The Rain by Virginia Bergin Page A

we’re much, much nicer people than most
adults. 1 Our world would have been a better world.
    OK, that’s my take on it. It’s probably not quite right, but mainly it probably is. I’m giving myself another A*.

CHAPTER SEVEN – PART TWO
    We watched the broadcast thing a few times. There was a pause when it got to the end and then it would start over again. I asked Simon some stuff; he answered – when he
could answer. There was so much stuff he didn’t know, that no one knew. The main question, I guess, was what was going to happen next.
    I’m glad no one could answer that. I wouldn’t have wanted to have known.
    You know what it reminded me of, though, Emergency Public Service Broadcast Number Two? It reminded me of the way how, when you’re in trouble and you know it, you kind of go easy on the
basic facts. That’s Emergency Public Service Broadcast Number One; you’re cornered, so you’ve got to fess up . . . but it’s much better to keep the fessing to a minimum to
avoid a full parental freak-out. You want to hold off blurting the further details – well, for as long as you can, really. That’s Emergency Public Service Broadcast Number Two; what you
confess when there’s no longer any point in denying stuff. The worst example I can think of is this girl at my school who basically got caught with a boy so she had to admit they’d done
the deed (when they’d actually been doing it for months). Her parents went nuts about EPSB No. 1; they went so nuts she didn’t actually get round to telling them the second part (EPSB
No. 2) until they found the pregnancy-testing kit in the bin . . .
    Let’s just take an easier example:
    EPSB No. 1: ‘OK, so I’ve just come home in an outfit I didn’t leave the house in . . . so I might as well tell you I went to a
party.’
    (‘OK, you’ll have noticed anyone who got rained on has got sick, so we may as well tell you: it’s in the rain.’)
    EPSB No. 2: ‘I think I might be sick in a minute so you may as well know that at that party I drank some punch – with gin in it.’
    (‘You may have noticed some people are dead, so we may as well tell you it’s fatal. Oh! You’ve got it too? Shucks! We may as well tell you: it’s contagious.’)
    You’d think you’d get your head round it, hearing the same thing again and again – there’s an initial freak-out, then people get over it – but
somehow Emergency Public Service Broadcast Number Two got worse the more times you heard it. And it wasn’t just because my mum and my Henry were dead – that was bad enough – it
was because it made you start thinking about . . . stuff you couldn’t even begin to start thinking about - say, like, e.g., whether the world was ending. So I tuned out.
    It must have been too much for Simon too because, not long after, he put the DVD back on. The history thing had got up to World War One; I told Simon we weren’t doing that at school so he
put the bird thing on instead, but really it was because it was too horrible to look at: all those people dying. He left me watching a thing about woodland birds while he went and messed about with
the radio in the kitchen. He kept it so quiet I couldn’t hear whatever it was people were saying. There was music sometimes; I don’t know what. I wasn’t even listening out for it.
I wasn’t listening to the bird thing either, and not even to the rain. I was thinking about my mum, and about Henry, my dearest babiest brother-brat beloved.

CHAPTER EIGHT
    In the morning, it was sunny, like it had been for so many days before the rain came. It was sunny and the sky was blue; the kind of blue that makes you forget there’s
even such a thing as rain. The kind of blue that made you think it was all over.
    Before I remembered it was supposed to be a bank holiday, I had this one random thought – really so stupid and silly but also kind of almost funny – that Simon was actually going to
say I had to go to school . . . really, I