How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff Read Free Book Online Page A

beating the goat's milk for ages with a whisk.
    One of the stranger things that we just came to accept was that no one seemed to know exactly where the food was coming from. At first they thought it must be the local council, but some people whispered that it was the Red Cross, or the Americans, and others suspected The Enemy, and lots of people wouldn't touch it at all Just In Case.
    I was pretty happy to starve rather than eat food Davina made in peacetime but I never thought anyone was trying to poison us during the war. I tried eating a little more so Edmond would stop looking at me that way and after a week or so he even said I looked better by which I'm sure he meant fatter so I cut back some after that.
    But I was talking about the quarantine.
    According to what Osbert picked up in one of his clandestine spy-boy meetings down at the pub, the Smallpox Epidemic was just a rumor spread around to keep us all quiet and scared and out of the way.
    Then we heard that people were dying.
    Edmond said that it was measles not smallpox and that most people weren't dying, but because it was almost impossible to get medicine, people were dying of pretty ordinary stuff like pneumonia and bad cases of chicken pox, and broken bones and some women died having babies.
    We got flyers in with our food saying to boil all our water and
Be Extra Careful When Handling Knives, Tools or Firearms Because Minor Injuries Could Lead to Infection and Death
. Which struck me as extremely amusing given that we're supposedly in the middle of a war, which usually has the same effect.
    I didn't know if the food was poisoned. I didn't know whether we'd get an infection and die. I didn't know if a bomb would fall on us. I didn't know whether Osbert would expose us to spores from some deadly disease picked up during his secret meetings. I didn't know if we would be taken prisoner, tortured, murdered, raped, forced to confess or inform on our friends.
    The only thing I knew for certain was that all around me was more life than I'd ever experienced in all the years I'd been on earth and as long as no one shut me in the barn away from Edmond at night I was safe.

12
    S o there we are carrying on our happy little life of underage sex, child labor and espionage when someone came to visit us, which, after weeks of Just Us Five kind of took us by surprise, to put it mildly.
    He was a not-too-bad-looking man around thirty-five who seemed too tired even to pretend to be all polite and friendly and he said I'm sorry to bother you but have you got any drugs?
    We all stood there and gaped at him and speaking personally I was wondering whether he was setting up some kind of small business venture to sell cocaine to people who were housebound, deprived of television and generally bored senseless by the war.
    We must have looked pretty moronic just staring at him with our mouths open because he said Perhaps I should speak to your mother or father and then Osbert puffed himself up like he was going to make a big speech and said There's only us. So I guess he decided against the speech after all.
    Then the man looked puzzled and Osbert explained about Aunt Penn and even though the guy didn't say anything more, by the look on his face I was going to be surprised if that was the end of it as far as he was concerned even with all the other things he had to think about.
    Then he picked up more or less where he left off and said I'm sorry, perhaps I should explain about the drugs, I'm Dr. Jameson and as you've probably noticed there's a war on and we're trying to take care of the people in this area.
    We didn't say anything and so he just kept talking.
    The surgeries have all been shut down. The hospitals are on skeleton staff and trying to deal with casualties coming in from the cities and have confiscated most of the drugs from the chemists so local people with basic problems like high blood pressure or diabetes are experiencing difficulties. We're trying to keep these problems