE WRONG AND I AM RIGHT.

  It’s the best feeling in the world, isn’t it? Being right.

  ‘Where are they taking you?’ Darius shouted.

  I didn’t answer. I shook the quiet soldier’s hand off my arm and I walked with dignity. I didn’t answer because I didn’t know. I didn’t answer because it was an outrage that he should even –

  ‘You take care, Ru!’ he shouted. ‘You take care!’

  OK. That was too much. Don’t call me Ru. Do NOT call me Ru. I turned, I grabbed hold of every swear word I ever could have thought of and I –

  ‘Come on,’ said the SIT-DOWN! soldier, pulling me on to the coach before I could lash the Spratt with my burning rage.

  As I made my way to my seat, I noticed a thing. Those other people on that coach, they looked at me funny. They looked at me funny as if . . . they felt sorry for me? They thought I was stupid? Surely not that they – seriously – thought a girl like me would ever have ANYTHING to do with a boy like Darius Spratt.

  I did an emergency rummage in my head.

  ‘That boy,’ I announced to them all, ‘is a lousy kisser.’

  ‘SIT DOWN!’ yelled the SIT-DOWN! soldier.

  I glared at them all and sat down.

  My heart – bristling, bleeding, bruised, confused, messed up good and proper – shut itself up, tight . . . and right.

  I checked my make-up. It was pretty bad, unfortunately. Worse than I had thought. Amid the swipe and smudge marks, mascara run-off streaks fell like black rain from my eyes.

  We passed other gates to other camps. I was so busy sorting my make-up out (it’s a very calming activity, I find) I hardly noticed much, but some didn’t even look like they were army bases, how you’d think they’d be; they just looked like housing estates behind high fences – you even saw people there, with kids . . . out playing, because it was sunny and dry.

  ‘House like that’ll do me,’ said the woman who’d been rude, loudly.

  ‘Probably have to share it,’ said a bloke.

  ‘No way,’ said another woman.

  But that wasn’t where we were going.

  When we finally stopped, it was getting dark.

  We pulled up in the middle of this pretty little village.

  Sweet little cottages crowded around a sweet little village green filled with sweet little dead people. And a maypole, around which pretty ribbons fluttered in the breeze.

  ‘This ain’t right,’ the rude woman said.

  ‘Shut up,’ said another bloke. ‘They know what they’re doing.’

  They did know what they were doing. I’d been dumped that many times that day I should have known too. I was being dumped. Again.

  They herded us out.

  ‘What the is this?’ said the rude woman.

  They
got that girl’s wheelchair out of the coach; I remember how cool it looked, decorated with a million stickers. Her dad carried her off the coach and put her in it.

  ‘Now what?!’ demanded a bloke.

  The SIT-DOWN! soldier cocked his rifle again. Didn’t he just love doing that?

  This bawly brat in his mother’s arms started to cry.

  ‘The army is not able to accommodate everyone at this time,’ announced SIT-DOWN! soldier.

  I saw then that maybe he wasn’t so tough; I saw his fingers all nervous on that gun. It looked like as if maybe he was going to say something else; maybe he was supposed to say something else . . . but, really, what else was there to say?

  ‘You have got to be kidding me!’ said a bloke.

  ‘You are NOT leaving us here,’ said the rude woman.

  ‘You s!’ screamed the woman with the bawling kid as the soldiers got back on board.

  They hadn’t switched off the engine; they were positioned just right to go.

  The abandoned (half) coachload of people didn’t even try to get back on board. The soldiers got back on and they pulled away.

  All day long, I hadn’t looked at the sky. I hadn’t needed to; it had been sunny and then I’d been at the army place and I didn’t think – for one moment – that I’d get dumped under . . . The wind had got up and it looked rubbish: a jumbled altocumulus sky, the kind that changes every two seconds and is almost impossible to read. It’s the kind of sky you only go out under if you have to, and you’d better be quick about it.

  Like banging on about dead bodies – which, incidentally, do NOT go zombie grey when they start to go off. They go GREEN; they go GREEN with white mould spots and their lips shrivel and their mouths rot so everyone looks like LIPLESS MAGGOTY-MOUTHED SPOTTY ZOMBIE ELVES. BUT NORMAL-SIZED. PEOPLE DON’T SHRINK, THEY JUST GO GREEN. GREEN! Yes, like not banging on about that, I also do not want to bang on about the way people behaved – I just want to say that I was brought up to think that if something awful happened PEOPLE WERE SUPPOSED TO HELP EACH OTHER, NOT GRAB ALL THE BEST SUPPLIES, THREATEN PEOPLE WITH GUNS, MURDER PEOPLE, CHASE PEOPLE, ATTACK THEM WITH POISONED WATER OR . . . OR GO OFF WITH PEOPLE THEY WEREN’T SUPPOSED TO GO OFF WITH.

  OR DUMP PEOPLE IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE WHEN IT’S OBVIOUSLY JUST ABOUT TO RAIN. PROBABLY.