H2O (4 page)

He looked at his fingertips, at the blood and pieces 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 chill (and nightmare parents because of being off the scale in terms of embarrassment). Thing was, as Simon pointed out to me when I was going on about how awesome 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 show 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 rich. They were old-school rich; 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 movie. The warning counted for zilch.

“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 onto the table. “Ow!”

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

“I'm sorry,” he moaned, one hand clawing the other raw. All of us were 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 fight.

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 little, like you do when someone's parents are having an argument 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 Tylenol. 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-mom-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.

Or something else—that's what I think now. Fear, probably. Maybe despair.

“Come on,” Sarah told Caspar, handing him the towel.

They went out the back door, Sarah in front, Caspar stumbling after her.

I let go of Leonie's hand.

“Wait,” I said.

I ran out into the hall; I shoved my feet into a pair of someone's rain boots. I looked back at everyone in the kitchen. For a second, if you ignored the looks on everyone's faces, it looked so cozy—big pot of tea, mugs waiting; even the burnt toast smelled good.

“Ru! Don't!” sobbed Leonie.

And I swear, if someone else had said a single other thing, I would have caved.

“See you later, hon,” said Ronnie.

“See you later, babes,” I said.

Just like we always did.

It wasn't like I was about to run out into the rain. There was a kind of carport thing outside, a place where they stored all sorts of (hippie) junk and chopped wood. Their cars—a little zippy thing they used to get to yoga classes (hopefully wearing clothes on the journey) and this other beat-up big one, a station wagon—were parked there. So it'd be wrong if you in any way thought I was being brave. I really wasn't. I don't even know what exactly I was thinking. I wasn't thinking.

I suppose I felt bad, for not having tried to stop Caspar going outside.

I got into the front seat. Sarah didn't say anything. She didn't even look at me, not to begin with; she just drove. To this day, I'm not sure why she didn't send me back to the house. Maybe she wasn't thinking straight either; maybe she needed someone with her; maybe she thought Caspar and I were a serious item and not just two friends who'd only started making out about an hour ago. Or maybe she thought I might need to go to hospital too. Maybe she'd seen the state my chin was in; maybe she'd seen how I couldn't stop touching my lips, checking. I wasn't sick; I
couldn't
be sick.

Sarah had put Caspar in the back so he could lie down, and I was glad because it meant I didn't have to look at him. I'd been kissing his face off, and now I couldn't even bear to look at him. What
it
does to people is disgusting.

You could still hear him, though, panting and shaking and groaning and moaning.

Zak and his family lived way out in the sticks, down miles and miles of country lanes. Do you know what the lanes are like in Devon? They're tiny. They twist around all over the place. On either side are high banks. On top of the banks are hedges. You can't see where you are. It's bad enough in the daytime; at night it's like being stuck in some crazy maze. Up and down and left and right, twisting and turning—all you can see in front of you is a little patch of road, to the sides of you walls of grass and stone and brambles. I started to feel even sicker, which made me panic, which made me feel sicker.

“Don't,” said Sarah when I went to roll the window down.

It had stopped raining then, but she was right. Water dropped onto the car from the trees. Every now and then, Sarah turned the wipers on. I watched the silvery, dark drops smear across the screen. It was kind of impossible to get your head around it, how something so ordinary could…how they were saying it could do that, make someone sick like Caspar was sick.

Fatal
, that's what Barnaby had said.
Fatal
.

I shut my eyes and tried not to think about that. I tried not to think about anything except not throwing up. I breathed deeply, waiting for us to get to the main road. At least then, we could speed up; at least then, the car would stop weaving about.

Neither of these things happened. We didn't speed up and we didn't stop weaving about. When we hit the main road, there were lots of other cars on it, some heading out of town, most heading into town. The traffic was moving still—not a crawl, faster than that but slower than it should be. The road was really busy.

At first, when I saw that traffic, I closed my eyes again. I didn't want to think about what was in those cars, whether we were just part of a long line of cars carrying people like Caspar, suffering. I didn't want to look at the traffic. I didn't want to think about how long it was going to take for us to get to the hospital, which was miles and miles away, in Exeter. There was a hospital in Dartbridge, but it wasn't the emergency kind; my mom said you couldn't even go there to get a sliver taken out.

Fatal.

I breathed. I tried to just listen to the engine. When I felt the car weaving again, I thought maybe Sarah had taken a shortcut and we were back on the lanes.

My dad took me and Dan on a boat once. Dan's my half-brother; he's twelve and he's a pain, but I love him—brother-brat beloved. My dad's not with Dan's mom anymore either, so Dan and I, we've got the whole smashed-up family thing in common. It's kind of bonding. Anyway, we'd gone on this boat on a river with my dad, just for a weekend, and when we'd gotten off, I still felt like I was on the boat, for hours after—as if the ground was water and I was bobbing about on it.

That's what it was like in that car; I felt like we were back in the lanes, weaving. It made me feel so sick I opened my eyes. I wasn't imagining it; we
were
weaving about. For no reason. I looked at Sarah; even though it was so dark, I could see there was sweat on her forehead—but sweat, not blood. I dunno what I thought—that she was nervous, that she was panicking… It wasn't until there were streetlights that I noticed her hand. She kept flexing it, like it hurt. Flexing it, then rubbing it against her raincoat. I saw her look at it. I looked too. Her palm was bloody.

“The towel,” she said quietly. “It was wet.”

I looked around at Caspar.

“Don't touch him,” whispered Sarah.

He'd rolled over onto his side; in the orangey bursts of streetlights, his face looked shiny, dark with blood, ragged from scratching, his eyes staring at the seat in front—so still, his gaze, while his body shook and shook, and he groaned and groaned.

I looked away. I tried not to panic.

The traffic ground to a halt.

“
,” said Sarah. She was grimacing with pain now; her jaw started to shake a little, as if she was freezing cold, but sweat ran off her face like she was boiling hot. “We'll have to go another way,” she said.

I saw her look at her hand. “I'll drop you at your house,” she said.

I didn't argue. I wanted to be there. I wanted my mom. My chin hurt. It kind of throbbed.

She banged the car down a gear, then jerked the steering wheel left. We bumped up onto the curb. Car horns went crazy, honking at us as we drove—at an angle, half the car on the pavement, half in the road—until there was a car so tight against the curb we couldn't get past. Sarah pounded the horn; they wouldn't budge—and now, behind us, other cars were trying the same trick, tooting at us to get out of the way. There was a bump—the car behind actually tried to push us on.

“There's nowhere to go!” I shouted at them, even though I knew they couldn't hear.

“
,” cursed Sarah.

She turned the wheel hard and slammed down on the accelerator. I screamed because it felt like we were going to roll over, but we steadied, and that's how we did it. That's how we got down as far as Cooper's Lane—at a crazy angle, the car now half on the sidewalk, half up on the grass median where there were tons of daffodils in spring.

“All right?” said Sarah as, just missing a streetlight, we cleared the end of the lane and bounced back down onto the road.

And she looked at me then, and somehow she smiled.

“Yeah,” I said. Somehow I managed to smile back at her.

Five minutes later, we pulled up outside my house. I sort of felt like I should say something, but I didn't know what to say. “Thank you for giving me a lift home” just didn't seem to cut it.

“There's your dad,” said Sarah.

Simon was standing at the den window, watching. Stressing, by the looks of it.

Know what I said? What I always said to anyone who said that:

“He's not my dad.”

I turned to look at Caspar. He had his hands clasped over his face. I couldn't see his eyes, only his lips.

“Caspar?” I whispered.

His lips, the lips I had been kissing, moved a little.

Maybe he was whispering, “Rubybaby…”

Maybe he wasn't saying anything at all.

“Go on,” said Sarah.

“Don't touch the outside of the door,” she said as I opened it.

I stood in the road to wave her off, all around me alarms, screams, shouts, panic.

Then I turned. Simon wasn't in the window anymore, and the curtains were shut. So was the front door.

Huh?!

I ran up to the porch and banged on the door.

“Simon? Mom? Mom!” I shouted.

The lights were on, and through the frosted glass of the door I could see them, the shapes of them, moving around. I could hear them too—talking low and angry to each other, like they did when they were fighting and didn't want me to hear.

“Mom!” I shouted, banging on the door. It was nearly a scream.

There was a Ruby Emergency Key stashed in the garden, but I could hardly go rummaging around in the poison-rain soaked shrubbery to get it, could I? I banged on the door again.

“MOM!”

I felt this horrible stab of fear…then Simon's face loomed up at the glass.

“Ruby,” he instructed through the glass, “you need to take those boots off to come in the house. Carefully. You mustn't touch any water. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said. It was the right thing, I knew, but I felt angry.

He opened the door then. My mom was standing at the end of the hall. My mom!

She kind of gasped at me.

“Ruby! Oh my
! Your face!”

You know, for a moment I actually thought it might be easier to make out like I had
that
thing
rather than fess up.

“It's from kissing,” I said.

“You're OK?!”

“Yes!” I wailed.

She sort of smiled at me—this soppy, sobby smile of joy. And I did too! She looked like a mess; she'd been crying, but at least she wasn't covered in blood or anything. I suppose she might have been thinking the same thing about me.

I stepped out of the rain boots easily enough—they were massive—and into the house—onto a garbage bag. Simon, who'd been standing by the door, blocked my path. He had a broom in his hands, and he actually put it in front of me. I looked up at him in total disbelief. The look on his face was terrible—and weird, not his usual angry face, all grim-jawed but shaky somehow. Upset.
Scared
.

“You need to go in there,” he said, pointing at the den.

He was wearing rubber gloves. Ha! I thought he'd been cleaning.

“
What?!
” I said.

“Oh, Ruby…” said my mom. She came a couple of steps toward me.

“Becky, stay back!” Simon told her. “Go in there, please,” he said to me.

I looked at my mom. “Are you OK?! Is Henry OK?!” I couldn't work out what was going on.

“Just go in the room, darling,” said my mom. “Please?”

I went in, thinking Simon would follow. I suppose I was so used to being in trouble, getting told off, that a part of me kind of thought that was what was happening. The party I'd been at? Maybe I hadn't exactly mentioned I was going to it.

Simon shut the door behind me and locked it.