Rain

by Kate Le Vann

  ‘Not bloody likely,’ Vivienne said. ‘I’m not going anywhere looking like this.’

  ‘Well, it’s just that way, keep going all the way round the curve, second left after … ‘ Harry began, drawing diagrams in the air for Rain.

  ‘Oh come on, just go with her!’ Vivienne shouted. Vivienne had quite a set of lungs on her. ‘If she gets lost we’ll have to take time off to find her again.’

  So Rain found herself walking past the super-expensive ice-cream coloured houses of Notting Hill. Her gran might have been posh, but there was no way she could have afforded to buy a house here now – millionaires lived in them. Rain’s granddad had inherited the house more than thirty years ago, when the area was a lot grottier and cheaper. But still, the house was tatty now, knocked about by tenants, the garden overgrown after years with no one caring about it.

  Rain had been here quite a lot when she was very young. She remembered one Christmas: her mum standing on a chair to put a fallen fairy back on the tree and her granddad whispering to Rain that she could eat the chocolate on its branches. She remembered a sunny day with everyone playing badminton in the garden, Rain swinging her own little pink racquet and always missing the shuttlecock. One autumn, racing her mum to stamp on crab apples on the pavement outside the house. Little pieces of memory. She went through them in her mind over and over again, not wanting to let a single one die from neglect.

  ‘How long are you staying?’ Harry asked as they walked. His cords were covered in dry mud and there were bits of leaf in his hair. Will people think this is my boyfriend, Rain wondered, this scruffy farmboy in the middle of a city? She crossly admitted to herself that she sort of hoped they would.

  ‘All summer … until school starts again,’ Rain said.

  ‘Ah,’ Harry said, ‘and school gets serious next year, right? You’ll be doing your GCSEs?’

  Rain could feel herself redden with anger. ‘A- levels,’ she said.

  ‘Oh right,’ Harry said, pulling an exaggeratedly surprised face as he nodded. She wondered if he was making fun of her.

  ‘What about you?’ Rain said. ‘I suppose you didn’t bother with school past your GCSEs?’

  Harry laughed out loud. ‘No, I was foolish enough to keep going,’ he said. ‘I’m here at Imperial. That’s how your grandmother found me, in fact: she put an ad up in my faculty building.’

  ‘She advertised for a gardener at a university?’

  He laughed again. ‘You know Vivienne,’ Harry said, and Rain thought, but didn’t dare say, that she didn’t at all. ‘She wrote something witty and mysterious about needing an impoverished student who was prepared to do anything for money. I’m not just going to be doing the garden with her, we’ve got the whole house planned out. A paint job, bit of woodwork, getting rid of everything she doesn’t need – we were talking about eBaying stuff off if we have time.’

  ‘My gran knows about eBay?’ Rain thought.

  ‘Okay, here we are, London’s famous Portobello Road, as seen in the film Notting Hill.’ Harry held his hand out theatrically. She felt again that he was slightly making fun, or anyway making jokes that she was too unsophisticated to totally get.

  The narrow street they came out on to was a crowded fruit and veg market. The pavements were incredibly narrow and passers-by spilled over the sides, waiting for gaps in the steady traffic of mothers pushing wide prams, old ladies in motorised wheelchairs, people walking their pushbikes. There were dozens of intriguing little clothes shops, trendy girls gazing dreamily out of café windows, people walking down the middle of the street eating hot oniony sausages in buns that smelled at once delicious and disgusting to Rain’s hungry nostrils, a man sitting with his legs stretched out in front of him playing bongo drums, a little grey dog tied to a railing. Rain looked along as far as she could see, to stalls with teetering stacks of not-quite-familiar boxes of chocolate and, in the other direction, racks of dresses with batiky embellishment, and wacky shopping bags. She realised she’d lost Harry. She started to panic, not having paid any attention to the way they’d come. Then she felt a strong hand take hold of hers and pull her just a little bit too roughly forward through a group of young American tourists who’d come to a complete standstill, and she was relieved to discover the hand was Harry’s, then annoyed again.

  ‘Don’t be hypnotised by the pretty trinkets!’ he mocked, putting on a joky voice. ‘And watch out for strange men. Young women have gone missing here and been found years later as imprisoned scullery maids for rich businessmen.’

  Rain snatched her hand back from him. ‘So where are these bin bags anyway? Why couldn’t we just go to the supermarket?’

  ‘It’s not my job to question your grandmother,’ Harry said.

  They found the stall he wanted just in front of a branch of Tesco; it sold cleaning products, sponges, batteries, loo rolls and the bin bags Vivienne had sent them for, a pound a roll. While Harry bought four rolls, Rain looked enviously at a tiny, plump old man who walked past them eating chocolate brownies from a pink and white paper bag, pushing them quite steadily into his mouth as if chewing were not involved.

  Harry, noticing this, asked, ‘Are you craving a brownie?’

  ‘Yeah!’ Rain said, too hungry to act cool.

  ‘But we can do better than those ones. Come on, down here.’

  He led her to a road off the market street, and into an Italian delicatessen. Harry bought a paper bag of brownies and they set off home on a parallel road, this one less busy, eating the squidgiest, darkest, most delicious brownies Rain had ever tasted. She found herself warming to Harry, just a little bit.

  Chapter 2

  At seven o’clock, it was still as light as the middle of the day outside. Vivienne was downstairs cooking supper. She’d rented a DVD for them to watch, a scary thriller that Rain had wanted to see at the pictures, but hadn’t been able to interest her friends in. Rain looked around her at the cluttered room with its time-capsule contents and tried to feel like a beautiful orphan in a Victorian novel. This was tricky, what with the late sun streaming through the window and Vivienne clattering around downstairs being boisterous and modern, occasionally shouting up things like, ‘Do you eat squid, Rain?’ (Rain had no idea. Squid didn’t feature in her and her dad’s never-changing meal rotation.)

  There was a built-in wardrobe in the corner of the room that Rain had barely glanced at when she’d arrived the day before. She thought she should transfer the contents of her suitcase into it now, to stop everything getting creased and give herself more room. She tugged on its stiff door, and gasped when it jerked open. The cupboard was completely packed solid with stuff. So much stuff. More boxes, clothes, books, the same things that were in the room, but with no space at all between them anywhere. Rain ran downstairs to her granny.

  ‘What is all that in my room? In the cupboard? Whose is it?’

  She was hoping – praying – Vivienne would say some of it was her mum’s. She was suddenly tingling all over and her heart was beating lumpily.

  ‘Quite honestly I have no idea what’s in there, it’s been so long,’ Vivienne said.

  ‘Is any of it my mum’s?’ Rain said.

  ‘Some of it must be,’ Vivienne said. ‘You’re in her bedroom, or rather what was Sarah’s bedroom till she was sixteen. But it’ll be way back at the back, I bet. I just crammed everything in when I left the house. I don’t think you’ll find anything very wonderful, I’m afraid. I remember chucking a lot of her stuff out when she left home. You never think … ‘ Vivienne swallowed. ‘You never think. Could you be bothered to make a start sifting through it, though? I know you’re here to relax, but it would be a huge help.’

  ‘I love going through old stuff,’ Rain said. ‘I just hope the summer is long enough.’

  ‘We’ll just make a few piles: chuck, keep, charity,’ Vivienne said. ‘It’s going to take up the whole room, though. Why don’t I move you down a floor to sleep? I only put you all the way up there so you’d have your own ba
throom; there’s another empty bedroom.’

  ‘Oh, no, not if that’s okay with you?’ Rain said. ‘I love being up there.’ She was too embarrassed to say that she felt closer to her mum in the room, now she knew it had been hers.

  ‘Whatever you like, lovey,’ Vivienne said. ‘We’ll see how quickly the mess pushes you out – that cupboard goes back a long way. Now, how much heat can you take in your food? Personally I like it spicy enough to make my nose run … ‘ She held up a handful of tiny red chillis and Rain persuaded her to put most of them away for another day.

  Back upstairs, after a little stumbling around, she managed to ‘borrow’ a neighbour’s broadband connection on her laptop – Rain had been surprised that her gran didn’t have an internet connection because everything about her was modern and ungrannyish. But then, Vivienne hadn’t been back from Germany for very long. There was an email from Rain’s dad asking her to call when she got the chance and talking about packing for his research trip. Rain took out her mobile and phoned him as she went through the junkmail, emails from all the sites she looked at most, some shopping ads.

  ‘Hi, Rainy,’ he said.

  Rain wasn’t expecting the tug of emotion she felt hearing his voice, which always sounded lower on the phone. She’d seen him yesterday morning, but it suddenly seemed to sink in that she wouldn’t see her dad for weeks and weeks.

  ‘You all set?’ she said.

  ‘They have shops there – if I forget anything.’ Rain could hear him smiling. She smiled too.

  ‘Yeah, I know.’

  ‘Is everything okay there? You getting on okay?’

  ‘Of course!’ Rain said. ‘Gran’s lovely.’ And even though it wasn’t, not even a little, this felt like a lie because her dad’s concern made her feel a bit sad and she didn’t want him to hear it. ‘She’s making supper, it smells great.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll have to get her to teach you how to make new things!’ her dad said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  They talked for a while, just repeating the last conversation they’d had at home. Rain didn’t have anything new to say but didn’t want to hang up. Vivienne called upstairs that the chilli would be ready in a couple of minutes, and Rain repeated it to her dad.

  ‘Don’t keep her waiting,’ he said, but he didn’t hang up. ‘I wish I could have shown you round London,’ Rain’s dad said, breaking a short silence. ‘It’s where I had some of the best times of my life. Don’t be afraid of it, but be careful.’

  ‘I’m always careful.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Well, you be careful, too!’ Rain said.

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘Okay, then,’ Rain said.

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘I love you, Dad.’

  After hanging up, Rain went back to her email to remind her dad to pack his contact lens stuff, which he always forgot. Her best friend Georgina had written, too, and Rain skimmed it hurriedly.

  From: georgygirl@globelink.com

  Subject: How’s it going?

  Date: 19 July 5.17 p.m.

  To: rain@zoctine.com

  Haven’t heard from you yet. Miss you already. Next week will be the first Rain-free party of the summer, Toni’s seventeenth. Not necessarily rain-free – she’s taking a chance and having it outside with barbecue. I think that’s her parents’ idea, to make themselves useful so they can stick around for fire-fighting and general supervision + no puke stains on the carpet. I’ll be wearing your green silk top (thanks!) – but think it looks better on you. Still TOO JEALOUS of you for being in London all holiday long especially as I will be in SCOTLAND with my ‘other’ family? And how are things with your granny?

  ‘This is ready now, Rain,’ Vivienne called upstairs.

  ‘I’m coming right down, Gran, sorry!’ Rain shouted back, but she finished a hasty reply, her fingers flying over the keys:

  From: rain@zoctine.com

  Subject: Re: How’s it going?

  Date: 19 July 7.19 p.m.

  To: georgygirl@globelink.com

  MISS YOU TOO! Supper ready, rushing this, will write more later. Am gutted to be missing Toni’s. Must get her a card or she will hate me – last year sent her an e-card and everyone knows that just means you’ve forgotten. Obviously there’s nothing to be jealous about – I don’t know anyone here, haven’t done anything cool yet, and am VERY unlikely to go to any parties. But Gran is lovely, a bit insane. She’s hired a totally fit student to paint/decorate/garden. Classic eye-candy, smouldering eyes, dark hair, dark skin … shame about the personality: thinks he’s God’s gift. Will watch him with his sleeves rolled up doing manly things, but avoid ruining effect with actual conversation. Can’t wait to find out how Toni’s party goes.

  Rain knew she’d be missing the most important summer of their school lives, the last summer, a fact Georgina hadn’t let her forget for a second as she made up her mind to come here. It made her feel scared all over, that she was giving up something so important, especially now that Georgy was no longer round the corner. But her dad needed the time off: if he was ever going to get on with his life, something had to shake their routine up. And now Rain had a project of her own.

  That night, Rain dreamed that she was cleaning out the cupboard with her mum, who was talking to her about everything they found in there, saying weird things like ‘This is my toy elephant, I call him Bill Smith; these are my talking dandelions, I carry them in my pockets.’ When she woke up she felt as though she’d been given extra time with her mum, for free, and she felt fuzzy and happy all over. She looked at her watch and saw it was nearly ten o’clock – Rain hadn’t meant to sleep so late, but she and her granny had stayed up quite late watching the film together. She stretched, pushed her hair out of her eyes, and went over to the cupboard. The wodged-in mess seemed even more intimidating than it had the night before. Rain took hold of a black bag and gave it a weedy tug. Nothing moved. She pulled harder, the mess seemed to lock together and edge forward in one lump, and Rain worried that if she kept pulling everything would move. She decided to go down and say good morning to her gran, and grab some toast and jam and milky coffee, for strength.

  Bloody Harry was in the kitchen again, drinking his tea again. Rain was wearing horrible nightwear again.

  ‘Oh,’ Rain said, sarcastically. ‘It always seems to be time for a tea break when I get up.’

  Harry tilted his head on one side as he looked at her. ‘I suppose you must always sleep exactly three hours later than the time I get here,’ he said innocently.

  ‘I’ve been making a start on clearing out the upstairs cupboards,’ Rain said. ‘I’m taking a break myself.’ Harry glanced down at her pyjama bottoms, raising one eyebrow. She saw the glance and ignored it. ‘Where’s my granny?’

  ‘I suppose you’ve been so busy with your clearing- out project that you haven’t even seen her yet this morning,’ Harry said, his eyes shiny with mischief. ‘She’s in the garden.’ Rain didn’t want to get her breakfast ready in front of Harry. She wished he’d finish his stupid tea and get a move on. She watched him pick up his cup again. ‘Oh, let me get you some tea,’ Harry said.

  ‘You’re not here to get me tea,’ Rain said. ‘Anyway, I really want coffee.’

  ‘Whatever you like, Miss Rain,’ Harry said, in an old-fashioned servant boy’s voice, tugging at the floppy dark fringe that fell in front of his eyes. He chuckled as he got up to fill the kettle again. She was irritated beyond belief that he found her so amusing.

  ‘Look, let me,’ Rain said, but the only way she could stop him would be to actually take his hands away and she wasn’t going to do that. So she gave in and went to make her toast instead, careful not to touch him as she squeezed past to get to the toaster. She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye as he spooned coffee into the cafetière, looking very at home. He was wearing jeans today and a thin black T-shirt that hung closely but loosely over his lean torso. When she’d made plans to come and stay with her gran, she ha
dn’t expected also to be sharing the house with an aggravatingly pleased- with-himself, infuriatingly cute student.

  She took her toast and coffee upstairs to get out of Harry’s way. As soon as she’d closed the door behind her, she felt excited again about her mum’s cupboard, and promised herself to go very slowly, and not miss a single thing.

  Closest to the door were piles of medical books (her grandfather had been a doctor) – she carefully rebuilt the piles on the other side of the bedroom – then ordinary fiction books, then a massive stack of sheet music. Rain instantly flashed back to an old forgotten memory. There’d been a piano here when she was a little girl. Her mum had played and sung to her. What was the song she used to play? She hadn’t thought about it in years. Silver something. ‘Silver Begins.’ Rain shivered. She felt like crying, but with happiness. Going further into the cupboard was like going back in time. The frail, spindly memories she had were becoming fleshier, noisier.

  The next discovery was a pile of old records. Her mum had owned a lot of the titles on both vinyl and CD: tons of Madonna, some Prince, lots of old indie bands she barely knew, including a couple by a group called Lavender Sandcastles. Rain had heard of them – they’d had one or two famous singles, she thought, but she remembered her mum playing them when she was a kid. The group looked ridiculous – the male singer pouted with intense, mascara-ed eyes on the album sleeves – but vinyl covers were lovely to look at, they were so big.

  One of the tracks was ‘Silver Begins’.

  Rain laid the records on one side of the fireplace and went back into the cupboard. She took out a big plastic telephone shaped like a grand piano, a mirror with a two-tone painting of James Dean running over the top of it, tangles of glass beaded necklaces and fringey jet hair accessories. A piggy bank that rattled with a lonely coin.

  Rain’s silent wish had been to surround herself with things that had belonged to her mother and revealed her personality, shared some of her secrets, to find everything, to understand. Now, on the edge of doing that, she was overwhelmed. She felt weak and tired. She felt she could never live long enough to read all the books, listen to all the records, and really know them, really live some of Sarah’s life. She would never have a wardrobe big enough for all the clothes, or enough space for the strange little ornaments and possessions that were so painfully, truly, alive-ly Sarah’s. Rain sat down in the dark cupboard with her legs crossed and cried.