Rob Ewing - The Last of Us

‘ Ah why are men such filthy pigs? A whole ocean for their excreta, and still they do it in a bottle.’

She holds up the bottle and shouts across to Mr MacNeil: ‘Ho, Roddy? Is this your handiwork?’

Mr MacNeil, Duncan’s dad, drifts in. He examines the bottle like it’s the rarest treasure.

‘Certainly mine’s more luminous than that.’ He holds it up to the light. ‘And I’ve a preference for cola bottles when I’m passing water.’

Mrs Grant dumps the bottle in his bag.

Follow Seamus Cowan. Can smell his sweat, mixed with the sea and oilskin-reek.

‘Will take him out, soon as he learns,’ Duncan’s dad is saying, to Seamus. ‘Not before. There’s no excuse for the eldest son. Look what happened to my father, eh? So now there’s the swim-pool, he has no excuse.’

‘But you can be too hard on the boy, no?’ Seamus says. ‘Young Calum Ian looks right fed up with himself. Getting out, even on the bay, giving him a taste of it, that would pull him along don’t you think?’

‘I disagree. He needs to learn his swimming first. Then he goes fishing. That’s my choice.’

‘Sure, but you have your ain mind.’

Mum – even this last normal memory told tales about what would happen. The lack of swimming became important for us later on, as you’ll find out.

And I never forgot what Mrs Grant said about germs – you can’t see them but they see you fine – although understanding this, really understanding this was always going to be the one big problem for us.

It took us a day to pluck up the courage to leave. With our school lessons, and shopping, and our homes, we’d made a bit of life that felt normal. So now the thought of going away: to the places we don’t know, past the safe edge of our village, makes everyone worry for what we’ll find now that we’re forced to go and see.

We’re nearly ready to leave – when Alex goes missing.

I find him hiding under his bed, in the thick of a mess of dusty toys. Only he’s not playing: he’s just looking up, at the wooden boards holding up the mattress he sleeps on.

‘Wonder what it’s like to die,’ he says.

I try to reach him, but he just shuffles further in.

‘Don’t know,’ I answer. ‘Never did it. Not even when everybody else did.’

‘I think it’s like your DS. When you take out the game, and the screen freezes. It’s like that in real life. Your eyes keep seeing their last thing for ever.’

It’s strange – like another idea of his, that lava is just beneath the pavement. This one sounds half-true.

Me: ‘What if you saw a bit of dog shit then you died? You’d see dog shit for ever.’

His eyes warm up to an almost-smile. ‘Or if you saw a fat man with a fat arse?’

Me: ‘A famous person farting in the bath.’

Alex: ‘The Queen?’

Me: ‘Good choice. You have to be careful what to see.’

Alex: ‘Our mums and dads?’

Me: ‘ Best choice. You just have to get the choice right, see? Then everything’s OK.’

We bunch together in the gap by the beds. I see the broken rim of Alex’s bedside cabinet. There’s still a red smudge on his carpet from the spilled food dye.

Alex must be looking at this too, because he says: ‘I get unwell without my injections.’

He lets me link my arm in his. ‘We’re going to get some. We could be at your home by tonight even.’

His eyes go bright when I mention home. But the brightness of them goes out just as quick, so I’m left noticing how dirty around his mouth is.

‘Do we have to go to my old house?’

‘You don’t want to?’

I remind him we need to look for insulin. He gathers up a ball of dust and says, ‘Don’t think my mum and dad are alive. And you know what else? I worry really about finding them when we get to my old home.’

He comes out, brushing off his trousers. Then he brushes his hands, as if he’s showing that we settled the business. Still, he looks unsure.

‘What if you stayed seeing a bad thing?’

‘You worrying again?’

He kicks the wooden stump of our bunk beds. ‘To see a bad thing for ever – that would be the same as going to hell wouldn’t it?’

I want to argue against this – but Alex only smiles, the way adults did when they were just pretending to agree – and we have to be leaving anyway.

Mum’s van is where it always is. Like every other car there’s bird shit and cat shit over it, and the tyres have gone flat.

She must’ve stopped using the car, because she wouldn’t have let standards slip so far. She liked to keep things clean, shipshape.

Mike the stand-in postman left Mum’s laminate maps in the van before he left us.

He went back to Oban, so we didn’t get to go to Glasgow, and we didn’t get shopping for Christmas. At the time I thought this was the worst thing to happen, but now it’s become small beside all the other stuff.

The van door’s stiff and creaks loud. There’s still letters, undelivered. Old elastic bands on the floor. The seat has Mum’s smell, sadly gone quiet now. I find a scrunchy on the floor which smells so much of her I can’t stand it.

Calum Ian and Elizabeth whistle at the laminate maps as if they’re treasure, which I suppose they are.

I try to tell Elizabeth that Alex got sad – but she shushes me. While they get busy puzzling the streets and places I whisper an ask in Elizabeth’s ear.

‘All right, but be quick about it,’ she says.

My home once-upon-a-time already has a Psprayed by me on the door. You get to spray your old home, that’s the rule. So I sprayed Pfor perfect, because it was my real home in the world before.

Houses are Gfor Good if they don’t have a smell or a dead body. Bfor Bad if they do. It lets us know where we’ve been, and if we have to go back there, what we’ll find.

Except for the curly Gthat I sprayed on Calum Ian and Duncan’s home. That broke all the rules, even though I wasn’t thinking about rules or anything when I did it.

‘Hullo?’

Nobody answers.

In the kitchen there’s dirty washing in the sink. Sinks can smell, though ours doesn’t. Mum’s grey pants and bras are on a clothes horse. The tablecloth with those pen marks she scolded me for. Our folding chairs. The bit of wallpaper I used to peel. She scolded me for that, too.

In the living room there’s six Christmas cards on the mantelpiece. Season’s Greetings , says one. Greetings here doesn’t mean crying or meeting but Happy Returns.

There’s the Christmas tree. Now I remember her putting it up, on our last night together. Plus the broken boxes, including the box for my game, which she flattened then tried to make good again right at the end.

Mum’s boots; her spare post office jacket. That smells of wool and oil and being in the rain.

Upstairs, everything got small. My room. Most of all I see the stickers I shouldn’t’ve put on the wall. Left-alone bits of Lego. My Sleeping Beauty costume, my armbands for swimming. Everything with dust on it. There wasn’t as much dust last time we came in.

My best CD. Mum bought me Queen Greatest Hits. It’s only the case, the CD proper is at our new home. It gets ten stars from everyone, apart from Alex who doesn’t like the bit where the man sings ‘I don’t like Star Wars ’.

The bed feels cold, which is wrong because it’s summer. It doesn’t feel like my bed. It doesn’t feel like my room.

In the cobweb-dirt underneath I find two things: my teddy-chimp called Tom. Then an old plastic sword that Alex could like. I give Tom a cuddle, but his eyes are just stitches crossed so I decide not to save him.