by Ali Shaw
‘Listen, Elsa, I tried to tell you about these dogs before. They’re not like other dogs. They’re different.’
‘What do you mean?’
He scratched his head and looked wistfully at his useless radio.
‘Come on, Kenneth. You were going to say something more than that.’
He cleared his throat. ‘I don’t expect you to understand. Part of them is weather.’
‘Part of them is weather?’
For the first time since she had met him she saw a flash of irritation in his expression, although he quickly buried it. ‘Well, of course you should believe in whatever you want. Perhaps this is just another superstition from a superstitious town.’
‘Sorry, it’s just ... you can’t be serious?’
‘Look, Elsa, I am just trying to make things clear to you. For my part I have found the world a far more bearable place to live in ever since I stopped trying to assemble a list of things I believe in and a list of things I don’t. Instead I have resolved to believe in just a single thing: my own ignorance. The world is bigger than the confines of Kenneth Olivier’s head.’
‘I’m sorry. I bugged you about it and then I overstepped the mark.’
He chuckled. ‘Don’t worry. Because if you stay here worrying, you are going to be late for work ...’
They smiled at each other, then she set off for the office and her thoughts went back to her cloud man from the mountain. At work she became quickly reacquainted with the photocopier, but on her lunch break she found a bench in the church square and pulled from her bag the map she had used to find Old Colp’s ruined windmill. Tonight she would be better prepared to find the bothy.
No sooner was her afternoon shift over than she had changed into her sneakers and was hurrying up the mountain. Uphill, the world became hushed. The brown mountain grass and the mounds of heather stood as motionless as the ranks of boulders that crested each ridge. The sky was a tinny blue, and barred in the north with diagonal clouds. When a bird of prey whistled overhead it sounded loud as a siren. She looked up in time to see it become a plunging black chevron landing death on some unfortunate mammal.
When she reached the wreckage of the windmill she stopped to catch her breath. She found the spot where she had watched the man turn to cloud and rain on the meadow, and she fancied that the grass was greener there. After her hurried climb it was pleasant to imagine the cool touch of water, but she was too close now to stop and daydream. She set off along the gully she had followed the man down, the slates grinding beneath her footsteps, and before she knew it she was at the bothy.
She approached the front door and rested her fingertips for a moment on its white-painted wood. She had to calm herself before she could knock, for now that she was here she was nervous at the thought of seeing him, and perhaps seeing cloud seep out of him again. It took her a moment to take control of her feelings, for her instinct was to either race away downhill or charge on into the bothy, demanding answer after answer. A measured approach was required, and that had never been her strong point.
She tapped her knuckles lightly off the wood. Her feet were shuffling nervously on the step when the door opened.
His eyes widened when he saw her. A weird pallor of shadow and light rippled across his hairless face, like the shadow of a cloud dappling across a field. She was again struck by his size and peculiar lack of pigmentation, as if he had no blood to show through his skin.
He looked like he wanted to run and hide, but to her delight she had him cornered. ‘Hey,’ she said.
‘It’s you.’
‘Yes. Me.’
He tried to shut the door, but she stepped quickly forwards to block it. ‘Wait! Please. I’m sorry to ambush you like this.’
‘Then why are you here?’
She liked his voice. Each word was like the dry push of breath that blows out a candle. ‘I suppose ... I just want to know what I saw.’
‘It’s better for you if you don’t.’
She swallowed. ‘Then you’re going to be seeing a lot more of me.’
He sighed and looked past her at the slopes. He was wearing those same broken-lipped shoes he’d worn before, and a pair of jeans whose denim had faded almost to white, and a shirt that had perhaps been red or orange once, but had turned with time to a bleached yellow. ‘Are you alone?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Okay ... First you have to make me a promise. If I tell you all I can, will you leave me alone?’
‘Sure. I promise.’
‘And will you promise not to tell a soul?’
‘Okay, I promise that too. I only know one person in Thunderstown, anyway.’
He nodded. Then right away he looked puzzled. ‘Wait ... you’re not from Thunderstown?’
‘New York.’
His mouth made an O. ‘I’m sorry, I should have been able to tell that from your accent. But I don’t hear many voices up here, let alone New Yorker ones.’
‘Actually my accent’s kinda Oklahoman. That’s where I grew up.’
He looked confused. ‘Oak-what?’ he asked.
‘La-homa,’ she said, unable to hide her delight that he didn’t know the name. It gave her the spine-tingling assurance that she had come as far away from home as she had hoped she would all summer.
‘You’d better come in.’ He moved inside the bothy and motioned for her to follow him. She held back for a moment on the hearth, then took a forwards step that felt like a leap of faith.
The building’s low ceiling and confining walls told of its original function as a simple shelter. The main living space was no bigger than her bedroom in Kenneth’s house, but it still managed to cram in a sitting area, including a pair of wooden chairs and a small eating table. A door on the opposite wall opened on to a bathroom, and a wooden stepladder fixed to the wall climbed to a bedroom converted out of a loft.
But it was the man’s paper models that caught her attention. She had noticed the quantity and variety of them when she had peered in through the window, but inside she kept spotting more. As well as the countless paper birds that hung on mobiles from the ceiling – which now rippled their wings in the breeze flowing from the door as if they were real falcons riding on the thermals – there were paper animals tucked in every cranny. On shelves where in other houses books or photo frames might have been arranged, proud paper horses and paper dogs posed among paper trees with leaves twizzled out of paper branches. Unfolded sheets were stacked up on the table, and it seemed that she had caught him at work, for alongside them was a work-in-progress model: a half-formed animal she could not recognize.
He pulled out a chair for her, then sat down opposite. He was so big he made his chair look like a child’s, but he sat on it as lightly as a balloon on a lap. He examined her for a moment, his gaze more direct than any she had experienced before. If someone had looked at her so directly in New York she’d have freaked out or told them where to shove it, but there was something forgivably curious about the way he regarded her. He had an unfettered manner, as if he were an animal and this was his den.
Eventually he met her eyes and she saw again that his irises were tinged with a stormy purple. Within them his pupils looked imperfect, the black of them mingling with the inner rims of his irises, just as the eye of a hurricane mixes with its cloudwall. Looking into them made her feel like one of the paper birds hanging in the breeze.
‘Who are you?’ she gaped.
‘My name’s Finn Munro,’ he said.
But she hadn’t really meant to ask him his name. She had meant what are you? How can you have eyes such as these and how did you dissolve into cloud? ‘You’re ...’ she struggled. ‘I mean ...’
‘Are you going to tell me yours?’
‘Elsa. Elsa Beletti.’
He took a deep breath. ‘Well, Elsa, I am not like you. I am not like anybody. I used to think I was, but that was a long time ago now. I can’t promise you will understand. I don’t think many people could.’
&nb
sp; ‘I’ll do my best.’
‘Like I say, I’m not normal. Even if I’d started out that way, I suppose I’d have become very strange by living alone for so long like this.’
‘How long have you been here?’
‘Eight years. I was only sixteen when I came here. Before that I lived in Thunderstown, in a beautiful old house on Candle Street, with my mother and with Daniel. But I did something bad, and for everybody’s benefit I moved up here. Since then I’ve sort of stopped thinking in years, just in seasons. I’ve given up on birthdays and calendars.’
‘Wait. Daniel? Fossiter? I’ve met him.’
‘He was my mother’s ... friend. He helped me move up here so I could stay out of trouble. After my mother went away.’
He said those last words as lightly as he could, but she knew how to spot a child’s pain at their parent’s exit. She wanted to offer him sympathy. My dad left home when I was sixteen, and I can still remember him going, as if it were yesterday. Stuff like that doesn’t really get old.’
He looked up at her gratefully. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘it’s hard to forget what happened. But I have made my peace with it. I only mention it to explain that I’ve been up here on my own for a long while trying to come to terms with myself.’
‘I still don’t understand what I saw.’
‘Okay, put it this way ...’ He laid his hands flat on the table, beside the unfinished paper model he had left there. Up close she realized it was the start of a horse. The long head and fluid forelegs were complete, but the back of the animal remained only half-folded.
‘I have a storm inside of me.’
She blinked. ‘I beg your pardon?’ But she had heard him clearly. Her instinct was to disbelieve it, but she had seen grey mist fuming out of him. She had to lock her ankles together beneath her chair to stop her legs from jittering.
‘It’s always been that way. Part of me is cloud and rain and sometimes hail and snowflakes.’
‘But ...’ Her mind hurt, as if she had bitten on an ice cube. Her eyes were drawn again to the half-finished paper horse, and she suddenly realized that she had entirely misinterpreted it. It was finished, it was just that its hindquarters, which she had assumed were in need of more folding, were not those of a horse. They were those of a fish. She shuddered. ‘That’s impossible,’ she said.
He laughed ruefully. ‘I wish it were. Then I would not have this problem. Because, in a way, it is impossible. Impossible to live like other people do. Like you. I am too ... unpredictable. The weather can change in an instant.’
He looked at his fingers. It took him a minute to continue. ‘I grew up trying to be normal. My mother did all she could to make my life like that of any other little boy. In the end it didn’t work out.’
‘You said you did something.’
‘Something happened, yes. And I ended up living on my own in this bothy, trying to keep out of sight. There are people in Thunderstown who might ... react badly if they knew what was in me. So I spend all day walking the mountaintops and all evening folding animals out of paper. It’s not much of a life. It means I stay safe, but there’s always the weather inside of me, reminding me that things can never change. I can feel it, see, in my belly.’
She was sitting forwards in her chair. ‘What does that feel like?’
‘Well, it’s different from day to day. Sometimes it’s ice-cold, which makes me apathetic, like nothing matters in the world, and I think I wouldn’t care even if I dropped down dead. Other times it’s as hot and heavy as a monsoon and I can barely believe there’s so much rain inside of me. That’s when I’m glad that I’m up here alone, because I get soppy and ridiculous. I bawl my eyes out over the slightest things – a smashed mug, say, or a sad memory – then afterwards I wonder what I made all the fuss about. It makes it impossible to live life like an ordinary person. So, lately, I’ve started to wonder whether I should keep trying to be a person at all. Would I be happier if I was weather entirely? And that’s what I mean by coming to terms with myself. With what I really am. A few times now I’ve built up the courage, but every time something’s pulled me back. Just like you pulled me back at the windmill.’
‘Me?’
‘Yes. You asked me to wait.’
That caught her off guard. She remembered her strong urge for him to stay, but she had put it down to fear. She would never have thought that he would stay because of her.
They sat in silence for a moment. The paper birds flew along their painstaking orbits. The door was still ajar, and the breeze carried in a sudden fragrance of heather blossom. Finn seemed in no hurry to say anything more. She supposed you learned to cope with silence if you lived alone, in a stone hut halfway up a mountain.
‘Sometimes,’ she said carefully, ‘I feel things I’m not able to define. I’m not, um, part weather, but I mean ... I feel things I don’t recognize, feelings for which there are no words in the dictionary. Sometimes they frighten me, if I’m honest, and ... well, I’m not saying it’s the same as what you’ve just described ... I guess I’m just saying that, maybe, you don’t have to feel so alone about it.’
She scratched her cheek. It was an artificial gesture created to give her hands – turned suddenly fidgety – some occupation. She looked sharply around the bothy. She was not used to talking about her emotions with strangers. In fact, she was not used to talking like this with anyone.
‘Did you just try to say,’ he asked quietly, ‘that you feel like that too?’
A brisk nod. She forced herself to laugh. ‘Well, we have become awfully serious, for two total strangers!’
Again he regarded her with that level, scrutinizing stare, so unacceptable in a bar or café or subway car. Hell, even Peter had never had the nerve to look at her as if he could see into her like that, as if she were as insubstantial a thing as she had seen Finn turn into.
‘You’re different to the people in Thunderstown,’ he said.
She shrugged, still embarrassed. ‘The world’s a big place.’
‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘for telling me that.’
Suddenly she was talking again. ‘I just started feeling this stuff. It was a bolt from the blue. My dad died, you see, and that put everything out of perspective. Or into it, I can’t decide. He used to have a picture on his wall of a hurricane seen from space. I found it again after he died, when I went through all his things. A little eye of emptiness wrapped up in a whole lot of bluster. That’s me, right there, I thought. But I was frightened that, if I let the bluster die away, all I’d be left with was the emptiness at the middle of it all.’
She stopped as abruptly as she’d started. She was surprised to have blurted out so much of herself.
She tapped the table like a judge calling for order. ‘This is crazy!’ she declared, high-pitched. ‘What are we talking about? It’s impossible! You aren’t made out of weather! You can’t be!’
He was taken aback. ‘But you saw for yourself.’
‘It must have been a trick. One that isn’t funny any more. You have to tell me how you did it. Tell me what you did to me!’
He looked hurt. ‘I didn’t do anything to you. I didn’t even know you were there until you asked me to stay.’
She stood up and straightened out her top. ‘Look,’ she declared, ‘this has gone too far. Tell me the truth about what happened and I’ll leave you in peace.’
He scowled, then he stood up too, and went to the sink. There in a rack some cutlery was drying in the sun. He grabbed a knife and spun around with the blade raised.
She panicked and backed towards the door.
Then he turned the knife point down and used its tip to prick his forefinger. He tossed it aside and raised his hand. She could clearly see the little cut at the centre of his fingerprint, but no blood welled out of it. Instead, it hissed. It whistled like a punctured tyre. She felt its tiny breeze flowing across her cheek.
‘So,’ he said curtly, ‘all of your questions have been answered. And now you can keep
your promise.’
‘What promise?’ She had more questions now, although she did not know how to phrase them.
‘To leave me alone.’
She could see she’d upset him. She wished she hadn’t acted in the way she just had, but she had been so suddenly frightened. She tried to apologize but she was no good at it and she only mumbled something ineffectual. In the end she had no choice but to give a feeble goodbye wave and leave the bothy.
A few paces across the scraggy mountainside she looked back and hoped to see Finn at the door watching her go. But he had closed it soundlessly behind her and he was not even at the window.
7
OLD MAN THUNDER
It took the morning sun a long time to light and heat the Fossiter homestead. As it crept westward shafts of it shone in at angles, highlighting the cobwebs and the painted frowns on the portraits of deceased patriarchs. In a pool of such light, Daniel Fossiter was on his knees, saying, ‘Are you dead? Have you died, Mole?’
Mole, his dog, lay on the wooden floor with her paws stretched forwards and her good eye firmly shut. Her bad eye – the one in which she had been blind since birth – remained open, marbled black and blue like the shell of a mussel. She had not moved all morning and he could not detect her breathing.
If he was not such a damned sentimental old fool he would long ago have given her one last favourite meal, then led her outside. As it stood, he had let her reach this infirm stage, where every day seemed like her last.
‘Mole?’ he whispered. ‘Are you still in there, Mole?’
Every Fossiter who had ever walked the mountains had owned a dog, a member of a canine dynasty with a pedigree as meticulously charted as that of the Fossiters themselves. They were copper-haired, hardy pointer-retrievers, who rarely barked or played, preferring to slink after scent trails with their bellies close to the ground. Daniel had inherited several from his grandfather, but he also had his father’s pair of clumsy house dogs, who had spent their lives bickering in yaps so shrill that the hunting dogs had never dared to hassle them. For some years he’d lived with this motley pack, until the time when, as if in competition, the hunters and the house dogs had each birthed a litter of puppies and he’d feared being overrun. How strange it had felt to be the sole remaining Fossiter of Thunderstown, while all around him the fur-ball progenies of his forefathers’ mutts scrapped and bit and barked.