Rain

by Kate Le Vann

  ‘But they talk about your brother, I bet.’

  Harry rubbed his eyes with his palm. ‘Yeah,’ he said matter of factly. ‘They do. But usually it’s to say that I’m just like him, or I’m doing something he always did.’

  ‘I suppose my dad talks like that, too.’

  ‘So, maybe it isn’t really for us, maybe it’s to let themselves think there’s still a little bit of the other person here with them,’ Harry said.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Are you going to tell your dad?’

  Rain smiled. ‘I’m going to practise telling him until I can tell it like a joke. I’ve already made a start on that, I keep running through it in my head, trying to make it funny. I thought I’d have Colin answer the door in one of his stage outfits.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Harry said. ‘You know I’m really sorry about that.’

  ‘I’m sorry I gave you a hard time, at the time. I’m fine about it now, you know. Really.’ She shrugged.

  ‘Are you disappointed you’re not the bastard love- child of a one-hit-wonder … ‘

  ‘Two-hit-wonder … ‘

  ‘ … the bastard love-child of a two-hit-wonder pop star?’

  Rain laughed, and let her shoulder bump against Harry’s, then wondered if she should have. Could you do that with a friend? But she was doing well, it was feeling normal again between them. She was being very grown-up and sensible. She wanted someone to congratulate her, because it might have helped her with the heavy pain of her bruised heart.

  ‘So now what do we do?’ Harry said.

  ‘About what?’ Rain said, feeling scared – had he found her out? Was he going to gently let her down by telling her about Madrigal?

  ‘About me fancying you, dicking about every moment of every day trying to impress you, thinking about you all the time?’

  Rain’s heart stopped beating, then started again with a big stumbling kick. ‘Do you?’ she said. She felt as if her face was very gently on fire, and she had to open her mouth to breathe.

  ‘Yes. Do we do something about it, or do I … leave you alone?’

  This was so strange: while there was nothing she’d wanted to hear more than this, the fact that she knew what had happened the day before made it worse than anything else he could have said.

  ‘My granny said you were kissing Madrigal when she came in yesterday.’ She began hesitantly and finished quite fiercely.

  ‘Oh.’ He made a small ‘huh’ sound, looking up at the still grey sky. It was enough to confirm it – she’d still stupidly been hoping her granny was wrong and he’d been trying to take a piece of grit out of Madrigal’s eye or … a piece of grit out of her mouth … with his lips …

  ‘I’m just having trouble working out how that would fit into your constant efforts to impress me, and … ‘

  Harry didn’t say anything. He was still sighing quite loudly.

  ‘Well, you’re not trying to deny it, anyway,’ Rain said. ‘I suppose that’s something.’ She looked up at him. ‘I would have really liked you to try to deny it,’ she said. ‘I still want you to.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Harry said. ‘It did happen. You know, for … ten seconds I wanted to be kissed. Because I’d lost you. I’d ruined your life and made you sad and there was no coming back from that.’

  ‘But you came back today.’

  ‘Yeah.’ He dragged his hand through his hair. ‘As soon as she started kissing me I knew it wasn’t what I wanted at all.’

  ‘But why not?’ she said. ‘I mean, why would you not … she’s completely beautiful, you obviously get on … ‘

  ‘Right, I would like to pretend to be offended by that, and point out that men aren’t completely stupefied by beautiful girls, but what with you looking like you do, I think people would laugh at me.’

  ‘Oh, come on, I … ‘

  ‘Madrigal’s not my type. And she’s funny, but she’s not that nice. I quite like that in a friend, though. Everyone wants a friend who’s a little bit bad.’

  Rain pulled her frizzy, still-damp hair in front of her face. ‘It still hurts, Harry.’

  ‘Does it?’ Harry said. ‘I can’t think of a way of saying this that doesn’t sound terrible, but that makes me kind of happy, because maybe it means you … ? Rain, you believe me, don’t you? How do you feel?’

  They had reached the entrance to Kensington Gardens now, and fell back into silence. The rain had stopped, but the park seemed deserted. The Peter Pan playground was empty. There was no one sitting on the benches. There was no one anywhere. Rain felt the pressure to make something happen – she knew she could kiss Harry here, now, everything was set up to make it right. She could … she could stand on her tiptoes and hold his shoulders. Or she could turn his face towards hers and … The thing was, Rain could think about kissing him, but she couldn’t make it happen, she couldn’t feel her way to making it natural. As they walked further through the park, Rain started to see more and more people. There were dog owners walking their dogs, some Japanese tourists under umbrellas, small groups huddled beneath the shelters in the café. A light breeze rustled the tall, old trees and rippled the duck pond, the geese and swans shaking their feathers out: the park was coming to life again.

  And Rain knew she hadn’t answered Harry’s question.

  ‘Maybe we should go somewhere warmer,’ Rain said. Her feet were starting to hurt where the wet leather was rubbing them.

  ‘Sorry, you look really cold,’ Harry said. ‘Come on, let’s double back and get you somewhere warm.’

  As they walked to a café, Harry made funny jokes about the people who walked past them, pointing out which obscure celebrities they looked a bit like, asking Rain to explain their strange behaviour and guess their names, and she enjoyed coming up with mad reasons, and she and Harry were just like they always were together. He’d given her the chance to ignore what he’d said, and while she waited for him to bring their coffees, taking off the wet shoes and rubbing her freezing feet, she considered taking it. He turned round to look at her from the counter, his floppy dark hair, flattened by the rain, in his eyes, the little half-smile checking that things were okay.

  ‘I wish I could say something that would make me seem like a better guy,’ Harry said. ‘I was stupidly slow to catch on with Madrigal, which means I’ve been shitty to her, and I’ve screwed everything up. But the way I’ve felt hasn’t changed since you walked into your grandmother’s kitchen that first day.’ He slowed down until he’d stopped speaking and asked her with his eyes, and Rain still didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I feel like we missed our moment,’ she half-whispered.

  ‘We missed it, did we?’ Harry nodded and picked up a teaspoon, turning it over a few times. ‘Oh.’

  ‘I mean, there’d have been some moment where we just … kissed or something, in a fun way, and no one had to analyse it or worry about it because by then we wouldn’t have … ‘

  ‘What wouldn’t we have?’

  ‘But Madrigal was always in my mind, the fact that you weren’t free to go around kissing people, so we didn’t kiss then and we can’t kiss now because … ‘

  ‘Rain?’

  Rain was speaking so quickly now she didn’t know if she was making sense or not. ‘Because now it’s all changed and now I can’t just be your holiday fling and you can’t just be mine. And you have screwed things up. And there are consequences, and there are homes to go to, and there are times when everything is right but the timing is wrong, which is why I’m telling you we missed our … ‘

  Harry leaned over the table and held Rain’s cheek in his palm, and kissed her. It was a soft kiss, slow and steady, his hand moving back to the nape of her neck, gently holding her hair, and Rain felt so dizzy that she suddenly opened her eyes with a start, gasping and staring at him with her mouth still open.

  ‘That’s a pity,’ Harry said.

  ‘Well, it is a pity,’ Rain agreed. ‘And now no matter how much time we spend together the rest of the summ
er, and let me get this straight right now, we really should spend every minute of the rest of the summer together, I think we’re just never going to get that —’

  Harry kissed her again, and Rain carried on speaking into his lips for a second or two, then let her head spin away again, the way it seemed to when Harry was kissing her. On the other side of the kiss, she met his dark eyes again.

  ‘Harry, I’m serious, though. I like you too much. I can’t do this. You’re at university, I’m at school. There has to be an end, and it’s not all that far away. And it’s going to hurt. I’m going to get upset and miss you.’

  ‘We’ll work it out,’ Harry said.

  PART THREE

  Chapter 16

  Rain was sick of seeing people in sombreros. They came past in groups of six or so, usually carrying tired- looking kids. The parents looked strained from trying to keep their holiday spirit intact all the way home, but also relieved to be back. Rain could remember that feeling, the first sight of British things after a foreign holiday – how everything seemed ugly and boring but, at the same time, comforting. She’d been at the airport since before ten o’clock, her dad’s plane had been due just after ten-thirty and had landed about half an hour late. It was now well after midday, though she was trying not to look at her watch again because the hands didn’t seem to be moving. For the first hour, she’d smiled constantly, the happiness inside her spilling out unconsciously. Now she wondered if she’d be so tired of waiting that she’d only give her dad a so-so welcome.

  She needn’t have worried. When Sam Lindsay’slong, thin, untidy frame came around the corner, Rain shouted ‘Dad!’ in a voice that was meant to be a decently audible call, but came out as a slightly deranged, very childish yelp. And her dad ran to her, scooping her into his arms and hugging her and hugging her, their heads together, tears in both their eyes.

  ‘I’ve missed you so much, Rainy,’ her dad said. ‘God, you look so much older!’

  ‘You look younger,’ Rain said, laughing. ‘So tell me what you’ve been up to,’ Sam Lindsay said.

  Rain’s diary

  21 August

  Ack, I’m just like my mum, I never keep up with my diary when the things I’ll want to read about are actually happening. I’ve probably forgotten things, well, not forgotten, but my head is now so full of things I need to talk about and my fingers won’t go fast enough.

  I felt a bit like that yesterday, just talking, when I wanted to tell my dad what my summer had really been like and I was tripping over my words, trying to dance around the bits where I’d have had to tell him I thought my mum had been in love with someone else when he first went out with her.

  In the end I just told him. I hoped he’d laugh.

  He didn’t.

  He said, ‘I can’t believe I’ve told you nothing about your mum, I can’t believe you let me get away with that. I feel horrible. She was your mum and I owed you that. I owed her that.’

  I said, ‘But Dad, you’ve told me so much about her, you’ve told me loads of good stories and talked about how lovely she was. Besides, I knew her and I loved her.’

  ‘Yes, of course, I’m sorry Rainy. But I never talked about her and me in the early days, how we met, the way I really saw her – not as your mum but as my girl. To not talk to you about that was almost like lying. You know why I didn’t though, don’t you?’

  ‘Well, I thought it was because it would have been too … upsetting for you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So, Dad, you don’t have to.’

  Dad gave a little laugh. ‘Well, you’ve read the diaries now, eh? You probably remember better than me.’

  ‘Probably not.’

  ‘No, probably not,’ he said, smiling. ‘So, where should I start?’

  ‘It’s not really where,’ I said. ‘More like when. So maybe not now, this minute, but tell me when it occurs to you, you know, when it’s natural – just don’t not tell me again?’

  We ordered a Chinese takeaway – a break from our usual rotation: Sundays traditionally being fend-for- yourself days. I’d eaten a lot of fancy food at Gran’s, some of it successful, some of it a bit strange, and when our beef in black bean sauce and kung po chicken came, it tasted great. Then I made my dad talk to me about the early days, the Sarah’s Diary days, hanging out with my mum – despite having just told him he didn’t have to. I made jasmine tea to go with the takeaway, and we both drank tons of it and got giggly, the way you can on a lot of jasmine tea. For once, I didn’t have any of that feeling of Sunday dread. Maybe I was just high on happy because I was seeing my dad again.

  But a pot of tea later, Dad admitted he’d been in a band for a very short time – they were called The Strands – and I asked him why he never mentioned it or did anything musicky now.

  ‘I was the singer,’ Dad said. ‘You know, you’d have known about it if I was one of those sad old dads bringing out a guitar all the time, but it’s not the same for singers. I wasn’t a good singer, either, I was just the frontman because I had the front.’

  I looked at my sweet, geeky dad and wanted to laugh, but I didn’t. ‘So have you really not got any pictures of you lot playing?’ I said.

  ‘There were some taken at the time, but they just got lost,’ he said. ‘You move, you pack stuff up, different things get left in different places.’

  This was when I got him to go and look for early pictures of my mum and him anyway, pictures I’d seen tons of times before. I needed to look at them together and know for sure that they’d been in love. I mean, I knew that everything Harry and I had been looking for had been nonsense, but there were a couple of reasons I needed a fresh look. First, it had never occurred to me before this summer that my parents hadn’t loved each other perfectly, like people in films. But because that assumption had been shaken, even if it was just for a few weeks, I just wanted to … you know, sort of set my heart back on track, get all my senses back on board thinking that again. Second reason: I have never been in love before, and I needed to look at their love through my new loved-up eyes, as someone who knows. Because I knew that I would understand it all now in a way I never had as a kid.

  I cleared the leftovers away while Dad went to look. He was gone ages. Eventually I went up to see what he was doing. I found him sitting on the floor in the middle of his office with pictures all round him, smiling. I picked some of the pictures up.

  ‘Dad, I haven’t seen these before,’ I said.

  ‘I know, I had a brainstorm,’ he said. ‘It suddenly occurred to me that there might be something in my uni files. But I haven’t opened these boxes in a thousand years and there was all sorts of stuff I just … forgot about.’ Dad looked up at me with this really … weird smile on his face. ‘Here,’ he said, showing me a picture of some teenagers on stage. He was the one at the front, pulling a scary screaming face as he strangled a microphone stand.

  ‘Dad, it’s The Strands!’ I said, feeling my whole head smile. I sat down on the floor with him, and held the picture. I never wanted to stop looking at it. ‘What were you, punks?’ I said, enjoying the taste of a word I think I might never have said out loud before. ‘And is that eyeliner?’ I looked round to see that he wasn’t really listening: he was staring at a creased old sealed envelope.

  ‘There’s this, too, Rain.’

  He turned the front round to show me. It said: Rain, when she’s old enough. It was my mum’s handwriting.

  ‘What’s that?’ I said. I couldn’t hear any more. My heart was going so fast and it was as if there was a big whooshing breeze right through the middle of my head, upwards, the edges of my vision sort of sparkled with little yellow stars. I was … fainting. But I didn’t quite faint, I kept my eyes on my dad’s eyes and tried to keep my breathing normal as he told me.

  ‘Sarah wrote it. Not long after you were born. I can’t remember when, a day, a week, I’m really trying to remember … She … she said she’d give it to you when you were her age – the age she was then – so
you’d know how she felt when she, er, when you were born. She gave it to me because she always lost things and she said she knew I’d remember. I might have, but I stopped looking at these old things because, you know.’

  ‘What does it say?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know. And quite honestly, I think I should read it before giving it to you because I genuinely don’t know, not at all. But it’s not addressed to me, is it?’ He handed me the letter, and I saw his hand shake.

  Dear Baby Girl

  As I write this, we haven’t even decided what to call you. I’m trying to decide between Rain and Patience, but your dad thinks we should go for something more ‘normal’. I don’t want normal. You’re too amazing. I’m feeling so much for you that I need to share it with you, I have to set it down on paper, for keeps. I want you one day to know how I feel today.

  But first I have a confession, and I need to get it out so I’m writing it here. You were not planned, and for a lot of the pregnancy I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing, my tiny little girl. In fact, I was sure I was doing the wrong thing. I used to lie with my head on your dad’s lap while he stroked my massive stomach, and I’d say, ‘What are we doing? I don’t like babies! We’ve ruined our lives! We will never smile again. We will never be the same again!’ I said this … like EVERY DAY. Now let me tell you the truth: since you were born I haven’t stopped smiling. I can’t believe I get to keep you. I get to take you home. I get to hold you EVERY DAY. I can’t stop staring at you. I told Sam we’d never be the same again, and I was right, and it’s better than we could ever have hoped.

  I have great plans for us. You, me and your dad. We’ll see Africa together, and Rome and Brazil and Hawaii – well, if we ever have any money. We’ll sing Christmas carols round the piano at Christmas. (We’ll get a piano when we can afford one.) And money or no money, I promise you this: you will always wear fabulous shoes. I’m going to teach you everything I know about boys, and girls, and LIFE, everything you’ll need to know, and you will be formidable and fearless and kind.