by Ali Shaw
Elsa had no intention of letting Daniel dictate who she could and could not see, but his interference was a problem for the future, one she hoped Finn would confront sooner rather than later. For the time being, she let herself be satisfied with a kiss.
A knock at the door. She yawned as she climbed out of bed. She answered, rubbing sleep dust from her eyes. Kenneth Olivier was wearing a crumpled suit with a fresh yellow flower through its lapel. His tie was as gruesomely patterned as one of his multicoloured jumpers. Elsa was still dressed in her bed boxers and a t-shirt, and he looked embarrassed to see her in such clothes. ‘I’m sorry,’ he mumbled, backing away from the door. ‘I thought you would be getting ready for church.’
‘Er ... no. I’m not religious.’
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Oh, I see. Oh.’ His expression fell, not because he judged her on it, but because just yesterday he’d told her with a level of enthusiasm she’d only seen him display before when talking about doosras and googlies in cricket matches that he’d become the church choirmaster, and this Sunday would be the first time his charges would sing in the service. She wished she hadn’t said anything.
He blushed, apologized for disturbing her, and turned to shuffle back down the stairs.
‘Wait!’
He looked back hopefully.
‘The Church of Saint Erasmus?’
He nodded.
She grinned. ‘Five minutes.’
She closed the door and hurried to her wardrobe. She immediately caught sight of the presents from her mother, still wrapped and in their bag, forgotten in the wooden shadows. She bit back a wash of guilt that their taped-up paper brought her, but still she would not open them.
Church, then. It had been a while. She couldn’t stomach her mother’s church, a place she was obliged to attend if a visit home took place over a Sunday. The way that the congregation raised their hands in the air and pulled pained spiritual expressions as they sang made her feel self-conscious, even though she liked the idea that God could be like lightning, that raising a hand might increase your chances of being struck. She hoped the Church of Saint Erasmus, that cavernous minster so closed to the elements, would prove to be different.
She’d have to dress smart, like Kenneth. Her only appropriate clothes were her office skirt and blouse, which she pulled on with regret, since they made her feel like a workday had come around early. She tied her hair up to disguise the fact she hadn’t washed it, then hurried down the stairs, still stamping into her unpolished black shoes. Kenneth was waiting in the yard outside the house, whistling a hymn she half-recognized. The noise of a dull bell tolling rang out from the direction of the church. She put her arm through Kenneth’s and they set off.
‘Daniel Fossiter stopped by earlier, while you were sleeping,’ he remarked as they walked.
‘Why? I mean, are you guys friends?’
‘Not really, no, although we get along all right. But this morning he had actually come looking for you. He said he’d heard I had a guest. And that she was an American girl. He’s going to come back later, but perhaps you’ll see him at church.’
‘That’s all? He was just paying a friendly visit?’
‘Yes. I suppose so.’
They turned off Prospect Street and into Bradawl Alley, where the walls wore a green stain like a tidemark and every so often the pavement hopped down a few chipped steps.
‘Weird,’ she said. ‘He didn’t seem like the type.’
Kenneth frowned. ‘You’re still thinking about the dog you saw him kill. I don’t think you should judge him too harshly for that. Daniel is dependable and decent. You’ll find far worse than him in Thunderstown.’
‘That doesn’t paint a pretty picture.’
He chuckled. ‘You wait until you see some of the folk in my choir. I’m afraid that the people of Thunderstown have good reasons for many of their beliefs. Some of the things they think are, frankly, nonsense, but others are born out of very real and painful memories. Lots of people here are old enough to remember the terrible flood that destroyed the mines, and many of them lost loved ones that day. It is important for them to know that a culler is here with them, to protect them from the weather.’
Bradawl Alley ended under a blackened stone arch, beyond which lay Corris Street, whose windows were all shuttered up. Saint Erasmus’s belfry poked above the chimney stacks, its tolling bell sounding closer with every step. Behind it, Drum Head watched the town with one sleepy eye.
‘What on earth,’ she asked, ‘could Daniel Fossiter do to protect Thunderstown from another flood?’
Kenneth chuckled. ‘Nothing, of course, although the more superstitious residents would disagree. They still hope he’ll catch Old Man Thunder.’
‘What? Who’s Old Man Thunder?’
He cleared his throat. ‘Some people blame a sort of devil for the bad weather that has, in the past, devastated parts of the town. Legend has it that he lives somewhere up in the mountains. He’s old and bald and wicked, although they say he didn’t start out that way. They say he was a thunderstorm once, who got so lonely up in the sky that he turned himself into a man of skin and bones. Only, when he tried to speak, his words were lightning, and they set the meadows on fire. When he tried to touch another person he blew them away with a gale. He became so sad that he could not be a proper human being that he wept, and his tears became a flood that rushed down to the town, drowned the livestock and filled the mines with poisonous water.’
They walked in silence. There was no noise of bird or wind, only the clang of the church bell.
‘Kenneth,’ she asked warily, ‘do you believe in that story?’
‘Oh no, no. But I can understand it. Sometimes people need someone to blame.’
Corris Street arced into Saint Erasmus Square, and the colossal church appeared before them. The knowledge that she was about to enter it, not just to explore it but to be there with the worshippers, gave the building an even darker aspect. It didn’t feel like a church from the modern world but some solemn temple from ancient times.
She shook her head as if to clear out her overactive imagination. It was just a huge stack of bricks and mortar. Inside there would be nothing but empty space and elderly churchgoers.
She was right, and triumphant for a moment as Kenneth led her through the door, then disappointed that there was no mystery within, no soul of the building present like a phantom. The church felt barren, its walls whitewashed and bare, the cold confines of its stone keeping the hot day out. A tuneless organ played as the congregation entered. Depending on how you looked at it, attendance was either exceptional or dire: every uncomfortable pew was full, but there were very few pews in the church. Most of them had vanished along with its statues and gargoyles and, given the rich mahogany they’d been joined from, Elsa suspected they had all been pawned. Surrounding these few rows of worshippers spread a sea of grey flagstones, chiselled with the names and titles of the bodies interned beneath. Mosses sprouted through the cracks, and the stones were smattered with the droppings of those feathered church regulars who lived in the rafters.
Then she saw Daniel Fossiter in the front row, head bowed in piety, a conspicuous space between him and both his neighbours.
Kenneth went to sit with his choir so Elsa found a spot on the end of a back pew, as far from Daniel as possible. She’d been sitting there barely a minute when a diminutive nun wearing enormous glasses sat down beside her.
‘New here?’ she asked Elsa, in an ancient, impish voice.
‘Quite, yes.’
The nun unfolded her hands in her lap. When she spoke her teeth showed, each one whittled away until it was set apart from the next. ‘I’m old here,’ she said. She unfolded her ancient fingers to indicate she was not only old in this church but old in the streets outside, the uplands and the mountains beyond.
‘Dot,’ she said, and pinched Elsa mischievously on the arm.
‘Elsa.’
‘And you’re staying with Mr Olivier.’
‘Yes,’ Elsa replied, surprised at what this old lady knew. ‘Kenneth, yes.’
Dot tapped the side of her crooked nose with an even more crooked finger. ‘Kenneth told me to look out for you. Said you’d sit at the back. So I stuck my bones down here. I won’t hear much of the sermon this far away from the lectern, but there’s no harm in that, is there?’
Elsa laughed, a little too loudly, and her laughter rippled off the vault of the roof, where wings thrashed in response.
‘And how was your journey?’ Dot asked.
‘We just walked. Kenneth doesn’t live so far away.’
‘No. Your journey to Thunderstown.’
‘Oh,’ she said absent-mindedly, ‘Beautiful. You know, when the clouds are like a landscape and you want to run across them? And everybody else has their head in a book or their eyes closed and you feel like you’re the only one in the world who still thinks there’s magic in flying.’
‘Look here,’ said the nun, reaching into her crisp grey habit to pull out a little pouch. After trying unsuccessfully to remove its contents with her bent fingers, she reached across and took one of Elsa’s hands, turned the palm upwards into a cup, and tipped the contents into it. On to her palm fell a fresh red flower like a baby tulip, a big yellow button, a canine tooth and a passport-sized photograph. This last item Dot picked up and showed to Elsa.
‘I haven’t got a husband to carry in my purse with me,’ grinned Dot, ‘unless of course you count the good Lord himself, who doesn’t pose for photographs. But this is the next best thing.’
The photo didn’t show a face but a dark mass of clouds with the sun bursting behind them, so that the cloud edges were lined with a brilliant light.
‘It’s a silver lining,’ Elsa said.
‘I’ve got more, many more.’ She began to repack the things into their pouch. ‘You should come and visit me sometime.’
Before Elsa could answer, the organ ceased playing and the priest stood and cleared his throat. He was all jowls, and had no hair on his spotted head except for a pair of eyebrows that were thick and black like rat fur. ‘That priest,’ Dot whispered, leaning so close that Elsa could smell her (and she smelled heady and sweet like pudding wine), ‘was young here when this church was glorious. When the windowpanes were still full of stained glass.’
After an opening address and prayer, the priest informed the congregation that it was time for the choir to sing. Elsa recognized one or two of its members from around town, but she now knew all of them by name and vocal range, thanks to Kenneth’s enthusiastic descriptions.
That man with the tufty moustache and greased, combed hair was Hamel Rhys, who claimed he had been suckled on bottles of beer instead of breast milk. Behind him stood Hettie Moses, wife of the town busybody Sidney, and alongside her a pair of austere old sisters, identical twins who still lived together. These Hettie had befriended, and she had done all she could to curl her hair and dress as if she were their triplet. The final member of the choir was little Abe Cosser, who kept a flock of sheep on the fields of Drum Head. It was said in Thunderstown that just as a dog resembles its owner, so too a shepherd resembles his flock, and true to form, little Abe Cosser possessed spread eyes and the slanted, reaching teeth of a ewe. Yet he also had a beautiful falsetto, and when Kenneth raised his hands (Elsa could see the nerves jittering in his left leg) and the choir began to sing, Abe’s voice fluted mournfully over the amateur tones of the other members, lifting their plain song into a melancholy harmony made almost supernatural by the lofty echoes of the church. Dot closed her eyes and exhaled with pleasure, and when the singing stopped Elsa had a momentary pang of something almost like grief at its ending.
Then came the priest’s sermon, addressed to the gathered faithful in his reedy voice. It was a losing battle with the acoustics of the building. The congregation cupped hands to ears to try to make out the words above echoing interruptions from sneezes, cleared throats, dropped hymn sheets and the constant commotion of pigeons up above.
Unable to follow the sermon, Elsa settled as comfortably as she could into the pew and watched the light playing across the plain frosted glass of the windows. Outside, the clouds were passing across the sun, sifting shadows down on to the town.
She remembered waking before first light on a Saturday, the door to her bedroom creaking open, and her dad appearing with a finger to his lips. Slipping out of bed, she’d padded after him and shadowed him down the stairs. There in the hallway he’d dressed her in her coat, and together they’d tiptoed out of the door with him carrying her shoes by the laces. She couldn’t risk putting them on inside, in case her footsteps echoed on the floorboards. Dark mornings were different from night-times, especially when you were still brimming with sleep. She’d crept along, hand in hand with her father, obeying the only rule he imposed whenever they did this: this stays our secret, you don’t breathe a word about it when we return to the house. But that would happen long after absorbing fleets of altocumulus in the dim morning glow, or the eerie disc of a lenticular cloud, floating like a spaceship above the distant Ouachita Mountains.
She kept their rule. Never told her mother she’d been up and outside long before the day had started. Told her instead that her dad had taken her to dance classes while her mum had snored through her weekend lie-in. She had to learn a few moves now and again to feign a performance, but she didn’t feel bad in deceiving her. She knew her mum would go berserk if she found out what they were really doing, and besides, these trips were just as important to Elsa as they were to her dad.
Now, thinking back to it, she wondered why her dad had never come to church with them on Sundays? If he’d done that it could have been a pact: storms on a Saturday and services the day after. She knew right away why he hadn’t: he was addicted. On Sunday mornings, too, he’d head out cloud-watching before dawn broke. But to Elsa those Saturday mornings felt more spiritual than the Sunday ones. It was no surprise to her that, once upon a time, people had equated storms with gods. The first time she saw a town that had been sucked up and spat out by a tornado, it broke her heart and made her question the immense indifference of the universe, just as others might question the indifference of a deity. That was what storms were: they behaved with all the splendour and barbarity of ancient deities. Clouds were not just an ornament of godly imagery, clouds were the inspiration for pantheons, awesomely real and intangible at the same time. There were thousands of them swarming across the planet at any given moment, and yet under the shelters of roofs and ceilings it was so easy to forget their existence.
The church of the sky was something she’d so often dreamed of while the hoo-ha of the Sunday service carried on around her. There seemed to her infinitely more God to be found by staring up at the never-ending universe than by looking glumly around a building of bricks and stone.
Her father’s holy books were written by meteorologists. His preferred prophet was the lightning: he was on a one-man crusade to explain the inner workings of a lightning bolt to anyone he could, as if they held some revelatory value. Cab drivers, waiters, shop assistants: no one was safe. ‘The lightning doesn’t strike,’ he would tell them, and if they made the mistake of asking him to elaborate he would do so until they managed to excuse themselves. ‘It’s a connection, you see. The storm reaches for the ground with an electrical feeler, invisible to the naked eye. The ground does the same, and it’s like two arms trying to grasp each other in the dark. Then, if they manage to find one another, their connection is so strong it catches on fire, and is hotter than the surface of the sun.’
Not long after Elsa moved to New York, her dad received his first prison sentence. She had been hosting her flat-warming party on the night he phoned her to say he was in trouble again with the police. It was not the first time he had been caught stealing. On previous occasions he had escaped with fines and community service, but this time the judge had ruled that his repeat offences warranted something more severe.
It had been a sur
real revelation. She knew he had been broke for years, but he had hidden the extent of it from her. It was because he was a storm junkie. When she was a kid he had worked at a big weather centre in Norman, but his employers had noticed the peculiar pattern of his sick days. Every time he got news of some big hurricane forming off the coast, or some mega-tornado predicted in the prairie, he’d set off in his truck to be in its company. After they fired him he got other, crappier jobs, but these exerted even less of a hold on him and his absenteeism only increased. Eventually he had no money left and stole a bag of candy bars from a mart.
She had wanted to support him at the hearing. She’d been able to see what he’d done in perspective: it was only a damned packet of candy bars, whereas he was her precious father. But he had lied to her about the court location and only subsequently did she learn of his later, escalating crimes, which had culminated in the theft of the purse of a single mother of three.
She was the only one who visited him in jail. Not her mother, not her father’s side of the family, not even the storm-chaser friends who – she had always felt – had never been on his wavelength anyway. They were thrill-seekers, whereas her dad had no interest in storms as a joyride. His reasons for following them were more spiritual than that. He was the high priest of the hurricane, the liturgist of the lightning, and this image was the one she clung to, even if she knew it was only a part of the picture that was her father.
Before he was interned, Elsa had hoped that prison would knock sense back into him. Then, on her first visit, when he’d mumbled, ‘I’m weather-powered, see,’ she’d had a kind of premonition of how he would go to pieces behind bars.
One time, after she’d drunk a little too much bourbon, her mum said she was calling his weather-powered bluff. He was not fuelled by the energies of storms and tornadoes. He was fuelled by the company of his only child, and he had stopped functioning because she had left him for the bright lights of the city. Perhaps she had drunkenly exaggerated, but even so the idea sent Elsa’s mind reeling in horror. Could she have destroyed her father through the inevitable act of growing up? She tried to ask him about it, once, in the space between that first jail term and his second, but he was too prickly to speak on the topic.