Rob Ewing - The Last of Us

She only just beat me to it this time.

Next morning, for the first time, Alex misses his insulin. We watch as he eats his favourite breakfast – wafer biscuits with jam, dried apricots with juice – to see if he’ll start to become unwell or act strange.

All that happens is he gets fed up of all our staring, and takes his food off to a different room.

Nobody talks about what Calum Ian did with the dart. When it’s time to go he packs quiet and separate from the rest of us, talking only to Duncan and Alex.

His rucksack looks as heavy as it did before; and the smell on it is still strong with petrol.

When we start off on the road again he’s exactly the same as yesterday: holding back, always being last, watching. But now Elizabeth has slowed, too: though for why, to annoy him or to outdo him, I can’t tell.

Alex’s house is a mile up the road. It has a red roof, a garden around. There’s a trampoline blown on its side, jammed under a fence. His old bike is there, but rusted so much that we can’t turn the wheels or the steering.

We spray our perfume-hankies. Alex stays at the gate, nervously chewing his sleeve.

‘Please don’t be spraying petrol,’ he says, putting his hands together in prayer in front of Calum Ian.

Calum Ian just waves him away.

The house – has no smell. Calum Ian goes right in, takes off his hanky. He breathes deep. Then he comes back and claps Alex on the back like he’s a competition winner.

‘It’s all right.’

After this, ahead of schedule, Duncan takes out his spray-paint and sprays a gold Gon the door.

‘I’m the luckiest kid,’ Alex says.

In the hallway it only smells of coldness. His house reminds me of my old home, with its stairs, shoe rack, curtains. There’s a pair of Highland dancing shoes with red laces on the floor, which Alex says belonged to his big sister, Clare. I forgot or never knew in the first place he had a big sister. He was only ever Alex to me.

The living room has black leather chairs. There’s a scrunched yellow duvet on the longest sofa. On the floor, a mess of plastic aprons, masks, towels. Some of the towels have dirty bits on them, which seems to get Alex ashamed, because he kicks them into a corner.

We get on guard for finding something bad, but Alex says it was like this before: the same mess.

‘The masks were dumb,’ he says. ‘They made my face go hot and my nose itchy.’

‘What – you prefer being dead?’ Duncan asks.

‘Lots of dead people are still wearing them,’ Alex answers.

There’s a pile of Alex’s old DVDs on the floor. He looks through them, though we’ve found most of his favourites in other people’s homes. Elizabeth, meanwhile, looks in the kitchen for injection things. She opens the drawers as softly and as kindly as she can, for respect.

In one drawer, in a plastic box, she finds bandages, antiseptic creams. In another: tissues, candles, kids’ plasters with brave faces on them.

No insulin.

I stay in the living room beside Alex. He stares at the sofa, at the scrunched duvet. Then says, ‘This was where Mum was sick.’ He pulls back the duvet and calls out in surprise. ‘See I just found it, look! There’s her plate with the jam sandwich I made her!’

Duncan goes ahead to look. The sandwich isn’t a sandwich. It’s a shrivelled crisp of green-grey mould.

‘She never ate it,’ Alex says.

‘No wonder,’ Duncan laughs, trying a joke, then seeing that the not-eating is a subject Alex is sad about.

‘If only I’d made a better job,’ he says. ‘She might’ve had it and got her strength. She might’ve got better.’

Duncan forgets his joke. He puts an arm over Alex’s back instead. Alex says, ‘Auntie Jane was crying about us being in here, but she was too strict, wasn’t she?’

‘Strict? For what?’

‘For going away. When the men came they wouldn’t let me go with Mum. I told them I wouldn’t get sick, that I didn’t have a cold all summer. I said “Cross my heart, hope to die; stick a needle in my eye.” I even kicked the edge of the rug, but it was no use.’

‘They took your mum…’

‘So I stayed with Auntie Jane. Only she was too scared to inject me. After that I don’t remember.’

We cover the sandwich up. Alex pats the duvet like it’s a favourite friend, then frowns, calls himself eejit.

His sister Clare’s room is the first one upstairs. She has a sign Sellotaped to her door: PLEASE KNOCK BEFORE ENTERING and if I am not hereGO AND LO.O.K FOR ME. The OOs of LO.O.K have dots to turn them into accusing eyes.

There’s a bookcase, striped carpet, bed, wardrobe. She has a silver CD player. The CD inside is by Lady Gaga. Her bedsheets are pink. So’s the carpet.

We wait for Alex to decide what to do. For once he’s the boss; even Calum Ian waits.

After thinking about it, Alex goes to Clare’s bookcase to look through her books. He spends a long time there, then picks up something from the floor.

It’s a girl’s shoe: shiny black. Alex puts it back on the floor next to his own foot for measurement.

‘Her feet went less of a size,’ he says. ‘I never realised my big sister would go that way.’

Next along is his mum and dad’s bedroom. The duvet’s missing – it’s downstairs. The wardrobes emptied, with a lot of plastic bags of clothes on the floor. The bedside lamp, broken. Perfumes on a dressing table.

We follow him to his old room. There’s a sign on the door made of red card and gold tinsel which says Santa Stop Here . He has a small bed, and the wardrobe’s small too. There’s a teddy bear temperature-reader on a chest of drawers, which right now says COLD.

He opens his toybox. There are a lot of things inside for a boy. I want him to have a party of it, but he just stares at the contents. Then closes the box.

‘So this is my house,’ he says, circling his hands. ‘I hope you like it. It’s quite dark. Also, it feels lonelier than it did. But it’s a good house, and I’m proud of it.’

He sits on the toybox. All of a sudden the fun seems to melt away from his face, and he says, ‘What if they won’t understand? What if we’ve changed how we speak so much that when adults come to find us we’ll be talking a different language?’

Everybody goes quiet – maybe because there isn’t any way of proving that it couldn’t happen, other than it not being long enough for time.

‘ We’d know,’ Calum Ian says. ‘I’d tell you straight if you started talking rubbish. We’d give you a clap on the head to get you normal again.’

Alex doesn’t answer back. He gets up from the toybox and goes out to the hall.

We follow, and he stops on the stairs.

Still being in charge he points at Duncan like he’s the smaller kid then says: ‘You can be the one to put on my DVD.’

Duncan says, ‘You want a film?’

‘Not a film. Something else. It’s part of the worst. I’m not scared if you’re here. It’s downstairs.’

‘What worst—’

‘Downstairs.’

We follow him to the living room. After a time of chewing his sleeve Alex points to the DVD player then says, ‘Inside that.’

Duncan takes a metal ruler out of his rucksack. He uses it to break the lid of the DVD player.

There’s a disc inside: just silver, no film name. He hands it to Alex. Alex doesn’t want to touch it.

Duncan looks at us, puzzled, then goes back into his rucksack and takes out his portable DVD player. He connects the battery-pack, puts in the disc.

We try to bunch together by sitting on the floor and on the chair behind.

When the screen gets broken into choices we press PLAY.