H2O (29 page)

Short chapter, that one was. Short and bitter. Bitter like the acidy stuff you throw up from your stomach when there's nothing left inside you to throw up.

I was led out into another room. They fingerprinted me; they photographed me. I'd seen that stuff too, on TV. The flash of the camera made me snap out of it a little, and I tried to ask about Dan, about Grandma Hollis, about Nana and Gramps, about Auntie Kate about Uncle James…about the Spratt.

“They're not here,” said a soldier.

“Turn,” said the photographer.

“But—” I said.

“Turn!” barked the soldier.

The photographer glanced over his shoulder at her.

“Turn,” the photographer said, more softly.

I turned; he snapped my picture.

“But—”

“You're all done,” the photographer sighed.

I'd heard them. I heard them like I heard Darius say my dad was dead. I heard them and I refused to believe. All dead? Not all dead. All done? Not all done.

• • •

They led me out into another yard through another army polytunnel and dumped me on another bus.

“You took your time,” said some rude woman as I plunked myself and my bags down in the first free seat.

I was numb. I couldn't think where my dad could be. I don't mean that I was actually thinking about that, about where he could be; I mean I just couldn't think. I couldn't think, and I felt as if I could hardly move.

I only remember two other things about that wait on the bus. Two other things:

1. We were there so long people chatted to the soldiers on the coach—who weren't real soldiers, it turned out, but “reserves”: people who were soldiers on the weekend and stuff, for a hobby; people who were maybe accountants like Simon the rest of the time. (Can you imagine?
Surrender
or
I'll miscalculate your taxes! Sorry, Sarge, but we've had to cancel the invasion because someone has spotted a rare species of bird nesting on the battlefield
, etc., etc.)

2. Looked to me like those army people had taken all the water. Trucks pulled up, supplies got unloaded into a hangar. Food—yes—and about a million bottles of water, and a truckload of huge plastic tanks in which yet more water sloshed. One plastic cup, they'd offered me, one measly plastic cup. I bet it was the army that had cleared out the supermarket in Dartbridge. I bet it was.

I wished I'd drunk that measly plastic cup of water because that bus was only half full, and it seemed like it'd be days before they filled it up. It was an age before the next person got on—the next two people: this girl in a headscarf who was lifted out of her wheelchair and carried on to the bus by this guy. This guy who was her dad. I'd felt sorry for her the second I saw her, not because she was in a wheelchair but because her dad looked like some kind of religious type, beardy and serious and smocked. (There was a girl in my class at school whose dad was a pastor, beardy and serious and smocked, and she got no end of teasing and hassle for it.) I'd heard them in the line, a couple people behind me, the dad going on in some foreign language and the girl getting so annoyed with him she burst out in English, “Dad!
Abo!
Please! It's not as though I'm sick, is it? Please don't make a fuss!”

Me and my bags shifted back a seat before the dad could ask me to and the girl could tell him again not to make a fuss. I did not want to hear that.

Do I even need to say how much I wished my dad was there, making a fuss?

After that, they seemed to decide that was enough people, even though the bus was only half full. One of the soldiers did a head count like it was a school trip or something, and they shut the doors. Then they opened them again to let this other guy on board—a doctor, must have been; white jacket and stethoscope and a look on his face like he'd just had to tell someone they had a week to live.

“Hey, guys,” he said, flashing an ID at them. He said “Hey, guys” like Simon would say it.
I'm just like you, really I
am.

We drove out through a different exit, a different set of gates. There was another small gathering of people outside them, like there had been when we arrived. They were angry; they were shouting—I couldn't hear what. I didn't much care. Same as when we'd arrived, soldiers in bio-suits cocked rifles at those people so they could get the gates open. This time it was to let the bus out.

We went down a road; we went down another road. We stopped outside another camp. The doors opened.

“Cheers, guys,” said the doctor-man again as he got off.

I looked out the window. There, lining up outside a building in the camp, I saw Darius Spratt.

I didn't want to punch him.

“DARIUS!” I screamed, hammering at the window. “DARIUS!”

I saw him turn. I saw him look. I saw him not see a thing.

“DARIUS! DARIUS! DAAAAAAAAAA-RIUS!” I tried to storm off the bus, but the two soldiers blocked my path.

One shook his head at me.

“Please!” I shouted at them. “That's my friend! Please!”

That's how desperate I was; I called Darius Spratt my friend.

Second time—AND LAST.

Their faces were stone.

“He can't see me! He can't see a thing! He's lost his glasses!”

“Just sit down, love,” said the other soldier.

“Please!”

“For
's sake,” said the woman who'd been rude to me, standing up…but she wasn't saying it at me—she was saying it at the soldiers.

“Come on, buddy,” said a guy, getting out of his seat. “Show the girl some pity.”

“Yeah,” said another guy, standing, “show some
pity!”

That soldier, the one who'd told me to sit down, he cocked his rifle.

“SIT DOWN!” he said.

And that's what everyone did. Everyone. You don't argue with a gun, do you?

I sat there shaking—with rage, I think. I wished I had a bucket full of pee to chuck in their faces. I wished my Halloween Bad Dolly self would come. I wished I could be Saskia; a girl like Saskia would know what to do.

“What's your name?” asked the SIT-DOWN! one.

“Ruby,” I said.

The other, quiet soldier muttered something and went out and said something to the ones guarding the gate.

They looked at me, my hands pressed to the window mouthing,
Please, please, please!

Eyes got rolled, but one of the guards sauntered across the yard, got blind Darius, and brought him to the gate.

The SIT-DOWN! soldier nodded at me over his gun—I sprang up out of my seat, down the steps, and “Darius!” I screamed, and I ran for that gate and flung myself at it:

BOMF!

He was there. He was right there. My hands panicked. They sort of grabbed through that gate at Darius—and his hands, Darius Spratt's hands, they panicked back.

I felt tears sting at my eyes and Nerd Boy went all blurry.

And I thought…and I thought…that Darius was all I had left. And that was how it was now. That was just how it was.

“Ruby!” he gasped, all choky-throated, like maybe that's how it was for him too.

“Darius!” I sobbed. I couldn't help myself—no more than I could help how my hands grabbed. I was ready to talk now; I was ready to tell him how it had been. That it had been bad, Darius. And I would hear—and I would listen—to how bad it had been for him. I would listen. We were all we had left.

“Hey, Ru!” said a familiar voice.

BOMF!

My hands fell away from Darius Spratt.

“Hey, Sask,” I said.

There she was, looking just fresh and perky and as if everything was normal.

“You look amazing!” she said. “
Are
you
OK?
”

“Yeah…yeah…I'm fine,” I said, swiping tears off my face.

I couldn't have looked that amazing because I saw, on the back of my hand, that my tears were mascara black. I had to look better than her though. I had to.

“Oh my
! It's just been so totally awful, hasn't it?” gushed Saskia.

“Yeah,” I said, smoothing my hair, smoothing my dress, smoothing myself.

“Is your family—”

“Yeah,” I said, before she could go on about it.

“Mine too,” said Saskia.

There was an awkward moment, during which I could have said I knew that, about Saskia's family, because I'd seen them spread around the back garden with the guacamole, and that—by the way—I'd broken into her house and seen the photos in her bedroom and taken her mom's dog, which she had cruelly abandoned, etc., etc.

“Luckily, I found Darius!” she trilled. The way she said it reminded me of that American Mom character she'd played in their spoof washing-detergent ad. Perky? Super-perky!

She slipped her arm through his.

“We're
engaged
,” she said.

This explosion of a laugh filled my cheeks and half spat out through my lips.

It was a joke, right? It had to be a joke.

Like her arm was a hook, the Spratt-fish dangled limp on the end of it.

I couldn't help myself; I looked at Darius Spratt. This weird, wobbly, pleading smile slunk onto his face.

“Ruby,” he whispered, staring straight back at me.

What had happened in the spongy-snake closet was not staying in the spongy-snake closet; it was flashing before my eyes.

My brain could not process the unimaginableness—the unimaginable, unbelievable, outrageous, horrific horribleness—of such a thing. My jaw dropped open from the weight of the words of horror and disbelief that filled it. YOU
WHAT?!
I wanted to shriek.
AS
IF!
I wanted to shriek. I could have shrieked those words and about a trillion other things, none of them nice. I spoke one. One word.

Oh, I am so proud of myself for that one word. I—truly—am RUBY the GENIUS.

“Congratulations,” I said.

“Ru!” whispered Saskia, almost managing a giggle. “It's not, like,
for
real
or anything. We totally just had to! They keep kicking people out of here and—” She gasped then. She actually gasped. “Ru-by!” she shrieked. “Do you, like,
LIKE
him?”

The quiet soldier lost it. “Come on!” he said. He
sighed
… Like this, the most mortifying and appalling and…
soul-wounding
situation on Earth was the most boring situation on Earth. He grabbed my arm and he pulled me back to the bus. I did not resist. Someone had to stop it. Someone had to stop…all that.

I don't mean that, about the soul wounding. It just felt like it was at the time. It was an extreme time. During which extreme things happened. I was very traumatized and confused.

“My dad is alive,” I shouted over my shoulder at Saskia, and at Darius Spratt. “MY—DAD—IS—ALIVE.”

Saying that? It was better than swearing. It was the best and the most triumphant thing I could say, the best and most triumphant thing anyone could ever say: YOU ARE WRONG AND I AM RIGHT.