“NO!” she roars.
“NO!” with more power and force than she has ever spoken to another creature in all her life.
Big, goofy dog hesitates. GIRL-I-LIKE?
“NO!” she screams. She has to scream it. It is killing her to scream at him; all she wants to do is hug him, but—
“NO!” She has to make him stop.
Big, goofy dog sinks down. He isn’t sure what he has done wrong, but he is so very pleased to see Girl-I-Like, he will do anything.
See how pleased? He is lying down, but his tail is sweeping around, mad with joy! Oh pet me, pet me, pet me, I like you, I like you, I like you, I like you lots! See how good I am?! Hey, Girl-I-Like, hey girl, hey girl—
“STAY! Good boy! STAY!”
“Ruby!”
Other-Girl saying that. Girl-I-Like looks round.
Other-Girl running at Girl-I-Like. Dog called Whitby doesn’t like it. Thinks Girl-I-Like is being attacked. Other-Girl flings her arms around Girl-I-Like. Whitby charges—
“NO!” Girl-I-Like screams.
He crouches. He cringes. He does So-Sorry Good Dog.
He is a good dog. He didn’t know.
He didn’t know.
It is too late. The Other-Girl…she backed off so far…she stood on the edge of the lily pond. She lost her balance.
But Saskia was a gymnast; Saskia gets her balance back.
Only her toe had dipped into that cool, dark water.
THUNK!
I’d never heard a dog scream like that. My heart screamed for him. He never, ever would have meant this to happen. I screamed back at him. “GO! GO ON! GO!”
I never, ever, for as long as I live, want to scream like that at another living creature. I never ever want to do that again.
Whitby, shot, yelping—with no thought now but HURTS—is already going. Dumb dog makes smart decision: Girl-I-Like or Pain and Fear. He is already limping as fast as he can away from this terrible place.
Saskia is going nowhere.
She had sat down; the tiny patch of damp on her left Converse spreading.
“!” she cried, clutching her leg. “CUT IT OFF!”
I just stood there. Weird, awful, half-forgotten memories of stuff I thought she’d tried to say last night banged around my head. I just… You can’t do that, can you? You can’t just say, “Oh, OK then,” and chop a person’s foot off, can you?
Everyone piled outside, watching Saskia pleading with me, for—it felt like hours. It wasn’t even minutes. She crawled at me and grabbed my leg. “CUT IT OFF! YOU HAVE TO CUT MY FOOT OFF. IT’S THE ONLY WAY. I’VE SEEN IT! I TOLD YOU! THAT’S WHAT YOU HAVE TO DO. DO IT. CUT IT OFF! IT’S THE ONLY WAY! CUT IT—”
Her scream was louder than the sound the ax made. It took another blow for Xar to chop Saskia’s foot off completely—so hard a blow the ax rang as it bit into the stone at the edge of the pond. Then he batted the foot away with the ax, like it was a ball and the ax was a hockey stick. It splopped into the lily pond.
Saskia had passed out on the first chop; she didn’t see fish nibbling at her sneakered foot. I did. I couldn’t look anywhere else: not at Saskia and the bleeding; not at the Court of King Xar, who’d all gone “Urrrr!” like they were watching something awful on YouTube and not something awful that was happening for real, right in front of them.
“Help her, someone help her, someone help her,” I heard my own voice saying…because there was nothing—nothing I could do, nothing I knew to do. That chapter in the SAS book about first aid? It had scared me just thinking about it, so I’d skipped it—and in any case, even if I had known what to do, would I have done it? What if Saskia’s blood was infected?
People started to drift away, back to their hangovers and a lazy day.
“We can’t help her,” muttered Grace, crying and hugging the baby inside her. “Come away, Ruby. Just come away.”
I shook my head at her; unable to stand it, she turned and waddled back into the house, sobbing. That just left me and Xar.
He was staring at Saskia—observing, I guess…to see if it was true, what she had said, that the only way to save her was to cut off her foot.
“She’ll bleed to death,” I whined at him. “She’ll die anyway.”
“Yes,” he said.
And then I got it; no one was coming to the rescue here. There was only me.
CHAPTER SEVEN
At this point in time, there are a number of things I don’t really get. But these are only the things I know I don’t get, and not the things I don’t know I don’t get, which are, unfortunately, to be revealed.
I dragged Saskia into that ice-cream van myself. No one helped. No one tried to stop me. Crying, dog tired (don’t think about dogs)—no, dead tired (don’t think about death)—very (that’s OK) tired, very hungover, very ill, and very aching-all-over, I drove that stupid ice-cream van toward the army base. It was the only place I could think of where there would be medical help, and I took the only route I knew to get to it: highway, turn right at Swindon.
I was on the same highway I’d once driven along with the Spratt, when we sang and played silly games—as you do when you’re trying to take your mind off an apocalypse-type situation. And I realized a dreadful thing. That journey? It was the last time I’d laughed. I had smiled since. I had smiled pretty hard last night. Grinned witchy grins. But that journey? It was the last time I had laughed.
In an attempt to block out thoughts about the disappearance of my own laugh, I tried to find other things to think about—but I didn’t much want to think about a single thing. Except…why had Saskia even turned up looking for me in the first place? Why would she—why would anyone?—leave the Camp of the Useful: the army camp where you’d be protected and taken care of? Where everything was surely…tickety-boo, as my grandma would have said.
It was the one thing I probably should have asked her about, and now I couldn’t ask her about it, and no explanation I could come up with seemed remotely plausible:
EXPLANATION #1: Saskia is a kindhearted girl who really likes me and was so worried about whether I was OK she left the army camp.
Comments:
EXPLANATION #2: Saskia had ditched the Spratt, and she had come to beg my forgiveness.
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EXPLANATION #3: The Spratt had ditched Saskia, and she had nowhere else to go.
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EXPLANATION #4: Ruby, she kept trying to tell you something and maybe you wouldn’t have to be dreaming up explanations if you’d listened.
Comments:
There are no comments because I have nothing to say about any of my own explanations. It was almost enough to make me want to stop the ice-cream ambulance and go and shake Saskia back to consciousness for just long enough to get the truth out of her, but only a monster would do such a thing—and I am not a monster. Thinking bad thoughts is not the same as doing bad things, and plenty of people who think they think GOOD thoughts do TERRIBLE things. (They used to call it “politics” or “religion” or “teaching mathematics.”) All I do is drive an ice-cream van.
When we finally arrive at the gates to the army base, there is a camp of useless people, like me. There are cars; there are caravans—fires burning, people sitting out under tarps…people wrapped in blankets and duvets that tumble from their shoulders as they rise to their feet, laughing and…hooting, jeering, and cheering.
I remember that I am a witch-fairy driving an ice-cream van.
Ahead of me, at the gates, electric lights in the dusk burn so brightly, I am blinded, and I stop long before I have to, blinking, dazzled. My head hurts.
I am getting into this base. I am getting Saskia into this base.
THUMP!
A fist against my window. I see a face—a woman’s face. I have a memory of a time I was safe in a car and a woman, alr
eady bleeding from the rain, tried to get in. Like I said, I have emotional issues about being trapped in cars.
“Make mine a King Cone!” she shouts through the glass, laughing.
“I’d rather have a Popsicle!” someone shouts.
I see others crowd up.
“There’s someone in there!” another voice shouts.
“It’s a kid! She’s got a kid!”
“She’s bleeding. Kid’s bleeding!”
Saskia—maybe responding to this new sound, maybe responding to us having stopped—groans loudly. People back off at a million miles an hour.
“She’s hurt! She’s just hurt!” I scream to anyone who’ll listen, not even thinking to roll down my window.
Hello, silence. Know you well. You make me feel like I am dreaming. But I am not. Oh! My brain wants to tell me this is not really happening. Go back to sleep, it is trying to say.
This is really happening.
“She’s not sick!” I scream. “She’s hurt! It’s her foot!”
Some brave someone comes back up to the van, flashlight in hand, and peers inside.
“Kid’s hurt,” she shouts.
That’s what it takes—an adult to say what I have said.
“Kid’s hurt!” someone echoes.
“They’re just kids!” a someone yells at the gates. That means “go,” right? That means it’s OK? I press on the accelerator. I see wire—too late: I bump the gates. In the blinding light, stick figures of soldiers form in front of me.
“Get back! Get back!” I hear them shouting, stick guns get cocked.
No, I think. No. I do not know what else to do. I hammer on the horn. I flick switches, and the jingle comes blaring out.
All I hear is a crackling racket of tuneless bells. I can’t hear what anyone is shouting anymore.
THUMP!
The King Cone lady bashes my window.
“Back up so they can let you in!” she shouts.
I smash gears to find reverse—the shadows of wire against light swing open ahead of me.
“Come on!” bellows a stick soldier.
Forward, then?
I accelerate and—thump!—hit another set of gates.
I didn’t even see the wire. The light—it is dazzling.
In my side mirrors, I see gates shut behind me. Shadows of soldiers step away from the closed gate; the useless people crowd up, clutching wire…waiting to see what will happen.
I am trapped between gates. A flashlight gets shined into my face—very unnecessarily, I might add. It’s not as though it’s the middle of the night.
THUMP!
“Stop the engine!” a soldier yells at the glass.
Just in case I didn’t get that, he points this big gun at me. There is glass between me and that gun, but I don’t suppose ice-cream vans come with bulletproof glass, or at least they probably wouldn’t have in Dartbridge.
I’ve seen films. I turn the engine off, and I raise my hands.
“And turn that off!” he yells.
I kill the jolly tune. Raise my hands again.
“Get out!” he yells.
I get out. Raise my hands again.
This sniggering murmur goes through the crowd; even the soldiers look like they’re trying not to laugh. Hilarious, no? A witch-fairy driving an ice-cream van. Hilarious? NO.
I see soldiers prowl around the van—and behind them, there’s a whole crowd watching, fingers hooked into wire for this evening’s entertainment. The back door of the van gets yanked open. Guns and torches get waved into the back of the ice-cream van…where Saskia lies, pale and sweating. Her blood filling the floor where a jolly person once stood asking, “Sauce? Sprinkles?”
“She needs help!” I shriek.
The crowd at the gate falls silent.
My brain kicks up a desperate gear, and I realize what the soldiers must be thinking.
“She’s not sick!” I gibber. “She’s not sick sick!”
Yeah, Ruby, P-R-O-B-A-B-L-Y?
Ignoring all those films I’ve seen, I start to shout.
“She had her foot chopped off! It happened hours ago! She’s going to bleed to death! SHE’S NOT RAIN SICK! SHE NEEDS HELP!”
“SHUT UP,” says a soldier on a walkie-talkie.
When he says what he has to say to the person on the other end of the line, any normal, kind person would just say, “Oh my goodness! Those poor girls! Let them in immediately!” (“The driver must obviously be a brave hero,” etc.), but the person at the other end of the line… Oh, I can SO tell—they do NOT want to be bothered by this drama.
Know what it reminds me of? When you overhear parents talking to other parents about some kind of situation and TOTALLY FAILING TO APPRECIATE the seriousness of it.
“We’re kind of busy here,” I hear the person at the other end of the line say. “It’s a one-oh-one.”
In the silence, the crowd at the gate register that.
A terrible booing and hooting and hissing starts up. I do not know what a 101 is, but they obviously do. I’m guessing it’s NOT GOOD.
“One-oh-one!” the walkie-talkie soldier shouts over the din.
The soldiers, guns at the ready, step up to the gate I just came through—the booing crowd quiets and backs off, snarling. You don’t have to be Einstein—and I guess you know by now that I’m not—to realize—
“We cannot assist you. You must leave,” the gun wielder tells me.
I FLIP OUT.
“NO! SHE’LL DIE! YOU HAVE TO HELP HER! HER FOOT WENT IN THE POND AND…AND”—I see fish, nibbling—“HER FOOT WENT IN THE POND AND WE HAD TO CHOP IT OFF!”
I see my mom; I see my mom’s hand reaching out into the rain, trying to help someone.
My mom…my mom…my mom.
I am thousands of breaths away from you.
I cannot…I cannot think…if we had known to chop off your kind hand, would you have lived? Oh, Mom…my mom… These thousands of breaths? Every one of them hurts.
I am not so lost in this terrible thought that I am not mad with myself for thinking it right now. I am Ruby. I VOW I WILL NOT CRY! I am strong. I am fierce. I am—
“SHUT UP,” the walkie-talkie soldier tells me. Realizing I’m not going to, and that the crowd is starting to join in, he walks away from the racket so he can discuss whatever he wants to discuss—probably whether there’s any chance of a cup of tea after all this—in private.
A cheer rises up from the crowd of the useless as the second set of gates is opened.
“Get in and shift over,” a soldier tells me, scowling because his mates are laughing at him.
“Got any choc-ices?” one of them shouts at him.
I snarl a witchy snarl at the shouter. This isn’t funny. It is also, in my opinion, very unprofessional behavior. And from the British Army.
As they wheel Sask into the hospital section, she wakes up and starts screaming all over again. It’s all a little garbled, but the gist of it is, “No, no, no. NO! Oh my , NO!”
I mean, I know hospitals can be scary places, but honestly. There’s gratitude for you, eh?
Mercifully, they knock her out with an injection of something and I sink down onto a chair, wondering if there’s any chance of a bed for the night because I tell you, I am DONE IN. But it won’t matter if there is no bed, because even the floor is suddenly looking extremely comfy. Through eyes rolling shut from exhaustion, I detect a nurse approaching, and before I can even inquire about their B&B facilities, she dumps some random, ugly coat onto my lap and tells me, “You can go now.”
She is smiling kindly, beaming nurse-y kindness.
I am speechless. (Ha! But you know me—only for a second!)
“Is my friend OK?” I ask her.
“She’ll be fine. You need to go,” I get told.
“Go…where?” I say.
“It’s a dry night. You’ll be OK,” she says cheerfully. “Stay with the people outside the gates tonight, then get out of here.”
Lady, you cannot be serious, I think, staring at her, shaking my head, my dog dead very tired jaw lolling open in weary disbelief.
I see her eyes do this microscopic flick thing, a thing that has to be universally understood by anyone who ever had the misfortune to go to school. It is the teen equivalent of that white flash on a rabbit’s bum—only exquisitely more subtle, obviously. It means DANGER, which usually means a teacher is watching (or worse, approaching). I get it instantly. I turn, and (tragically forgetting the intricate eyeliner work all over my face) I do a brilliant faux mascara-rub move on my sore eye sockets, swiveling my eyes about to locate the danger…which turns out to be a surveillance camera above the nurses’ desk. Sneaks.
“You have to go,” she says.
HEY! my brain shouts. HEY! I THINK THIS LADY IS TRYING TO HELP YOU!
I get it! I suppose staying in any place with security cameras isn’t a good idea, in case some bored bloke in front of a bank of screens decides to investigate the witch-fairy. If they work out who I am, I’m out of here—because I am officially useless, doncha know?
“Thanks,” I tell her, studying her face for some sort of sign about the secret tip-off she’s just given me, but she has a flawless smile mask painted on her face (unlike my face, which, though I don’t realize it, is now a total smudgy mess). I am deeply impressed by her self-control. (Although I suppose nurses get trained for that sort of thing. “This won’t hurt a bit,” etc. They are brilliant at remaining cheery during hideous and difficult situations of all kinds.)
I stand, pull on the coat she’s just handed me because it would seem rude not to, and look for some sort of sign about where exactly I should go, because all I see is a maze of doors. On one I see it: a label. One word:
Sunnyside
That’s what it says—in cute, kiddie-friendly letters. Clowns cavort with balloons on either side of it. A most un-cute, un-kiddie-friendly memory of something Saskia tried to say the night before goes shuddering through my brain—
“Over there,” the nurse is saying, pointing at another door.
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