Rob Ewing - The Last of Us

We follow them for a bit, and I say they’ll not be wanted if they come to visit later. Calum Ian makes an O with his mouth to show he doesn’t care. Duncan has gone back to being invisible.

‘Why’d you even collect petrol?’ I shout. ‘Your last fire didn’t work.’

Calum Ian: ‘So we’re going to make the next one bigger. Plus I got a better idea for how to start it.’

‘Your ideas never work.’

Now I get annoyed that they won’t share food or plans. So when they’re not looking I throw a stone which whizzes past Calum Ian’s head. He just waves back.

Elizabeth is waiting for us at home. We tell her about the badly shared hot dogs and broth and icing sugar. She doesn’t say much, just tells us how clever we were with our mission in the first place. Turns out, though, she’s been New Shopping – and on her own.

There are new sheets on Alex’s bed, plus tins of fruit and peas and carrots, and packet soups and biscuits. It’s a very, very good result!

We don’t ask where she went shopping, and she doesn’t offer to tell. We look through some of the other things: candles, raisins, ancient treacle, coffee filter papers, even two packets of Jammie Dodgers.

Alex: ‘Were these from a good house? I mean, were they opened already or near to—’

‘All houses are good,’ Elizabeth says quick, holding up her hand for no more questions.

‘Can there be poison that gets—’

‘ Shut up , OK?’

For dinner we have to put all the food we might eat in a square for choosing. With the power of three we decide on chicken soup, beans on crackers, then raisins dipped in treacle. I like to spend ages reading the sides of the packets. Ingredients. Contents. Est weight. Best before.

Me: ‘You know why they call them ingredients?’

Elizabeth: ‘What’s your idea again?’

Me: ‘Because it’s the stuff that makes you greedy. In-GREEDY-ents.’

Elizabeth does a half-and-half smile.

I go on reading the packets as she makes our soup. Wheatgerm, rice syrup, flavourings, colourings, E116. This is how clever the world once was! Not just cream with chicken. Your statutory rights. What about statutory wrongs? Customer queries, call this number. I’ve tried to call these numbers before, on our spare charged-up phone, but there’s never any answer.

Just when I think Calum Ian and Duncan aren’t coming because of the stone I threw, they do come.

They smell of bonfire. We don’t ask what they’ve been doing. Their knees are scuffed and dirty and Duncan has black scorches on his shoes. In the shadows made by our torches his skin looks even bumpier.

We’ve all got scars: on our faces, on our backs and necks, from the sickness. I remember a lady on TV saying that the worse your scars, the worse the illness.

Duncan got the worst of all of us. After that it’s Elizabeth, then Calum Ian, then me, then Alex.

Adults and littler kids had the worst scars of all. That’s why they became so sick. That’s why we have two separate places to go and remember them. See them.

We eat dinner, which is great because it’s warm, then Calum Ian takes the best seat on the couch and says, ‘Press play, Bonus Features.’

Alex gets called Bonus Features because that’s what he thought the seventh Star Wars film was called. He’s in charge of our battery-powered DVD player. Tonight he does adverts, by using some recordings we found, and then we get a film: Tin Toy from the Toy Story DVD.

It’s very short though, and awful soon it’s over.

Elizabeth: ‘OK, batteries out.’

Both Duncan and Alex thump their arms and feet on the carpet.

‘No no no!’ shouts Alex.

‘You’re not the ruler of me!’ says Duncan.

Alex becomes unmanageable for a bit. We try to ignore him but then Elizabeth remembers: his injection. He’s in a different mood from this morning, though, and he struggles and cries and Calum Ian has to get involved to hold him down, which only makes things worse.

Afterwards Alex rubs his stomach and cries.

‘I forgot not to be angry,’ he says.

For a treat he’s allowed batteries in his DS. For me, I decide to draw, so I tear a stamp from the book of stamps we found, and stick it in my drawing jotter. Beneath it, under the Queen’s head, I draw a fat body with an old woman’s stern hands and knees. Mum once said that the Queen had jewellery dripping off her, so on her wrists I draw pearl bracelets with richness oozing.

Alex: ‘The Queen lived on a farm in London.’

For some reason Calum Ian and Elizabeth find this funny. I find it a bit ignorant.

‘D’you think the Queen died?’ Alex asks.

‘She was old,’ Elizabeth answers. ‘But her doctors would be the best. So maybe she didn’t.’

Alex puts down his DS. ‘I think she did die. I think she got sick. I think there’s no Queen.’

Calum Ian: ‘What about the Prime Minister? I bet they put him underground, miles under where there was no bad stuff could happen. I bet he’s still there, eating apples, drinking milk. And I hope he chokes on some of that milk, and a bit of apple gets lodged and kills him.’

He chucks a rubber ball against the wall. When it comes back he catches it, nifty.

‘Who’s stronger – Santa or God?’ Alex asks Elizabeth.

‘That’s a hard one…’

‘Do you think Santa died?’

‘ No, of course he didn’t. Santa can’t die.’

‘So then why didn’t he come last Christmas?’

Elizabeth sits forward, sighs. ‘I suppose I could say… well he’s a supernatural being, like a god really, so he can’t truly die. He’s protected by force fields. He’ll come this year, just you wait.’

Duncan makes a sound of spit in his throat which is disrespectful to Santa. Elizabeth does her frown at him to tell him not to give the game away.

Alex goes back to his DS for a bit. We hear swooshes and a beep-countdown then the game-over theme.

‘I absolutely hate Santa,’ he says.

Elizabeth: ‘No you don’t.’

‘Yes I do. I hate him and I hate God. And I hate baby Jesus and I hate the tooth fairy.’

‘You forgot the Easter bunny,’ Duncan says, doing his sound of spit again.

Alex says nothing.

‘Who wants a bedtime snack?’ Elizabeth asks.

By bedtime snack she means supper. By dinner she usually means tea. And when she says lunch, really that means dinner. It’s her own habit. I learnt that Elizabeth is in a separate country, and time, when it comes to food, because she’s from England.

Now Calum Ian calls her an incomer – which is kind of true, but not truly kind.

‘ Incomers like their own name for food,’ he says.

Elizabeth looks away sadly, so I decide to stand up for her at once: ‘When Elizabeth’s mum and dad came to the island, they decided it was too risky for babies to be born here,’ I remind Calum Ian. ‘This meant that I got born in Glasgow. Same with all the other kids at school. So we are all incomers. Which makes you the odd-one-out.’

Alex claps; Elizabeth smiles. Calum Ian gives me the rude two-finger sign.

We turn on the gas fire. It dances blue when I blow on it. I almost prefer it to the real fire. Elizabeth gets out the sleeping bags, and we gather in to toast biscuits.

In the fire-dark her skin looks bumpy like Duncan’s. You can’t tell where the black or the blue of her eyes are, which is kind of scary, so I try not to look.

‘Do you think your mum and dad are dead?’ I ask her, without even knowing I was going to.

This is against the rules. Nobody says so.

Elizabeth burns and burns her biscuit. The smoke of it gets up my nose. She could be waxwork.

‘They are dead,’ she says.