Storm

by Virginia Bergin

  “It’s done now,” Darius says. “It’s done.”

  I stare bleakly at him.

  “And Saskia was wrong,” he says. “All that’s happening here right now is there are people trying to find a cure.”

  I am nodding this calming information into my brain—where it sits, very unhappily, alongside that memory of Saskia—calm, cool, superpoised, supersmart Saskia—screaming her head off.

  “Really,” says Darius. “All that is happening in this place is that there are a lot of people working twenty-four/seven to try to work this thing out. Day and night, Ru, that’s all we’re doing.”

  “We? Is that what you’re doing?”

  “Yeah! Course! I’ve got a job here too. Everyone has. Know what I do all day? I crunch numbers.”

  What numbers, Darius Spratt? That’s what I should have asked him. But I drank up every calming word he spoke.

  “You can’t imagine how boring it is,” he says.

  Crunching numbers? Oh, I think I can.

  “But we’ve just got to get on with it. I’ve just got to get on with it. That’s the only way we’re going to be able to sort this thing out.”

  I nodded. I felt reassured. I did. I believed Spratt the Sensible. I believed him because he believed himself. And, in a way, everything he said was true…because he didn’t know any better.

  “I’ll go see Sask tomorrow,” says Darius. “See how she is.”

  I nod a bit more.

  “Look, I kept all your stuff,” he says.

  From under the bed he pulls out bag after bag of my looted goodies. (Although I see instantly that they are not how I left them. Things have been folded. That’s pretty freaky in itself, but it also means that someone has been through it all. It is possible that Darius Spratt has touched my ten thousand pairs of looted knickers, the only slightly sensible thing I packed when I first went looking for my dad.)

  “Well, most of it. We couldn’t fit it all in here, so we had to dump some of it. Sorry.”

  I’m not really listening because… Come to Momma, pretty baby, come to Momma… I’ve just found ♥ my phone ♥. I’d kiss it, but the Spratt is watching—and in the next second, I discover even my beloved cell phone has been touched. Not only is it charged…

  “It’s unlocked!” I shriek.

  “I… It…it’s not what it looks like!” the Spratt stammers, flustered.

  Know what? It IS what it looks like. He’s gone bright red. He has SO looked on my phone.

  “You ! How DARE you!”

  “Whoa! No! Ruby! OK, I did look, but just to see whether anyone had called or anything—”

  “Have they?!” I’m jabbing away at my phone now, checking everything: messages, call logs. My fingers claw and scrape at the screen; all by themselves, they remember what to do.

  “No,” says Darius.

  I cradle my phone to my heart. I am as cross as cross can be, but I feel a troll-ish ah-hoo, ah-wah, ah-wooh trembling on my lips.

  “We decided to do it—”

  “We?!”

  “Me and Sask.”

  Uh. My mind spins somewhere way out of the known universe thinking what’s on that phone, what they’ve both seen. Some particularly nasty comments about Saskia come flashing back like incoming texts in my memory.

  “We were just worried about you, Ru. They keep saying they’re going to get the cellular networks back,” Darius blunders on, “so we thought we should keep the phones charged up—you know, in case anyone called. There’s this guy I work with who cracks them in exchange for water. He likes taking baths. Got a tub in his room, I heard. Oh, Ruby, I…”

  More private incoming messages pop up in my head, and I can’t help myself: I groan out loud.

  “We really thought it was the best thing to do,” says Darius quietly.

  I gulp and nod. I get it—just about. I still feel violated…and guilty. Some of those things I said about Saskia? They really were truly dreadful.

  “Can I get you something, Ru?”

  “I’d quite like to have my old life back.”

  (Yeah—and with a phone that’s safely locked.)

  “But then I wouldn’t be in it.”

  I can’t help it: some kind of cough that could almost be a laugh comes spluttering out. The Spratt grins.

  “What would make you feel better?” he asks. “You want a shower or something?”

  “That’s not funny,” I tell him.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Indeed it is not. These have showers. Apparently they only get one swipe-card-monitored, time-limited shower a week because—oh the poor lambs!—there’s only so much FILTERED water available.

  “You can FILTER it?!” I whisper-screech.

  “Shh!” says the Spratt. “Sure.”

  We are standing in the corridor outside the aforementioned swipe-card-monitored, time-limited showering facility.

  “You can FILTER it?!” I do believe I just whisper-screeched even louder.

  “Yesss,” hisses the Spratt, “but not like through a sieve or something. The bacterium is too tiny. It’s like 0.1 micrometers in diameter,” he says, like that explains it.

  I don’t have to tell you that I have no idea how big a micrometer is, let alone 0.1 of one, and only a hazy recollection of which part of a circle a diameter is—however, this does not seem to me to be the point.

  “But you can—”

  “It’s a complicated process. Trust me, it’s really complicated.”

  I open my mouth to tell Darius just how simple I think it is when someone opens their door. Darius shoves me into the aforementioned swipe-card-monitored, time-limited showering facility.

  “Can we just discuss this later?” he hisses, pushing towels and clothes and toiletries into my arms. “You’ve got three minutes.”

  “What?” It’s going to take me that long to get undressed.

  “From when the shower goes on. Three minutes,” the Spratt hisses and shuts the door on me.

  Whoa! My stepdad, Simon, if he were still alive, would have loved this. He moaned at me so, so, so, so, so many times about the amount of time I took in the shower—which was only partially my fault because, as I pointed out to him so, so, so, so, so many times, if the shower were a decent one, I wouldn’t have to do that. I smile, just remembering that—and then the smile dies on my face.

  Why can’t the dead come back alive? Why not? Why shouldn’t it be possible? What difference would it make to God—if there is a God (which I doubt—and if there is, it/she/he/the Supreme Panda is in BIG TROUBLE with me)—or what difference even would it make to the general micrometer mathematics of the universe if just one of them did? Henry! Could I not just be given back Henry, dearest babiest brat beloved? Surely the universe could give back just this one, small, baby life?

  Don’t go there, I tell myself. Don’t think those things.

  I tear off my witch-fairy frock, still thinking those things, and I storm at the mirror to give myself a pep talk and I…

  Ooooooooh, gosh. In spite of everything, I almost want to laugh…I look SO bad. Grace’s pretty design has been wrecked. It is nothing but a great band of smudgy black and gold across my face. You can think, right here, if you want to: so why didn’t the Spratt tell me? Hah! Only a nerd would fail to mention such a crucial thing.

  I get stuff ready. Three minutes, huh? I need to make them count. Since the rain fell, ignoring the time I had jumped into a swimming pool to escape death (then jumped right back out again for the same reason—don’t ask me about that, and don’t ask me what happened after, which involved Darius Spratt and kissing)—I’d had ONE bath. No showers, obviously. ONE bath. On a crazy, mad day when I’d scored six—count ’em!—six great big plastic bottles of water from a gym. I’d left five outside in the summer sun, heating up to a glorious lukewarm, then poured the
m into the bath. I’d got new batteries for Mr. Fitch’s boom-box ghetto blaster especially for the occasion. I lit candles. I had prime beauty products lined up. Super-prime looted beauty products. I slicked my crackly, undernourished hair with a super-prime looted moisturizing treatment and slathered on a face mask. I pressed play on Mr. Fitch’s brass-band music tape, though it was getting kind of wobbly and worn, and I got into the bath.

  For approximately ten seconds, it was delicious.

  I sighed into it. I laid back. Clouds of bubbles frothed around me.

  In the candlelight, from the showerhead, which had not been used in weeks and weeks and weeks…I saw a single drop of water fall. It landed in the bathwater.

  splip!

  Drip, drip, drop, dead.

  I jumped out of that bath like there were piranhas in it. I hugged towels around me, scratched and scraped them all over my body. No, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh no. Oh no. OH NO.

  All that water wasted. All that water wasted. Wasted.

  But I was alive. I was still alive.

  I told Simon to fix that shower.

  Three minutes? This is going to be a luxury. I will not miss a second of it. Pre-shower gelled loofah at the ready (I’m surprised the Spratt takes skin care so seriously; it might be Saskia’s influence—certainly I suspect there must be something other than le fine French cuisine to account for the improvement in his skin), I stand under the showerhead.

  I stare up at it. It is one of those big, fat daisy-head showers. Is it going to come out cold? Do I care? I care enough to crank the setting thing up to hot. Am I really ready for this? Oh yes. I am so ready. I press the lever—nothing happens. I have that moment of frustrated confusion you have in any new shower—OH! Maybe it’s like—I lift the lever.

  The daisy head bursts into life, water pours—pours—down—but HOT! SO HOT! I have to scrabble around immediately to work out how to cool it down.

  And I work it out.

  And I shower, scrubbing frantically…but I tell you: that—those three minutes—was the best, the most appreciated shower I swear I will ever have in my life.

  I swung open the door, clean and serene, in a pair of the Spratt’s pj’s.

  Darius, waiting outside, took one look at me and said, “Oh my .”

  He hustled me back into the room.

  “What happened to you?!” he hissed—even though there was now obviously no need to hiss at all.

  I knew why he’d be asking that. Sans Grace’s makeup, I had reverted to…pure Panda Ruby, I suppose. You can’t scrub away major bruising.

  “I…” I said, flopping onto the bed and trying to work out what I did want to say about it…but I was too dog dead just plain tired. “Let’s not talk about this now,” I murmured.

  “OK,” said Darius, leaning across me.

  My eyes snapped open in panic. He was staring at me in—ah—um—a tender manner.

  WERE WE GOING TO KISS?!

  “I need to get the other mattress, Ru.”

  “What?”

  “It’s underneath you. Can you get up, just for a sec?”

  “Yeah, course,” I said, flustered.

  I got to my feet and stood by the closet as Darius sorted out beds. A sticky fug of embarrassment filled the room. And I reckoned it wasn’t just me either.

  I climbed into bed and pulled the covers up to my chin.

  Darius started taking his shirt off.

  “Hn. Um, maybe I’ll just…” He pointed at the light switch.

  “Yes!” I squeaked—and I turned over anyway, trying not to think that maybe it might be a nice thing to do right now to curl up in bed with the Spratt.

  “Night, Ru,” whispered Darius.

  “Night,” I squeaked back.

  “I think you’re really brave, you know.”

  I grunted squeakily.

  “You really are. Even the shower. Most people around here are too scared to use them.” He yawned.

  Sometime in the night, I woke up. I was hot, and I kicked off the duvet. And I lay. I just lay. The Spratt was reading—with a flashlight—on a bed on the floor, down beside me. And I knew he knew I’d woken up, but neither of us spoke.

  In the light from his flashlight on the wall, he did a shadow thing. He waved. Waggling fingers that looked way too much like the wiggly space bug thing-in-the-rain for my liking shook shadowishly about.

  When the Spratt knew I was watching, he spoke.

  “You do know nothing…you know, happened between me and Sask, don’t you?” he whispers.

  “Hn.”

  Oh my , did I just say “Hn”?!

  “She was just there, on her own, so we teamed up—but not, you know, like that.”

  “Whatever,” I say. And the second it comes out of my mouth, I feel a bit bad about saying it and I feel cross with myself that I feel bad.

  “I was going to come and look for you, Ru,” he whispers.

  “But you didn’t, did you?”

  “I couldn’t see,” he says—and for one beautiful, weird moment I think he means that he must have kind of lost sight of my exquisite beauty or something. “I had to wait an age for new glasses.”

  Those glasses. Those glasses. I do not want to talk. I just want to sleep, but my eyes, staring at the wall in front of me, refuse to shut.

  “I crashed a Ferrari,” I tell the Spratt. “That’s how come…you know. My eyes.”

  “You crashed a Ferrari?” he says.

  “Yeah. Totaled it.”

  I smile in the dark.

  “You TOTALED a Ferrari?” he says. His voice is about ready to burst with laughter.

  Ah! How can this be happening? “Yeah,” I tell him, with something that feels like a giggle rising in my throat.

  I hear the Spratt spit laughter into the dark—and oh, oh, oh, oh. What is this? I laugh too.

  The flashlight beam on the wall shakes—and HA!—a dog-head shadow puppet, formed by the Spratt’s own hand, appears in it.

  “What’s that supposed to be?” I laugh, even though I know perfectly well. Didn’t Simon play that game with me when I was little, making shadow puppets with his hands, trying to win a smile?

  That thought could almost make me stop laughing, but—ha!—the Spratt shadow dog tips back its head, opens its jaw, and HOWLS.

  “I missed you,” he says.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  In the morning, the Spratt wakes me up with breakfast. I’d have been pretty grumpy about that because I was sound asleep, but he brought a spectacular selection of items. I couldn’t have stacked up that tray better myself: as well as Les Pastries Française there’s Le Full English Breakfast: fried everything and a pile of baked beans.

  He sits and watches me cramming food into my face like a cavewoman. Part of me wants to ask about where, precisely, all this stuff comes from, but mainly I just feel like I don’t want to hear it—haven’t I seen enough already to know that while I have suffered Apocalypse Max, these people have been living in Apocalypse Lite?

  I was wrong; survival is a competition, and these people are winning—which reminds me, about twelve hours later than a nicer (nice?) person would have thought of it:

  “Hey, what happened to the Princess?” I manage to ask between glorious great mouthfuls of eggs and bacon.

  I may need to remind you that the Princess was this mute kid the Spratt found—or rather she found him—after the rain fell. An Asian kid, maybe Indian, I’d guessed. Age unknown, name unknown. Tiny, beautiful, heart-woundingly sad. Mute with fright (we reckoned), but never silent…least of all on the subject of me. The Princess didn’t like me, not one bit. I tried to be kind; I did try. I just shouted a lot. It was a stressful time.

  “That Welsh family took her. They had to. What do I know about looking after a kid?”

  “You did OK,�
�� I say, cramming in fried bread. And then I think the thought that goes with that thought. “What happened to my dog?” I ask, stabbing a sausage. I mean Saskia’s dog, the Darling Chihuahua.

  “They don’t let animals in here, Ru,” says Darius.

  There is this awful silence during which I can no longer face eating that sausage. Not that I think Darling got turned into one. These people are spoiled, but they are surely not monsters. Just coldhearted abandoners of small, innocent dogs and…

  “Or people like me.”

  “Ru…” says Darius.

  I amaze myself that I am the one to say it, but the thought comes to me, cutting through the snuggly hug of food and sleepiness as sharp as a surgeon’s knife: “I’m not going to be able to stay here, am I?”

  “We can talk about that later,” he says.

  While seeming not to be an answer to my question, that is an answer. It isn’t a very specific one though, because it’s not clear to me who’s going to kick me out first: the British Army, the Spratt—or me. Am I capable of doing that? Am I capable of trying to walk out of this place with bravery and dignity? (Once I have finished breakfast, obviously.) (Or maybe tomorrow, if I lie low and the Spratt doesn’t get too pushy.)

  “I think, if you leave—” says Darius.

  “When. It’s ‘when,’ isn’t it? Not ‘if.’”

  “I want to come too. I mean—if that’s OK with you.”

  I do sort of feel I could faint or something, so massive is the storm of conflicting stuff in my head. This is a conversation I never ever thought I’d be having in a place I never ever thought I’d be—physically, emotionally, mentally, you-name-it-ly. (Have I told you before how much I hate apocalypses?) There is only one way to deal with this, and that is to push it all back onto the Spratt.

  I amaze myself for a second time—and I haven’t even finished breakfast.

  “Yeah,” I say, “and what about your job, Darius? What about working twenty-four/seven to save the planet?”