Rani writes.
Cold today. Ice on the inside of the windows. We're wrapped up in every blanket the house has, but I'm worried about Sarah Jane. The cough hasn't gone away. I would put something about needing a Doctor, but I don't think it's very funny.
She scavenged a child's exercise book from an abandoned school. There were bloodstains on it and a half-done list of spellings.
Everything seems quiet out there. I think it helps that this house is so out of the way. Maybe they don't know it's here? But we're keeping our heads down, just in case.
When she writes down what's happening, it's as if she is looking back on herself before this started. The her who wanted to be a journalist. It seems as childish, now, as when you were seven and wanted to be a princess. They don't have journalists any more. Newspapers are for keeping warm. Often she finds there aren't any thoughts in her head, just static like a broken TV with one or two words coming through, like How? or Why? or Mum, Dad. Or there are too many thoughts, the same ones leaping over and over, this can't be happening, there must be something we can do, we're all going to die, I'm scared I'm scared I am so scared -
And so she makes herself write. Note down one thing.
We are down to the last can. Clyde tried to give his portion to me. He said that even a post-apocalyptic wasteland won't make him eat sweetcorn.
Echoes of herself, of the her who knew what to do, who's saved the world more times than she can count. And if the unthinkable happens (though it's not so unthinkable when you've seen so many others die, when you've seen your parents no longer looking back at you) then the book will still be there, and perhaps someone else will pick it up and read it. Her name in print at last.
ooo
Luke makes lists.
33. Things that aren't cool: white socks with black shoes. I think white socks may be uncool on their own, but they definitely are if your shoes are a dark colour.
He keeps feeling he should know what to do, or at least like the other two expect him to. Like, you're sort of an alien and you're really clever, why can't you fix this? They've never said it, but he hears it anyway. Because he does want to be able to fix it. He so badly wants to spot the vital link that everyone's else missed, the one that will destroy Harold Saxon for good and put things back to how they used to be.
Instead of which, he knows nothing, and Rani's parents are dead and Clyde doesn't know where his mum is and his own Mum keeps getting sick and most of the time none of them do anything but lie in semi-darkness and wait to be found.
34. When a girl asks you if she looks okay in an outfit, you always say yes, no matter what the truth is.
The lists - he keeps them on the backs of envelopes, or labels from tins - are of stupid things. Things he remembers from school, mainly from Clyde. Pretending to be normal. He liked pretending to be normal. He liked it because Mum and Clyde and Rani let him stop pretending if he wanted to and he could step between the worlds and not worry about it.
Now he's stuck in this one where nothing is normal, where normal isn't important any more, and - this really is stupid, he knows, but he can't shake off the feeling he brought it somehow. As if without him, none of this would be happening to them. Which is - pathetic, lame - more normal words - which is arrogant, more than anything; his mother at least had dealt with hundreds of alien menaces long before he came along -
35. Only weird people like sweetcorn, apparently.
Cataloguing knowledge, he tells himself. It's not just going to be struggling to survive and remembering all those who died. One day, the stupid things are going to come back, and normal will be something he can choose again.
ooo
Clyde draws.
When Rani and Luke and Sarah Jane are watching, he does little cartoons, like of the Doctor and Sarah Jane playing ping-pong with Toclafane, or Harold Saxon being chased by a swarm of bees. That kind of stuff.
When no one's watching he draws the other stuff, the stuff he's seen, the stuff he'd really like to get out of his head. It feels messed-up doing it, thinking about shading and lines like he doesn't care, but if he did care as much as he's meant to he thinks he'd go mad. And no one needs that, right? They need him to be the joker. They need something to stay the same. He certainly does.
He draws the bad stuff on walls, or the backs of doors, or the insides of books. Biros that usually run out of ink before he's done. And now his hands are cold all the time so the lines are jagged and shaky - he's keeping an eye out for some fingerless gloves to scavenge, but so far no joy - so it really isn't great art by any stretch of the imagination but he needs to try, at least, he needs to keep getting stuff out of his head and into reality. Sometimes it feels seriously weird, like half of him is upstairs drawing a picture of a woman missing a hand dying by the side of the motorway and half of him is sitting with the others lecturing them on the evils of sweetcorn, but that's okay too. Two of him sounds like each one will only have half as much to cope with, and he can just about keep up his role as King of Comedy if not all of him has to laugh.