Beat the Rain

by Nigel Jay Cooper

  At first, they had spent their days in the flat, floating about, making each other coffee and watching daytime TV. When they went out, the only neighbour who didn’t double take was dear old Mr Carmichael, but so what? Being on the ‘outside’ of ‘normal’ suited both of them – in many ways it made them feel more alive, more able to live fully and completely. Things weren’t perfect, of course. In death as in life, Tom cast a long shadow. Adam missed his brother continually. Pain is supposed to get more tolerable over time, but for Adam, it was something he learned to incorporate into his daily routine without showing the signs outwardly. Nobody was interested in long-term grief – most people had lost interest within a week of the funeral, let alone months and years.

  It wasn’t simple, however. He certainly wasn’t without his insecurities where Louise and Tom were concerned.

  “You’re a better shag than Tom was,” Louise had grinned once, when he’d been asking her if she was sure she loved him.

  “You can’t say that…”

  “Tom’s idea of foreplay was slapping my quim,” she’d said.

  “No,” Adam had said, sticking his fingers in his ears. “Don’t want to hear this.” They’d stared at each other for a moment, both smiling until he couldn’t resist saying: “Quim? Who uses words like quim?” He’d taken his fingers out of his ears. “He liked slapping it?”

  Louise had nodded, chuckling to herself.

  “What? Like…” Adam had paused, miming a slapping motion in the air with his left hand and making popping sounds with his lips.

  “Uh huh.” Louise’s shoulders had been shaking with laughter.

  “And did you like it?”

  “Nope.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “No, it seemed rude.”

  “Giving you a red-raw quim seems a bit more rude.” Adam had laughed, diving on top her and kissing her on the mouth.

  “And,” Louise had said, pushing his head downwards, “you’re much better at oral than him.”

  Later, as she sat naked between his thighs, head leaning back comfortably into his chest, she’d said, “I’m putting the flat on the market.”

  Adam’s heart had sped up, beating a little faster with utter, complete love. A place of their own, somewhere to create their own memories, away from memories of Tom. He kissed her head, inhaling deeply the scent of her cherry blossom shampoo. He hadn’t spoken, he’d simply sat there holding her. Eventually they had to give in and move, to go about the business of life again, cooking dinner, putting the washing on and tidying up.

  * * *

  Adam double locks the front door behind him and glances up at the blue sky and sunshine, smiling to himself. Now they are parents, they don’t have the freedom they had in the early years of their relationship, but Adam wouldn’t change it for the world. Besides, they’d wrung everything out of single life back then.

  Shortly after getting married, they’d gone to Spain, somewhere nobody knew them, where the whispers and nudging wouldn’t touch them, somewhere they could drink in the sun, like there might be no tomorrow.

  “Why is that girl licking herself all over like a cat?” Louise asked, sitting in a Spanish nightclub, sipping her cocktail through a straw and nodding her head towards a girl on the multi-coloured dance floor. Adam had taken a sip of his own cocktail, taking his eyes off his wife’s cleavage for a moment to see what she was talking about.

  A girl, maybe only eighteen years old, was sitting down on the dance floor, a fur coat (fake, he hoped it was fake) on the floor under her, wearing nothing but a bra and orange hot pants. And she was licking her forearm earnestly, like a cat preening itself, lapping and nuzzling as if it was the most normal thing in the world. Adam had burst out laughing, a throaty, full-bodied laugh he’d forgotten he was capable of.

  “She’s on something, right?” He’d laughed. “Jesus, I hope she’s all right, how much shit has she taken?”

  “Ha, Adam, you’ve changed. I remember a certain man dressed as a Munchkin taking everything he could get his hands on.”

  “Fuck, that was terrible,” Adam had said, smiling and spinning around on his bar stool. Louise had stood up and grabbed his hand and dragged him onto the dance floor, laughing. Two days later, they’d hired a small car, purple, number plates half falling off. Cheap, probably not even roadworthy but they hadn’t cared, it did the job. They’d driven up a tiny narrow potholed road, weaving around the cliff towards the small town of Comares in Andalucía and everything was perfect. Louise had been driving (she always had to drive) and Adam had stared from the window at the cliffs and valleys beneath them, not green like England’s hills, they were drier, more barren, but beautiful. They’d jolted along the tiny, unsafe road, hitting pothole after pothole, sometimes getting uncomfortably close to the edge, near the crash barriers that would have been hard pushed to stop a Robin Reliant doing ten miles an hour from plummeting over the edge. And Adam had realised something alarming. For a brief moment, he had contemplated the car spinning out of control and smashing through the barrier and plummeting off the mountain and he’d calmly thought ‘okay then’. He’d have been happy to carry on staring at the beauty of the Sierra Nevada mountains, waiting for his existence to cease as long as he was with Louise. He would have looked sideways at her, grasping her hand and neither of them would have screamed, they’d have grabbed each other and kissed and held each other tightly.

  Adam’s thought about that moment a lot. It wasn’t that he wanted them die, far from it. But he’d realised in that moment that he was so happy, so complete that if their lives had ended there and then it would have been okay. It was nothing more than a transient thought, a fleeting emotion, but it affected Adam massively, made him realise that despite losing Tom, he was going to be okay. Louise had pulled the small car into a space in the small town of Comares and Adam had jumped out and held his head up, closing his eyes, feeling the breeze and the sun on his face. His nostrils had filled with the smell of olive oil and garlic from a café behind them and as he’d opened his eyes to survey the scene, he’d seen a maelstrom of knitted green yellow cacti on the mountainside with bulbous, red, sticky fruit ripening on them.

  “Come on, I think it’s this way,” Louise said with growing excitement, smiling and grabbing his arm, dragging him along. She led them through some narrow, winding lanes to the town cemetery. It was not like an English cemetery; the dead were buried above ground here, not below – five bodies high, twenty or sometimes thirty rows across.

  “Why did you bring us here?” Adam asked, actually quite fascinated but feeling it was a little morbid.

  “Shame for the ones at the top,” Louise said, ignoring him. “How can loved ones come and mourn and lay flowers all the way up there?”

  “Maybe they’ve got step ladders?” Adam said, half joking, half serious.

  “Silly sod.” Louise flashed him a smile. “Look.” She pointed to the end, where large iron steps on wheels stood beside one of the grave halls.

  “Well, nearly a step ladder,” he said, squinting to read the inscriptions in front of him. “Juan Perez, died 1920.” The grave halls each had a small window, containing a tiny gravestone and flowers.

  “You haven’t got family here or something have you?” Adam asked, thinking there was a wider significance to their visit that he’d been too self-absorbed to notice.

  “No, I just read about it in the guide book, it’s cool isn’t it.”

  The only similarity with British cemeteries and this place was the silence. Apart from a dramatic wind picking up through the cliff tops, rustling dry leaves and grasses in a slightly eerie sonata, there was nothing. No human interference, apart from Louise and Adam, tourists in a graveyard.

  “Yeah,” Adam had said, walking over and taking Louise’s hand. “It’s wonderful.”

  * * *

  Adam walks down the road, heading to Maria’s school, still thinking about the early years with Louise, before the children were born. He missed Tom, stil
l does, with every fibre, but somehow being with Louise made him feel closer to him. Things had worked out okay, something he hadn’t thought possible. Except there’s something niggling him, something he’s not letting in. Louise isn’t coping, he knows she isn’t. He thought she would be all right, that she’d get over things, but lately he’s started to think it might not be that simple.

  As he crosses the road, his mobile goes off again. This time, it’s his mother.

  “How you getting on?” Her voice is stern, like he’s done something wrong. This is always how she speaks to him, always her opening tone. The assumption being he’s done something wrong or there is something wrong or something needs to be fixed. Equilibrium doesn’t exist for Janet Gaddis, only different shades of crisis.

  “Mum, I’m fine. This is the third time you’ve called today. Louise’s only away for a week.”

  “Well, I still think it’s a little strange,” his mother says. “Leaving her kids alone like that.”

  “They’re not alone, Mum, they’re with me.”

  “Still, a mother’s place…”

  “Mum.” His tone has an air of finality; it’s a conversation they’ve had many times before. Janet has never been able to accept that Adam is a stay-at-home parent and Louise goes out to work. Actually, she’d never been able to accept Louise full stop. If Janet can find a reason to have a go at Louise, she’ll take it, no matter how big or small.

  To say that his mum didn’t take kindly to Adam’s marriage would be an understatement. Janet has never apologised for anything in her life, but she makes a habit of finding inexcusable behaviour in others. When she feels she has someone bang to rights – that they’ve behaved so badly that everyone else in the world would agree with her – well, she’ll hold that bit between her teeth until her gums bleed. So when Adam moved in with Louise, when he’d married her, when they had two children, it was quite high up on her list of unforgivable actions. One more thing on the long list of grievances his mother will never forgive him for, like when she caught Jason Atkins going down on him when they were fourteen years old. Or when Tom died instead of him, the son they both know she would much rather have lost.

  In the early days, Adam and Louise had tried to get her onside and win her approval. Adam had invited them to the flat for dinner once, desperately trying to prove to them that their relationship wasn’t as weird as they thought it was, trying to navigate a path back to some sort of normality for their family. Predictably, it had been a disaster – frosty, uncomfortable and filled with snipes and silences. Afterwards, as Adam had sat in bed watching Louise perform the bedtime rituals he loved so much, they had decided it was probably best not to do it again.

  “I don’t want her here anymore.” Louise had stood in her knickers, smoothing face cream into her cheeks. “We invite her round for dinner and what do we get? Sour-faced old cow.”

  “Come on, Louise, she’s my mum,”

  “If I mash the potatoes, she tells me you like them roasted. If I roast them, I’m told they should be crispier. Even the soap I buy is wrong. Unhygienic, apparently. How can soap be unhygienic, Adam? It’s bloody soap. And I like them soggy.”

  “What?”

  “Potatoes, Adam. I like them soggy. The only one who doesn’t like them a bit soggy is your mother.”

  “Actually,” Adam had said, taking his life into his own hands, “Mum’s right, everyone in the world except you prefers them crispy.” He’d ducked in time to avoid the lid of Louise’s face cream as it sailed towards him.

  “You’re such a sod,” she’d said, running over and jumping on him, straddling him. “You wait.” She’d leant in for a kiss but had withdrawn at the last moment and jumped off him.

  “Unfair.” He’d grinned.

  “No quim for you tonight.” She’d laughed.

  While Adam had wanted to repair his relationship with his parents, he knew his mother well enough to know there wasn’t much he could do about it. When she had her mind set, she rarely changed it based on other people’s actions; she could always find something wrong if she wanted to. Instead, Adam decided not to waste any of his energy trying to appease her, he’d play the long game and get on with his life. She’d come around eventually.

  The trouble this time is that Adam can’t help feeling that his mother might be right – about one thing at least. Something isn’t right with Louise, hasn’t been for a while. It’s like an open secret nobody mentions. After Maria was born, Louise suffered from post-natal depression. Having Matthew only fifteen months later didn’t help. She’d thought she would somehow feel differently the second time, that she’d feel like a woman was supposed to feel. Her words, not his:

  “I don’t feel like I’m supposed to feel, Adam. Like a mother is supposed to feel. I see you with her and you’re so natural, so…I don’t know. I’m like my mother, aren’t I? Not capable of loving her.”

  “You’re nothing like your mother,” Adam had tried to reassure her, “nothing like her at all.” But as time went on, he began to privately, secretly (oh so far inside his head that he didn’t even allow it conscious expression) suspect that she might be right. What if she was a little too like her mother?

  Chapter Seven

  Louise has been at a country hotel alone for nearly a week. She told Adam she had to attend a catering conference, that it was important to her café business. In reality, there is no catering conference. But as Adam and the children had buzzed around her, the invisible woman sitting on their family sofa, nothing more than an obstacle for them to climb over, she’d felt that feeling of panic growing, the whistling kettle inside again, bubbling away, desperate to scream, to vent, to escape. They’d be better off without her anyway. Because she’s like her mother, inescapably, genetically, the same: selfish.

  * * *

  “You don’t think she’s jinxed, do you?” her mother is saying, a constant memory replaying in Louise’s mind.

  “Don’t be stupid,” her dad replies, exasperated to be having the same conversation yet again.

  Louise, a small child, sitting crouched, knees hugged, staring into the glowing slit that reveals her parents’ bedroom.

  “I know, it’s just…I don’t know. I know it’s awful to say about your own child, but she’s different since it happened. She’s got these dark little eyes.”

  “She’s got green eyes, Jane, like you.”

  “Icy, then…”

  “She saw Lucy die, it’s bound to have affected her.”

  “She watched Lucy die, Pete. She didn’t see it, she watched it. And that psychic woman said she was going to be involved in something terrible.”

  “She wasn’t a psychic, Jane, she was a char lady from Dagenham.”

  Louise had been five years old when Lucy, the suicide babysitter, killed herself.

  “Louise, I’m dizzy,” Lucy had said, falling dramatically back onto the sofa. Louise had remained cross-legged on the floor, playing with her doll – called Sylvia – and a plastic Trog called Janette-Plantette. Louise hadn’t paid much attention to her babysitter; she’d seen it all before. Whenever she babysat, Lucy would down some of the whisky from the drinks cabinet or smoke a cigarette or throw up in the kitchen sink. The pills didn’t seem like anything new. Later in life, Louise realised Lucy had probably meant her to tell someone and get help. But Louise hadn’t realised it wasn’t a game until Lucy had stopped convulsing.

  “But…” Louise’s mum continues in the memory, still trying to convince Louise’s dad there’s something fundamentally wrong with their daughter.

  “Look, can we stop talking about Lucy. Hasn’t she caused enough harm?”

  “Don’t talk like that – she’s dead. And in our house, why in our house? It was probably a cry for help, Pete. If only Louise had done something.”

  “It’s not Louise’s fault, Jane, stop blaming her.”

  “I’m saying, is all. It’s a bit weird, isn’t it? She just played with her dolls while Lucy was right next to her, dyi
ng.”

  “If we hadn’t gone out that night…” her dad says quietly.

  “Pete, we’re allowed a life. It’s not like we ever get to do much with Louise hanging off us all the time.”

  “But if we’d come home earlier. Or phoned to check how Louise was?”

  “Louise was fine,” Jane says coldly, “she was playing with her Sylvie doll, wasn’t she.”

  “Jane, stop this. It wasn’t Louise’s fault.”

  “I’m just saying.”

  “You’re always just saying. It has to stop. It’s not fair on her, she’s not stupid, she picks up on things.”

  “Other people must think it, “Jane continues. “What kind of kid watches her babysitter die?”

  “How many kids’ babysitters top themselves?” Louise’s dad raises his voice a little, before tempering it back down to a whisper. “Enough, Jane.”

  “And you know she’s got an imaginary brother now?” Jane carries on regardless. “Silas, she calls him. Silas, I mean where did she get that name from? It’s creepy. There’s something not right about her, I knew it the first time I held her.”

  Listening outside, little Louise chews her knees through her pyjamas.

  “It wasn’t your fault,” Silas whispers in her ear, but she doesn’t believe him. Why would she? Louise bites harder into the yellow fabric covering her small, soft knees. If she applies a reasonable amount of pressure, she knows she can leave tooth prints in her skin. She wants to mark herself there, to create a landmark that only she knows about, hiding beneath the surface. After a while, she stands up and creeps silently back to her bedroom where her dolls are strewn on her threadbare, waxy multi-coloured rug. Barbie lies car crash on top of Sylvie doll. Janette-Plantette the troll glowers over them menacingly. Silas loves Sylvie the rag doll with the stripy legs best. He says it reminds him of Jemima from Play School, even though it doesn’t look anything like her. Louise hates Play School anyway. The girls at school say they like Hamble the best but try as she might, Louise can’t understand that. Hamble is rubbish, how can they like her the most?