of a riot was going to see me holding ‘Daddy’s’ hand and stop and say, ‘Ruby?!
Oh my! What ARE you wearing?!’)
Those people there, rioting, they looked like the kind of people you saw every day in Dartbridge. Some of them were just ordinary people; some of them looked like the sort of people who probably
spent a lot of time going to basket-weaving workshops or worshipping crystals in woodland glades. Point is, the hippies and the townies,
everyone
had gone nuts. If it had been organised by
the school, it would have been what they called a ‘group activity’, which meant you weren’t allowed to just stick with your friends but you had to actually
‘participate’ with the sorts of people you’d really rather
die
– I must stop saying that – than participate with.
We cut back down on to the hospital road, which was rammed with stopped cars. On the other side of that was the supermarket.
I guess we’d gone too far to turn back, so we went forward.
You know how a supermarket car park normally is? Everyone circling round like pizza-eating vultures just to try to get parked one space closer to the doors? Well, it wasn’t like that at
all. Cars were parked all over, not neatly in the spaces but jammed in everywhere, none of them moving, no one even packing stuff into them or hooting and tooting to get out. Only dead cars,
abandoned cars – and car alarms, going on and on.
‘Come on,’ said Simon, dragging me through it.
Up ahead, the supermarket looked nuts. There were a lot of people going in and out of it, but it was the biggest supermarket for miles around so that wasn’t unusual. You didn’t
really get how bad it was until you got closer. Then you could see the front doors were all smashed in. And I do mean all smashed in – not just the glass in the doors broken or something, but
the actual doors had gone. A truck was right inside the shop, smashed into the flower display.
Do I even need to say that there was no one at the tills, no one trying to stop or control anything? No, it was a grab-what-you-can job: people laden with stuff . . . but lots of mad, crazy,
what-do-you-want-that-for? stuff. I saw a guy with a trolley full of toilet rolls, two women with a trolley full of washing powder, a kid lugging a basket full of ketchup and icing sugar.
Sounds like crazy fun, huh?
Simon and I, we wandered into all this . . . and it was obvious, right away, that we’d come too late. Somewhere in that shop a dog was barking as we roamed the aisles realising how bad it
was. Where the fruit and vegetables should have been, it was bare. I mean stripped clean, bare-naked bare, nada. Not even a single packet of boiled beetroot left. (Boo hoo.) The dairy bit: the
milk, the yogurt – all of it gone. He took us to where the bottled water would have been: all the drinks, all the juices, everything, gone. From the looks of it the booze was also pretty much
cleaned out, I noticed. We went to the tinned fruit; that was cleaned out too – even the prunes had been taken.
‘I can’t believe this, I can’t believe this,’ Simon kept muttering.
I could. Inside my mouth it was as dry as when you go to the dentists and they put that sucky thing in your mouth so they don’t have to work in a pool of spit. Bone dry. When I stared at
those empty shelves, it was like they’d put that sucky thing right down in the middle of me and sucked up every last drop of moisture in my body.
We didn’t even get to the ice cubes. They would have all been gone, anyway. In the freezer section there was stuff, frozen stuff, melting, chucked all over the floor. Small groups of
people were bent inside the freezers, hacking away at the ice, shovelling it into bin liners that leaked precious water. A woman was on the floor, mopping the water up with kitchen cloths and
ringing it out into a bucket; two little kids stood near, sucking on kitchen cloths, each clutching a bumper-bag of sweets . . . and over them all,
Oh my! What ARE you wearing?!’)
Those people there, rioting, they looked like the kind of people you saw every day in Dartbridge. Some of them were just ordinary people; some of them looked like the sort of people who probably
spent a lot of time going to basket-weaving workshops or worshipping crystals in woodland glades. Point is, the hippies and the townies,
everyone
had gone nuts. If it had been organised by
the school, it would have been what they called a ‘group activity’, which meant you weren’t allowed to just stick with your friends but you had to actually
‘participate’ with the sorts of people you’d really rather
die
– I must stop saying that – than participate with.
We cut back down on to the hospital road, which was rammed with stopped cars. On the other side of that was the supermarket.
I guess we’d gone too far to turn back, so we went forward.
You know how a supermarket car park normally is? Everyone circling round like pizza-eating vultures just to try to get parked one space closer to the doors? Well, it wasn’t like that at
all. Cars were parked all over, not neatly in the spaces but jammed in everywhere, none of them moving, no one even packing stuff into them or hooting and tooting to get out. Only dead cars,
abandoned cars – and car alarms, going on and on.
‘Come on,’ said Simon, dragging me through it.
Up ahead, the supermarket looked nuts. There were a lot of people going in and out of it, but it was the biggest supermarket for miles around so that wasn’t unusual. You didn’t
really get how bad it was until you got closer. Then you could see the front doors were all smashed in. And I do mean all smashed in – not just the glass in the doors broken or something, but
the actual doors had gone. A truck was right inside the shop, smashed into the flower display.
Do I even need to say that there was no one at the tills, no one trying to stop or control anything? No, it was a grab-what-you-can job: people laden with stuff . . . but lots of mad, crazy,
what-do-you-want-that-for? stuff. I saw a guy with a trolley full of toilet rolls, two women with a trolley full of washing powder, a kid lugging a basket full of ketchup and icing sugar.
Sounds like crazy fun, huh?
Simon and I, we wandered into all this . . . and it was obvious, right away, that we’d come too late. Somewhere in that shop a dog was barking as we roamed the aisles realising how bad it
was. Where the fruit and vegetables should have been, it was bare. I mean stripped clean, bare-naked bare, nada. Not even a single packet of boiled beetroot left. (Boo hoo.) The dairy bit: the
milk, the yogurt – all of it gone. He took us to where the bottled water would have been: all the drinks, all the juices, everything, gone. From the looks of it the booze was also pretty much
cleaned out, I noticed. We went to the tinned fruit; that was cleaned out too – even the prunes had been taken.
‘I can’t believe this, I can’t believe this,’ Simon kept muttering.
I could. Inside my mouth it was as dry as when you go to the dentists and they put that sucky thing in your mouth so they don’t have to work in a pool of spit. Bone dry. When I stared at
those empty shelves, it was like they’d put that sucky thing right down in the middle of me and sucked up every last drop of moisture in my body.
We didn’t even get to the ice cubes. They would have all been gone, anyway. In the freezer section there was stuff, frozen stuff, melting, chucked all over the floor. Small groups of
people were bent inside the freezers, hacking away at the ice, shovelling it into bin liners that leaked precious water. A woman was on the floor, mopping the water up with kitchen cloths and
ringing it out into a bucket; two little kids stood near, sucking on kitchen cloths, each clutching a bumper-bag of sweets . . . and over them all,
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