The Rain Read online

  For Karen, Sue and John

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE RUBY MORRIS KILLER RAIN SUMMARY

  CHAPTER SEVEN – PART TWO

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE CHAPTER OF SHAME – TO BE DELETED

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  THE STORM

  CUCKOO SONG

  If this was a proper story, like the kind you’d read for fun, it would have such a great beginning. Probably they’d want to make it into a film, it’d be that good. It would start in Mission Control – or maybe deep in space, where a massive hunk of rock, an asteroid, is whizzing through the stars on a collision course with planet Earth.

  We cut to Earth: all over the world, everyone is terrified; they crowd around their TVs, weeping and praying. Probably there’s also a lot of hugging and kissing and hand-holding, that kind of thing. Lots of deep and meaningful conversations – but not too many; we don’t want to spoil the action.

  The final countdown starts and back in Mission Control some old duffer in a uniform stands aside to let some hot young dude – a misunderstood rebel genius who’s masterminded the operation – press the button. His girlfriend is there – or maybe she’s at home, watching on TV, whispering, ‘I love you, Brad,’ as he launches the super-rocket that’s the Earth’s only hope.

  Now all everyone can do is wait and hope and pray.

  You’d have to speed up the next bit. Apparently in real life it took hours and hours, days, for the missile to reach the asteroid; in the film of the book it’d take just enough time to let the buff dude and his girl find each other, so they can be kissing when:

  KA-BOOM!!!!

  The asteroid is blown to smithereens. (It looks really pretty, too: a shimmering starburst in the sky. Everyone on Earth goes ooh and ahh and does some more hugging and kissing.)

  The buff dude has saved the planet! The hot guy triumphed! Hurrah!

  See?! What a great story!

  Except, as I said, this is just the beginning . . . and in any case I was too young to remember the asteroid and all that. Me and my friends, we’d seen the stuff about it on the internet and, honestly, it was boring.

  Simon, my stepdad, heard me say that once, and he went mental.

  ‘Are you telling me,’ he said. ‘Are you telling me –’

  Here we go. You knew, you just knew, when he repeated stuff like that he was going to repeat a whole load of other stuff. On and on and on and –

  ‘– that you find the near-destruction of the planet Earth, on which you live, boring?’

  I’ve got to say that when he got on his high horse like that, I couldn’t help it: I saddled up my own. Yee-haa!

  ‘Well, yeah,’ I said.

  I was telling the truth. I hate it when you get into trouble for stuff like that, for just saying what’s true. It’s like THEY – the parental types and about 99.999 per cent of all known teachers – want you to lie about what you think. You get into trouble for lying about everything else – who you were with, what you were doing, whether you’ve done your homework or not – but they don’t care when you lie about what you think. They actually want you to do it. It’s called agreeing with them, and that’s what they want, all the time, even if they’re totally wrong.

  ‘Unbelievable. Did you hear that, Becky? Are you listening to this?’

  That was another thing he did; he tried to drag my mum into everything.

  ‘Simon,’ she said. ‘Let it go. She’s just trying to wind you up.’

  The truth about that was I didn’t know myself half the time whether I was trying to wind him up. I couldn’t help myself. He annoyed me. My mum said we were two peas in a pod, which made me really angry because he wasn’t even my dad. Like I would ever share a pod with Simon; being forced to share a house was bad enough.

  ‘I’m not,’ I said. ‘It is boring. Something really bad nearly happened. It’s, like, so what? There’s a lot of really bad things that are actually really happening.’

  ‘Ruby,’ said Simon, borderline total rage-out, ‘what you are failing to understand is that –’

  I forget what else he said, what it was I was failing to understand. Same old, I expect – with same old results. He’d get madder and madder, I’d get madder and madder, and my mum would get drowned out. Or else we’d both end up having a go at her. It probably ended up with me getting grounded – that happened a lot – or made to go and tidy my room, or do the dishes even though we had a dishwasher, or clean out the stupid guinea pigs.

  The thing is, I would give anything to be back there, in the kitchen, having that row. I would just agree with him, or say sorry or something . . . but there will never be another row in the kitchen. There will never be another row anywhere in this house. Pretty much everyone is dead – except, perhaps, the stupid guinea pigs.

  My name is Ruby Morris, and this is my story. If you are reading it, you are very, very lucky to be alive . . . but you already know that, right?

  CHAPTER ONE

  There’s really no point going on about how things used to be. For one, I can’t bear to think about it – even though I do, a lot, and it makes me want to throw up with sadness. For two, it kind of doesn’t matter, does it? It’s over. And, for three, I’m not writing this because of how things used to be – I’m writing this because of what happened . . . so I’ll start right there. This is what happened:

  I was sitting in a hot tub in my underwear snogging Caspar McCloud.

  Ha! That also sounds like a great beginning, perhaps from some kind of kiss-fest romance, or maybe Caspar turns out to be a sexy vampire . . . but the truth is – and this is the one thing I will do, for sure: I will try to tell the truth, even if it hurts me to say it, even if it shocks you to hear it (and I doubt it will, because if you’re reading this you’ve probably had about a gazillion shocks already) – it wouldn’t be right to make out that snogging in a hot tub was the kind of thing I usually did on a Saturday night, because it wasn’t.

  It soooooooooooooooooooooo wasn’t. Don’t get me wrong: I’d kissed boys before (two); I’d been to parties before (like, since I was five years old or something); I’d even sat in that hot tub in my underwear before (with Lee; that’s Lee as in Leonie, my best friend) . . . but that night, that party . . . it was the best, the most brilliant – scarily brilliant – time I had ever had in my life up until that point. (Not difficult.)

  That night, that one, glorious, hot Saturday night, I was becoming a new me, one that was going to have a boyfriend called Caspar and do stuff like snog in hot tubs at wild parties all the time. Yes, from the nagging jaws of the THEY I was about to snatch complete amazing greatness and total brilliance. And a boyfriend.

  What can I say? It happened. It really happened! Zak, who lived in this massively cool rambling old farmhouse, and whose parents were so la
id back you could basically do whatever you liked, pulled the speakers outside the barn where we – that’s me and all my lovely friends (exception to be named shortly) – had been hanging out necking LETHAL cider punch, and a bunch of us stripped off – to our underwear – and climbed into their hot tub.

  We sort of danced where we sat, doing so-slick-yeah-check-it mini arm moves. It was a total giggle but it was also totally cramped . . . until people started getting out again, moaning that the hot tub was too hot.

  It was like some dreadful slow-motion countdown to LURVE; with every person that got out, the water in that tub got stiller and stiller. I kept wishing it was one of those jacuzzi tubs, with bubbles, but it wasn’t; unless you kept trailing your hands about on the surface you could see everything. So I sat there, casually fanning my hands around . . . because across that pool of steaming water sat Caspar-Swoon-McCloud.

  And in between us sat Saskia, who wasn’t fanning her hands about at all.

  I do just want to say that, even before that night, I wasn’t really sure how much I actually liked Saskia. Not that I really knew her; she’d just started hanging out with us lately – even more lately than Caspar, who’d been transferred to our school from the arty hippy school, and was cool and wild – and was in a band, and I’d told Simon and my mum I was babysitting with Lee so’s I could go see Caspar’s band play at The George. And it was there, while Caspar was onstage doing his guitar thing, that he’d looked up and looked at me and I’d looked at him and –

  KA-CASPAR-BOOM! (PART ONE)

  I realised I was in love with Caspar McCloud.

  And this is too much information, isn’t it? This is exactly what I said I wouldn’t do, which is go on about how things were. I can’t stand it. I’ll shut up.

  Back in the hot tub, Lee came to my rescue – or tried to. She came up and asked Saskia where the gin had gone (I told you that punch was lethal) and Saskia said she didn’t know and Lee said she thought she’d seen her with it and Saskia said she hadn’t had it and Lee said maybe she could just come and help her look for it and Saskia, who SO knew all along what Lee was trying to do, sighed this enormous bored sigh and stood up and climbed out of the tub with her chest practically in Caspar’s face and then turned to me and said –

  ‘Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.’

  Then there really was nothing but a steaming hot tub of water between me and Caspar McCloud.

  I was so shy. I nearly died of shyness. Also I was slightly worried that I was going to cook to death or perish from an exploding bladder because I really, really needed to pee. I tried not to think about that and it wasn’t difficult not to think about that because I was in a state of pre-kiss terror. For sure, any second now, there was going to be a kiss. There HAD to be a kiss.

  ‘Hey, Rubybaby,’ said Caspar.

  That’s what he called me: ‘Rubybaby’. From the lips of anyone other than a divine being, it would have sounded cringe-making and vomit-worthy. From the lips of Caspar McCloud it was utterly thrilling, as if an electric-lipped angel was kissing your soul. You know: hot and crackly.

  ‘Hey, Caspar,’ I said, crackling.

  ‘Why don’t you swim on around here and keep me company?’ he said.

  I fixed him with this sultry model’s stare (deadpan, but pouty) that I’d been practising at home. ‘Well, why don’t you swim on around here?’ I said.

  It was the pre-kiss terror that made me say that. Basically I would have swum the Atlantic to get to him. Genius, Ruby; all I’d done was prolong the agony.

  Slowly and sexily, we both scooted towards each other. Actually, I’m not sure if you can scoot slowly and sexily, but that’s what it felt like. Also it felt like it took an eternity, when really it was probably about ten seconds or something.

  I looked into his eyes. Then I had to look away because it was just too, too intense. I could see all my friends, dancing and messing around like loonies; behind them, this gorgeous red sunset blazing in the sky.

  If I’d looked the other way, I would have seen something else. I would have seen clouds gobbling up the night. Maybe I would even have seen that reflected in Caspar’s eyes, but when I got a grip enough to stare into them again I wasn’t there to admire the view.

  BOMF! I practically head-butted him as my lips mashed into his. His lips sort of opened a bit and I kind of pushed my tongue into his mouth. I thought that was what you were supposed to do, to show how passionate you felt or something. Like I said, I’d kissed boys before, and that’s what we had done. It had been fairly disgusting. Kissing Caspar like that wasn’t disgusting; it was scary, and it felt all wrong. Until . . . I dunno: it just changed. One minute it was tongue-on-tongue combat, the next minute . . .

  If this was my blockbuster movie, we would pause here. It would be worth a whole scene all by itself, that kiss. We would linger on it for as long as possible. That kiss. Those kisses. Where does one kiss end and another begin? We just kind of melted into one another. I do know that’s the kind of stupid thing they say in cheesy romances, but we did. That’s what happened! One minute I was my own clumsy me being, freaking out, and I could feel this divine Caspar being (was he freaking out too?), this Caspar being’s tongue, and the next minute . . . I dunno . . . it was total –

  KA-CASPAR-BOOM!

  (PART TWO)

  We didn’t hear the yelling.

  Fingers dug into my arm. My lips disconnected from Caspar’s. I turned and –

  ‘GET OUT!’ Zak’s dad shouted into my face, hauling me from the tub.

  And that is when it all began.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Like most people in the country, Zak’s parents had gone to a barbecue that night. That’s the thing about Britain, isn’t it? First glimmer of sunshine, first lick of heat and everyone goes nuts, strips off and has a barbecue. Doesn’t matter if it looks like rain; we go out and we stay out until the first drop falls. No – it’s worse than that: it actually has to start chucking it down before people give up and go inside. You add to that a bank holiday weekend – a whole extra day for sunburnt people to lie around wishing they hadn’t drunk 10 zillion cans of lager and/or that they had cooked the sausages properly, in an oven – and you get . . . well, you get what happened, don’t you?

  Zak’s parents weren’t supposed to be coming home, so it was obvious right away that something was wrong because they were back, but it was even more obvious that something was wrong because they were freaking out. Normally, they wouldn’t have been even slightly bothered about whatever it was we were doing. That was what was so cool about Zak’s; OK, he had the hot tub and the barn and woods and fields and everything to mess about in, but the really cool thing was that his parents were completely chilled. They smoked joints in front of us – hey, they even gave Zak weed! – that’s how chilled they were.

  Tonight, they were not chilled. They basically went all Simon on us. They herded us all into the kitchen. The only thing that was most un-Simon was that Zak’s dad, Barnaby, kept swearing.

  OK, so this is going to be the only other rule about this story: I will try to be honest; I will try to tell everything as it was, but I will not swear. My mum hated me swearing – the word ‘God’ included, despite the fact that 1) she said it herself all the time (but denied it) and 2) as far as I can tell everyone else on the planet says it all the time too. There’s no need for swearing, she’d tell me. Even with the whole world in the grip of a death-fest mega-crisis, she’d say, Ruby, there is absolutely no need to swear.

  Actually, there is quite a lot of need for it in this story, and a lot of swearing did happen, but out of respect for my mum I will not write those words. If, like me, you curse all the time anyway, you can go ahead and add your own swear words, but I hope you’ll understand why I can’t.

  I’ll write something beautiful instead. I’ll write ‘’. For my mum.

  ‘Oh ! Oh ! Oh !’ Barnaby kept going.

  (The thing is, Zak’s parents were always into some pagan-y religiou
s thing or another, so it’s possible that Barnaby really was calling on some specific god and wasn’t just generally ranting.)

  He locked the kitchen door.

  ‘You’re frightening them,’ said Zak’s mum, Sarah, but Barnaby wasn’t listening; he closed every window in the kitchen – and when he’d finished doing that he started closing all the other windows.

  You could hear him, banging about all over the house.

  We weren’t frightened at all. It was a little weird, but the hardest thing was not to get the giggles – although in my case I had nothing to laugh about, now there wasn’t even any water to cover me. I did my best with tea towels. All our stuff, everyone’s stuff, was in the barn.

  ‘Mum, what’s going on?’ said Zak.

  ‘We’re not really sure,’ said Sarah. ‘Someone Barnaby knows called him and—’

  Thump, thump, thump – bang! – thump, thump, thump, went Barnaby upstairs.

  ‘Mum?’ said Zak.

  Bang! Thump, thump, thump; Barnaby came back down the stairs.

  ‘You’d better ask your dad,’ said Sarah.

  See now, that was kind of weird, wasn’t it? Zak didn’t normally call his mum ‘Mum’; Sarah didn’t normally call Barnaby ‘your dad’. If I didn’t know Zak was practically immune to a whole lot of stuff that really bothered other people – like being embarrassed by your parents – I would have thought he was freaking out too . . . but his parents did nutty stuff all the time, and everyone knew they did and usually no one laughed about it much because everyone understood what Zak had to deal with . . . and also because Sarah and Barnaby were so kind to us.

  This latest nutty thing, whatever it was, it was just bad timing, party-wise.

  ‘Turn the radio on,’ Barnaby told Zak.

  ‘Dad?’ said Zak, but he turned it on anyway.

  They didn’t have a TV. Zak’s parents didn’t even have a digital radio; they had the old-fashioned crackly kind. Guess what was on?

  Gardeners’ Question Time.

  They were discussing the best methods of tackling blight on roses.