by Michel Faber
Some Rain Must Fall
MICHEL FABER
Edin burgh• London• New York • Melbourne
To Eva,
For help of every imaginable kind
Contents
Some Rain Must Fall
Fish
In Case of Vertigo
Toy Story
Miss Fatt and Miss Thinne
Half a Million Pounds and a Miracle
The Red Cement Truck
Somewhere Warm and Comfortable
Nina’s Hand
The Crust of Hell
The Gossip Cell
Accountability
Pidgin American
The Tunnel of Love
Sheep
Some Rain Must Fall
FRANCES STRATHAIRN came home to find that her partner had cooked her a meal.
‘First day at your new job,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d be exhausted.’
My relationship with this man is in crisis, Frances reminded herself, kissing him on the lips. There is no doubt about it.
But of course there was doubt. Exhausted, she collapsed on the sofa and ate her meal, which was excellent. Her own recipe, followed to perfection.
‘So how are the kids?’ he asked.
It wasn’t a question about any children belonging to him or her: they weren’t that kind of couple. He was asking her about the pupils at Rotherey Primary School.
‘It’s too soon to tell,’ she said.
The first thing she’d got them to do was tidy up. Wellies in neat rows. Coats on pegs. Story books arranged from largest to smallest. Every pencil sharp.
Neatness was not her own personal bugbear: she merely knew, as a professional, that it was what the children craved. She was their new teacher and had been imposed on them at short notice; a contract must be made. They needed to demonstrate their goodness, their usefulness; they needed her to demonstrate her authority.
Most of all, they needed life to go on, with a maximum of fuss.
‘Next: does every one of you have an eraser?’ asked Frances.
The rustle and click of a dozen pencil cases being disembowelled.
‘Anyone whose eraser is smaller than this, gets one of these,’ she smiled, holding up one of the bagful of brand-new giant Faber-Castells she always brought along to new classes.
General wonderment as every child realised he or she qualified for one of these magnificent gifts.
Out of the corner of her eye, Frances observed one of the school’s other teachers watching her from the doorway of the next room, no doubt wondering if Frances was really worth three times an ordinary teacher’s salary.
‘Now, I want every one of you to look through your project books and choose a page that you think has your very best handwriting on it. When you’ve chosen, I want you to lay your books open at that page, all together on the floor just here … No, not on top of one another – all showing fully. Edge to edge, like bricks in a wall. But with a little space in between. That’s right … Give each other room. Good … Good …’
Frances squatted down, giving the children the hint that she could play with them at their level, while reminding them with her bigness and her spreading halo of skirt that she was something other. Though scarcely interested in their handwriting at this stage, she noted that nobody was conspicuously incompetent: Jenny MacShane, their teacher until last week, can’t have been too bad.
On the morning of the second day, the two children who hadn’t turned up on the first day presented themselves. That was a good sign: word of mouth among the mothers, perhaps.
Frances read the absence notes: upset tummy for little Amy, doctor’s appointment for little Sam. Fear, most likely, which might have grown unmanageable if they’d been allowed to stay away longer. She welcomed Amy and Sam back to their school, gave them their erasers. They were slower than the others to settle in, so Frances decided, among other things, to put off the essays until tomorrow.
Frances herself was slow to settle in to her new house on the hill above Rotherey village.
Her last lodgings had been in a ramshackle apartment – dog’s-dinner decor, hastily convened furniture. She’d liked it there: it had once been the occupational therapy wing of a mental asylum, before Care in the Community had evicted the inmates. It still had some intriguing features: the odd mark on the wall, peculiar plastic things sealing some of the power outlets, a wicker clothes-basket woven by unsteady hand.
This house in Rotherey was a council house, cosy and generic; a policeman and his wife had lived there, and had respected all its prefab integrities. Not so much as a WANTED poster in the loo.
‘The anonymity of this place gives me the shits,’ she said to Nick, her partner.
‘Well … Can I change anything for you?’ he offered. ‘I’ve got the time.’
Enjoying a sabbatical while he waited for his doctoral thesis to be assessed, he did indeed have the time, but there was nothing Frances could imagine him doing with this house. Rather, she wanted him to change.
‘Let’s go to bed,’ she sighed.
The next night, though, she stayed up.
‘How long, do you think?’ he asked, just to sort out the sleeping arrangements.
‘As long as it takes,’ she replied.
As with everything, he was fine about having to sleep on his own; well-behaved, well-behaved, well-behaved. She wished he would haul her up to the bedroom and fuck her. It would be inconsiderate and inconvenient, God yes: she had no time for sex tonight because she had the children’s essays to examine: eleven responses she must keep distinct in her mind, eleven plans of action she must conceive by the morning – as well as needing some sleep, of course. And yet she longed for him to knock her off course, or at least dare to try.
In her lap lay the children’s essays: ‘About Me, My School and My Teacher’. To each one she had clipped the best ID shot she’d been able to cull from the school’s photographic montages of prize-giving nights, sports teams, Christmas concerts.
The first essay to hand was by Fiona Perry, the blonde one with the tiny ears and the oversized T-shirts.
Our school is called Rotherey Primary School. It has three big rooms, the oldest kids are Primary 6 and 7 and that is the room I am in. We do the hard stuff. Next year I am going to Moss Bank Accademey. Our teacher says thats where the fun really begins. Our teacher isnt at the school anymore. The last day I saw her she had to go home because she was crying. The next day was the day I was off sick with food poisning (the wrong kind of fish). But my best friend Rachel says our teacher just lost her head that day and now shes not coming back. We have a new teacher now who is you Mrs Strathiarn who is reading this essay!
Frances turned the page to see if there was any more, but that was all Fiona had to say, so she turned the sheet facedown on the couch next to her. ‘The wrong kind of fish’ – she smiled sadly. The wrong kind of fish could make a child an absentee on a day which might have changed its life for ever. Fiona Perry had missed a Wednesday presumably quite at random; yet by that evening her parents, along with the parents of all her classmates, had been phoned with the news that all the children could stay home until a replacement teacher for Mrs MacShane was found. In her essay, little Fiona was turning on the charm for the newcomer without missing a beat; Mrs MacShane had simply disappeared from her young life as if rubbed out by that lovely new eraser.
My school is called Rotherey Primary, wrote Martin Duffy. I am in the big grade, Primary 6. I use to live in Bolton when I was young. My mum says that what happened with Mrs Macshane has got nothing to do with me and I should forget about it. Lots of people have asked me about 1,000 times and some times I tell them and some
times I dont. But every time I do tell I forget it worse and worse, because really as soon as Mrs Macshane started crying I got embarsed and covered my eyes and I didnt see much. So thats my story.
As if to punctuate, a toilet flushed. Nick, coming down for one last pee before sleep.
Don’t you realise our relationship is in crisis!, she felt like yelling to him, which was such an absurd impulse that she laughed out loud. He heard her laugh and came to her, his wrists still wet from hurried towelling.
‘Something funny?’ he wanted to know. His sense of humour was the best thing about him – one of the best things, anyway He stood there, naked above the waist, a spray of glistening water-drops across his ribcage, a glow cast over his contours by her reading lamp. Her breath caught with the pain of soon not being with him anymore, because she would push him away, make sure he would never come back.
‘Come here,’ she murmured. He obeyed.
She would make love to him fast, here on the couch, then get on with her work. Undressing, she speculated on what Martin Duffy had really seen through his ten little fingers, which were tinged with the Marmite he had for breakfast. The covering of eyes was a social gesture, a message to one’s peers asking for confirmation of the transgressive status of an event … She slid her rear over the edge of the couch to let Nick get inside her from where he was kneeling. So, did Martin Duffy really not see much? She doubted it. She might have to work on him, if there was evidence that his apparent robustness was a defence mechanism. Being new to the village made him vulnerable straight off, though on the other hand it would have prevented him getting too attached to Jenny MacShane … Right now Frances had to admit that her clitoris wasn’t getting enough friction, especially with that damned condom, and her back was being repeatedly stabbed by a metal zip on one of the cushions.
‘Let’s go upstairs,’ she said.
After orgasm, drunk with endomorphins, she drifted off to sleep, nestled against his back.
The school is fine and my old teacher is fine. This was the entire text of Greg Barre’s essay. Which one was he again? She couldn’t picture him, even with the aid of the photograph – admittedly an out-of-focus shot of a Nativity performance: a blur of cotton-wool beards and cardboard wings.
‘What does this kid make you think of?’
She handed Nick the photograph across the breakfast table. He checked his fingers for margarine and took hold of the tiny square of card by its edges.
‘Shy,’ he decided after a moment.
‘Why?’
‘In Christmas plays they always give the non-speaking shepherd parts to the shy ones. The girl in front is obviously the one who says, “We have followed a star,” or whatever. This kid just has to tag along – maybe hand over a gift.’
She smiled at him as he handed back the photograph, a real eye-to-eye smile, the most genuinely intimate exchange they’d had for days. He was perceptive, all right. When it came to strangers.
‘You’d make a good father,’ she purred, still conscious of her flesh tingling with satisfaction and sleeplessness.
‘Let’s not start that again,’ he advised her tersely.
Something flashed disconcertingly in her line of vision. It was the photo of little Greg. She hadn’t accepted it back yet, and Nick was irritated all of a sudden, waving the image at her as if she’d already lumbered him with a child he didn’t want.
The school was walking distance from the house, which was a pity in a way. A long drive in the passenger seat of someone’s car would have given her a precious last chance to read the other essays. How could she have fallen asleep last night? She was like those useless men that women were always complaining about in advice columns.
‘Good morning Mrs Strathairn!’ chorused the children when she walked in.
She was ‘Mrs’ to them. She was always ‘Mrs’ to her classes, by professional decision. She felt that children trusted her more if they believed her to be a conventional spouse and mother, as if this made her an emissary from that story book world where family equations were not negotiable. Unconventional and coolly feminist among her peers, she was able to compromise instantly and enthusiastically when she saw the need for it. Perhaps this quality more than any other got her chosen ahead of colleagues in her field, at least in fiendishly delicate situations like this.
She’d figured out almost immediately which of the children were the touchy-feely ones, and she drew them to her as bait for the others. Her talent was to radiate safety and the restoration of order. It was a gift she had possessed well before all her years of training.
Already children were pressing themselves to her, whispering things into her ear just for the thrill of leaning against her soft shoulder. The ones she was most worried about weren’t these, but she worked hard to charm them anyway: they would help thaw the others out.
‘Rachel? I’m told you know how to use the photocopier in the office. Could you make ten copies of this very important document, please?’
Rachel (I don’t play with many people at all I like doing work much more) hurried away to the sacred machine, glowing with pride at the confidence shown in her as she prepared to step into an off-limits zone and tame the mysteries of technology.
Frances had a feel for the group as a whole, its tensions and safety valves, its flame-haired explosives, its doe-eyed emollients. The shock of the last day the children had spent with Mrs MacShane was working its way through their systems at different rates; Frances guessed that either Jacqui Cox or Tommy Munro would be the first to crack, in some spectacular incident that would appear to have no connection with their old teacher. Jacqui (classic hot-house flower, very particular that her fellow pupils spell her name ‘the proper way’) had written in her essay:
I like my teacher very much and I wouldn’t want another one, at least not permantly. She has all my old work and it was her that wrote my reports and she knows why she wrote what she wrote. So when she comes back she will be able to keep me straight.
Tommy Munro, an ill-coordinated, excitable boy with startlingly long eyelashes and a prem head, wrote much the same essay to the best of his more limited abilities: My old teacher is fine and everthing els is to.
But his old teacher wasn’t fine, at all, and Tommy was struggling with the impossibly unfair challenges of ruling straight margins and glueing sheets of cardboard together, his emotions corkscrewed deep into his pigeon chest.
Miraculously, nothing unusual happened on the fourth day, at least nothing any ordinary teacher wasn’t paid to deal with. Just a heated argument about who was supposed to bring the sports chairs inside now that it had started raining – class beauty Cathy Cotterill, overwhelmed by responsibility. Red-faced, grimacing with a bee-stung mouth that would soon be grinning broadly again, she was one of life’s intuitive survivors. Her essay had devoted two matter-of-fact lines to the circumstances of Mrs MacShane’s departure, then went on to fill a page with I don’t play football much I rather play hop scoch. On Monday I get Jim I am not very good at Jim and so on. Her anger had in-built transience and a limited scope: as an emotional firelighter she was a dud.
Exercising authority like a physical skill, Frances calmly took hold of the flailing ends of the dispute and wound them around her little finger. The yelling stopped, the threat of mayhem disappeared without a trace, and within ten minutes she had her entire class sitting at her feet, spellbound as she paraphrased text and showed photographs from a book about albinism. Frances had quite a number of these sorts of books: odd enough to promise children a frisson of the bizarre, informative enough to fill their heads with the crunchy cereal of fact, irrelevant enough to be unthreatening. The sight of white Aborigines with pink eyes was enough to keep even Tommy dumbstruck while the cleverer ones frowned over the finer points of genetics.
As the rain dimmed the skies outside and the fluorescent strip-light took over, the children looked a bit albino themselves, a phenomenon Frances pointed out to suppressed squeals of queasy delight.
At hometime it was raining so heavily that even those children who lived easy walking distance from the school were picked up by relatives or neighbours in cars. All except Harriet Fishlock and her tiny brother Spike from the tots’ grade. (Frances found it hard to believe his name could really be Spike, but that was what everyone called him.)
‘I don’t know how I’m going to get Spike home,’ sighed Harriet, fussing her pet-sized sibling into his greasy duffle-coat, ‘without him getting totally soaked.’
Harriet lived in a shabby caravan park on the edge of the village with her alcoholic mother and a stepfather who could get spare parts for cars if necessary. There were rumours of sexual abuse, and a social services file running into dozens of pages.
‘I have an umbrella,’ said Frances. ‘A super-duper giant umbrella. I can walk with you as far as the petrol station.’ She watched the flicker of calculation cross the girl’s face: yes, the petrol station was not in view of the wretched caravans: yes, the answer was yes.
Together they walked through the streets of Rotherey, the pelting rain screening the shops and houses as if through frosted glass. Everything was an indistinct and luminous grey, a vast sea with a mirage of a village shimmering on the waves, through which car headlights cruised slowly like distant ships. To get the best cover from the umbrella, Spike and Harriet walked on either side of Frances, and after ten minutes or so Frances was surprised and delighted to feel Harriet fumbling to hold hands with her.