The Rain Read online

  Someone lost it, and giggled. The giggling, it spread.

  ‘This isn’t right,’ said Barnaby quietly. ‘It should be the news.’

  I laughed too; it was impossible not to crack up with Mrs Fotheringay-Flytrap describing the spotty bits on her Rambling Rector . . . but you want to know something weird? While I certainly wouldn’t in a million years have thought, Oh no! This must mean the world as we know it is about to end, I kind of knew it wasn’t right too. I didn’t know what was supposed to be on, but I knew Gardeners’ Question Time shouldn’t have been. My mum LOVED that programme and listened to it every Sunday. Every Sunday; not on a Saturday night. Never on a Saturday night. Not exactly scary, though, was it?

  ‘Go and put your clothes on!’ Sarah snapped at us.

  I shivered; Caspar hugged me close. Leonie grabbed my hand.

  She never snapped at us.

  ‘They’re in the barn,’ said Saskia – in a really horrible way, like Sarah was stupid.

  ‘Take ours, then,’ said Sarah. ‘Take whatever you want. Just get dressed.’

  Someone muttered something and headed for the kitchen door.

  ‘Don’t go outside,’ said Barnaby. Loudly, angrily. ‘You do NOT go outside.’

  We shuffled out of the room, the whole herd of us . . . On the stairs, someone cracked up and we all had to make a mad dash for Zak’s parents’ bedroom so’s we could laugh our heads off in private, without hurting their feelings.

  ‘What the is up with your parents, man?’ said Caspar.

  ‘Search me, dude,’ said Zak . . . but he didn’t sound OK; he still didn’t sound OK. ‘C’mon,’ he said to Ronnie – my techiest friend – and they dived off to Zak’s room.

  The rest of us, we played fancy dress with Zak’s parents’ clothes. It was so funny you forgot all the weirdness. Caspar pulled on a kaftan.

  ‘Ohhm!’ he said, doing this prayer thing with his hands.

  I laughed so hard I almost –

  ‘I need to pee,’ I remembered.

  Lee followed me to the bathroom. I went first; I had to – I was bursting. Then Lee went while I surveyed myself in the mirror: . So much for the model look. The big, baggy hippy dress was the least of it. My lips, which felt puffy-bruised and tingling from the kissing, looked kind of normal, but I had mascara zombie eyes and where I’d had bright red lipstick on earlier it looked like it had sort of smeared itself all over my chin; even my nose had gone Rudolf. No hope Sarah would have make-up remover, so I wet a bit of toilet paper, dabbed it in the soap and wiped at my chin.

  It wasn’t really lipstick at all; it was my first ever full-blown snogging rash and it stung. It really stung.

  Nothing I could do about it, so I had a quick scrub at the mascara disaster. Their soap, which wasn’t like the soap we had at home but some organic, lentil-based, grey-green thing, was useless. It didn’t even foam up . . . so that was it, then: I was half black-eyed zombie, half human cherry. Mortifying. Seriously mortifying.

  ‘C’mon, get out!’ shouted Caspar through the bathroom door. ‘Molly wants to puke!’

  Great. I had to face him knowing what the face I was facing him with looked like. We opened the door and Molly burst in, chundering. Under normal friendship circumstances, it would have been our duty to stay with her – but, honestly, just listening to her made my own stomach start to heave. It was bad enough looking like a mutant in front of Caspar – I definitely did not want him to witness me spewing my guts up, so I grabbed Lee’s hand and we went back downstairs.

  We passed Zak’s room on the way; him and Ronnie bickering for control of the computer. (‘Why’s it so slow?! Just click there,’ Zak was saying, trying to grab hold of the mouse. ‘Just click on it!’)

  In the kitchen, the radio people had moved on to discussing plants for dry shady borders – which is a serious problem, apparently, and was not nearly as funny as spotty bits. Barnaby looked as if he was in a trance, staring out of the kitchen window at . . . OK, so now the party had been well and truly spoilt; it was raining. None of us had noticed; why would we? We’d been too busy laughing our heads off.

  ‘I think you all need to sober up,’ said Sarah, handing out glass after glass of water. ‘Leonie, can you please put the kettle on?’

  ‘Yes Sarah Yes,’ Lee slurred, glugging her water.

  Barnaby grabbed his mobile phone and started jabbing at it, trying different numbers.

  ‘. . ,’ he said, having trouble getting through.

  Then Gardeners’ Question Time stopped. It just stopped.

  Then it started.

  ‘This is an emergency public service broadcast . . . ’

  ‘The rain’ – that’s all I remember hearing to begin with. ‘It’s in the rain’, and everyone staring at the radio as if it was a TV. That’s how hard we all stared at it . . . everyone except Barnaby, who dumped his mobile and went out to try the phone in the hall.

  Lee shoved the kettle on the stove and came and held my hand, the one that wasn’t gripping Caspar’s.

  ‘Ru,’ whispered Lee. ‘Do you think we’re gonna die or something?’

  ‘No!’ I said.

  Of course no one was gonna die!

  My mum was out at the neighbours’ barbecue.

  It’s in the rain.

  I felt as if I was the last person to get it, what was going on. I stood in that kitchen, shivering – I leaned into Caspar’s body, but even that felt cold – and finally I sort of started to get it. See, for days there’d been stuff on the news about some new kind of epidemic. Outbreaks in Africa, in South America. Then reports from Russia. Some new kind of disease thing, deadly . . . but – well, it wasn’t here, was it? Not like the bird-flu thing when Simon (who was probably more worried about the birds) had got into a right sweat. So had a lot of people. (OK, so had I; it gave me nightmares.) But this? It was so . . . remote, that’s the word . . . we never paid it any attention. Ronnie had tried to go on about it, I remember that, and we had all rolled our eyes and told him to shut up, because it just seemed like another thing for Ronnie to go on about.

  ‘The rain,’ they kept saying on the radio. ‘It’s in the rain.’

  ‘I told you so,’ said Ronnie, stomping down the stairs into the kitchen.

  He had. He had said: ‘There’s something in with the rain.’ And we’d all gone, ‘Yeah right! Shut up, Ronnie!’ because we knew just what kind of website he’d have read that on – probably the same one that claimed the Pope had been replaced by an alien (that’s why you never see his legs; they’re green and spindly) – and Ronnie had gone, ‘No! There is! There’s something in the rain. Look!’ and tried to show us this eye-witness video thing on the internet but it had been taken down, which Ronnie said proved it was true.

  ‘Shut up, Ronnie,’ someone said.

  Lee stared at me. ‘Ru,’ she said. ‘I really am scared.’

  She started crying. Other girls were too. I hugged her. I hugged my lovely best friend.

  It’s in the rain.

  Saskia swept downstairs wearing one of Barnaby’s shirts like a mini-dress. For a moment, she stared at the radio like we’d done; Sarah tried to hand her a glass of water, but Saskia shook her head.

  ‘I wanna go home,’ she announced.

  She’s such a . . . not a drama queen, but a . . . she’s not even a spoilt brat . . . I suppose the best way to describe it is Saskia always finds a way to get what she wants. It’s not even because half the boys in school drool over her . . . OK: ALL the boys in school (because they fancy her or want to be like her), pretty much all the teachers (because she’s cunningly polite to them and makes a showy effort to understand whatever it is they’re going on about) and a seriously shocking number of the girls (because they also fancy her or want to be like her) drool over Saskia, and that should be enough to explain it, why Saskia always gets her way, but it’s not. It’s something weirder and darker. Seriously; she’s like a hypnotist or something, sending out invisible mind rays that zap her victims int
o doing whatever she wants. But not tonight, Sask! Seemed like no one else but me was even listening to her anyway because everyone was staring out of the windows at the rain.

  It just looked like rain normally looks. You know, drippy.

  You could hear Barnaby on the phone in the hall: dialling, slamming the handset down and redialling. He wasn’t calling on a god any more, he was just plain swearing his head off.

  ‘I said I wanna go home,’ Saskia re-announced.

  ‘Whatever,’ someone said.

  She stormed into the hall to try to get the phone off Barnaby; Zak bounded down the stairs . . . Molly drifting down after him, looking sick as a dog.

  ‘The internet’s down!’ Zak said. ‘Like the WHOLE of the web just crashed.’

  ‘Told you so,’ murmured Ronnie.

  ‘It’s probably just a local thing,’ said Sarah.

  Ronnie shook his head in that way that he did to make out he knew stuff no one else did. Molly heaved again; Sarah looked at her in panic.

  ‘It’s the punch, Mum. She’s just had too much punch,’ said Zak.

  People kind of nodded sheepishly, same way you would if someone else’s parents had caught us out.

  ‘Barnaby,’ Sarah called, rummaging in a cupboard, ‘have we got any coffee?’

  Coffee. Even then, even at that moment, I thought that was kind of random. Like that would solve everything. Barnaby wandered in from the hall. He looked . . . grim. That’d be the word. Grim.

  ‘I can’t get through,’ he said. ‘To anyone,’ he added, looking straight at Sarah like she’d know who that anyone was.

  You could hear Saskia back out in the hall; she had the phone to herself then, was dialling and redialling and swearing her head off too.

  ‘HAVE. WE. GOT. ANY. COFFEE?’ Sarah asked Barnaby.

  That seemed to sort of snap him out of it – and a lot of other people too. Girls who’d been crying (because girls are allowed to under extreme circumstances) stopped; boys who’d looked like they were going to cry got a grip. For a moment, it was just all so normal. A bunch of late-night people getting late-night snacks and drinks. Barnaby found some ancient coffee beans in the freezer and was pulverising them in an electric grinder thing. Zak sawed into a loaf of their heavy-duty homemade bread. He handed the slices to Sarah, who put them into the wire thing, to toast them on the top of the stove. I got mugs out; Leonie got teaspoons; other people got other stuff . . . all the stuff you need: teapot, sugar, knives, jams, plates, butter, milk.

  I saw Caspar . . . edging away from us all. I saw Caspar staring mournfully out of the kitchen window.

  I went to him.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I whispered, hoping the darkness by the kitchen door would hide the hideous mess my face was in so we could share a romantic moment.

  ‘No it’s not,’ he said. ‘That’s my MP3 out there.’

  He pointed at his jeans; out on the grass, getting rained on.

  ‘ this,’ he whispered.

  ‘Caspar!’

  I was so stupid; I whispered it, so’s no one noticed.

  ‘Chill, Rubybaby,’ he whispered back, and kissed me.

  I don’t know whether that kiss was meant to shut me up, but it did. Even with all the freaky horribleness of it all, I still had the hots for him and I still couldn’t believe that we’d actually snogged – and in front of everyone, which basically meant that as far as the glass mountain of being cool was concerned, I had now developed spider-sucker climbing powers and had effortlessly scaled to the top. Best not to blow it now by blurting, ‘Ooo! Caspar! No! Zak’s dad said we really shouldn’t!’ at the top of my voice.

  He slipped the lock on the door. He grabbed a towel. He held it over his head. He dashed out. I saw him do that. I saw him go out, barefoot in the rain in Barnaby’s kaftan. He dashed back in again. Slipped the lock back shut. Dumped the towel.

  No one else had noticed. And me? I dunno what I thought was going to happen, like he’d just go up in a puff of green smoke or something. He didn’t. He rummaged in his jeans, pulled out his phone and his MP3, wiped them on his kaftan and waved them at me, grinning.

  I felt like an idiot.

  ‘Cool!’ I whispered. I didn’t know what else to say or do so I gave him this quick, casual peck on the lips and went back to the snack-making . . . so’s I’d look like I was cool (and hadn’t even thought about angsting about anything). Tea! I had to make tea! I had to make a whole lot of tea right now! But the tea was made! OK! I had to casually butter toast . . . that was good, that was better . . . casually buttering toast.

  Barnaby switched the coffee grinder off. It made a racket, that thing. That was fine, because it meant you couldn’t hear the radio. It was also why no one had heard Caspar.

  He was sort of groaning, but not like a Molly puky groan. It was some other kind of groan. He stepped out of the darkness by the kitchen door.

  ‘,’ he said, scratching at his head . . . at his face.

  He looked at his fingertips, at the blood and bits of torn-up skin that coated them. There was blood running down; not tons of it, but trickles and smears . . . from his scalp, from his face . . . where there were sores, red marks, like burns, but bleeding . . . He looked like one of those gory Jesus pictures, minus the crown of thorns. Wherever the rain had touched him, wherever it had seeped through the towel, there was blood . . . even his shoulders, even his chest. Soaking through the kaftan. His naked feet looked like he’d walked a mile on broken glass.

  Saskia flounced back into the room and screamed.

  Sarah rushed over to Caspar – ‘Don’t touch him! Don’t touch him!’ said Barnaby – and she hesitated.

  It’s the first thing you do when someone is hurt, isn’t it? You go to help them. Even if they’re in a really disgusting mess and the sight of all that blood makes you feel like you’re going to throw up or pass out, you go to help them.

  ‘It might be contagious,’ said Barnaby.

  So here’s the thing; I suppose I could say this later, or not say it at all. That’s how much difference it made. As I said, Barnaby and Sarah were very, very good to us: dream parents, totally chilled. (And nightmare parents, because of the being off the scale in terms of embarrassment.) Thing was, as Simon pointed out to me when I was going on about how brilliant they were one day, they could afford to be. I huffed on about it, but I knew – annoyingly – he was right. Zak’s parents never seemed to work; they never seemed to have to do anything but fiddle about in the garden or rock up to naked yoga classes (oh yes!) . . . and the reason Zak’s parents could spend all day growing weirdly shaped organic cauliflowers and doing dog pose naked (DO NOT imagine this!) was because they were minted. They were Old Skool minted; probably they’d started stashing cash the day coins were invented. Zak’s godfather was some kind of Lord. His uncle was another kind of Lord and sat in the House of Lords. His grandma had been a Lady with a capital L, not a small one like everyone else’s grandma.

  Barnaby and Sarah ‘knew people’. That’s what the other parents said, and like the whole grandma deal it didn’t mean they ‘knew people’ the same way everyone else did. It meant the kind of people they knew owned the country or ran it, or both. Someone Barnaby ‘knew’ had called him and warned him. How many other people got a warning?

  But this is not a Hollywood film. The warning counted for zip.

  ‘Dad, they’re not saying that,’ said Zak. ‘They’re not saying it’s contagious.’

  They weren’t. That word never got used.

  But you know what? No one did go to help Caspar.

  It’s the rain. It’s in the rain.

  I’d kissed him. My lips, my chin . . . they tingled. They stung. They’d been stinging anyway. They were just stinging, normal stinging. It had to be normal stinging.

  The smell of burning filled the room.

  ‘Oww!’ said Molly as she grabbed the wire thing to rescue the toast, dumping it on to the table. ‘Ow!’

  Caspar groaned – louder and harder
. It was horrible to hear.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he moaned, one hand clawing the other raw; us all thinking, Don’t do that! Stop doing that! Please, stop doing that! ‘I’m so sorry,’ he said . . . and he sort of sank down, crouching against the door.

  ‘Right,’ said Sarah. She went into the hall to get her coat.

  ‘Sarah,’ Barnaby called after her – but wearily, almost, like they were going to have some regular kind of a row.

  The effect on all of us, despite the circumstances – and apart from Caspar, who was groaning in agony – was we all sort of looked at the floor a bit, like you do when someone’s parents are having a bit of a tiff in front of you.

  ‘I’m taking him to the hospital,’ Sarah said, pulling on her raincoat, patting pockets for her keys; scanning the kitchen for them.

  ‘They say not to,’ said Barnaby.

  They hadn’t said that either, actually. All they’d said was that victims should be given paracetamol. Ha.

  ‘I’m going,’ she said, reaching into Barnaby’s pocket for his keys.

  He grabbed her wrist – and held it.

  ‘Sarah,’ said Barnaby. ‘There is no point.’

  If he’d been Simon, the next thing he’d have said would have been, ‘Be reasonable’. But Barnaby didn’t say that; Barnaby didn’t say anything like that. Sarah extracted her hand and the keys –

  ‘It’s fatal,’ said Barnaby.

  Whoa! There’s harsh and there’s . . . at that moment, everyone in that room hated Barnaby. You could feel it. They hadn’t said THAT on the radio. They DEFINITELY HADN’T said THAT.

  Caspar groaned again. He was shaking quite a lot. I didn’t know what that was. Pain? Shock? Fear? I touched my lips; my chin . . . stinging, sore – but normal, right? Just normal. I didn’t – I couldn’t – have that thing.

  For a moment, Sarah stared at Barnaby in a most un-kaftan-mum-like way.

  ‘Get up!’ she said to Caspar.

  Somehow Caspar stood. Everyone kind of pulled back a little.

  ‘Sarah!’ shouted Barnaby, sounding most un-kaftan-dad-like. ‘I am begging you!’ – but his voice had gone all wobbly, like he couldn’t choose between raging or pleading.