The Man Who Rained

by Ali Shaw

  ‘Nothing.’

  She knew there was something. The cloud had made him blurred, like an unfocused photograph, so it took her a moment to notice the bulge in his jeans.

  For a moment everything was quiet. She heard his tiny groan of embarrassment. Then she roared with laughter that something so earthly had overcome him. ‘Finn!’ she exclaimed, and threw her arms around him. The mist shimmered. ‘It’s okay!’

  ‘Then why are you laughing?’

  She pushed him on to his back and the cloud swirled around them. She reached down lightly to touch him and he made a dumb contented noise.

  ‘Are you okay with this?’

  He nodded. She undid the popper at the top of his fly.

  They undressed in a nervous flurry of clothes. At first he didn’t know what to do. He just sat there naked and hazy with the sunlight diffusing through the vapour and framing him in a corona. They locked lips again and then she climbed on top of him. When his confidence grew she moved on to her back.

  Then, as he lost himself in her, she gasped because the sunlight dropped a blanket of rainbow through the cloud. It settled over their two skins with a prismatic shudder and they were bound together in seven colours.

  16

  BROOK HORSE

  On the stroke of midday, when the sun was directly overhead and its rays could find no route through the windows, the Church of Saint Erasmus was at its darkest, and a congregation of shadows occupied the pews and aisles. Here, in the murk, Daniel sometimes sat from mid-morning, enjoying the failing of the light. A private eclipse, with all the lonely silence of the church to share it with.

  Today’s gloom was just such an exquisite affair. He reclined in it as other men might in a hot bath. There was a darkness such as this inside of him too, which this one helped appease. It made him feel undone out of his skin, so that it was hard to tell where Daniel Fossiter ended and the world began. In this way he felt released, an uncorked genie floating for a few precious moments beyond his lamp.

  He heard someone whisper his name. ‘Daniel.’

  Startled, he looked around him. The church was too dim to be sure, but all of the pews were empty and when he sprung to his feet and searched behind the pillars he found nobody hiding there.

  ‘Daniel.’ There it was again. ‘Daniel Fossiter.’

  He covered his ears with his hands to test whether the voice was inside his mind, but there were only the silent flowings of his thinkings, and no sooner did he let his hands drop to his sides than he heard it again, louder this time. ‘Daniel Fossiter!’

  ‘You fool, Daniel,’ he scolded himself, as he realized it was not a whisper but a yell, coming from outside.

  When he threw open the doors and screwed up his face against the sunlight, his name was shouted enthusiastically. Some fifteen townspeople were approaching the church steps. They had with them a pony, a bedraggled-looking thing that walked with a limp. Sidney Moses held a rope tied around its neck and by this he had evidently forced it to Saint Erasmus Square. ‘Mr Fossiter!’ he cried up the steps. ‘Look what Abe Cosser found up on Drum Head. A brook horse!’

  Sidney clapped Abe across the shoulders, knocking the scrawny shepherd two steps forwards, and urging, ‘Tell him! Tell him, Abe! Tell Mr Fossiter what happened!’

  ‘Well, sir,’ mumbled Abe, ‘it was like this. I was up on Drum Head, you see, to check how the sheep had done in that rain we had, and maybe to move them down a pasture, if they were up to their necks in boggy ground. And, well—’

  Sidney clapped his hands. ‘Cut to it, Abe!’

  The pony snorted and flapped an ear at an interested fly. Daniel folded his arms.

  ‘Well, sir, it was like this. Up there the rain must have been a damn sight heavier because the tarn at Gravel Point had filled up so much that she’d burst her banks and all the earth around her had turned to mush and puddles.’ Sidney Moses cleared his throat as a warning, but Daniel raised a finger. ‘Let him finish, Mr Moses. In your own time, Abe.’

  Sidney rolled his eyes.

  ‘Well, sir, what should I see stood dumbly in the mud but this brook horse? Since I meant to spend the better part of the day up there with the flock, I had some provisions on me. Nothing a brook horse likes more than a fishy sandwich, my old man used to say, and it just so happened I had, well ...’ He waved a nibbled sardine sandwich through the air and the pony whinnied eagerly.

  Daniel plodded down the steps. ‘Why do you think it is a brook horse?’

  ‘You’ve only got to look at its tail,’ chipped in Sidney. He stepped right up alongside Daniel to demonstrate how he should do just that.

  Daniel laid both hands on the pony’s back and made a deep noise in the back of his throat. The pony puffed algae-smelling air from its nostrils and lowered its head as if it were in need of sleep. Daniel rubbed the coarse hair of its flank and moved along its side to examine its tail.

  Instead of the long, swishing appendage common to other wild horses and hill ponies, this beast had a tapering stub, bald and calloused at its end. It did not look diseased, more likely that the pony had been born with it deformed in this way. At the very tip of the tail Daniel discovered three hard plates of skin, each the size and shape of a fingernail. He pondered these for a moment, the only noise that of a rook croaking as it settled on one of the church’s eaves. The crowd’s excitement was palpable, but they knew well enough to stay silent while Daniel conducted his examination.

  He crouched down to inspect the back leg, for he had seen how lamely the pony had limped after Sidney Moses. This too did not look diseased or injured. Instead, its muscles were thin and its hoof was too small to support its share of weight. Around the ankle were a dozen more scaly callouses like those on the tip of its tail, and between these drooped a thin inch of transparent skin which Daniel ran lightly between his forefinger and thumb. It had a wrinkled, slimy texture that reminded him of the fin of a fish.

  He sighed. He was feeling soft today. He could sense the bulk of the church behind him frowning like the ghost of the Reverend Fossiter. Just like his father, who had deserted his role as culler because he opposed what the crowd now expected from it, Daniel had no wish to execute this brook horse. A goat was one thing because a goat was full of greed, but this poor being would have shied away from Thunderstown had it not been led down here. Abe Cosser was a fool for capturing it and bringing it to a man as bloodthirsty as Sidney Moses.

  ‘Be hard like an anvil,’ his grandfather used to say, ‘and then the hammer blows stop hurting.’ Daniel looked from face to anxious face, until doing so returned him to the sorry brook horse. He wondered how many times his grandfathers had stood in this plaza surrounded by men with names like Cosser or Moses, and with them some deviant creature of the weather brought forth for Mr Fossiter’s judgement. This thought gave him comfort. His own feelings meant little in the torrent of history. What he was about to do was in his very flesh and bones. It was the only way he knew.

  Then he remembered out of nowhere his first encounter with Miss Beletti. In this square, against the walls of this church, he had broken the neck of a wild dog and she had confronted him afterwards, with her anger as brilliant as a sunrise.

  ‘It is a brook horse,’ he sighed, and every member of the crowd took a satisfied breath. ‘But I have no knife. Mr Moses, hand me that rope leash. I will lead the devil back to my homestead and do right by it there.’

  Sidney licked his lips. ‘It’s all right, Daniel. I didn’t expect you to take your knife with you to church, so as luck would have it I stopped by my house and grabbed hold of mine.’

  Without breaking eye contact, he reached down to his belt and retrieved a long steel blade with a plastic handle, which he offered to Daniel.

  Betty, thought Daniel out of nowhere. How she had so hated this sort of thing. He took the knife and considered it with disgust. A good culling knife should have a handle of bone. It showed its purpose. A plastic handle was Sidney through and through, and Daniel longed to re
turn it to him with the blade sheathed in his stomach.

  He shook himself. His father; Betty; Elsa: none of them would agree with this. Only his hateful grandfather, who had once axed the head from a chicken just to laugh at its body racing around the yard. So why did it trouble him what a contemptible man like Sidney Moses thought? Again he scanned the earnest faces of the crowd, asking himself who he cared for among these people. There was Hamel Rhys, a pervert and a snake. There was Bryn Cobbler, a drunken shoemaker. There was Sally Nairn, whom he did care for, who had helped him once choose the right flowers to present to Betty, but who now would not meet his eye. She was as subscribed to this as the rest of them. All of them had come here for a killing, for a sacrifice to their own good fortunes.

  ‘Mr Fossiter,’ prompted Sidney, ‘we are waiting.’

  It’s in your bones, whispered the voice of his DNA, it is your bones. Without it you would have no shape.

  ‘I fear,’ said Sidney, sideways to the crowd, ‘that Mr Fossiter is not himself.’

  Daniel wanted to return to the church’s dark. There, in the shadows where everything was without limit, he could cope better with the mess of his thinkings.

  ‘I fear that Mr Fossiter has not been himself in a very long time. Not since Betty Munro took the heart out of him.’

  Daniel patted the pony’s grey neck, scratched its mane, felt the warmth of its throat. ‘You have made a very big show, of late,’ he said, turning back to Sidney, ‘of being the one who tells me who I am and who I am not.’

  Sidney looked affronted. ‘Well, it’s as I’ve always said. Everybody must be accountable. Nobody is bigger than the town.’

  ‘Except you, Mr Moses, isn’t that right? You with your fingers soft from paperwork and your lips gone crooked from too much politicking.’

  Sidney bristled. ‘Mr Fossiter!’ His eyes goggled and his chin retracted into his jowls. He looked as ridiculous as a turkey. ‘All I have ever asked of you is that you be more ambitious in the way you conduct your business. That you help us find Old Man Thunder!’

  At that name the crowd murmured their assent.

  ‘What if conducting my business has taught me when and where it is needed? I have no desire to kill this animal.’

  Sidney was flabbergasted. He spread his hands theatrically. ‘Since when has desire come into anything? You are employed to carry out a duty! If your desires have so confused you of your purpose, perhaps it is time for somebody else to take the lead. We will never catch Old Man Thunder if we dither over cases such as this.’

  One or two more impressionable townsfolk drew in a sharp breath at this flagrant opposition to their culler. Several pairs of pleading eyes fixed on Daniel, and he fancied that they carried no more love for Sidney than he did. They wanted him to break whatever spell had enchanted him and turn the knife on the brook horse.

  He looked down at the blade and tested it with the side of his thumb. To Sidney’s credit it was sharp enough to draw a trace of blood. He gripped the handle hard.

  ‘Who on earth is going to take that lead, Sidney? Who knows the ways of the mountains like I do? You? You would trip over your own pot belly and fall to your death on the Merrow Wold. If you think that all there is to culling is taking potshots at goats while you lean on your garden fence, then you are greatly mistaken.’ He snorted and tossed the knife at Sidney’s feet, where the steel clattered against the paving. ‘I will not kill this brook horse. Abe, lead it back up to the place where you found it, and set it free.’

  With that he turned and began to plod away towards his homestead. He tried to carry himself steadily, but the thrill of what he had just done made him want to dance. Dance a jig, like he and Betty had danced at Mr Nairn’s one-hundredth birthday party. Waltz and whirl, because he had disobeyed not only Sidney, but all of them, back through history.

  Then he heard a brief whinny and a horrible pop followed by a tearing noise.

  He turned in time to see Sidney pull the knife from the brook horse’s jugular.

  If they had judged wrongly and it were a true pony, Sidney and the crowd might have been kicked and thrown about as the animal struggled against death, but it was a brook horse so it only collapsed to its knees. From the wound in its neck, water frothed where blood should have flowed, spattering on to the paving and Sidney’s polished shoes.

  The frame of the animal sagged and its back rippled. It flopped on to its side, still gushing water. The crowd retreated a few paces as the last of the liquid bubbled out of its throat. Its hide wrinkled and drooped into the puddle it had made. There was a smell of stale water and sediment, for where one might have expected bones and muscles to have filled the brook horse’s skin there was only dirty flood water, seeping outwards from a shrivelled coat.

  Sidney was doing all he could to hold on to the knife with trembling hands. His shirt was soaked and stuck to his skin, showing his pink belly through the cotton. Some of the crowd had covered their mouths with their hands, but others were staring angrily at Daniel. Sally Nairn looked betrayed. Abe Cosser looked like a kicked dog. Others regarded the man holding the plastic-handled knife with a newfound respect.

  ‘Th-that,’ declared Sidney before clearing his throat and trying again, ‘that is what we’ll do to Old Man Thunder.’

  Daniel stared at the hide in the puddle. The crowd whispered to each other, and then someone said, ‘Hear hear,’ albeit cautiously. Daniel felt as if he had woken from a blissful dream to find himself in the dock of a courtroom.

  ‘Let’s not get carried away,’ said Sidney, regaining confidence enough to raise one commanding finger. ‘Mr Fossiter evidently needs rest. He needs time off. Should, after that, he decide to honour the wishes of his employers and return to work, well, then I’m sure we shall be very glad to consider it.’

  Somebody at the back of the crowd hit a few claps of applause. Somebody else crossed themselves and stared at Daniel as if he had been unmasked as a witch. Daniel looked at the dead brook horse and the last liquid flowing out of it and searched himself for the feeling of a minute earlier. Where before he had felt free and liberated, now he only felt lost.

  When he arrived, shaken and pensive, back at the homestead, Mole was dead beneath the table. He crouched and rubbed her back, but there was no warmth in her. He lifted her and carried her outside and laid her gently on the grass. Thirty yards from the homestead a lifeless, slanting tree made a circle of shade over a row of small gravestones. He found his shovel and plodded over to this tiny cemetery, reading the names of all of the hounds who had been buried there. Flint, Hunter, Sharpeye, the list went on in this fashion. Then Esme and Prosper, his father’s housedogs. Then the patch of green grass he had been keeping watered and soft so it would be ready to dig on this day.

  He looked back over his shoulder at the small black shape lying by the homestead. ‘Get up,’ he urged, beneath his breath, and tried with all his might to will it into happening. The grass shifted in the breeze. A speckling of cloud blew across the sky. He put his shovel down. ‘Don’t worry, Mole, I won’t make you rest with these.’

  He went to the workshop and collected his axe. Then he returned to the dead cemetery tree and began to chop at the parched lower branches. When he had severed a good many, he split them into lengths and carried them in armfuls to a good flat place to pile them.

  Once he had got the fire going around Mole, he crouched at a distance with his sleeve across his mouth and nose. The black fumes came up from the flames, dancing and leaping. A plaited column of smoke rose high into the air. He thought about the days when Mole and Betty had chased each other across this very spot, and rolled in it laughing and barking, and he wished he could go back, and fall about with them in the green grass.

  17

  KITE

  A dragging day of work followed, in which she filed the photocopies she had made on her prior shifts there. At lunchtime she overheard her supervisor Lily gossiping about her with another girl who worked in the offices. Lily was recounting
what Elsa had said on her first day at work, about coming to Thunderstown to find out what I wanted life to be. At this both Lily and the other girl giggled snidely. ‘She thinks this is another world,’ sniffed Lily. ‘And she left New York for it. Can you believe it? New York!’

  She spent the day with the click of the hole punch, the snow of its emptied paper circles, the snap of the ring binder opening and closing. In the evening she ate, with Kenneth, a coal pot stew he’d cooked with so many chillies that, after her final mouthful, she slumped exhausted in her chair and could think of nothing but an early night. Her bedroom was hot and she slept without sheets. In the small hours she woke from the heat and pushed both the windows open. It did little to lower the temperature, but it brought in a dry air that smelled of heather blossom.

  Just before dawn she woke to a thump above her. She propped herself up on her elbows and listened. Another thump, then another, as if something were moving on the roof of the house. A tickling breeze came in through the open windows. The sky was a navy blue, with a pale fuzz building along the outline of Drum Head.

  Then, rushing through the window and welling in the dead end of her room, came a wind. Her hair fluttered and a book she had left on the bedside table opened its cover and flicked its pages. A paper goose that Finn had made her took off from the shelf where she’d decided to display it. The wardrobe door – which she had left ajar – swung open.

  Suddenly, something more than blown air came in through the window. She shrieked and huddled backwards against the headboard. A pour of grey fur had landed in the shadows at the foot of her bed. It looked up at her with navy eyes and its ears pricked up. She bunched her fists against her mouth, too petrified to call for help.

  The dog lost interest in her almost at once and lowered its nose to the floorboards. It sniffed along the wood until it came to the opened wardrobe. Placing its forepaws on the base, it ducked its head inside and snuffled around among her things.