The Man Who Rained

by Ali Shaw

  When it backtracked out of the wardrobe it had the presents her mother had given her held lightly between its teeth. They were, of course, still wrapped in their sparkling red paper, but even though she had left them unopened her heart lurched at the idea that the dog might steal or damage them. It carried them across the floor and pounced up on to the window sill.

  She threw herself out of bed, yelling, ‘Wait!’

  The dog seemed unfazed by the three-storey drop. It tensed its grey haunches and bent its knees, as if preparing to leap.

  She reached out her arms. ‘Give those back! Please!’

  It wagged its tail. The fur thudded against the window frame.

  ‘Please.’

  It crouched. It was going to jump.

  She lunged forwards to seize the packages, but at the last minute it dropped them gamely into her reaching hands. As she cuddled them to her chest, the dog flickered its tongue out across its nose and stepped casually out of the window. When she looked out after it, it was nowhere to be seen. There was only a weathervane turning south.

  She closed the window and collapsed on to the bed, still cradling the presents. She did not know whether to laugh or cry or just sag with relief. Nor did her diaphragm, which made her hiccup with a mix of gratitude and fright.

  After a minute she wiped her eyes on her t-shirt and placed the presents side by side on the mattress. Both were flat and square, but one was rigid where the other flexed. She realized she loved the scarlet glitter of the wrapping paper her mother had chosen, and when she slid her finger under the tape of the first present she did so with the utmost care.

  When she saw what was beneath she had to look away and wait for the beaded tears to drop from her eyelash. She heard the wind hum back past the window.

  It was her favourite record. Nina Simone’s Live at Town Hall. She must have been five years old when she stole it from her dad’s record collection and determined to carry it with her everywhere she went. ‘Just think what good taste you have,’ her dad remarked once, but she had taken it because it was his favourite too. She had loved other records since, records that had arrested her with an incisive lyric or a melody that cut straight to the heart, but it was for this LP that her affections endured. She’d grown up on its songs, turned back to them in times of need. Just the other day, in fact, she’d been missing this record, when all along it lay wrapped in her room. It was the only possession of her father’s that her mother had not thrown out with the man himself, and it had been Elsa’s soundtrack to becoming a young woman, her soundtrack to leaving Oklahoma. On her first nights in New York she had played it as loud as her cheap record player could bear. Played as the walls rattled when the subway passed, or when she sat in the window frame as she had had the habit of doing back then.

  In the weeks before she’d left New York for Thunderstown, she had sold off or scrapped all of her possessions. Only a handful of them survived the clear-out, and these she had delivered to her mum’s house in Norman, to be stowed there in her attic. Her mother must have found the record among those items, and recalled at once its importance to her daughter. With no means of playing it now, she held the record in her hands and stared at the photo on the cover, which showed Simone from a distance and from behind, on a stage in the spotlight, absorbed in her piano. Elsa thought of her mother, all alone in her living room in Norman.

  There was no need for a record player: the songs struck up of their own accord in her head, made her mouth hum them and her tongue sing their lyrics on the edge of her breath. She remembered splashing about in puddles when she was younger, trying to recreate the moody chords of Simone’s version of ‘Fine and Mellow’ by whistling through a cardboard tube. She remembered discovering with a thrill that the plinking notes of the piano sounded like falling rain, and Simone’s voice like the breathy cooing of the wind itself.

  Likewise she had listened to that song on the day of her dad’s release from jail, when she had played it on the car stereo as she drove excitedly to meet him, taking with her his old plastic raincoat. He’d loved that watertight coat, which was as yellow as a fisherman’s, because, as he liked to point out, ‘Fishermen and weather-watchers are like family. Spending all of their time staring into water. Hoping for a sight of something.’ She’d hoped it would bring back some of his old cheer. In her final few visits he’d been a total wreck, and all he could talk about was weather. ‘The lightning doesn’t strike,’ he’d repeated on each occasion. ‘It’s a connection made in secret by the earth and the storm. Only when it’s made does it catch fire, hotter than the surface of the sun.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she’d said. ‘Yeah, you told me about that before.’

  Then he had lied to her about the time of his release and when she enquired at the gate she discovered to her horror that he had left the jail four hours earlier and was long gone on his way into the prairie. She had held his plastic coat in her arms, sitting in disbelief in her car outside the prison gates, a copy of this album playing on loop on the stereo.

  She put the record down on the bed and dried her eyes again. Just as those songs could still disturb the air, should the needle take its slow spiralling journey towards the centre of the vinyl, memories of her father could still stir up such intense feelings in her that she could barely breathe. She looked at the phone in the corner of her room and wished there was a number she could call which would lead to his voice breathing down the line. She wanted badly to tell him about Finn and what she had found in him. But there were billions of combinations of digits you could punch into a telephone and not one single string of them could connect her to her father.

  She put the record aside.

  When she tried to unwrap the second gift, her hands were trembling and she had to put it down again. She considered for a moment picking up the handset and miming the act of dialling her dad’s old number. Then she could pretend he had answered and let him know all the things that she felt. There was so much to tell him that she would not know where to start. Perhaps she would start by telling him that ... Perhaps she would ...

  She fanned her face because the blood had rushed to her head and tears were threatening once more.

  She would tell him that he was a bastard. He should have been there on that day when she – the only one who still cared – arrived at the jail with his beloved yellow raincoat and Nina Simone playing on the stereo and money saved up to help him get back on his feet. Instead he had vanished, found himself a tornado to die in, left everything unfinished.

  He had made her feel as if he loved storms more than he loved his daughter.

  She grabbed a handkerchief and blew her nose. Then, with bleary eyes that meant she tore the paper, she opened the second present.

  It was a kite.

  A diamond-shaped kite made from quartz-white fabric. The tail, bunched up in polythene, was tied with silver bows. As she took it from the packet the tail fell to its full length with the grace of a waterfall. Her chest tightened and her shoulders bunched forwards. She picked up the phone and this time she did not mime but punched in the numbers. The clicks and crackles of receivers connecting across continents. Then the ringing tone that itself reminded her so much of her mother.

  ‘Hello? Who is this?’ Her mother sounded shattered, and only then did Elsa realize that it would be the middle of the night in America.

  She had no idea what to say. She pressed the handset tight against her ear and cheek.

  ‘Who’s there? Do you know what time it is?’

  ‘Mum ...’

  ‘Elsa! Oh my God!’

  ‘Hello, Mum.’

  ‘Elsa!’

  ‘Um, thank you, Mum, for my presents.’

  If her mother was cross with her for not calling, or upset that she had only just now opened her gifts, her voice didn’t show it. ‘You liked them? Elsa, I can’t believe it’s you! Have you flown the kite yet?’

  ‘No, I ... I’m going to fly it today. With someone I met here.’

  ‘I’m
so pleased, Elsa. I’ve got the receipt if it’s no good. But I guess you’re a long way from the store ...’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, I probably am.’

  Silence – apart from the rummaging static of a few thousand miles of crossed air and leapfrogged oceans – but she had learned from Finn that an unfilled silence could be worth more than a hurried word.

  ‘And the record?’ her mother asked. ‘It still plays okay?’

  ‘I don’t have a record player, but that doesn’t matter.’

  ‘Ah. It was ... I know it’s funny to give you something that’s already yours but, you know ... Oh, Elsa, I can’t believe it’s you.’

  Elsa looked down at the telephone cord twisted round her fingers. It wasn’t already hers, it was and had always been her dad’s. Her mum used to infuriate her with such mistakes, but not today. ‘It’s perfect, Mum. I mean, it’s a massive surprise because it was ... because it was ...’

  ‘Because it was your father’s?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She could hear the breath passing over her mother’s lips. She wondered whether, if she could but listen hard enough, she might hear the clock ticking on the wall above her mum’s phone, or the Oklahoman wind blowing through the avenues of Norman.

  Mum blew her nose. ‘Sorry, Elsa, it’s just so marvellous to hear your voice. I wonder, did I ever tell you what my favourite line on that album was?’

  ‘I didn’t think you cared for it, Mum.’

  ‘“Like a leaf clings to a tree, oh my darling cling to me. Don’t you know you’re life itself ...” She cleared her throat. Elsa knew it was hard for her mother to talk about her emotions, even if it was in quotation marks. ‘Your father,’ she continued, ‘played that to me on the night we got engaged, after we got back from the beach where he proposed to me. Do you want to know what he told me after that?’

  Elsa bit her lip and nodded silently. Her mother waited for a moment and continued. ‘He said human beings were like a wind blowing. He said that sometimes we’re loud and sometimes we’re a whisper, sometimes we’re warm and sometimes we’re frighteningly cold. But however we blow, we blow onwards, and leave no sign of us behind.’

  ‘Mum,’ Elsa gulped, ‘I think I fell in love.’

  She yelped with excitement. ‘What? Love? I never thought I’d hear you say that!’

  ‘Well, I – he – changed my mind.’

  ‘Who is he?’

  ‘His name is ...’ she hesitated. She was tempted to say Cumulonimbus. ‘His name is Finn.’

  ‘And what does he do?’

  ‘He, er, he makes me happy.’

  ‘Good. Good. He sounds very mysterious. Although he’d have to be, to cut through all your opposition to falling in love.’

  ‘Well, you know, you and Dad never really made the best case for it, Mum.’

  Her mum didn’t reply at once, and Elsa cringed and wished she hadn’t said that. It was so easy to slip back into the old ways of talking.

  ‘I loved your father very much, to begin with, but with all his storm-chasing he might as well have had another woman on the go. You won’t believe it, but when I was pregnant with you, I was the more whimsical, the one who did things on the spur of the moment.’

  ‘I know. I never even thanked you for all those practical things you did.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, dear, of course you did.’

  ‘That’s kind of you, but I know I didn’t.’

  ‘You don’t need to say something to mean it.’

  ‘All the same ... thank you.’

  Her mum blew her nose again, an explosion of snorts and gasped breath, distorted by the long-distance connection into something truly horrific.

  ‘So,’ said Elsa when they had both recovered, ‘are you not going to ask me where I’ve gone?’

  ‘I’m not allowed to, am I?’

  ‘Oh, Mum, I’m so sorry. I just ... I needed ...’

  ‘I know. You don’t have to explain.’

  ‘Well, you can call me whenever you like.’ And she gave her mother her telephone number and address and she told her about Thunderstown and Kenneth Olivier and each of the mountains and again, eventually, about Finn, although on that subject there was very little more she could say.

  By the time Elsa’s phone call had finished, the sun was up and the winds were blowing above the mountains, chasing a bunch of white clouds through the high fields of the sky. She pulled on her sneakers and left the house, the kite rustling under her arm.

  As soon as Finn opened the bothy door, she sprung on him and wrapped her arms around him. She leaned her head against his neck and heard the small swallowing noises of his throat and beneath that his breath, the expansion and contraction of his chest. Surprised, he returned her embrace. Their bodies fitted together like separated continents.

  After a while she took a step backwards so she could look at him. ‘I’ve got something for us,’ she said, and handed him the kite.

  He took it out of its packet, the bows shimmering as he shook out the tail. He ran his hand over its glittering surface.

  ‘I want us to fly it together,’ she said.

  ‘But I don’t know how to fly a kite.’

  ‘I’ll teach you.’

  A wind came rushing down the mountain, throwing up leaves and dust and humming through the bothy’s walls.

  ‘It’s the perfect day for it,’ she said.

  He leaned forwards and kissed her. ‘Come on, then.’

  Old Colp’s higher reaches inclined gently, giving way to meadows of dark tufty grass and dried-out ferns curled up into orbs. Finn led Elsa to one such place, an expanse dotted with poppies that had – for the time being at least – dodged the attentions of the goats. Their scarlet heads bobbed in the sweeping wind, and the meadow grass keeled left and right in its currents.

  ‘It’s easy,’ Elsa said, when they were standing side by side and the wind was eagerly flapping her hair. ‘We each take one end of it, and I hold the guide strings. Then we run. As fast as we can, and when I shout to let go we throw the kite into the air. Got it?’

  He nodded, concentrating, and took his side of the kite. She looked at him, laughed at how seriously he was taking it, then shouted, ‘Run!’

  And off they shot, over the springy grass with the wind racing along with them and surging up their backs. The fabric of the kite crackled like a firework about to go off. They ran at breakneck speed – she hadn’t run this fast in years – and then she yelled, ‘Throw!’ and they launched the kite into the air. It took off with a hungry crackle and ripped upwards on the currents. They skidded to a halt, and Elsa turned to guide its flight with the strings, although all she really needed to do was to anchor it. It looped high above them in a dazzle, the sunlight making the colour glitter in its fabric.

  ‘How do you control it?’ he puffed.

  ‘Like this,’ she said, demonstrating. ‘It’s easy, especially in this wind. Here, have a go.’

  He took the guide handles from her as cautiously as if they were eggshells, but he quickly grew in confidence. He tugged experimentally at one handle and the kite dinked to the side. He grinned and made it reverse the other way. He had mastered it in no time, just as he had mastered the art of folding paper birds. Now he made it dance a figure of eight, now zigzag across the deep sky. Its tail coursed in its wake.

  Elsa watched Finn’s face. It would not be possible for his grin to be any larger. ‘I wonder if ...’ he mused as he experimented with the strings. ‘Watch this!’

  He made the kite move at a blur through an arc and another arc, so that it traced an E in the sky. After that it shot vertically in a straight line, then shimmied back down on itself. Finally it zipped through a circle, signing off with a dash.

  ‘You wrote my name!’

  He nodded happily, and offered her the strings. ‘Your turn.’

  She got through a loosely defined F, then sent the kite crashing down to the ground where its fabric ruffled indignantly, caught in the grass. They picke
d it up together and dusted it off.

  ‘Try again?’ he asked.

  ‘Damn right!’

  She began to run. Finn chased along beside her and the kite crackled between them, already straining to ride the wind. They raced across the flowery earth and she was about to shout, ‘Now!’ when she tripped and flew forwards, losing her grip. The sheer surprise of it made him trip too. He yelped and clutched in vain at the kite’s tail as he fell along with her on to the grass. They rolled on to their backs just in time to watch the kite shoot free, wriggling away like a snake swimming through water.

  Elsa laughed.

  ‘You aren’t cross that it’s gone?’

  ‘No. It was fun while it lasted.’

  He nodded.

  She moved across to lay her head down on his chest. There was a noise in there of distant thunder. She lay against him, looking up at the kite until it diminished into a white dot, a star in the daytime.

  ‘We should go too,’ he said.

  ‘What? We only just got up here.’

  He became serious. ‘No. I mean, you and I should go away. We should have an adventure together.’

  She stared outwards at the great blue atmosphere and wondered how far their kite had flown. There was infinity beyond that cerulean expanse. ‘Where would we go?’

  ‘I don’t know. That’s the exciting thing about it.’

  ‘I’ve only just started my job. I might not be able to book the holiday.’

  ‘Elsa, that’s not what I meant. I meant we should leave Thunderstown.’

  ‘Oh. Wow. That’s a big step.’

  ‘Yes. That’s the whole point of it.’

  ‘Finn, I’ve only just got here. It was only this morning that I told my mum where I’d gone.’

  ‘You don’t have to lose touch with her again; I’m not suggesting that. But think how exciting it would be to pick a horizon and head off for it.’

  What if, she wondered, Thunderstown had never been her destination, but only the starting post for an important journey that was to come? She tested herself to see if she had grown too attached to leave. She had not fled New York in search of a change of bricks and mortar. She had left it in search of a different life. Kenneth would be disappointed, and she realized just how much it would hurt to leave him; but they could always stay in touch.