Rob Ewing - The Last of Us

Elizabeth frowns at me, then agrees that it is a test.

Everything changes when we get home.

Everything changes for ever.

At first we don’t notice anything different. Home just looks like it always does: quite a bit messy, which makes me think about Elizabeth’s first rule: Tidy up.

Then we see smashed things: and I know at once it isn’t just mess.

Funny how some things you can’t know all at once. It takes maybe the third or fourth try. It’s maybe even my fifth look that tells me things went very bad.

Elizabeth goes and sits on the floor. There’s a dirty mess on my bed. Heaps of stones and dirt from the garden. A teddy covered in blue paint. This isn’t so terrible. But my pencils: snapped. My pillow: jam spilt on it.

This is enough to make me sad – but then I see that Elizabeth is staring at something else. For the first time, for me, a bit of good news. They got my bed, but the wrong bedside cabinet. Alex must’ve left his book – there it is, Dr Dog – on my cabinet. Thinking wrongly, they tipped up and smashed all the stuff in his instead.

Me: ‘It’s better news for me.’

‘Shut up ,’ Elizabeth hisses. ‘Shut your face up .’

This shocks me: she never talks like this. I want to tell her how sad she makes me feel by saying that, but she’s just staring at the floor beside Alex’s cabinet.

‘There’s red on the floor,’ I say, taking my chance to talk again. ‘It’s a very bad thing to spill the food dye for our water, isn’t it?’

Elizabeth: ‘You know what this is? On the floor, over here?’

Me: ‘No.’

Elizabeth: ‘It’s Alex’s insulin.’

Me: ‘But what’s it doing down over there?’

Elizabeth: ‘It’s smashed that’s what!’

Me: ‘Well… but did you not keep it in the cool box?’

Elizabeth: ‘I did. But that was before I brought it here for safe keeping.’

She doesn’t want to hear me say he might be all right without it. She isn’t interested when I act brave and start to clean my pillow. Instead, Elizabeth looks furious.

‘Of course he needs it,’ she says. ‘This is bad, this is very bad… Have you any idea why they’d do this?’

‘I – no.’

‘So here’s something you should know. There’s only one vial left. That’s in his pen, and that’s only quarter full. You know how long a quarter lasts?’

‘Twenty days?’

‘Two days.’

Alex is standing by the door. He looks at the mess. More than that, he looks at the glass. Elizabeth hurriedly kneels down on the floor to try and hide it, but he sees and understands completely.

‘Someone has done a bad thing,’ he says.

We find them at the big ferry pier. They’ve tipped out a pot of white paint on the tarmac. Both of them are cycling their bikes through it, making bendy lines like a cartoon road or planes flying circles in the sky.

Calum Ian stops short of Elizabeth. At first he thinks she’s going at him for making a mess with paint: then his face changes. Duncan stops, too. He has spots of white all up the back of his trousers, on his hands, on his face. It makes his scarred bits look even stranger.

‘Why?’ Elizabeth asks.

When they don’t answer she says, ‘Know something? Right now I hate your bloody guts.’

Calum Ian starts to say that it’s just a bit of jam, that it was just a bit of food dye.

He stops when she tells him about the insulin.

Duncan begins to shake and tries to brush all the white dots from his jeans, but they only smudge into fingerprint-lines.

‘He made me do it,’ he says.

The first thing we do is go to the hospital. We go back to the room with the broken white cupboards. Calum Ian checks inside the fridge, even though it stinks. Then Elizabeth goes through every single drawer and cupboard – twice. Me and Alex do all the cupboards in a room called The Sluice. We don’t find anything.

Next door is the nursing home. Nobody wants to look in these rooms, but we have to. Their cupboards are empty. Each bed in every room has an old dead person in it.

Alex doesn’t want to look, and neither do I, but we can’t stop ourselves.

I see one old lady whose face is like rotten bark on a tree. I shut my eyes, try to unsee. Too late.

In the hall of the nursing home there’s a big trolley with wheels. Inside the trolley are lots of packets of tablets. Elizabeth makes a bingo! sound, but then goes quiet when she doesn’t find any kind of injection.

Feeling gloomy we return to the hospital corridor. Elizabeth puts on her perfume-hanky and Calum Ian tears off the BIOHAZARD tape and clear plastic from the doors.

She goes in quick, checks the bedside cabinets, cupboards, then comes out quick again, before the smell gets onto her, before she has time to take even one breath.

‘ Think, think, think, ’ she says.

We all go outside to sit on the craggy stones at the edge of the car park. It’s a place where the wind skirls around. Elizabeth tucks her hair down inside her jumper.

I sit several steps behind her, because it feels like the safest place to be: not too close to anyone who might think to blame me.

Me: ‘Why are we waiting?’

Elizabeth: ‘Because I don’t want to think about what needs to happen next.’

‘What needs to happen next?’

‘We need to get into the practice.’

This means the doctor’s practice: that’s all. Big deal! We went in there once before when we were looking for bandages for Alex, after he cut his arm. The practice wasn’t too spooky, plus it didn’t have a smell. The main doors had been broken open by the adults, and we found bandages in a box in the nurses’ room.

When I tell Elizabeth how easy it’ll be she hisses, ‘ Not easy. This time it’s the dispensary we need to get into.’

‘We couldn’t open that door.’

‘ Great memory.’

She stands with her arms folded, looking between Calum Ian, Duncan and me. I nearly don’t recognise her: with her scars gone red, her eyes narrowed.

‘There was one door,’ Calum Ian says. ‘But with three locks. Only we didn’t have any key. An adult must’ve tried to break it – the door was splintered all up one side, remember?’

‘So since you have all the best ideas, how are we going to get in when the adults couldn’t?’

‘It was an accident with Alex, I never—’

‘ I don’t care about anything you say. I wouldn’t care if you jumped off a cliff. I only want an answer.’

Calum Ian looks away to the sea: sad then angry then sad again. Finally he puts his head down on his lap for not knowing.

With a too-calm voice Elizabeth says, ‘When it happened, Dad wouldn’t let anyone in. There were too many people trying to get in: they were all banging on the main door, shouting. So he kept the keys on a chain. And the keys must still be with him.’

Alex chews the neck of his jumper.

‘We need to go inside the gym,’ she says. ‘And I’m sorry, but I’m not doing that. No way. I’m not going in there.’

Nobody wants to go. It would usually be Elizabeth but that chance is broken. We argue about ways of choosing, but all of them are unfair for Alex or me.

‘Why does he need insulin anyway?’ Calum Ian asks, now looking as big with regret as Elizabeth.

‘He can’t be healthy without it.’

‘Why?’

‘He needs it for his sugar to stay normal.’

‘Then he shouldn’t be eating sugar. No more sweets or treats. What can he have instead?’