Rob Ewing - The Last of Us

Calum Ian: ‘It all looks the same.’

Me: ‘Could it be all of them at the same time?’

Elizabeth: ‘I don’t think so. That’s not likely.’

Me: ‘Then just some of them?’

Elizabeth: ‘Don’t know.’

Calum Ian: ‘I thought you did know? I thought you were the doctor’s girl, who had learnt everything before going to big school? That’s what we believed. Or what you wanted us to believe.’

Elizabeth looks hard at the book. Then she asks us for an extra moment, and goes out into the garden.

Alex eats a biscuit and stares at Duncan as if he were a dinosaur in a museum. I look at Calum Ian and say, ‘You actually like Elizabeth, don’t you? Bet you draw pictures of her at home where she’s the mum and you’re the dad and we’re the kids. Bet you do.’

Calum Ian’s face changes and changes: the last change turning out to be the worst.

‘Where you fucking been, Gloic ?’ he says. Then: ‘You fucking stay away from our house, all right?’

Too late – I’m thinking.

For about the first time, though, I have doubts about what I did.

I go to the window. Elizabeth is in the corner of the garden. She’s talking with nobody there.

When I go outside she stops. When I ask who she was talking to she says, ‘Nobody.’ She looks shy again when I ask if it was her mum or dad.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ I tell her. ‘It’s natural. I talk to other people all the time.’

‘I know you do,’ she says.

We stand staring at her book. It’s open on a page, of a sad boy with angry skin and terrible bumps on his face. The illness he has is called Smallpox, Scarring of Face .

Me: ‘Is that the illness we all got?’

Elizabeth shakes her head.

‘It looked a bit like that. But I checked before. The illness we had isn’t even in the book.’

The wind hushes and shushes across the grass. Elizabeth looks at me funnily. Then she takes my hand and says, ‘We need to go up to the hospital. He needs antibiotics. I don’t want to go there on my own.’

The hospital was built on its own rocky shore. Mum used to call it a cottage hospital, but that’s false because it’s not a cottage. It’s not a hospital either: more like a long house, or a small fish factory. Part of it was a nursing home, which is where my granny lived before she died. Her window had a good view of the bay. You could spy kayakers or seals or birds or ferries from it.

We go in a side door. There’s a glass corridor, where I waited once while Morven my cousin had her wrist set. Then some doors into the hospital. It used to look spic and span, but now it’s messed up with bits of card and plastic and old clothes on the floor. There’s brown spots all over the place, brown tracks where the wheels went. There are no flies inside; maybe the doors help with that.

The dentist’s room is first. It has a big chair like a torture or captain’s chair. The next room has big blue footballs and rails on the walls like gym-rails.

Elizabeth continues to the white room. The white room has white cupboards beside a bed for sick folk. The floor’s a mess of smashed bottles, ripped-up packets. Nearly all of the cupboard doors are splintered or broken open.

There’s a fridge. We open it only enough to know it stinks. Elizabeth opens the cupboards and begins to collect packets of pills. She lines them up in rows, so we know what they are. This is OK fun, especially when all the packets start to look like buildings in a city. I find a pen and draw wheels on one packet, then drive it crazily around a road in the street I’ve made.

Elizabeth: ‘Could you please help? Stop it, will you, and pass that over.’

I pass her a boring book. She reads the name of each tablet aloud, then drops all the ones she doesn’t want into a plastic bag she has opened out on the floor.

Me: ‘I found another packet, look!’

Elizabeth: ‘What does it say?’

Me: ‘The name on this one says… Warfarin.’

She looks it up in her book.

‘No, it’s a poison. Put it away out of reach.’

She goes back to checking her tablets. I get bored. The plastic bag at her feet fills up too slow, so I go back to playing cars, and I’m playing so seriously that I don’t notice that she’s stopped.

When I look up proper, Elizabeth is just staring at a book. It was open on the counter, yet I didn’t notice it because it seemed like from a bank or something.

The book is a list of names, medicines, all in a row – beside her mum and dad’s signatures.

‘They were writing just here,’ she says.

I try to think of what to come back with. It’s not easy. It needs to be more adult than Elizabeth even.

‘Are you able to smell your mum’s perfume on it?’

She puts her nose down on the page.

‘I can’t.’

‘Did they know how to use everything in here? All the complicated stuff, all the machines, the tablets?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s amazing. They must’ve known everything. I wouldn’t’ve known how to even start.’ I try to catch her eye. ‘Do you know how to use everything?’

‘Me?’ She stops looking, now looks back. ‘Me? How can you—’ She goes back to her work.

After a long time of searching she has three packets that sound about right.

Only one of them turns out to be an antibiotic.

Someone has cut some of the tablets out, so the packet is shaped like an L.

Me: ‘Will it make him sick if it’s the wrong kind?’

Elizabeth: ‘I really, really hope not.’

‘Are you worried about Duncan?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is he going to die?’

‘No… Come off it, don’t be saying things like that. I thought we all agreed not to talk about getting sick? Yes, you remember. So let’s not mention it again.’

She starts looking in the bottom cupboards for creams. Before we leave I click some switches on and off. I try the taps in the sink just to make sure they’re dry.

‘Elizabeth?’

‘What?’

‘Do you miss your mum and dad?’

‘About as much as it is possible to miss anything. About as much as you miss yours.’

I have to think about this.

‘OK then, but I never knew my dad. So it’s hard to miss him to even start with.’ I wait for Elizabeth to smile or show appreciation, but she’s busy. ‘Truly though, I do miss my mum. But I’m a lucky one. It’ll not be long before I see her again. She’s coming back. I know it.’

She stops searching. Instead she looks at me. She sits on a footstool and gives me an over-long stare.

‘You believe that? That’s really what you think?’

‘Aye, I do.’

She goes to say something but I go first: ‘She just left me for a while, that’s all. So I just have to keep waiting. Keep looking until I’ve discovered her. It’s called Pester Power. Which means not taking no for an answer.’

She holds up a packet.

‘This is it.’

‘It’s the right antibiotic? Will it work?’

‘I’m really hoping it will.’

‘Is it the yellow stuff that tastes of bananas?’

‘No, it’s a pill. Called Trimethoprim. In the book it doesn’t say it’s for skin. But I can’t find anything else.’

She sounds headed towards sad Elizabeth, so I take her hand and blow a fart onto the back of it.

‘It shall work. You don’t have to be grown-up to be a doctor. Remember our law? “Kids rule; adults drool.” We can do everything they can. Or could. That’s called teamwork.’

Elizabeth does her half-and-half smile.

When we get home Duncan is lying on a chair, still wearing his coat. He says he feels happiest when he’s left alone. But Elizabeth won’t take this for an answer; instead she helps him, moves him into her bed.