Rob Ewing - The Last of Us

The person who did all of that: is that thing there. Could reach out, touch it. But it’s not her.

How right can it be that she can’t hold back my hand?

I’m in bed, with a knife from our kitchen drawer beside me, when they come home.

I clasp the knife tight – get ready to use it to defend myself – then I see it’s just Alex and Elizabeth.

‘Thank God you’re safe,’ she says.

Mairi comes in behind them. There isn’t the five-kid distance between her and them any more.

Somehow, when I didn’t notice, Elizabeth has taken the knife from me, put it somewhere else.

It takes me a while to pluck up my courage to get up, but in the end I find the MacNeil brothers have not come to our home. The others are sitting on cushions on the floor.

I want to tell them where I’ve been, but it’s too much to think of right now, so I don’t.

Mairi is wearing a pair of Alex’s trousers, plus Elizabeth’s old school jumper. She looks too small for the clothes, even though Alex is still small.

‘You decided she was safe?’ I ask.

Elizabeth fills my blue plastic bowl with rice pudding, then hands it over.

‘Decided we were all in the same struggle,’ she answers. Then she looks across at Mairi. ‘Decided we just had to take the chance. Decided we couldn’t leave her.’

I watch Mairi: with her clear, clean face, scooping rice with her fingers. So she’s the one that breaks Elizabeth’s rules. Maybe that’s what she tells us in the end.

‘Where are the MacNeil brothers?’

‘Gone to their house.’

‘It wasn’t my fault. Calum Ian should’ve used his inner voice, not his outside one.’

Elizabeth doesn’t agree, or disagree. Instead she says, ‘We had another house to check. Remember?’

She and Alex take it in turns to tell me about the last house. How it was at the end of a road going to the ferry terminal. How it had windows with torn curtains, and a boat in the garden filled with orange flowers.

How it didn’t have any smell, not even in the room where they found dead rabbits in a cage.

Then, last of all, she tells me how it had insulin. But not in a fridge: in a plastic box in a bathroom cabinet.

I get up to dance on the bed for them. They smile but don’t want to join in too much.

Elizabeth takes out the insulin for us to look at. It’s called INSULATARD. Then she fetches her books to solve whether or not it’s the right kind.

‘We decided on the way back that there was good news and bad news,’ Alex says.

‘The good news first, please.’

‘The insulin!’

‘OK… so then what’s the bad news?’

He chews his sleeve and looks away, like they left the bad news in another room.

Then he admits: ‘We only got a single glass. Plus: it’s gone cloudy.’

He holds up the glass to show me.

The water inside it looks full of cobwebs.

I look at Elizabeth, but she’s gone back to reading her books.

When I ask Alex if he’s had any yet, he rolls up the front of his jumper, and points to a swollen red spot just beneath his belly-button.

‘She gave me a test.’

The test has gone sore. When I try to press it Alex pulls back. He tugs his jumper down again.

‘Was only a first test.’

I ask if Elizabeth is planning to give him more, but she won’t tell me or talk about it.

Mairi has been put back on the other side of a divide – a skipping rope on the floor – only this time, she’s just one kid distant. For the illness we had it might work, though nobody really knows for sure.

I ask if she still hasn’t said anything, and Alex says no. He tells me that she followed them home, and would only allow Elizabeth to get close – nobody else – and that sometimes she would start to miss her old house and would try to get them all to turn around.

‘Calum Ian was strange,’ he says.

‘How?’

‘He didn’t want her. Mairi. And he was talking funny. He was—’

Elizabeth holds up her hand for Alex to be quiet.

They both keep looking at the door, like they’re worried someone might come through it.

‘He thought we were too slow,’ Alex says.

Now he goes and sits on the couch beside Elizabeth.

When I think about it, I’m surprised by the look of her – she looks worn, or tired-looking, maybe even sick.

Alex asks her, ‘Did your leg get worse?’

She pulls a face, then takes off her sock and shoe, and rolls up her trouser leg.

Her right leg above the knee went swollen. Just like Duncan’s face did. Just like the spot on Alex’s stomach.

But this redness is much bigger. Much darker.

We stare at it, wondering what it means.

Alex: ‘Is it healing yet?’

Elizabeth laughs but with sarcasm and says, ‘’Course, sure. I only had to walk on it all day to make it better.’ But then she adds, ‘Don’t worry, I’ve been checking it. Drew around the edges. You’re meant to do that, to watch in case it gets bigger.’

‘Sorry.’

‘It isn’t your fault. It was Calum Ian and his stupid dart.’

I remember about it: when he stabbed her leg, back when he was trying to get me.

We watch as she puts on cream, then a brown plaster. This last bit hurts and she has to bite the skin of her arm until the leg is wrapped up again.

‘Better now,’ she says, blinking tears.

She puts her sock back on. It’s crusty and smelly from where the redness has started to make liquid. Maybe she’s going to wash that later?

‘Sometimes I don’t think I can—’ she stops – looks quick at all of us, seeing if we heard her or not.

Nobody asks what she was going to say – because nobody wants to know the things Elizabeth can’t do.

To make her feel better I tell her about my memory of her mum and dad.

It was at the end: after I was put in the Cròileagan.

My window looked out on the school; I tell her I peeled back the plastic cover, and saw them.

‘What were they doing?’ she asks.

‘They were meeting the ambulance, the police. Your dad kept giving out white cards, and the people would go in one way or the other. I remember that.’

‘How did they look?’

It feels like something I have to get right. I try to think of all the names for the ways a person can be.

‘Helpful?’

She smiles at this. I notice how puffy and dirty her hands got.

‘Lastly, I saw your dad. But it was from the side, so I didn’t see if he was happy or sad. He was helping your mum to walk. I thought they were having a hug first, but not in the street, surely? Sorry I saw that.’

Now her lips have gone dry like crinkled paper.

‘Don’t be sorry,’ she says. ‘You’ve given me something to remember. It’s a help.’

She gets up, and tries to walk with her sore leg, holding our beds to turn a circle on the floor.

‘One day this is all going to be better,’ she says. ‘We just need to get through the hard bit first.’

I don’t understand what she means about there being a hard bit. But I don’t want to ask her, either, in case I find out sooner than I want.

Before bed Alex gets one more test.

Elizabeth chooses a faraway part of his stomach from the last, while I distract him with juice.

But again – it hurts.

The redness this time begins almost at once, and gets sore enough to make Alex cry out.

‘Don’t want any more tests.’ He tucks his jumper firmly down inside his trousers. ‘Let’s find some other houses to check instead, all right?’

Elizabeth just packs away his injection kit.

We don’t get to sleep until late. It takes Mairi an age to get satisfied about bed. First she wants our type of bed: then she wants to make a nest for herself, like in her old home: using a box and blankets and last of all pulling a pillow over the door to seal herself in.