The Rain Read Online Free PDF Page A

you couldn’t even go there to get a splinter 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 short cut 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. Also my dad’s not with Dan’s mum any
more either, so Dan and me 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 got 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 street lights 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.
    I looked round at Caspar.
    ‘Don’t touch him,’ whispered Sarah.
    He’d rolled over on to his side; in the orangey bursts of street lights, 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 home,’ she said.
    I didn’t argue. I wanted to be there. I wanted my mum. My chin hurt. It kind of throbbed.
    She banged the car down a gear, then jerked the steering wheel left; we bumped up on to the kerb. 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 kerb 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 to 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 pavement, half up on the grass bank where there were tons of daffodils in spring.
    ‘All right?’ said Sarah as – just missing a street light – we cleared the end of the lane and bounced back down on to 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 ought to 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 front-room 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