The Rain Read Online Free PDF

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 any more and the curtains were shut. So was the front door.
    Huh?!
    I ran up to the porch and banged on the door.
    ‘Simon? Mum? Mum!’ I shouted.
    The lights were on and through the frosted glass of the door I could see them, the shapes of them, moving about. I could hear them too; talking low and angry to each other, like they did when
they were rowing and didn’t want me to hear.
    ‘Mum!’ 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.
    ‘MUM!’
    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 mum was standing at the end of the hall. My mum!
    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 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 wellies easily enough – they were massive – and into the house – on to a bin liner. 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 front room.
    He was wearing rubber gloves. Ha! I thought he’d been cleaning.
    ‘
What?!
’ I said.
    ‘Oh, Ruby . . .’ said my mum. She came a couple of steps towards me.
    ‘Becky, stay back!’ Simon told her. ‘Go in there, please,’ he said to me.
    I looked at my mum. ‘Are you OK?! Is Henry OK?!’ I couldn’t work out what was going on.
    ‘Just go in the room, darling,’ said my mum. ‘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.

CHAPTER FOUR
    One little rainstorm. ‘Only a shower’. That’s the kind of thing my mum said all the time because it rains a lot in Devon. Where I used to live, in London,
where my dad still lived, it hardly ever seemed to rain and even if it did it hardly mattered because you could always hop on a bus or a tube that would take you to exactly wherever it was you
wanted to go without getting a drop of rain on you. In Devon, you had to walk places – or kill yourself cycling up hills. If I moaned that I didn’t want to go and do something or that I
wanted a lift because it was raining, that’s what my mum would say: ‘It’s only a shower!’ It meant, ‘Get on with it.’ Simon, on the other hand, could never leave
it at that.
    Example No. 1
    Simon: If you were going to a festival you wouldn’t be bothered about a bit of rain, would you?
    Me: Well, as I’m not allowed to go to festivals, I wouldn’t know.
    Example No. 2
    Simon: So, Ruby, how