by Tommy Dakar
Rain, rain falling in fine billowing sheets of muslin, moulded by the wind, forming Arabic dances of sensual silk, caressing, joyful, greeting. He shifted the weight of his pack as a playful lash of wind scattered liquid diamonds across his eyes which turned cold as ice and ran into his hair and beard or seeped trudged with difficulty in his huge green wellingtons, made silent by the attack of the weather. Richard watched his arse waddle as he stomped over the stones and grass that constituted the 'road' to the cottage, and he thought of the bus and the diesel and wondered if the farmer would fart soon, and if he did would it be a visible dark cloud of foul gas? The vast panorama of sea and hills was closed, fenced in by the mists of rain which fell almost silently, almost with intent, continuing some strange long-forgotten ritual which only the land knew of, whispered it in breezes to the trees and birds, communicated it to the murmuring sea, but secretly. The farmer tripped on a stone and throttled a curse deep in his raw throat. He was a country man, as rough as rock, a man who rolled his round life between the mystery of sea, sun, death and shit - a man bemused before the soiled roots of life, aware of something greater than he, and content to let it lie undiscovered among the heather and sound of his territory.
Rain. Cascading across the open fields, along the winding lanes and into the half-land of the suburbs, glossing the felt roofs of garden sheds, crystallising neat flowers and stringing clothes-lines with iridescent beads of glass. Catching up the cigarette butts and sweets papers, rivuleting along the cracks in pavements, smearing smooth glass windows which appear to melt and cry, and the faces behind each closed casement appear pallid, sallow, weary with a sweet sadness that dreams of yesteryear, of steaming classroom radiators when the rain laughed, before whenever it was that you stopped being able to laugh so freely, before the rain became a lament, and wept.
He clambered over the wooden fence and side-stepped a puddle full of growing rings. The rain was pushing harder now as if it intended to attain a climax, a crescendo of congratulatory tears.
'Over this next hill,'
said the farmer, a little breathlessly. Richard didn't reply, he knew exactly where it was, he had been there twice before. The farmer increased his difficult pace, hurrying on under the threat of a cloud burst that would drench him and ruin his afternoon. Richard followed the farmer in silence, keeping pace with the tempo of the rain.
And so he had finally arrived, the last sodden steps of a difficult clambering road of false turnings and hot guilty mistakes, a road that had begun ... where? In the canteen? Later, thunder struck and lightening before the living sea? The last futile, pathetic oh-so-wrong scenes with Eleanor? The day in the country pinned upon that well-mapped grid of land? Or before? Back to that initial bright damp defeat, that petrol-blue suggestion that the winter would never disappear, would always snag somewhere, perhaps on the fingertips or memory, the liver or hope - but sure to snag, as insipid and unavoidable as human hatred.
And now, coming into view, focusing, the end of that progression nears, and he prays to something out there (God? Sea? Rain?) that it was the right road, that it would end in a triumph of spirit, an understanding, an insight, and not simply be one man's mistake, a side road, a short-cut to nothing more than loneliness, cold, nothingness.
They concluded their agreement and the farmer took his leave. The cottage, or rather comfortable hut, squatted defiantly among the huge, pre-human rocks that constituted the promontory, a finger of land thrust into the passion of the sea, at times trembling under the force of a liquid storm, but determined, resolute. Inside it was dark and damp like a raincloud, two small square windows giving the only thin light; one the light of the land, the other of the sea. So it crouched, its shoulders hunched against the cruel weather, caught between two mighty hands which at any second could clap shut, like a venus fly-trap, or a discarded fridge. Richard hung his greatcoat on a nail and started to prepare the fire.