Rain Fall

by Ella West

  ‘Take a look now.’

  I glance up at the window. I can see rain, lawn, hedge, road and figures in black coming out from behind trees and fences.

  ‘They weren’t there before.’

  ‘It’ll be the Armed Offenders Squad up from Greymouth.’

  ‘They look kind of ridiculous.’

  I can make out helmets, vests, backpacks, everything black. One of the figures is running between the others, handing out something, talking to each of them.

  ‘What are they doing?’ I ask.

  ‘I can’t believe it.’ Mum laughs. ‘That guy is handing out morning tea to them all. See, brown paper bags. Probably mince pies from Freckles.’

  We watch as the figures put down their weapons and eat whatever is in the paper bags. Take sips from takeaway coffee cups. They’re in clusters. There is nodding, glances around as if they’re talking about the weather, their plans for the weekend, how good the pies are, which they are – Freckles makes the best pies. A few of the glances are towards our house.

  ‘Do you think they can see us?’

  ‘No. We’re far enough away from your window. If you turned the light on maybe they could.’

  ‘What’s going to happen?’

  ‘Pete will wake up and wander out and they’ll arrest him, I suppose.’

  ‘Will he be okay?’

  ‘I hope so. We’ll make sure he gets a good lawyer. We owe that to Mary at the very least.’

  ‘Is it going to be on TV?’

  ‘Maybe. The news crew are probably having morning tea too. Maybe we should ring up Pete and tell him now is the time for him to go for it, everyone is scoffing mince pies.’

  ‘Have you talked to him lately?’

  ‘No. Not really. Not since the funeral. I’m not even sure if the phone is still connected. He might not be paying the bill. I haven’t got his cell phone number.’

  We’re silent again, sipping our hot drinks, watching the cops eat their pies, thinking about Pete.

  ‘They won’t shoot him, will they?’

  ‘Only if he comes out pointing a gun at them. Then they might. But he’s not that stupid.’

  ‘And if he is?’

  ‘Just don’t watch.’ She laughs. ‘Anyway, haven’t you got homework or something to do? I don’t know, Instagram or Facebook or whatever?’

  ‘Everyone’s in class.’

  ‘Well, work was going to email me some stuff, so I suppose I’d better go and do it. Stay away from the window, won’t you? Remember what that detective said.’

  I nod again, still holding the mug in both hands, still staring out of the window at the rain as she leaves.

  Dad is still snoring too.

  Morning tea eaten, the Armed Offenders Squad melt back into their hiding places. Now I know they’re there, I can make them out, just. Will Pete know they’re there? Have the cops already rung him, if they know his phone number? Maybe we should give it to them. If he has paid his phone bill. Maybe his mum paid it months in advance before she died, knowing that he wouldn’t get around to it, along with the power and the rates and the Sky TV subscription. A satellite dish has been on the house’s roof for as long as I can remember, before you had to have one when TV turned over to digital, so I think he has Sky, or did have Sky. Maybe the cops are bargaining with him on the phone right now, come out with no weapons and we won’t shoot you, Pete wanting them just to go away and leave him alone, or demanding a plane and a bag of money. Or maybe they’re still waiting for him to sleep it off, whatever that means. Maybe he’s watching sport on Sky.

  Two hours to the basketball game.

  Still raining.

  Thomas, our cat, comes into my room squawking. He jumps up onto the bed and purrs louder than Dad’s snoring, demanding to be patted, scratched under the chin, between his ears. Then he jumps off again and sticks his head into my hot chocolate mug, which is now on the floor, and starts licking at the remains. I swat him away and he saunters out of the room, his tail in the air, as if he hasn’t done anything wrong.

  One and three-quarter hours to the basketball game.

  Outside there’s movement – no, there isn’t. Am I imagining it? Grey on grey, black shapes against green. No, there’s nothing. All quiet and still. Except for the rain.

  One hour and three minutes to the basketball game.

  Mum hangs her head around my doorway. ‘If this is over soon enough I’ll take you to school,’ she says.

  I nod.

  ‘It’s only Kaiapoi,’ she says.

  ‘We’ve got to win, Mum.’

  ‘I know, but there’s always next year and anyway, maybe they’ll win without you. It is a team sport, remember.’

  I don’t say anything. She leaves.

  Fifty-two minutes to the basketball game.

  Dad snoring.

  How long does Pete have to sleep for? Is he snoring too? Like Dad? Have the cops got some listening device up against the wall of the house so they can hear him, so they know he’s still asleep? If they have, I can’t see it. I can’t see anything in the rain.

  Thirty-eight minutes to the basketball game.

  It’s a five-minute ride to school, if there isn’t a milk tanker or something on the road in the way. Two minutes to run to the gym. I can get changed in the car. Put my gym shoes on when I get inside, so they’re not wet.

  There’s movement out there again. Someone is going from group to group, heads together. Maybe they’re putting in their lunch order, or maybe they’re getting ready to go in, wake him up. Please, wake him up.

  Fourteen minutes to the basketball game.

  ‘Do you want some lunch?’ Mum is at the door again. ‘Toasted sandwich? I can do cheese, ham and pineapple.’

  There’s a flash of light and then noise and the feeling of someone punching me in the chest. Mum screams. I turn to the window and watch Pete’s house explode in the rain.

  Pete blew his house up with Powergel. It’s all in The Westport News, the local newspaper, that afternoon. The police think it was with a timer or some sort of remote detonator (he could have used his phone) but they’re not sure. They’re not sure because they don’t know if he was in the house or not when it blew up. They’re not sure because there’s nothing left. Maybe Pete set up the Powergel as some sort of booby-trap and it exploded by accident while he was still in there. Or maybe he wanted to blow himself up, but I hope not. Powergel is putty-like stuff in sausage-shaped tubes. They use it up at the mines for blasting. Dad says it’s pretty safe to handle. You need a detonator to blow it up, and electricity; a battery will do it. At the mines they wire it and then the siren goes so everyone knows to get clear and then they push a button and boom. There was no siren when Pete used it on his house. There were plenty afterwards.

  No one else is killed or hurt. Probably some of the Armed Offenders Squad can’t hear afterwards for a bit, and the glass in my bedroom window and Mum and Dad’s bedroom window is shattered. The explosion woke Dad up. He’s not impressed.

  No one seems to know how Pete got his hands on the Powergel. He wasn’t working at the mines. The company that supplies it keeps it in a locked shed out on a pakihi terrace in the middle of nowhere – which is probably a good idea if you think about it, because if something does go wrong and it all blows up there are no houses close by. Maybe a weka or a few pukekoes would die, but that would be it. They probably wouldn’t even find the feathers. Anyway, straight after the explosion they did a stocktake of the shed’s contents and there was a lot of Powergel missing, far more than it had taken to blow up Pete’s house. But that was nothing unusual, Dad said. Powergel goes missing all the time from that shed. It might be in the middle of nowhere, but everyone knows exactly where it is, and there’s no one around to see anyone sneak up and break in and steal some. Makes you think, though – where is all that missing explosive?

  I don’t get to the basketball game and yes, we lose. Actually, we lose the whole interchange. Every team. The road outside is blocked
with fire engines and police cars and even a helicopter hovers above us and it takes Mum a while to stop screaming and I have to pick the bits of glass out of my hair, so it’s a lost cause. If Pete blew up his house two hours earlier I might have made it, but twelve minutes is pushing it. Mum rings up my school and explains what’s happened and that I won’t be there for the afternoon, which she doesn’t really have to because not only is it in The Westport News but it’s on TV at night and all over the internet so everyone knows about it, everyone in the whole world.

  Dad says only something like this could happen in Westport, which makes me feel a little better. Where else in New Zealand does your neighbour blow up their house with Powergel when it’s surrounded by Armed Offenders Squad members busy figuring out what to order for lunch? I do feel sad for Pete though. Not that we’re sure he’s dead, but if he isn’t dead he has no house now, and it’s where he grew up and where his mum died and there must have been a lot of memories for him there. It’s also made a bit of a black wasteland across the road from us. After the explosion, what was left of the house caught fire and even the rain and the two Westport Volunteer Fire Brigade’s engines couldn’t put it out in time, so it burnt to the ground. I hope his dog, if he still had a dog, wasn’t inside.

  As Dad puts up tarpaulins over the broken windows to keep out the rain until the glazier can get to us, I pick up the bigger pieces of glass and Mum vacuums the floor in my bedroom and theirs. A TV news crew knocks on our front door to ask if we filmed the blast on our phones. Mum tells the reporter what she thinks about that. Have you ever been this close to an explosion? Do you think getting our phones out to capture it was what we were thinking about at the time? Dad stands in the hallway listening to her and laughs.

  While they’re talking to the reporter I slip out the back door to check on Blue, my horse. I want to make sure he’s okay. I’ve started getting the shakes, I suppose from the explosion, and I need to get away from Mum and Dad fussing. Blue is my perfect excuse. As soon as he sees me he whinnies and walks over to the fence that separates his paddock from our back lawn. He wants his daily slab of hay, of course. If he’s upset by the explosion and everything else, he doesn’t show it. Food is more important to him than what we stupid people get up to, even if it is blowing up a house. I go into the shed to get the hay, retying the string on the bale in a loose bow, then shut the door behind me. I chuck the slab at him, bits of hay flying everywhere, and he takes a step back to reach down to where it has landed in the paddock, snorting through his nose as he does. His real name, his racing name, is something Country Blues (racehorses all have to have different names and they are running out of normal horse names, which is why some of them are getting really weird now, such as Who Shot the Barman). But Blue is no longer a racehorse. He’s a pacer and kept breaking into a trot or canter on the track, so I got him instead. Unfortunately he now seems to want to redeem himself, because with me he sometimes breaks out of a trot or a canter and into pacing, and it’s really weird to sit on a horse when it’s pacing along the sand on the beach.

  I jump over the fence and check his cover. Blue has a love–hate relationship with his cover (he’s a complicated horse). If I put it on he gets rub marks and if I leave it off he gets mud sores from the rain and from rolling in his paddock. I try to do fifty-fifty when it’s wet like this. He’s a fifteen-point-two hands chestnut (even though he’s called Blue) gelding. Boy horses are either stallions or geldings. Geldings have had their bits removed so they’re easier to handle. It makes them calmer. Not that he’s had everything removed. He likes to let it all hang out. It’s so good people wear clothes.

  Blue turns his head, his mouth full of hay, to watch me as I walk around his back, dragging his cover so it’s straight, tugging a piece of gorse out of his tail. He came from the racing stable down the road, next to the cemetery. His former owner died a couple of years ago from a stroke and Mum and Dad went to the funeral (I had to go to school that day). His son now runs the place. Mum said they had all the horses from the stable in the paddock next to the graves and they had all stood quietly, their heads bowed over the fence when the last words were said by the minister, as if they were praying just like all the people standing around the grave. And then, when they lowered the coffin, all the horses suddenly whinnied loudly, reared up and galloped away. Mum told me this with tears in her eyes.

  I give Blue a hug around his neck and he nudges me back with his head, still chewing hay. When the rain stops we’ll go for a ride. Not that the rain is the problem, it’s more about damaging the paddock and every grass verge we ride on. The rain makes the ground soft and Blue isn’t that light and he’ll leave hoofprints everywhere and damaged paddocks don’t grow grass and grass is better than hay for him to eat. Sorry, Blue. Maybe we can go out on the beach one day soon.

  I climb over the fence again and push back the wet hair plastered to my forehead. Blue suddenly stamps one of his feet, and kicks out at his cover, snorting loudly.

  ‘What’s got into you?’ I ask.

  He pushes against me with his head, his mouth still full of hay. Some of it drops to the ground on my side of the fence.

  I sigh and pick it up, stuff it back into his mouth for him, being careful of his teeth.

  ‘There, settle down.’

  But his ears are back. He’s not listening to me. Maybe he’s finally smelt the smoke from the explosion and the fire. Something has spooked him.

  I give him a final rub on the neck, promise him a carrot later on, if I can steal one from the fridge without Mum catching me, and turn away. I haven’t shut the feed shed door. The shed is about the same age as our house, circa Iron Age, or maybe early Roman, and if I don’t shut the door the rain will get inside and make the hay damp. Blue gives me another snort as I pull the door shut. Complicated horse.

  ‘See you later,’ I tell him and walk back to the house to see if Mum has calmed down yet.

  She hasn’t. Dad hasn’t gone back to bed, either.

  There are more reporters knocking on our door wanting to find out what we saw, what we know, did we take pictures?

  Dad isn’t laughing anymore. I can tell he’s straining to be polite. He goes outside and talks to one of the police on the road. I watch from my bedroom through a gap between the tarpaulin and the window frame. There’s a lot of nodding and pointing, and then Dad comes back inside with a look of satisfaction on his face and a cop in uniform spends the rest of the afternoon guarding our front gate.

  That evening we get a phone call from the police. They’ve finally decided it’s most unlikely that Pete was in his house when it blew up, although they don’t tell us how they’ve figured that out. Maybe they had a forensic team in, like on CSI, looking for DNA amid the wreckage of what’s left. Or maybe it would have been obvious and any cop, or even me, could figure it out just by looking. A body blown up then burnt would still leave behind bones – maybe shattered burnt bones, but still bones, surely. Or maybe there would have just been an outline of where he was standing when it all happened. Or where he was lying, if he was sleeping it off. Maybe they expected to find his blackened skull still on his pillow in his bedroom. But they didn’t, so that’s why they think he escaped somehow. Except that wouldn’t be right, because the pillow would have got burnt too, and the sheets and the mattress and the bed, along with his bedroom and everything else.

  Maybe the cops knew all along that Pete wasn’t in there but just didn’t want to admit that somehow he had given them the slip when his house was surrounded by the Armed Offenders Squad, which is, remember, supposed to be the country’s elite armed police force.

  Anyway, they want all the neighbours to keep a lookout and to ring them straightaway if they see anything unusual, whatever that means.

  ‘Do they think he’ll be hiding somewhere, in someone’s garage?’ Mum asks when Dad hangs up the phone.

  ‘He’ll be long gone.’

  ‘We’ve only got the carport and there’s nowhere in there for anyone
to hide,’ Mum says. ‘And the horse shed, I suppose.’

  ‘You fed Blue today?’ Dad asks me.

  ‘There was no one in there.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘I think I would have noticed, Dad.’

  ‘Should we go check it now, just in case?’ Mum asks.

  ‘I’m not going out in the dark and the rain,’ Dad says. ‘And what if I did find him? You’d probably want me to invite him in for something to eat. Shall we make up the spare bed now?’

  ‘There was no one in there.’

  ‘I’ll go check the shed.’ Mum gets up.

  ‘Leave it. He’ll be long gone,’ Dad says.

  ‘He wasn’t in there.’

  ‘Don’t you have homework to do?’ Dad says.

  We’re all in the living room watching reruns of Top Gear on TV. Unlike Pete we don’t have Sky TV, or used to have Sky TV.

  ‘That would mean I had gone to school today and had homework given to me.’

  Dad gives me a don’t-be-so-smart look as Mum sits back down next to him on the sofa, then turns his attention again to Jeremy Clarkson trying to make a caravan fly. In only another couple of hours he should go to work, and with the sirens and the reporters and the police this afternoon and then the glazier coming to fix the windows he didn’t get back to sleep after being woken by the explosion. He hates shift work, we hate him doing shift work, but he still does it. Got to eat, he says.

  Dad drives the coal trains from the bins at Ngakawau below the open-cast Stockton Mine to Otira at Arthur’s Pass. There a Canterbury driver swaps with him and takes the train through to Lyttelton Port near Christchurch where the coal is loaded onto ships to be delivered to India or China or South Africa. Stockton coal is not dirty coal, it’s the best in the world. Our coal is hard and shiny and it burns too hot to use on the fire. And we don’t use it to make electricity like they do in Australia and in Europe, pumping smoke into the atmosphere, causing greenhouse gasses and global warming. Our coal is used to make steel. Steel is iron with carbon added, and that carbon comes from our coal. Even the greenies need steel, because that’s what bicycles are made out of. Not that most of them cycle anywhere anyway: they still use cars just like the rest of us.