The Man Who Rained

by Ali Shaw

  ‘You know,’ she sniffed, ‘when you hear people say that life is short, that you should live every last second to the full. Well, it’s too hard. Hard, when trusting someone can let them hurt you, when you don’t really know your own mind, when the things you want turn out to be the things you never wanted, when you can’t connect with friends and family, when there are groceries to buy and dishes to be done, and photocopying and filing and timetables and diaries and distractions.’

  He reached down and she felt him lift her chin, with the exact same gesture her dad used to use to raise her head and restore her confidence when she was a little girl.

  And then he did something she had never seen him do before. Not once, she realized, in all her time in Thunderstown.

  He smiled.

  He had the largest, heartiest smile she had ever seen. His teeth were strong and white and the lines of his face that were usually so set in contemplation or a frown fell away, and new lines appeared that accentuated the depth of his beaming, heartening smile.

  He has gone mad, she thought, to think he has found something to smile about.

  And then he let go of her hand, and the smile dropped from his face like snow slipping off a branch. He became earnest again. He met for a long moment her eyes, then nodded and left the room.

  And although she did not know it then, she would never see Daniel Fossiter again.

  21

  WERE ALL SPIRITS, AND ARE MELTED INTO AIR

  Daniel Fossiter stood on the Devil’s Diadem in the windless night, with his back to the walls of the nunnery and Finn’s storm still pouring over Thunderstown below.

  The night had become too dark to distinguish the cumulonimbus from the black sky surrounding it. Only when a blade of lightning stabbed down at a chimney or at Saint Erasmus’s belfry was its shape revealed: a citadel of fumes with towers as high as any of the mountain peaks. Sometimes the lightning revealed steep ramparts of cloud, with battlements reflecting the light as coldly as stone.

  This was not the first storm he had watched from the nunnery’s vantage point. He remembered being up here with his father once, as a child, not long after his mother left, watching a storm drift away into the east. It had been a red flotilla in the sunset, and Daniel had looked from it to his father and seen – for the only time in his life – the old man on the edge of tears. ‘Just watch it go, son,’ his father had whispered, ‘and don’t blink. Don’t forget one beautiful second of it.’

  Daniel heard his name spoken and turned around. Dot had come out to find him. When she spoke, her voice seemed able to anticipate the lulls in the storm’s noises and to dart between them. ‘It’s getting late. Do you want to come inside for something to eat?’

  He shook his head. A blue-white flicker of lightning sputtered inside the storm.

  Dot regarded him for a moment: his coat buttoned up to his beard and his broad-brimmed hat wedged on his head. ‘You look as if you are going somewhere.’

  He shrugged. ‘I believe I am. Although I am not sure where.’

  Thunder passed over them like the beating of wings. Dot waited for it to boom into the distance, then asked, ‘Would you like us to keep some food out for you?’

  ‘There’s no need. I hope I do not come back.’

  She stayed quiet, digesting what he’d just said. ‘I think,’ she said eventually, ‘I understand you. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’

  In his childhood memories of this place, she was just as ancient as she was today. He could remember first encountering her, back when he was three or four feet tall. Then to his young eyes her age had seemed preposterous and grotesque, barely even human.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘but someone has to try it, and it should not be Elsa.’

  ‘Perhaps I can give you something to take with you?’

  He laughed. ‘What more do I need, other than my own two legs?’

  ‘How about a story? When your father used to come up here, when he’d spend long hours in conversations with the abbess ... well, sometimes I was present for those discussions.’

  ‘Forgive me, Sister, but I’m not sure that stories of my father are what I need to hear right now.’

  Dot ignored him. ‘Mostly we talked shop, but on one occasion the Reverend Fossiter wanted to confide in us.’

  ‘Confide what?’

  Dot drew a deep breath. ‘That your mother, when she left Thunderstown, didn’t go to Paris or Delhi or Beijing, or anywhere like that. She went somewhere both nearer and further away. She went back to the place she had come from.’ She placed a buckled hand on his arm. ‘Upwards, Daniel. But you had guessed that already, hadn’t you?’

  He nodded mutely.

  ‘Your father said he had fallen in love with a witch. That was what he wanted to confide in us. A monster of the air, he called her. He said that he had thought her to be an angel to begin with, but that after a time she had convinced him she was of the devil, because of the way she would defend the weather.’

  Daniel clenched his fists, rueing his father’s superstitions.

  ‘Of course,’ Dot continued, ‘she was neither devil nor angel. She was utterly ordinary. There are three thousand of her kind present on the earth in any given moment.’

  Daniel waited for this to sink in, but he discovered that his thinkings had already prepared him for it. It was as if they had known this secret all along. ‘If that were true,’ he scratched his head, ‘shouldn’t I be like them too? I assure you that when I am cut I bleed blood, not air. Only once have I ever – only a day ago, in fact – seen anything like weather come from inside of myself.’

  Dot smiled sadly, her face folding up under her wrinkles. ‘Perhaps some of us don’t see it as often as we might. Perhaps that means we have lost touch. Or perhaps those of us who do see it need to be better at holding ourselves together.’

  ‘What about me? Do you think I am enough like them? To do what I have to do now?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose it depends on whether Finn is still there to be saved. I suppose if you believe he is, it may be possible.’ She patted his arm lightly. ‘I think that is all I can offer you. I wish you well, Mr Fossiter, wherever you are going.’

  And with that she pushed him gently in the small of the back.

  He set off like a racer at the starting gunshot. When he was some distance down the slope a wind arrived to spur him on, and when on a ridge top he looked back over his shoulder at the now distant nunnery, the wind smeared his black hair across his eyes so that he could not see and be tempted to turn back.

  He raced downhill, towards Thunderstown, but only when he reached its outskirts did he truly appreciate the severity of the storm. The town hid behind a curtain of rain, and he had to hold his arms up in front of his face to make his way through it. The sky smashed open again and again with lightning. Torrential rain hammered the pavements, smashing off the flagstones like sparks off an anvil. It stung his eyes and soaked his clothing, bringing with it hailstones hard enough to chip the paint from doors. He shielded his eyes as he got his bearings, then toiled in the direction of Saint Erasmus Square.

  In Welcan Row, old mine shafts were overflowing. Rotten ropes, mushed mosses and scrap metal emerged and were carried away on a stream of filthy liquid that slicked the street. In Corris Street he splashed through shin-deep water, then headed south through Bradawl Alley, where the cobbles had turned to islands. In each street the floodwater was deeper than the last, but he sloshed onwards with his boots soaked through and squelching.

  In Foremans Avenue, trees rattled and creaked as the storm shook them. With a noise like a record distorting, one cracked down the length of its trunk. The road beneath it popped open and roots sprang out, then the nearer half of the tree crashed down with a bending squeal and a shiver of leaves. He looked up as he passed the Moses residence, and was satisfied to see floodwater frothing under the front door, and one window blasted out of its frame by lightning. He hurried on. He had to get to the Church of Saint Eras
mus.

  Rain pinged off car bonnets, twanged off the pavements, flicked him with hard ice as he struggled, grabbing now and then a lamp post for support, to the end of Widdershin Road and at last into the wide church square. He could barely see a stone’s throw in front of him, let alone up to the spire. Rain scratched out all visibility. The plaza was awash, gurgling with scummy white eddies.

  He had to wade the final few metres before he reached the high ground of the church’s steps. There he looked back for a moment across the square. Liquid rushed in from every street, bearing debris and caked scum, churning in the pattern of a whirlpool around the church. Watching it made him dizzy, as if not just the water but the entire town were turning in that gyre.

  He battled into the church and slammed the doors behind him, then paused to collect his breath. How still the air was in here. The roof rang with the strikes of so many raindrops that their echoes combined into a single throbbing note. It was so dark that he was forced to squint his way along the aisle by memory, picturing the place as he had known it through the years. His memory added the details: his father at the pulpit, with his face bunched in devoted prayer; his grandfather slouched bored or tipsy in a back pew; Betty, watching him with a look he still believed had been a fond one, on that single time when he had tried to give a reading from the book of his namesake and his tongue had sunk into silence at the lectern. ‘I, Daniel,’ he had read, ‘was troubled in spirit, and the visions that passed through my mind disturbed me.’

  He walked slowly towards the altar. He paused at the front pew where he himself had sat every Sunday for years. He stroked the cold wood, removed his soaked leather hat, and laid it on the seat. Then he crossed to the side door and climbed the spiral staircase to the belfry. The stairwell was full of the din of falling water.

  When he emerged on to the belfry he at once felt the electricity humming in the stones beneath him, hissing in the tumbling rain. The masonry zinged with energy. And there was the storm in an indigo expanse.

  This high up, he felt almost intimately close to the thunder. He was convinced that if he reached for the cloud – which he did now, raising himself on his tiptoes – he would be able to stroke his fingers through it. He touched nothing and retracted his hand, feeling foolish, but the sky had seemed too small for such a monstrous cloud. It puzzled him that something so enormous could not be grasped. Hail rattled on the belfry like thrown dice, and stung the skin of his upturned face. Rain made the old stone sizzle. A sheet of lightning flashed. In the half-second that it lasted for, that which had seemed limitless became clarified. If time could have paused in that moment, he thought he would be able to take in every detail of the thundercloud, for every wisp and fold of steam became defined in a photojournalist’s black and white. When, in the next instant, the world plunged back into darkness, he felt as blind inside as out. He wiped the rain from his eyes and groped around for the lightning rod. His hands were shaking when he seized hold of it. The sense of purpose that had driven him up here had been lost to the darkness like words to spilled ink. He was afraid, he realized. He had never been more afraid.

  There was a white light.

  And then there was nothing.

  22

  THE LOVER OF THUNDER

  Come morning the storm had died out. It would be a fine day of sunshine, with a pleasant south-westerly breeze tempering the heat.

  In Thunderstown, men and women stood dumbfounded in their doorways, staring at the cyan sky reflected in the floodwater. Otherwise they used buckets and tubs to bail out their houses, shaking their heads and cursing Old Man Thunder. Canaries alighted on the weathervanes, or were yellow blurs chasing each other between the chimneys.

  On the belfry of the Church of Saint Erasmus, a body lay face down on the stone. It was a man’s body, burly and black-bearded. The sunshine had dried off its flesh and hair, but had not yet evaporated the puddle in which it had lain since the storm faded. Every so often the body would give a meek cough or a judder of its shoulder blades, then lapse into another hour of stillness. Now, finally, it groaned and tried to prop itself up. It raised itself an inch before it flopped back into the puddle. It lay there for a little while more, occasionally dribbling up a mouthful of water. Then, finally, with a moan, it rolled on to its back. Sometime later it pulled itself up and sat against the wall. Fluid drooled from its mouth and nostrils.

  It tilted its head to drain water from its ears. It rubbed its eyes. After a while more it managed to stand up, as shakily as a newborn calf. When it got the better of its balance it squinted around at the bright rooftops and the dazzling sunshine on the windowpanes of the town. It looked down at itself and sneezed. It rubbed its bearded face.

  It stopped very still.

  It rubbed its face some more, plying its cheeks and groping at its neck.

  ‘Uhh ...’ it murmured, then shook its head. ‘I ... huhh ...’ It felt again across its cheeks. It twisted its fingers through its drenched black locks.

  ‘I have hair,’ it said.

  But when it tugged on it, clumps came out on its fingers. It looked at the black scraps in its hands, then tugged experimentally at a part of its beard. This came loose too, pulled free as easily as moss off a stone.

  It got down on its knees and leaned over the puddle to view its dim reflection. It reached out a tentative, pointing finger for the face it saw there, then jumped in alarm when the reflection broke into circles.

  It kept pulling at its hair. It scruffed it up with both hands and it came free everywhere. It splashed water over its scalp and washed away the last of it until its head was totally bald. It did the same thing to its beard, spitting and slurping when it got a clump of it on its tongue. It rubbed its head, exploring its smooth jaw and crown. Now that the puddle had settled, it inspected its reflection for a second time. It had missed something. Its eyebrows, which rubbed free as easily as chalk off a blackboard.

  ‘Who am I?’ it asked of the water. It waited for an answer and when none came it screwed up its eyes and rubbed its head and looked vulnerable and confused.

  It got up and staggered to the door. It tripped and nearly tumbled several times as it made its way down the spiral staircase. In the empty church below it paused, because on a pew lay an object it recognized, although it could not tell from where. It picked it up and punched it into shape, then plied for a moment the brim, which was still damp from the storm.

  After a minute it remembered. Daniel Fossiter’s rain cap. All that had happened came crashing back.

  It had begun with a dream of falling, but instead of sleep’s darkness everything had been white-hot. Falling for a long time, head over heels, long past the point when the rush of plummeting jerks the dreamer awake. Down and down it had fallen, with a sickening sense of its own weight, until heaviness itself had been the thing to slow its fall. Heaviness had become a kind of gravity, and it had no longer felt as if it were falling but compacting into a nucleus. Eventually it had simply hung, paralyzed by its own solidity. And then it had not been hanging but lying, and it was a prone man on a church belfry.

  After a while, the man folded the hat and tucked it into the pocket of his trousers. At one point, during his sensation of falling, he’d sensed another presence, travelling in the opposite direction.

  ‘I will miss you,’ he said.

  When Elsa woke to the sunlit morning and its postcard-blue sky, she pulled the sheet up over her head. She lay in the narrow bed in the nunnery cell, with the smell of pollen drifting in through the window, and she longed for rain to replace the honeyed burblings of songbirds. She had already cried until her tear ducts were dried out, and she knew she would cry again once they were rehydrated.

  She slept the first half of the day away. Daniel was nowhere to be seen. She missed him and began to think he had given up on her. Probably he was holed away in depression in his homestead.

  In the afternoon she was able to leave the bed for the first time. Her muscles tightened with each step and she
managed only a single lap of the room before she collapsed back on to the mattress.

  Sleep gave no relief. She dreamed of rain pouring from the heavens.

  When she woke next it was evening. Through the high window of the cell she could see stars emerging, so she turned on the bedside lamp. She didn’t want stars. She wanted black skies venting water.

  All she had to distract her was a cloud atlas borrowed from Dot. The old nun had warned against it, but reluctantly loaned it to her when Elsa insisted. Now she wished she’d taken Dot’s advice, for the moment she opened it and saw the black prow of a cumulonimbus she felt strangled, and threw the book across the room.

  She rested her head on the pillow and stared at the ceiling, thinking of her dad, and how ceilings had to be very sturdy things to survive all of the prayers and pleas directed at them.

  The moth who had become her cellmate was still up there with its brown wings flattened across the plaster. Now that the bedside lamp was aglow it came alive, dropped from its resting place and zoomed around the aura of the light. When it started throwing itself against the lampshade, it cast elastic shadows across the ceiling and she thought of Finn’s mobiles, which would be circling abandoned in his bothy, and she wished she had the paper goose he had made her, or even the paper skyscraper. She had to turn the lamp off and suffer the stars, just to stop the moth from reminding her of them.

  A breeze passed by the window.

  She sat bolt upright and was rewarded with jarring pains in both sides. This time, however, she had strength to bear them. The wind passed again, with a noise like a tuneless note from a flute, and then died away. She waited impatiently for it to come back, listening to the moth’s clicking wings in the interval. When the wind returned it sounded as if it were panting, then faded away into the distance.