Storm

by Virginia Bergin

  There’s another terrifying pause. My heart is in my mouth—for myself, and for Grace. I can hear her sobbing. It’s a dreadful sound in this smashed-up place.

  “Go and look for them,” Xar instructs in a bored, irritable voice.

  There’s a scuttling of Court feet.

  “Not you, Grace,” says Xar.

  In the silence that follows, I hear only her sobbing—and a sloshing sound… Within moments, the stink of gas reaches my nose.

  “YOU ARE THE SECRET AND THE KEEPER OF THE SECRET,” he roars, so loud I jump. I hear this sinister shake, shake, shake… Matches. That’ll be matches. “AND YOU SHOULD LEARN TO KEEP QUIET.

  “Here you go, Grace,” he says.

  It is so quiet you could hear a pin drop—or a match strike. And another. And another and another.

  “Ladybird! Your house is on fire!” Xar shrieks, laughing his head off.

  The crack, the spit, the hiss of flame. The choking stink of foul smoke. Of fire burning ancient dead things and smashed-up wood. Of fire burning treasure.

  “Ging Gang Goolie,” says Xar.

  He waits, you know, until that fire really gets going, until my chest starts to heave and hurt from the smoke, and I have to crouch down into the broken stuff.

  “See you around, Ladybird,” I hear him call.

  I can’t know for sure whether he’s gone, but when my chest won’t hold out any longer, I start coughing. And I can’t stop. I don’t know if it’s possible for this stone and marble place to burn to the ground, but I do know we’re going to choke to death if we stay—so we must go. I fish the kid out from under the smashed case, and we run to the stairs, down the stairs, and—I can see how we can get around this fire to the door. There is a gap between the edge of the pyre and the wall, but the doing of it is another matter. The heat! I can’t even get near that gap—but we have to—this massive old wood-and-canvas plane falls, crashing from the ceiling. “We have to!” I shout at the Princess.

  So we do.

  It is only a few seconds, but I feel as though I am going to burst into flame.

  Me and the kid stagger out, coughing, sucking in air and coughing again, eyes weeping, lungs weeping, mouths spitting.

  I am expecting Xar to be there—or Grace, with a breakfast tray, being given a second chance. The street is deserted. I grab my sad little bag of stuff from our abandoned car.

  We need another car—now—but I am too scared to walk down the long shop-lined hill ahead of us. Nowhere to hide but small shops that would burn so much more easily and quickly than a museum, so we walk in another direction—not back toward Xar’s, but away from all this.

  There is no point dwelling on what just happened. There is no point letting smoked-out lungs stop us. We do try to keep the coughing and the spitting quiet.

  All. I. Want. Is. A. Car.

  I try car door after car door after car door—and there are more and more cars to try; there’s a hospital, and the road that leads to it is choked with them. I find one that will start, but it is so blocked in I can’t even smash and bash my way out—and the noise it makes terrifies me. We have to give up and start again—and behind us, the smoke from the museum fire swells up black into a clear sky…and a small plane passing overhead banks, turning, dropping lower and lower, circling.

  No time to gawk. “C’mon,” I cough at the Princess.

  I find us a car, on the other side of the hospital. Way I find it is: I put my hand on the hood as I stumble on a dead something I don’t want to describe. The hood is warm; not sun-warmed like others had been, but proper engine warmed.

  Got a fear about that; look around, see no one.

  Maybe they’re on their way to toast marshmallows on Xar’s little bonfire. The keys are in it; they’re either kind or they’re planning to come back after the campfire sing-along.

  If they did come back, they’d find their car gone.

  I have nothing left but Plan C. Plan C for the C-grade girl. When we reach the place where we have to make a choice on the highway, I stop. I pause for a moment, freaking out about the fuel I am burning while I also freak out about…

  All I want to do is go home. I head that way…and then I pause again. Freaking out.

  Plan C is shaky.

  I want to go home…but I also don’t want to go home. Not just because I am being sensible—like, if the army really is looking for me, I suppose that’s where they’d go. And not even just because…I cannot bear the thought of what they might have done to my mom, to Simon, to the babiest brother-brat beloved. Whether they—their bodies—would even still be there. I know that my dad won’t have rocked up there while I have been away, that I should have stopped believing that could happen a very long time ago. I don’t want to go home because there is too much hurt there already.

  If I go back there now and there is more hurt, I fear I will lose “home” forever.

  From my sad little plastic bag of stuff, I fish my sad little crumpled list of addresses out of the pocket of my jeans…but I already know there is only one place I want to go. It is first on my list, but was the last on Sask’s neat, geographical version.

  I reverse off the on-ramp. I turn around. I am scared to let another lovely place be destroyed, but if I can’t go home, I can go to the next best place: my grandmother’s.

  This really is Plan C. This really is all I have left.

  I already know my grandma is not going to be there (alive). My dad is not going to be there (alive). But I am alive, and I…I need the comfort of my grandma’s. I just need a safe place to be still for a second. We’ll go there. Then we’ll work out what comes next.

  I forgot. “We” won’t be working anything out. I’m in charge, and I’ve got a kid to take care of.

  Then I’ll work out what next. Then I’ll work it out.

  We cough and spit museum smoke. We listen to music. We hide under a bridge when a helicopter goes overhead. I don’t speak because I have nothing to say. The Princess doesn’t speak because she doesn’t speak. After what I have just managed to put her through, I seriously doubt whether she will ever speak again. I start to feel like we are driving into oblivion, that when we get to the end of this road, Lancaster probably won’t even be there. That there will just be this enormous, planet-gobbling white fog, into which we will drive and disappear.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  It upsets me a lot that I have trouble finding Grandma’s. I know the house very well, but it is like I know it from a dream. That’s how it is with places you go to when you’re a kid, isn’t it? You know them in a kid way, so some things—like the color and shape of the cookie tin or the bush with the squishy white berries (“snot berries,” me and Dan called them)—you’d know instantly and never forget, but other things—like precisely where the house is—are a little hazy. It was never my responsibility to remember exactly how to get to Grandma’s.

  We drive up and down the wrong lane before I find the right lane and the house—and the back door is open, which I am very pleased about because I think it would not have felt nice to have smashed my way into my grandma’s. I am even more pleased that there is no spicy-sweet stench of anything I don’t want to see, only a colder version of how my grandma’s house always smelled: of cookies, with a hint of mothballs and Chanel. I tour the house, sniffing it all in, saying a silent hi to the ornaments I love best and winding the grandfather clock—the first time in my life I have done this without supervision. The house feels so much better with its tick-tock back, but a tick-tock will not save us. The Princess, meantime, has gone through the cupboards and there’s nothing for us here—not even an empty cookie tin, because the tin itself has gone.

  “We need to get something to eat and drink,” I tell her, winning today’s prize for stating the SCREAMINGLY OBVIOUS.

  I hate it so much that we are going to have to get back in that car, but I
would rather have driven a thousand more miles than been confronted by the sight that awaits us outside: there is a guy standing there with a shotgun.

  He raises it as he sees us.

  I swear I can’t take any more. I swear I can’t. We stop in our tracks—of course we do—but my body? It hardly even tenses.

  “All right?” says the man, glaring at us. “Who’s with you?”

  “Loads of people,” I tell him.

  “Yeah? Where are they?”

  “They’re just coming.”

  He lowers the gun. I am fooling no one. “What are you doing here?” he asks.

  “This is my grandma’s house,” I tell him. “I’ve got a right to be here if I want.”

  “Oh yeah,” he says. “She must have been a popular lady, your nan.”

  I don’t know what game this is. All I know is that I don’t want to play it.

  “Lot of people been coming up here the past couple of weeks. We’ve had the army visit, for a start.”

  “So what,” I tell him. I don’t even have the energy.

  “And another guy come up here. Kid with him, and a woman. Guy said he was her son.”

  I can’t speak. I actually cannot speak.

  “That your dad, then? Or your uncle?”

  I think I do not even speak the word. I think my lips just make its shape: “Dad.”

  “You’d better come and speak to Bridget, then,” he says, and turns to walk away. “We’re just up the lane,” he says.

  I take one step and the Princess pulls me back, her other hand grabbing at the car. From somewhere in the fog of shock that I now am, a lone brain cell responds.

  “We’ll drive,” I shout.

  He stops and looks at me. “Please yourself,” he says.

  We drive. He walks ahead of us. I wish he would walk faster. I am shaking all over. The Princess puts out her hand and squeezes my arm. It is not a reassuring squeeze; it is an “Earth calling Ruby” squeeze, as hard and as mean as she can manage.

  “OK, OK…but I have to. I can’t not. We’ll stay in the car. We’ll just stay in the car till we see.”

  It’s farther than just up the lane, but it is not far. On a bend in the lane ahead of us, there is a big house, set back from the road on its own little hill. The guy waves at the house and people come out. Men, women…I see kids try to sneak out and get shooed back in. They all look normal enough (e.g., no weird costumes), but I don’t much like it; there are a lot of them and only two of us, and the way the road runs, the only way out of here is going to be driving right past the house—and I can’t see what might be around the corner.

  I can’t tell you what this feels like; I want to know what they know. I need to speak to them. I have to speak to them. But I am so scared, even my mind feels like it is shaking. That’s what it feels like: as though an earthquake crack is opening up inside my head, splitting the thinking of the me that wants my daddy and the me that was born on the night the rain fell.

  “Hey!” shouts the guy as I force myself to turn the car around. The lane’s too narrow to do that easily, so I have to make a nine-hundred-point turn in long grass at the gateway to a field. By the time I’ve done it, they could have all easily swarmed up to the car, but they don’t. They just stand in the lane outside the house, watching.

  “I have to do this,” I tell the Princess, watching them all back in my rearview. I check our doors are locked, and I reverse—at speed. I want them to see how fast I can move. I burn rubber. I stop.

  The woman I’m thinking must be Bridget is the only one who comes to the car. Though perhaps not old enough to be a proper granny—her hair’s not even gray or anything—she looks as craggedy and weather bashed as the moors. I do not roll down my window.

  “Hello,” she says to me through the glass.

  I glance at her. She is smiling—a little. Not some huge, welcoming grin, but a small, worried sort of smile. I don’t want her to see my desperation. She is not going to hear it either, because I am finding it hard to speak. I check on the rest of them in my rearview; they’ve stayed where they are. I look back at her.

  “Have you girls come far?”

  Her voice, muffled, comes to me like a voice I am imagining. I can’t speak.

  “Do you want to come in and have a cup of tea? Are you hungry?”

  She glances back at her people, shrugs at them.

  “Barry said he thought you might be looking for your dad?”

  She crouches down at my window.

  “Are you looking for your dad?”

  I can’t even nod. I am so dehydrated, so tired, and so cried out already that I can’t believe there could be a single tear left in me, but I feel the first trickle escape.

  This, apparently, counts as an answer.

  “We haven’t seen them for about a week,” she says.

  I feel my breath starting to suck and drag like I am back in the fire.

  “I’m telling you that just in case, OK? Just in case they’ve moved on. It isn’t the most sensible place to set up home.”

  I feel my mouth open like words want to come out, but they won’t.

  “And if they’re not there, you come back here. We don’t bite.”

  JUST TELL ME, LADY, my mind yowls.

  “Do you hear me? You come back here.”

  I nod. Ferociously. LADY…

  “Do you know where Overton is?”

  I shake my head.

  “Do you know where Morecambe is?”

  Of course I know. I know. I know. I know. Sort of. I’ve been there. I know.

  “I’ll come with you,” she says.

  That earthquake fault? It’s widening.

  “You can follow my car,” she says.

  I watch her in my rearview as she walks back to her people; she is shaking her head. Not some great big no of a shake, but some sad little thing. She goes into the house, comes out a few moments later—with stuff that she hands to another woman and keys that she jangles in the air. For my benefit. She knows I am watching. She knows. The other woman comes to the car.

  “Bridget thought you might like these,” she shouts at my window.

  There’re cookies—a whole packet, unopened—and water—a big bottle.

  I wouldn’t take them, but the Princess grabs my arm again and squeezes tight, so I lower my window—just enough.

  “,” says the woman.

  I don’t know what that’s about. I don’t know if it’s about the gap I am prepared to open the window by, being barely large enough to get the water bottle through. I don’t know whether she’s looking at us and being horrified. I don’t know. I don’t care. I drag the cookies and the water into the car. I check the seals, that they haven’t been opened. I check them all over. I think they’re OK—the Princess seems sure; she snatches them out of my hands, glugs water, stuffs cookies, offers them to me…but I could go for a million miles on empty now; I am just watching the road behind us.

  That Bridget woman comes up behind us in a Land Rover.

  I start up and I move off.

  I don’t pull over the first place I can—where I turned, where the lane is so narrow. I worry I’d be boxed in too easily. (The split—do you see?—the earthquake split.) I drive onto a bigger road and pull over where I know we could bolt and run no problem. Bridget goes ahead.

  I follow her because I have no choice…but all along I am thinking if one single weird thing happens, I heard what she said, and I will split and go get a map and go work out where I am and where Overton is for myself.

  No weird thing happens. We go what even I think is a funny route around Lancaster. We do not go through the middle of it. That doesn’t make me panic too much; I remember what it was like, back in the normal days. Sitting in traffic in the center of the city with my dad swearing. We cut up away from the
city, then down onto a road I heard that swearing on—the river, warehouses on our left—but it’s all clear now; only the side running into town is choked with traffic that will never move. We turn left again.

  We go on.

  The Princess squeezes my arm.

  “Get off me,” I tell her.

  Looking back, this was very bad of me. But all I am doing is looking forward. All I am doing is wishing, hard.

  And I remember…

  I believed so much in those fairies my mom told me about that I climbed up and climbed in and waded through that ancient well because I saw—half-buried in the mud—an apple. The red-and-green cheek of an apple, under the water…the water that, hundreds and hundreds of years ago, doomed, desperate people (lepers, mainly) had believed could cure them. At seven years old, I didn’t know anything about that; the head of my seven-year-old self was such a muddle of fairies and wishes and longing, I thought I saw a magical fairy apple. A gift that they had given back. Do you see? It had worked! You give things to the fairies, and they give back and—the mud in the well was horrible. I remember that. It was horrible and so deep…but I plunged my hands down into the dark water and the mud, and I grabbed up the apple, and I bit into it—but the apple was mush and did not taste nice, and I heard my mom shriek, “Ruby! What HAVE you got?!”

  I swallowed it anyway…because that’s what fairies do, don’t they? They like to make things difficult for humans. They like to trick people. But you cannot let them beat you. No. You have to show that you are brave and clever and then they will have to grant your wish.

  I wished for my dad.

  I choked.

  And then I threw up so hard it came through my nose. I remember that. It came through my nose.

  How hard am I wishing right now? I am wishing so hard I don’t feel anything except that wishing. Not my thirst, not my hunger, not my fear. Certainly not the Princess’s arm-squeeze. I feel nothing but the wish.

  The car in front of me stops. I am wishing so hard, I forgot about who was driving it, about how we came to be here. This woman in the car in front of me gets out. She points. I get out. I follow her pointing finger.