It's Raining Men

by Milly Johnson

  ‘We sort of noticed,’ said May.

  ‘Can’t see why anyone would want to holiday here, though, I have to say,’ Shirley said with a shrug. ‘I’m ticking off the days till I go to Cambridge uni next month.’ She puffed up proudly as she said it.

  ‘Congratulations,’ said May, a sentiment which was echoed by the others.

  ‘Yeah, there will actually be some other girls to talk to.’

  ‘Women seem a bit thin on the ground here,’ said May.

  Shirley nodded. ‘You’re telling me.’

  ‘Shirley,’ called Uncle Morris from across the room. There was a subtle warning in the way he said her name. Shirley flapped her hand at him and turned head-on to face Clare.

  ‘Do you mind me asking . . . are they contact lenses?’

  ‘No,’ said Clare, dropping her eyes from Shirley’s intense stare. ‘Quite natural.’

  ‘Amazing,’ said Shirley. ‘Everybody is talking about them.’

  Clare raised her eyebrows and puffed out her cheeks. She didn’t ask why; she was afraid of what the answer might be.

  Just then the door to the pub bounced open and Daisy wheeled herself in, followed by Frank.

  ‘The choice of females in this area is very limited for men, poor sods, as you might gather,’ said Shirley, leaning low over the table. It sounded very much as if she wasn’t a fan of Daisy’s either.

  Daisy’s wheels spun in their direction then stopped dead. She noticed the three women, cast them one of her evil stares, then turned to Frank and started gesticulating like a very angry Italian. He tried to calm her down but obviously didn’t manage it as Daisy sped away from him and barged straight into May’s chair as if she was in a dodgem car and not a wheelchair.

  ‘This is my table,’ she said, her eyes narrowed.

  May stood up to move. If this was the only table that gave enough space for her wheelchair, she would quite happily go to another – despite Daisy’s rudeness. However, when she looked around she saw there were at least two other tables that would give her more room to manoeuvre.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Frank, his rich bass voice fighting embarrassment.

  ‘Don’t you apologize for me, Francis Hathersage. We always sit here,’ screeched Daisy.

  She couldn’t have been older than thirty, thought Clare, but Daisy was already showing signs of being a fully fledged battle-axe. Those scowls made her look much older than she was and they’d give her a healthy serving of deep wrinkles within the next ten years, she bet.

  ‘It’s fine, we’ll move,’ said Lara, more because she didn’t want to give the holidaymaker haters any ammunition, plus it gave them brownie points for being so gracious in the face of such immature behaviour. She didn’t actually feel gracious, though; she felt like slapping the little madam.

  ‘Please don’t move,’ said Frank, his eyes on May. ‘We’ll sit—’

  ‘We’re sitting here,’ insisted Daisy, speaking over him and then calling triumphantly to Shirley: ‘Usual, Shirley.’

  No please to that request, noted Lara, who hated bad manners. Keely and Garth hadn’t been taught any manners at all by their parents. They scoffed at her whenever she waited for ‘the magic word’ and never delivered it.

  Lara, May and Clare moved over to the table near the window.

  ‘I thought you were going to lamp her, Lara,’ said Clare quietly.

  ‘I did think about it,’ she replied with a sweet smile, holding up her hand to stop May speaking. ‘And before you say being so rude and angry is part and parcel of being in a wheelchair, no, it isn’t, May.’

  ‘Let’s go back to the cottage after this round,’ said May. She was going to find herself in trouble if they didn’t. Her eyes were constantly drifting over to Frank and, when Daisy wasn’t watching, his were doing the same to her. There was something about the man that was making her heart hungry in her chest. But, as she had already proved to herself, she was absolutely rubbish at judging character. He was bound to be yet another knobhead.

  ‘I don’t know about you two but I’m ready for bed,’ said Clare. ‘And I want to be up early to go swimming in that lovely water.’

  ‘Yeah, well, an early one won’t do me any harm either,’ said Lara. Despite having napped that afternoon, she knew she wouldn’t take any rocking to sleep that night.

  They simultaneously drained their glasses and stood to go. They didn’t know whether to mark their leaving with a ‘goodnight’ but it felt rude not to, so they did. Only Shirley replied verbally. But Frank smiled, May noticed. Daisy ignored them, but then Lara was used to being invisible – it was like being back in the company of Keely.

  As they were going up the hill, a truck trundled into the drive to La Mer.

  ‘It’s him,’ said Lara, emboldened by the two gins. ‘I’m going to collar him.’

  She slipped through May’s hands as they tried to hold her back.

  ‘Er, Mr Hathersage, can I have a word?’ said Lara, striding towards him just as he climbed out of the driver’s side. He looked even bigger than he had standing in the doorway, not that Lara was cowed by that.

  ‘What is it now?’ he said with faux patience.

  ‘That luxury hamper you charged us one hundred and fifty pounds for. It’s not worth a quarter of that.’

  Gene Hathersage crossed his arms as if he meant business.

  ‘From what I remember, the note from the agent was that you would pay one hundred and fifty pounds for a luxury hamper. In my opinion that is indeed a luxury hamper but there was no indication that you wanted your money’s worth. I don’t do hampers, Miss Rickman. You should have been grateful that I cobbled something together for you.’

  And with that he turned to go, but he was arrested by Lara’s voice again.

  ‘A refund would be decent, Mr Hathersage.’

  ‘It would,’ said Gene over his shoulder. ‘But I’m not decent and you’re not getting one.’ And with that his long legs strode into his cottage and they heard the door slam so hard it seemed to rattle the whole village.

  ‘Bloody cheek of the man,’ exclaimed Lara.

  ‘So that’s who you were talking about,’ said Clare.

  ‘He scares me a bit,’ said May.

  ‘Well, he doesn’t scare me,’ said Lara. ‘You wait and see. I’ll have a refund from him for that hamper before this holiday is over. Or die in the process.’

  ‘That is what I’m worried about,’ said May.

  Chapter 26

  The next morning Lara swam into consciousness as if she had been gently lifted up from the depths of sleep on a magic carpet. James had his arm looped around her; she could feel his presence at her back. Something inside her swooped upwards with joy and she turned over to cuddle him, smacking her head into the wall in the process. The rude awakening confirmed that she was alone in a single bed, the ‘presence’ was the wall itself and there was no arm around her, just a fold of quilt. Tears sprang to her eyes and wouldn’t be pushed down. They were raining so fast onto the pillow that she thought she must have grown another hundred ducts to channel them.

  She wondered what James was doing now. Was he alone? Was Tianne looking through her underwear and laughing at the absence of ‘spicy’ G-strings? She twisted around again to look at her watch on the small shelf on the wall and saw that it was eight o’clock. James would be at work. She – if he had thought about her at all – would be in a compartment in his head, to be dealt with at a later hour.

  Men could do that, stuff problems away in boxes. Women bore their heartache like scabs and worried at them constantly, making them bleed, whereas men could shelve their feelings away until it was a more convenient time to deal with them, if at all. Well, she had lived in a man’s world for too long and some of their techniques had rubbed off on her. Emotion might have blindsided her when she was half asleep, but she wasn’t going to let it take over her holiday. She visualized scooping up her sad feelings in a cloth and knotting it, then consigning it to a bin in her head label
led ‘Wanker’. Then she locked it and stepped away from it to see if the fastening would hold. The wanker bin jumped around as if whatever was inside was desperate to get out. She knew it would eventually work the lock and spring out to torture her, but for now she was okay.

  She didn’t want to spoil a holiday that had cost her this much money. They could have gone abroad for this. She supplanted any residual thoughts of James with pictures of the ridiculously hairy Gene Hathersage and confirmed her resolve to get some of their money back. Anger dried up her tears like a blowtorch. She pictured the cranky, horrible man counting out twenty-pound notes and handing them over, apologizing profusely as she hovered over him in the air, like Xena Warrior Princess. Then Lara did what she hadn’t done for years because she was usually bright and awake by five o’clock – she nestled her head down into the fat feathery pillow and dropped back into a deep and indulgent sleep.

  Clare awoke at nine, much later than she’d thought she would. She remembered that she’d had the nicest dream about the lagoon, except in her dream it was a thin strip of fluorescent water that ran on for miles. She was in her bathing costume and carrying a towel and her phone-torch down the winding stone staircase within five minutes of rising, after leaving a note on the kitchen table to tell the others where she had gone.

  Once at the bottom of the steps, she switched off her phone for artificial light was no longer needed, and took a moment just to look at the lovely water. Where it left the cover of rock to join the sea, the water was dull grey, but in the lagoon it was bright blue, or was it green? It seemed to drift between the two colours and back again. She dipped her toe into the warm water and wondered what was heating it. It had to be something in the rock below, a natural phenomenon like the hot springs in Iceland. Just yards away, at the mouth of the cave, the water would be much cooler, she knew. Giddy with excitement, she sat at the edge of the rock, then slipped into the water. She gasped with delight at the feeling of it on her skin and then dived down to find the lagoon even more clear and blue that it looked from above. When she reached the other side she surfaced and saw another set of steps winding upwards. She wondered if they led to a door behind another person’s wardrobe – and did they even know it existed?

  She kicked off the side and headed out of the lagoon for the open sea. As she anticipated, the waters were cooler here, but the view was worth it for she found herself in the tiniest of horseshoe bays. To the left was the main harbour of Ren Dullem, but it was completely unreachable by land from here. Above her head, those mad grey clouds were swirling again as if puffed out from a giant machine.

  Clare let the water soothe her soul and her mind and thought of nothing but swimming and disappearing beneath the surface to look at the rocks and surprise little fish, totally losing count of time. Oh, how she had needed a swim like this in the sea to take her away from all the bearing-down pressures in her life that she wouldn’t admit to anyone but herself. She hardly ever went swimming any more; she had no time. Then when she did, it was only to an overcrowded baths stinking of chlorine – and that wasn’t a swim. Not like this, gliding and slipping like a fish under the gently buffeted waves.

  ‘Hello. Hello.’

  She heard the call as she lifted her head out of the water and spun round to trace where it was coming from. She couldn’t see anyone.

  ‘Hello.’

  Clare looked up and saw a figure, seated, and waving from the small cottage that looked perilously close to the cliff edge.

  Clare waved back for no other reason than that it seemed rude not to.

  The figure now appeared to be beckoning her.

  ‘Come, please.’ The voice was deep but it was a woman’s, she thought. And was it a wheelchair she was sitting in? Oh God, it wasn’t Daisy, was it? She wasn’t so impressed by Clare’s swimming that she wanted her to be her new bezzy mate, surely? But as the figure carried on beckoning, Clare knew it wasn’t Daisy. This woman was a lot older.

  ‘Er, yeah,’ Clare shouted back. ‘I’ll come up.’ If I can find your house, she added to herself. She wished she’d pretended she hadn’t heard the old lady, really. She didn’t particularly want to go visiting people she didn’t know. Silly Clare, said a voice in her head. Never thinking before you open your mouth. The voice sounded like her mother’s.

  May and Lara weren’t up when Clare got back into her room. She had a quick shower, dressed, grabbed her handbag and thought she’d take a walk and buy some more bacon and bread, leaving a second note for her lazy friends. As she went down the road she was busy musing about the waving woman on the cliff when Gene Hathersage almost ran her over, pulling too fast out of his drive. He braked hard and wound down his window.

  ‘Watch it,’ he barked.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Clare. ‘I was miles away.’

  ‘I wish,’ said Gene, raking the hair away from his face.

  ‘Er . . . can you help me, please?’ asked Clare. ‘Where did you get that lovely bacon that was in the, er . . . hamper? Was it from your brother’s farm?’

  Gene Hathersage looked at her with eyes that were almost black. ‘No,’ he said flatly, though she got the idea he could have said a lot more. ‘There’s a butcher’s to the left down the hill. Him.’

  ‘Also, how do I get up to that cottage on the headland, please?’ Clare pointed behind her in the direction of the waving woman’s residence.

  ‘Why do you want to get up there?’ His eyes were narrow slits now.

  ‘The lady in the wheelchair there invited me up. When she saw me swimming,’ replied Clare, feeling the need to add more detail as Gene Hathersage was just staring at her eyes. His attention was going from one to the other but he was saying nothing and it was really disconcerting. ‘She waved at me and asked if I’d go and see her.’

  ‘Swimming where?’

  ‘In the lagoon underneath . . .’ Oh, shit.

  His head tilted to one side. If his eyes got any blacker they’d start to smell of coal. ‘How did you find that?’

  ‘I . . . er . . .’ She couldn’t exactly say that she’d wrecked his house and discovered the door that led down there, even though he knew she must have.

  To her great relief and total shock, he didn’t ask any more questions but gave her the directions she had asked for.

  ‘Go through the woods, take the small path right up the hill,’ he said, before crashing the gearstick forward and setting off at G-force before Clare could thank him.

  Clare carried on walking, aware that the four men and one elderly lady she passed had turned to watch her. By the time she got to the butcher’s, her cheeks felt red and hot enough to cook a barbecue on.

  ‘It’s lovely bacon,’ she said, complimenting the butcher after ordering nine rashers of it.

  ‘Comes from Frank Hathersage’s farm,’ he replied, wrapping it in waxed paper and then placing it in a paper bag. ‘He runs a good farm, does Frank.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Clare, a wry smile on her face as she handed over her money. She wondered if Gene knew that the bacon was from his brother’s place – she thought not. He hadn’t looked very happy to hear his name mentioned.

  Clare bought a basket hanging outside a gift shop and put her bacon into it. It felt like proper village shopping with a basket to carry and food wrapped in paper. The gift shop was full of lovely things handmade by the locals, she read on the labels. Jams and relishes, wiry bronze figures, embroidered cushions, driftwood mirrors and cabinets, wooden cats, pottery. There was no tat normally associated with the usual commercialized gift shops: the ubiquitous clotted-cream fudge and rubbishy ornaments. She bought some blackberry jam. It would be lovely on toast with that salty farm butter.

  She found the village square and the church, a small but sturdy Gothic build with a high bell tower. It was set in a beautiful churchyard and exuded an air of quiet tranquillity. Clare wandered between the higgledy-piggledy gravestones, reading the names and testing herself on translating the Latin wording.

  The dates on th
e graves went from as far back as the 1700s to as recently as three months ago. The gravestones were all shapes and sizes – angels, crosses, flat slabs. Some stood erect, some leaned to the side as if they were having a snooze. But, strangely, amongst the disorganization, eleven graves stood together in a perfectly straight line, their stones a uniform arch, each bearing the expression Fratres A Mare at the top and a single male name below. Their wives and children lay in graves nearby, but not with them.

  Brothers from the sea, mused Clare. What the heck did that mean? At first she thought they might have all died in a boat accident together, but no, the death dates were different. She noticed that the eleventh grave, which was next to the fence, had a neighbour. A twelfth grave, with the same arched stone, had been dug in land outside the original border of the churchyard but the fence had been replaced around the back of it, as if it were once shut out and had been welcomed back in again. Odd, thought Clare. It very much looked to her as if one of the ‘brothers’ had initially been buried on unconsecrated ground. Below the familiar words Fratres A Mare, the carved words announced that Seymour Elias Acaster lay here after dying in 1969 and that he was the beloved husband of R. Below that was a small Latin inscription: Illis quos amo deserviam. She racked her brains trying to work out what the Latin meant but only got as far as recalling that amo meant I love. Maybe something about deserving love? The words on the grave weren’t as intriguing as its position. Had Mr Acaster been a criminal? Didn’t they used to bury criminals on land that hadn’t been blessed? Clare loved a good mystery.

  She pottered back up the hill, calling in at the bakery to buy a cheese pastry twist to nibble on. As she walked out of the shop she crashed straight into a man who extended his arms to stop her falling.

  ‘Careful,’ he said. She looked up to see a handsome face with cat-green eyes. Then he smiled. ‘So you’re the witch everyone is talking about.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ said Clare, flustered for a whole number of reasons.