Rob Ewing - The Last of Us

Yet Calum Ian sounds tired by his own words, as if he didn’t really want to be asking them.

He goes to the rocks, beyond. He’s gone for a moment, and I think he’s sulking, but then he comes back. He’s holding something in his hand.

‘We’ll draw straws.’

He’s got four bits of grass. Reluctantly, Elizabeth takes them from him.

She holds them up in her hand so they all stick up the same way, with the same thickness showing.

We each have a turn. Elizabeth doesn’t want Alex to draw at all, but Duncan says he has to.

No surprises then, when Alex chooses the shortest straw straight away.

He starts to cry.

Elizabeth shouts and grabs the straws back and throws them away. ‘Stop it, it’s not his fault. ’

Duncan gets up and begins walking alone back on the road to the school.

‘I’ll do it,’ he says, turning around. ‘It can be me, right? Nobody else needs to bother about trying.’

Calum Ian points at me.

‘No, she should. It’s her fault. You told them what you did to our house, Gloic ? Go on then! Tell her what you did to the pictures of our mum!’

Elizabeth doesn’t want to look at any of us.

‘It was you, you made me do it!’ Duncan shouts at Calum Ian from the road. ‘I never wanted to do it!’

We all wait on Calum Ian.

Finally, he bends down to pick up the straws.

He throws away the longest, one by one, until he’s left holding only the shortest one.

‘Me then.’

This time we don’t go in between the primary and the big school. Instead, we go straight through the main entrance, then in by the assembly hall. There’s a link corridor, then after that the door to the swimming pool. I remember from when we came before that its cover was left half-on, half-off.

The cover is still the same, only now the water’s gone pongy, stringy, grey-green.

From the lifeguard’s box Calum Ian borrows goggles. He already has a nose-clip on. He wraps his head and hair in lost property towels, then puts two lots of plastic bags on his feet, rolling elastic bands on top.

Lastly, he ties a perfume-hanky to his face.

‘Where are they.’

This is how he says it: not a question. Elizabeth has a firm mouth like she wants to stay calm.

‘OK. Go in. Right in, to the end. Dad’s in the last row. There’s a card to tell who he is. Remember I said about the orange plastic bags with clothes beside? Look inside his. You might get away with just looking there.’

‘Fine.’

‘I could draw you a map. Of the people. A plan?’

‘I’ll watch. For names. Where’s your mum?’

‘She’s on a side bed. At the side of the room. She’s not… in a bag, her clothes are still on. But it might be—’

‘I’m not scared. You don’t have to warn me about anything, I’m fine.’

‘Keep looking mostly at the ground. The flies might get on you so just keep your mouth—’

‘Stop bothering, I’m fine, I can do it myself.’

But truly, he doesn’t look fine. Calum Ian checks his nose-clip, then his goggles, at least ten times. After this he fusses with the plastic bags, breaking the elastic bands holding them on and having to put on new ones.

Before going through, Elizabeth gives him flowers to take in.

Then we all stand on the other side of the double doors and say good luck.

There’s a very bad smell: then an even worse smell as he passes through the two sets of doors. I don’t hear the sound of flies until he opens the second set.

Afterwards, he says it wasn’t hard, not really, though he’s gulping for air and forgot to leave the flowers.

‘That’s definitely the way to do it, definitely,’ he says. ‘If we ever needed, next time. Three plastic bags each foot would be better, remember that. It’s a long way to the end. There’s so many! I forgot about that man, sitting in the chair, he’s weird! Didn’t scare me, though! Then I thought someone had moved, but they couldn’t actually move, could they? I was only imagining, right?’

The flowers are crushed in his hand. He’s twisted them to shreds by holding them too tight. In the end he looks down and remembers what they are, were for.

‘Sorry,’ he says, to Elizabeth.

He keeps speaking fast: on and on about how crucial it is to keep on the goggles, though he could just as easily have done without. Finally he just sits and won’t stand up, not even when Elizabeth tries to help; instead, his eyes go sharp as he tells her to leave him alone.

‘You’ll want to know,’ he says, ‘there was a list of all the mums and dads. Saw my mum’s name.’ He does a so-what shrug. ‘Knew that, anyway. Knew she was there. At least Dad isn’t. At least Dad escaped, he’s out in the world, I know it. What? Stop all your bloody staring!’

We go back to the pool to wait.

When he comes out his face is red. Even so, he’s trying to smile, trying even harder to laugh.

He empties out a plastic bag at our feet.

Two sets of keys and a purse fall onto the tiles.

He still won’t look at me. Not even when I praise him for today’s top bravery. He’d usually say something, anything, even if it was just bad, but he doesn’t.

Around the front of the doctor’s practice there’s a lot of swirling dandelion clocks. The metal shutters are broken. Someone forced them up: with maybe a stone, or an axe, or a hammer. There are dents in the shutters where the silver’s been jabbed, but no right-through holes made.

Elizabeth stops at the sign by the door. Drs B & W Schofield. Her mum and dad, her dad’s letter first.

She touches the sign, rubs some of the salt-rust off. I touch the sign on my way past, too, to add my own respect.

I went in to see Elizabeth’s mum once, when she was a doctor. It was with a sore ear. She was busy, though not too fussy. Tall, with hair that smelt of perfume. When I saw her dad later for a cough, he showed me how his stethoscope worked. I only pretended to understand his instructions.

The air in the practice got old. Cobwebs stick to our faces as we walk in. The waiting room has signs, pictures on its walls: Nutrition in Pregnancy . SEE OUR NURSE FOR SMOKING CESSATION ADVICE. What’s pneumococcus? BREAST IS BEST!Our counsellor holds her clinics every Tuesday Evening. STAYING ACTIVE IN OLD AGE.

But then other signs, over the top of these, about what happened. They’re mostly in small letters, black and white. The advice in them never mattered. Or it came too late to matter.

The little play area’s in the corner. Coloured beads on wire. Train blocks. Books. The play area looks too tiny for anyone. There’s a yellow wooden stool, plus a green table, hardly big enough for one baby, let alone two.

The seats are shiny wood all around the walls. I remember sitting here before my injections.

I remember the other time me and Mum came, near the end. But I don’t want to remember that right now. It would only worry or upset Alex.

Someone – one of the adults – had tried to break into the dispensary. The wood of it got splintered around next to the lock, but it looks like they didn’t get in.

The keys work: first time.

We wait to see if there’s a puff of air, or a bad smell, but there isn’t.

Calum Ian goes first. There’s bits of crumbly wall, from where they tried to break the door. Apart from this, it’s like a new tomb in Egypt, with zero mess.

On shelves, lots of boxes of tablets, with strange names. AMITRIPTYLINE. BISOPROLOL. DETRUSITOL. IMDUR. MICROGYNON. ZOPICLONE. Alex says they sound like characters from Star Wars. For me, it’s more like ghosts or spooks from Howl’s Moving Castle.