Read The Rain for Free Online Page A

I said.
    I got up then, and drew the curtains.
    ‘Mum?’ I called.
    ‘Yes, Ruby?’
    She was still there; I knew she’d still be there.
    ‘I’m thirsty,’ I said.
    I heard them, not what they said, but the murmurings of a discussion. It wasn’t a row. I could imagine it: what to give me, how to give it to me . . . perhaps, also, whether I could be
trusted not to freak out and break out the second they opened the door.
    ‘Ruby?’ said my mum. ‘I’ll get you something. I’ll be back in a minute.’
    And I thought about how it was, then. That, really, we had been double lucky. That I’d had Barnaby drag me out of the hot tub, and my mum and Simon . . . they’d
gone to the neighbours’ barbecue as planned and taken the babiest brother-brat with them – not in some hideous child-abuse way, keeping him up all night, but because he had kept them up
all night the night before, teething, and had slept all afternoon and was full of beans, and just when my mum dared to pick up a glass of wine, Henry decided it was time to start keeping them up
for another night. So she took Screechster Boy back home. She put the radio on. She rocked my baby brother to sleep . . . trying to listen to
Gardeners’ Question Time
.
    She was so dog-tired, she said, she didn’t even bother wondering why it was on.
    Simon would have stayed out, but apparently one of the neighbours had said something nasty (‘an inflammatory remark’) about the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds . . . It was
probably a joke, but Simon, on a warning from my mum after the last time he’d flipped out at someone for sniggering about
bird
watching, had downed his shandy and stormed home
– seconds before the rain began.
    I might be adding to the detail a bit, but that’s basically what happened.
    A short while later there was a knock at the door.
    ‘Ma?’ I said.
    ‘It’s me,’ said Simon. ‘Ruby, I’m going to open the door. I’ve got some things for you. I want you to stand back, away from the door. Will you do
that?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    He opened the door. His face looked closer to normal; not shaky, not angry either . . . not even when he saw the mess in the room. He bunged my duvet in, then – one, two, three –
cushions from the sofa.
    ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘The airbed’s in the shed.’
    My pillow came next. Then my dressing gown, my snuggliest pyjamas, and my winter fluffy fake-fur slippers.
    ‘Your mum doesn’t want you to get cold,’ he said.
    Then he chucked a bucket in, on top of the pile.
    ‘What’s
that
for?’ I asked.
    ‘Guess,’ he said, slinging in a toilet roll. ‘And –’
    He chucked in my mum’s toiletry bag, but carefully, so’s it landed on the duvet. There was a new toothbrush sticking out of it; mine was in the barn at Zak’s . . . WITH MY
MOBILE. DID I MENTION THAT ALREADY? I DID NOT HAVE MY MOBILE!
    He slid a tray into the room. Tea and toast. With peanut butter. I thought we’d run out.
    Finally he reached round the corner and put two big glasses of water down on the floor. I suppose he guessed I’d been drinking.
    ‘I suppose you have to lock the door now,’ I said.
    ‘Ruby . . .’ said Simon.
    I thought about Caspar lying in the back of the car. I thought about Henry.
    ‘It’s OK,’ I said. ‘Lock it.’
    ‘Night, Ru,’ he said. He shut the door and locked it.
    I probably would have just cried my eyes out then, or something. But –
    ‘Ru?’
    It was my mum.
    She sat on the other side of the door while I ate my toast. I leaned against the door, and I felt as if I could feel her on the other side, sitting and leaning against it too. I felt as if I
could feel the warmth of her through the wood. I rattled on asking her stuff: about whether my dad had called (he hadn’t; I already knew no one could call anyone, didn’t I?), about
whether she thought everyone would be OK . . . and the more people I thought to ask about – family, friends, friends of family, families of