The Last of Us

Twelve days ago

Duncan spent a week at our home: getting his energy back, growing strength enough again to walk around. His face went from red, to scabbed, to saggy. He stayed with us until two mornings ago, when Elizabeth wanted him to get dressed. Duncan preferred his pyjamas: said he would put his clothes on if he could sleep in them from now on. Elizabeth said no way. That started an argument: and when Elizabeth put up new rules about getting along and give and take, the MacNeil brothers left us.

Calum Ian never mentioned what I did to his camera: and Duncan seemed to forget I ever told him. So after they left I decided that everything was OK: but that I would still try to make up to them by sharing my food, and not minding if they stole mine or didn’t share in return.

Now we’re back in school, in the P5 classroom for Duncan’s first day. This room works because it’s not anyone’s old class. Also, it has a picture-roll going around the walls with the Gaelic letters on. My favourite is B, for Beith, which is birch. My least favourite is H, for heather, Ur, because that isn’t even a tree, it’s a bush.

Part of the ceiling got broken. Elizabeth says it’s because slates come off and no one fixes them. But at least the windows are fine. I’ve learnt that once a window’s gone everything starts to come to pieces.

‘Facts and opinions,’ Elizabeth is saying. ‘Does anyone know the difference?’

We’re looking through our folders: the stuff our teachers were keeping back to show the parents. I found mine in Mrs Leonard’s cupboard. We spent too long already staring at the things we used to care about, and looking for the signatures of our parents at the bottom of the assessment sheets – so Elizabeth changed topic.

Alex: ‘That is too hard to know.’

Calum Ian: ‘It’s easy. Facts are real, see? They can only be one thing. They’re top trumps to opinions every time. Opinions aren’t as high up as facts.’

Elizabeth: ‘Examples?’

We each have a turn. FACT – the giant tortoise can live to over 150 years of age. But OPINION – hippos are pretty. FACT – koalas usually sleep during the day. But OPINION – everyone should clean their ears. This last one, put forward by Alex, gets us into bother, because no one can decide if it’s a FACT or an OPINION.

Alex: ‘Mum used to clean my ears on the edge of the corner of the towel. That’s a fact.’

Calum Ian: ‘My dad said you don’t need to do it. Opinion.’

Me: ‘It smells bad but is useful. Fact.’

Elizabeth: ‘Maybe it can be both fact and opinion?’

Calum Ian: ‘No way. It can’t be both.’

Me: ‘What about God and Santa?’

Calum Ian: ‘God’s a fact. Santa’s an opinion that you only get with babies. So who’s a little baby?’

I don’t want to say that I am. Neither does Alex. He just looks at the dirt on the floor.

‘Maybe Santa can be both?’ Elizabeth says, as usual offering an answer to help us agree. ‘Here’s a fact: if you believe in something then it might just be true. If you don’t: well, that’s only your opinion.’

Alex: ‘What about zombies?’

Elizabeth: ‘The rule doesn’t apply for zombies.’

Just for cheek we find lots of other exceptions to mess with Elizabeth’s rule: like ghosts, werewolves and mermaids.

She gets grumpy and says to forget it.

‘Is heaven a fact or opinion?’ Alex asks. ‘Because if Mum isn’t still moving, she must not be breathing. I’m quite bothered if heaven is not a fact.’

Calum Ian: ‘Don’t worry, Bonus Features. If she’s not in heaven then she’s in hell.’

When Alex looks upset by this Elizabeth squeezes his hand. For distraction she asks instead if anyone wants to remember. When nobody volunteers she says, ‘Duncan did it last time, for the group. That was very brave of him. If there isn’t a person who definitely wants to go, then maybe I should?’

No one tells her not to.

Alex: ‘Please don’t remember any bad bits.’

‘OK,’ she says, and stands at the front of the class, folding her fingers like Canon MacAllan used to do.

‘I remember,’ she says, looking nervous. ‘First I remember that Mum had green eyes. She had kind hands. Ach! How can hands be kind? Bloody crazy of me.’

It didn’t sound crazy till she said it.

‘Before we arrived, Dad looked up the island in his map-book. It was away right far off the edge! I could never believe that – I mean, going to a place that far away.’

‘You were the one far from us,’ Calum Ian says.

Elizabeth points his way as if to say: fair enough.

‘Mum called it a Big Step. When we got here: best of all she loved the beaches. She liked it when I saw the seals on Curachan. And she was really pleased that I liked the school.’ She winds her hands around to show it’s where we are. ‘Specially as you can do projects. This first badge here – see? I got that because I did the tuck-shop kitty. This one, because I learnt about wind turbines and hydro schemes and helped plant the wildlife garden.’

She passes around her two badges. The first one says BANKER. The second, ECO-STUDENT. When she sees that no one is writing down her memories for her, she stops to write them down for herself.

‘Never minded winter,’ she goes on. ‘Christmas! Only Dad didn’t like winter so much. He wanted to get back to Bristol, because it was less windy, less rainy there. But me and Mum had other ideas. He said, “We’ll see out two years.” Pretty soon we’d been here three.’

‘Dad always said you could tell the incomers,’ Calum Ian grumbles. ‘They only last one winter.’

Me: ‘Weren’t you even listening? Didn’t you turn up your ears? She said it was three already.’

Calum Ian: ‘I can say what I want, Gloic.’

Me: ‘You were speaking stupid.’

This becomes an argument. When we begin to shout loud at one another Duncan gets up, and goes to the fiddle cupboard and takes out a fiddle.

It’s out of tune, so he scratches it like there’s a monster coming. We all stop talking. We start laughing instead, until it’s a funny sort of riot.

Duncan looks surprised to have made us laugh. He makes more monster noises, until it’s past funny, then tunes up the fiddle proper.

When it sounds right he plays ‘Puff the Magic Dragon’, slow and sad.

I used to laugh at the kiss-face Duncan made when playing, but now I don’t.

He plays through twice then stops. Then he cuffs the strings and plucks them without any tune or song.

‘I’m going to be world champion on the fiddle,’ he says. ‘For Mum. For Dad. That’s my ambition. Then I’ll come back and teach all the new young kids.’

‘Remember Mr Patterson?’ Elizabeth asks. ‘He was our fiddle teacher.’

We all think of him. I thought he smelt funny. Mum said his smell was the water of life.

‘I remember him at the summer concert,’ Calum Ian says. ‘All the parents were in. It’s crazy: thinking about all the mums and dads. Just sitting there.’

Duncan puts his fiddle away. He goes back to his seat. Elizabeth goes quiet as she writes out her memories, then pins her badges back onto her jumper.

‘I’m remembering next.’

It’s Calum Ian. He does a fake bow then goes to the front. Elizabeth looks pleased: she quickly tears him a new sheet of paper, and gets ready with her pen to write down every last detail of his experiences.

It takes him ages. Finally he says, ‘So they’re dead. They’ve all died. Or where the fuck are they? I’ve realised that Dad’s maybe in hospital. That’s why he can’t get to us, right? He got sick, he could’ve lost his strength, or lost his memory? Maybe if… if he fell off his boat, when he got to the mainland… could’ve bumped his head. That’s what happens with a bump, your memory goes until it comes back weeks later.’

He begins to breathe fast, like he’s running. He opens his mouth, puffs out. Then he says, ‘Want memories? Right. A big thing I remember is the first house we shopped in. Uncle Frank’s. Who wants to talk about that? Aye? OK, me then. His front door was shut. So we opened it and his dog Mo ran past.’

Duncan is saying no. Alex pulls up his jumper and holds it against his ears.

‘Well, it’s a fucking memory, isn’t it? That’s what we’re doing, you should listen.’ He kicks up a torn bit of floor then says, ‘My one true memory, write it! The dog had been eating him. She never hurt anybody, not before. But she had to eat him, to survive. Write it down, quick! It goes in the book. Before we all forget.’

Elizabeth isn’t writing.

Calum Ian shrugs and goes back to his seat.

Alex is still too scared to uncover his ears, or take his head from the desk-top.

Nobody wants to talk.

I turn around to look at Calum Ian. He’s like a drawing where the eyes don’t want to be angry or sad but both. I watch him, only because I’m nervous, and not for being sympathetic.

‘Stop looking at me, Gloic,’ he says.

I turn back away.

Calum Ian’s chair scrapes. He stomps to the front. Now he’s glaring at me.

‘Had a camera,’ he says. ‘With the last pictures ever of Mum and my sister Flora in it. Some of my best memories were there. Only now I’ve lost them.’

He’s looking at me. My hands have gone cold, but my face feels red hot.

‘Sorry,’ Elizabeth says. ‘I don’t understand. Where did you leave the camera?’

‘Left it in the sea.’

‘You left it… how in the sea?’

‘I threw it in the sea.’

‘Why?’

Calum Ian keeps looking very definitely at me. Then he clicks his fingers at Duncan.

‘Out of here, Sidekick. A-mach à seo!’

But Duncan doesn’t want to go. He stays in his seat, until Calum Ian has to grab the neck of his jumper to pull him up and away.

When they’re gone we decide school’s over. We go to the library for a bit, but the darkness today is too spooky, so we go back outside.

Alex goes to the playpark, but none of us can find the fun in it. It starts to rain, so we hide under the chute. Elizabeth has made packed lunches for us: crackers, dried apricots and custard pots to drink. We get to eat the portions she made for Calum Ian and Duncan.

‘Why’d he throw his camera in the sea?’ Elizabeth asks. ‘If he cared that much about the pictures? It’s senseless. He can be too angry sometimes.’

To answer would be admitting guilt. I drink custard instead, though with only half my appetite.

We realise Alex is still thinking about Calum Ian’s uncle and the dog Mo when he says, ‘Dogs are as dangerous as wolves, for true this time.’

Elizabeth: ‘I hope you can just forget about it. Anyway, dogs were bred for being tame. They don’t just go back to being wolves.’

Alex: ‘What about a hungry dog?’

Elizabeth: ‘I think we should change topic.’

We don’t want to go home, not just yet, so it’s up for a vote. Alex doesn’t want to send messages; and I don’t want to go shopping, Old or New. In the end Elizabeth takes charge and says that, because we’re close by, we should go and pay our respects to the Last Adult.

She’s in the Community Centre. This has the Cròileagan, where we went to nursery, but also has the soft-play room and the café, where you can buy the best fish and chips in town.

The Last Adult is in the soft-play room.

The main door went stiff. Inside the hall are lots of Christmas decorations. There’s a silver tree with baubles and tinsel on. Some of the red tinsel has fallen off. A reindeer and a sugar-plum fairy are on the floor.

There’s a blue face-mask on the mat, with spots of blood on it, gone black long ago. Heaped along one wall are lots of boxes, orange bags. We opened a bag once: inside were plastic sheets and aprons and cartons of gloves, old and used. Some of the bags smelt very bad.

We go in on tiptoes. Elizabeth opens the soft-play door. There’s a smell, though only faint. There’s the ball-pool, in the far corner, heaped with dirty blankets and towels.

We found her on a sleeping mat, beside the pool.

Back then none of us understood about bodies. You just leave them alone – apart from flowers – and close the door so dogs don’t get in. We wanted to bury her, but nobody could pluck up the courage to touch her. So we found a pile of stones outside, which the adults were using to build a not-ready car park.

With plastic buckets and trolleys from the Co-op, we carried in the stones, and covered her up.

Now all we can see of her is this pile of stones. Our cards and presents are there on top, with our old flowers. I notice that the last of the flowers are already dry, and I feel a bit sorry for her. It’s been weeks since we came.

The room has orange curtains, nearly shut. A sharp line of sunlight finding the pile of stones, like God keeping an eye on her.

Alex: ‘Tell me how you knew she was the last adult again.’

Elizabeth: ‘Because she was still breathing.’

Alex: ‘Did she say anything?’

Elizabeth: ‘No. Like I said before, no. She was just breathing. It sounded… bubbly. She was the woman who looked after the last of us. I knew her face. It was her.’

Alex: ‘How did you help her?’

Elizabeth: ‘I left her some juice, crisps. And water. Because that’s what she did for us.’

We stand around the pile of stones. I wonder again who the Last Adult was. Elizabeth just says she doesn’t know.

Alex goes back to the Christmas tree. He returns with the sugar-plum fairy and lays it on top of the stones.

‘Wasn’t she my mum?’ he asks.

‘No, she wasn’t. I’ve seen your mum. I mean, I’d know her. It wasn’t her.’

When we pay respects we have to stand and say nothing. During the time this takes my eyes get used to the dark. There’s things left by the Last Adult: Bible, photos, dirty plastic cups, scrunched tissues, a water bottle. The water inside went brown. Plus a packet of tablets, the same type we keep seeing in people’s houses.

There’s also a pad of paper with all the last-alive kids’ names on it. Our names are there. The other kids’ names have been scored off. There’s numbers next to the scorings-off. I ask Elizabeth what the numbers mean.

‘The dates that they fell asleep,’ she says.

There are other rooms in the Community Centre. But nobody wants to go there. That’s where we were sick. Where we nearly died. Where the others died. And what if the thing that made us sick is still there? No way.

It’s a relief to get back outside. As we cross the not-ready car park I ask Elizabeth about her afterwards memories. She’s told us before, but still I ask: just like when I used to ask Mum about being born, over and over, just to hear about things that happened and I didn’t know.

‘It was very cold,’ she says, ‘so then… so I woke up, it was dark. All the lights were not working.’

‘After that?’

‘Then nothing. Maybe I fell asleep… I woke again and it was light. I remember having crusty eyes, not being able to see. I remember going from room to room. And then I heard someone crying.’

‘Who was that?’

‘That was Alex. He had on his Cròileagan orange vest, the ones the little kids used for crossing the road. There was a label on it with his name. Alex. He was beside Duncan. Duncan had a label too, though not a vest. Duncan was very sick. But he got better, so that’s great. Calum Ian was in another room. He woke up as soon as I talked to him. He said he was extremely thirsty.’

‘Then?’

‘We found a torch. We found some food. We got boxes from the cupboard, they used to be full of paper towels. We got inside them. They kept us perfectly warm. That’s why I never ever throw away cardboard boxes.’

‘You found me.’

‘Yes. We looked around the rooms. You were in the last one. You were hiding under a table. Didn’t see me. Or you looked right through me, I don’t know. We gave you some biscuits, juice. You didn’t say anything. You didn’t have a label or a vest, so I had to find your name on the list of kids that the Last Adult had beside her.’

‘I remember dogs barking.’

‘For true. There were dogs and cats trapped in houses. We let out as many as we could.’

‘And I remember the cows, from way over at the farm. They were making a racket.’

‘Because nobody had milked them.’

‘The only thing I don’t remember is when Mum said goodbye. Don’t remember her telling me to wait. Is it just going to be a test of patience?’

Elizabeth frowns at me, then agrees that it is a test.

Everything changes when we get home.

Everything changes for ever.

At first we don’t notice anything different. Home just looks like it always does: quite a bit messy, which makes me think about Elizabeth’s first rule: Tidy up.

Then we see smashed things: and I know at once it isn’t just mess.

Funny how some things you can’t know all at once. It takes maybe the third or fourth try. It’s maybe even my fifth look that tells me things went very bad.

Elizabeth goes and sits on the floor. There’s a dirty mess on my bed. Heaps of stones and dirt from the garden. A teddy covered in blue paint. This isn’t so terrible. But my pencils: snapped. My pillow: jam spilt on it.

This is enough to make me sad – but then I see that Elizabeth is staring at something else. For the first time, for me, a bit of good news. They got my bed, but the wrong bedside cabinet. Alex must’ve left his book – there it is, Dr Dog – on my cabinet. Thinking wrongly, they tipped up and smashed all the stuff in his instead.

Me: ‘It’s better news for me.’

‘Shut up,’ Elizabeth hisses. ‘Shut your face up.’

This shocks me: she never talks like this. I want to tell her how sad she makes me feel by saying that, but she’s just staring at the floor beside Alex’s cabinet.

‘There’s red on the floor,’ I say, taking my chance to talk again. ‘It’s a very bad thing to spill the food dye for our water, isn’t it?’

Elizabeth: ‘You know what this is? On the floor, over here?’

Me: ‘No.’

Elizabeth: ‘It’s Alex’s insulin.’

Me: ‘But what’s it doing down over there?’

Elizabeth: ‘It’s smashed that’s what!’

Me: ‘Well… but did you not keep it in the cool box?’

Elizabeth: ‘I did. But that was before I brought it here for safe keeping.’

She doesn’t want to hear me say he might be all right without it. She isn’t interested when I act brave and start to clean my pillow. Instead, Elizabeth looks furious.

‘Of course he needs it,’ she says. ‘This is bad, this is very bad… Have you any idea why they’d do this?’

‘I – no.’

‘So here’s something you should know. There’s only one vial left. That’s in his pen, and that’s only quarter full. You know how long a quarter lasts?’

‘Twenty days?’

‘Two days.’

Alex is standing by the door. He looks at the mess. More than that, he looks at the glass. Elizabeth hurriedly kneels down on the floor to try and hide it, but he sees and understands completely.

‘Someone has done a bad thing,’ he says.

We find them at the big ferry pier. They’ve tipped out a pot of white paint on the tarmac. Both of them are cycling their bikes through it, making bendy lines like a cartoon road or planes flying circles in the sky.

Calum Ian stops short of Elizabeth. At first he thinks she’s going at him for making a mess with paint: then his face changes. Duncan stops, too. He has spots of white all up the back of his trousers, on his hands, on his face. It makes his scarred bits look even stranger.

‘Why?’ Elizabeth asks.

When they don’t answer she says, ‘Know something? Right now I hate your bloody guts.’

Calum Ian starts to say that it’s just a bit of jam, that it was just a bit of food dye.

He stops when she tells him about the insulin.

Duncan begins to shake and tries to brush all the white dots from his jeans, but they only smudge into fingerprint-lines.

‘He made me do it,’ he says.

The first thing we do is go to the hospital. We go back to the room with the broken white cupboards. Calum Ian checks inside the fridge, even though it stinks. Then Elizabeth goes through every single drawer and cupboard – twice. Me and Alex do all the cupboards in a room called The Sluice. We don’t find anything.

Next door is the nursing home. Nobody wants to look in these rooms, but we have to. Their cupboards are empty. Each bed in every room has an old dead person in it.

Alex doesn’t want to look, and neither do I, but we can’t stop ourselves.

I see one old lady whose face is like rotten bark on a tree. I shut my eyes, try to unsee. Too late.

In the hall of the nursing home there’s a big trolley with wheels. Inside the trolley are lots of packets of tablets. Elizabeth makes a bingo! sound, but then goes quiet when she doesn’t find any kind of injection.

Feeling gloomy we return to the hospital corridor. Elizabeth puts on her perfume-hanky and Calum Ian tears off the BIOHAZARD tape and clear plastic from the doors.

She goes in quick, checks the bedside cabinets, cupboards, then comes out quick again, before the smell gets onto her, before she has time to take even one breath.

‘Think, think, think,’ she says.

We all go outside to sit on the craggy stones at the edge of the car park. It’s a place where the wind skirls around. Elizabeth tucks her hair down inside her jumper.

I sit several steps behind her, because it feels like the safest place to be: not too close to anyone who might think to blame me.

Me: ‘Why are we waiting?’

Elizabeth: ‘Because I don’t want to think about what needs to happen next.’

‘What needs to happen next?’

‘We need to get into the practice.’

This means the doctor’s practice: that’s all. Big deal! We went in there once before when we were looking for bandages for Alex, after he cut his arm. The practice wasn’t too spooky, plus it didn’t have a smell. The main doors had been broken open by the adults, and we found bandages in a box in the nurses’ room.

When I tell Elizabeth how easy it’ll be she hisses, ‘Not easy. This time it’s the dispensary we need to get into.’

‘We couldn’t open that door.’

‘Great memory.’

She stands with her arms folded, looking between Calum Ian, Duncan and me. I nearly don’t recognise her: with her scars gone red, her eyes narrowed.

‘There was one door,’ Calum Ian says. ‘But with three locks. Only we didn’t have any key. An adult must’ve tried to break it – the door was splintered all up one side, remember?’

‘So since you have all the best ideas, how are we going to get in when the adults couldn’t?’

‘It was an accident with Alex, I never—’

‘I don’t care about anything you say. I wouldn’t care if you jumped off a cliff. I only want an answer.’

Calum Ian looks away to the sea: sad then angry then sad again. Finally he puts his head down on his lap for not knowing.

With a too-calm voice Elizabeth says, ‘When it happened, Dad wouldn’t let anyone in. There were too many people trying to get in: they were all banging on the main door, shouting. So he kept the keys on a chain. And the keys must still be with him.’

Alex chews the neck of his jumper.

‘We need to go inside the gym,’ she says. ‘And I’m sorry, but I’m not doing that. No way. I’m not going in there.’

Nobody wants to go. It would usually be Elizabeth but that chance is broken. We argue about ways of choosing, but all of them are unfair for Alex or me.

‘Why does he need insulin anyway?’ Calum Ian asks, now looking as big with regret as Elizabeth.

‘He can’t be healthy without it.’

‘Why?’

‘He needs it for his sugar to stay normal.’

‘Then he shouldn’t be eating sugar. No more sweets or treats. What can he have instead?’

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.

We look through the cupboards. Elizabeth goes straight to the fridge. It doesn’t have much of a bad smell.

Also, it’s empty.

The cupboards have things like soap, or cream, or paper towels, or tubes of medicine or stockings. Everything has a clean smell, though, which is a relief.

‘Don’t see any,’ Elizabeth says.

She sits on a footstool, bent right over, looking down at the floor. Calum Ian kicks at the wall behind her.

‘I went in that gym for nothing?’

Her face goes bright red. Already, before anyone else can move, she’s next door, opening cupboards.

‘None of us are giving up.’

Only we don’t find anything. We do find two more fridges. One has an old can of juice in it, which we share out after wiping off any invisible badness. The other fridge is just empty. It doesn’t even smell, which is this day’s newest mystery, maybe without a solution.

Then Elizabeth has another idea. She decides we should look through all the patient records. When I ask what these are, and where, she says, ‘All around us.’

She’s telling the truth. There’s shelves in a clanking metal cupboard, and on the shelves are hundreds and hundreds of brown folders. Then loads more, in an ordinary cupboard that doesn’t move and doesn’t clank.

All of the people: families together, with names I forgot until now. There’s even the kids from my class, even the teacher, even the priest. I want to think that these bits of paper might bring the people back: but they don’t, of course, and so I deliberately don’t look for Mum’s notes.

Calum Ian grabs a record. He reads the first pages then throws the record away. ‘Just scratchy bloody writing,’ he says.

I think he’s being daft, but when I collect one it’s true: I can’t read it either.

Elizabeth pulls out a stack, then begins to go through them. Even doing three takes her ages.

‘There must be a faster way,’ she says. ‘This will just take us for ever.’

We make a plan of choosing ten each, doing them carefully. Pretty soon, though, my ten gets mixed up with Alex’s ten; plus I get bored after six and want to look around for quicker ways.

Me: ‘Make your eyes go special for that word. How do you spell that word?’

Elizabeth spells D-I-A-B-E-T-E-S.

Me: ‘Look for it like you’re looking for a colour. Then it jumps out. I’ve done that looking for shiny packets with sweets. It really works, try it.’

We make our eyes go sharp for DIABETES. Except it doesn’t work: they go sharp for other words like FIRE EXIT and DISPENSARY and AIR AMBULANCE CALL and YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE MAD TO WORK HERE BUT IT HELPS. Never for DIABETES.

Then Elizabeth has one more idea. She looks for a single record. The records go by alphabet – A, B, C, D – until it gets to M. Then there’s a whole wall for Mac, and a shelf for MacNeil. After this, the letters go back to normal, until the end, when there’s no X or Z.

She has Alex’s notes – Alex MacLeod. Elizabeth turns them over, upside down, inside out. When Calum Ian asks her what she’s looking for she says, ‘A sign, a label, anything to say his illness.’ But there isn’t one.

Calum Ian gets fed up. He kicks the footstool Elizabeth sat on, hard enough for it to flip over.

‘Looks like you’re facing your worst enemy,’ I say to him, when he decides to calm down.

With eyes narrowed into slits he looks at me and says,

‘So I am.’

Now Elizabeth says she wants to be alone, wants to go to one of the other rooms. Me and Alex are left behind.

We swirl on chairs, play stone-scissors-paper. Alex invents a new category: fingers waving for fire, which burns paper, melts scissors, cracks stone. Fire is the all-time winner.

‘You play games,’ Calum Ian says, ‘while the rest of us have to go through fucking bloody hell.’

We try not to look at him. Alex pays attention instead to the scab he has on his knee. He picks it off, and I watch the red dot grow into a red bead.

Me: ‘Does it hurt?’

Alex: ‘Not if you’re brave. Injections make me brave. It’s easy. I used to hate it, but my skin went strong.’ His eyes go blurry through thinking then he says, ‘Even so, I don’t mind not getting my injections.’

Me: ‘But you’ll get sick.’

Alex: ‘Don’t care. Then I might get to see my mum and dad. Because I’m not scared. Not any more. Fact, not opinion – when you’re dead you’re zero.’

I get him in a friendly kind of head-lock.

‘Listen,’ I say. ‘The only obstacle is us. It’s better to believe in being alive than what the opposite might be. It’s infinity better to believe that.’

Alex: ‘So why d’you talk to your mum?’

I didn’t think he’d noticed. Now I feel shy about it, not knowing at all what to say.

‘Gave your mum a fright once,’ he tells me.

‘My mum. You know about my mum? I want to know all the facts, tell me.’

Alex looks worried, or surprised, like I sounded too keen. Then he says, ‘When I was little. Four, maybe three? Your mum was delivering letters. Mum saw her on the path coming. It was very funny.’

‘Keep going, keep going!’

‘We waited by the door. Just before she got there I shoved my whole hand through the letterbox.’

‘What did she say!’

‘Em… My mum, it was her that told me to do it. She wanted to give your mum a letter to post. Your mum took letters as well as bringing them, didn’t she?’

‘Anybody knows that! She was a postwoman.’

‘Well, so I gave it to her. Said, Hullo! She took it and gave me hers. I heard her go away laughing.’

Because it’s about Mum I can’t find it normal like any other story, or even boring: I’m instead hungry to know every last detail.

‘Didn’t see her,’ Alex admits, in the end. ‘But she was laughing. She took my letter and she went.’

It’s when he says this that I get my best idea.

Elizabeth is on her own, in her mum’s old doctoring room. Her eyes look red like she’s been crying, but that’s impossible, because Elizabeth is way strong and never cries.

‘Go away,’ she says.

I hide behind the door – nearly leaving, wondering if I barged in, wondering if she’s in a crabby mind.

In the end she calls me back – makes me stand straight at the desk in front of her like a soldier.

‘Only wanted a few stupid seconds alone,’ she says.

I don’t know if this means she’s already had them: so I count thirty in my head in case she didn’t, then begin to tell her about how Mum used to pick up letters from people, even letters without stamps. But then I notice the room around is a mess: too much of a mess for Elizabeth to have made it on her own. Cupboards open, books on the floor. The bin overflowing with plastic aprons, gloves.

She stops me talking. Instead, she shows me a framed picture. Of Elizabeth with her mum and dad.

In the picture she’s making her eyes go squint. I didn’t know she could do it – make a squint, be funny. She looks daft, happy even.

‘Just after we came.’ She rubs a smudge from the glass. ‘We were at the beach, Traigh Eais. This was Mum’s favourite because it was early days. Dad had a beard then, see? And I didn’t have any scars.’

She puts a finger on her picture-cheek, then on her real cheek, to feel the new hardness there.

‘What I don’t know is what to do. Usually I think: what would Mum do? What would Dad do?’

‘What would they?’

Her voice cracks with – I don’t—

I start to tell her about my idea. It begins with how Mum didn’t just deliver letters, she collected things as well. And one group of things she collected were the squares of paper from old people, or ill people, which she took to the practice and exchanged for white bags of medicine.

‘She delivered the drugs,’ Elizabeth realises.

‘Which makes her important, right? So maybe we should look for the squares of paper?’

‘Maybe.’

It takes us a minute to find them. They’re in five big bundles done up with elastic bands like money, in a back drawer of the dispensary.

Elizabeth counts through twenty. She lays them out on the desk, then goes and fetches Alex’s medicine-pen from her rucksack.

The insulin inside it is called Mixtard.

In another minute we have the names of two people who had the same stuff. Then Elizabeth, after checking a book, writes down some more names.

We look through the piles of paper, until we find three more that are definitely a kind of insulin.

‘One address – see, it’s here in the village, nearby,’ she says, ‘it’s really not far. But after that… how are we going to find all these other places?’

Feeling a happy rush of pride I reply: ‘I know the answer to that as well!’

I’m thinking of the laminate cards that Mum used for her deliveries: the ones she gave for people who were doing the post round and didn’t know the island as well as her. And I think I know where they are.