Rain Fall

by Ella West

  We plod towards Deadmans, Blue going slower and slower with every step. I’m going to have to get off and lead him. There’s a noise behind us: the other horse and its rider. I glance back before I can stop myself.

  ‘What happened?’ he asks, when our horses are side by side. Blue picks up the pace, snorting.

  ‘Stupid helicopter.’

  ‘What was it doing? It was right over you.’

  I don’t answer.

  ‘Is your horse okay?’

  ‘He’ll be fine. I just want to get him home.’ Which I realise too late is the worst thing to say. We’re at Deadmans. The boy and his horse stop on the bank and watch as Blue and I wade through the water. I don’t turn around, but I know he’s watching as we go the short distance further along the beach and then up the bank. I don’t know anything about him but now he knows where I live.

  Mum is pulling wallpaper off the hallway wall. I’m inside getting some hot water to mix with molasses for Blue. I want to ask her what she’s doing, but Blue is my first priority. He needs something warm after what he’s been through. I’ve already washed and rubbed him down to get the sweat off him before I put his cover on, and when I get back with the bucket of water he knows exactly what’s next and whinnies his thanks. I mix in the molasses and oats and rub his neck as he eats, his head deep in the bucket.

  Back inside I grab a towel from the bathroom to dry my hair, then stand there, watching Mum. She’s started at my bedroom door and there’s about a square metre of missing wallpaper. It’s coming off in tiny bits. I’ve never liked the hallway wallpaper. It’s tiny pink flowers with green leaves on a white background, and you can’t tell if the flowers are upside down or they’re supposed to be like that. Whoever owned the house before us must have put it up.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I finally ask.

  ‘Stripping wallpaper. I want to paint the hallway. Make it nicer.’

  She has the light on. The hallway is always dark when it’s raining outside. Apart from the front door with its lead-light coloured glass surround, the only other light filters from the doorways of the rooms that lead off it.

  ‘What colour are you going to paint it?’

  ‘I don’t know. Something pale, I suppose.’ She sits back on her heels and looks at me. ‘Nice ride? Where did you go?’

  ‘Just down the beach. The paddock is too boggy.’

  ‘Blue okay after the explosion yesterday?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘You worry about that horse too much. Here, give me a hand.’

  I crouch down beside her. Even with the light on it’s still gloomy. She’s using a small knife from the kitchen, one she usually cuts up vegetables with, trying to slide it under the edge of the wallpaper and then rip it from the wall.

  ‘There’s more wallpaper underneath,’ I say.

  ‘I know. I reckon there are about five layers.’

  ‘So people have just wallpapered over the wallpaper?’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘What, for a hundred years? Isn’t that how old the house is?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘So why don’t we just paint over the wallpaper?’

  ‘Because I want it to look nice.’

  I slide a finger under a loose piece of wallpaper and tug and it tears off in a depressingly small jagged piece.

  ‘This is going to take forever.’

  ‘Just give me ten minutes of your time.’

  Underneath the upside-down pink flowers are wide brown and gold stripes. Who would have put that up? And then there’s a blue and teal pattern. Slightly nicer.

  ‘Did they have wallpaper a hundred years ago?’

  ‘I think they used to import it from England. It wouldn’t have been like wallpaper today. Some of it was handpainted. But it was still wallpaper.’

  Mum hands me her knife and I use it to get under an edge of the teal and pull like crazy. All three layers come off in one reasonably large piece.

  ‘Well done,’ Mum says and gets up, walks down the hallway. She comes back with another knife from the kitchen for her to use.

  When Dad comes in an hour later, we’re still in the hallway pulling wallpaper off the wall together.

  ‘What a mess,’ Dad says.

  ‘Got to make a mess sometimes,’ Mum says, brushing the pieces from her jeans.

  He pulls a patch slowly off the wall, trying to make it as large as possible before it tears but failing badly. ‘Big job.’

  ‘Well, we’ve made a start. I must admit it’s oddly addictive. Like doing a jigsaw puzzle. How was the meeting?’

  ‘Not good,’ he says and leaves it at that.

  ‘I’ll dish up tea,’ Mum says and follows him into the kitchen. ‘Five minutes, Annie?’

  ‘Okay.’

  Which in other words means I want to talk to Dad alone for five minutes in the kitchen about stuff you’re not meant to know about. Do they think I’m dumb? It will be about Dad’s work. Some meeting about what will happen with the railway if the coalmines close. It’s just not the miners who will be affected, but everyone. The mechanics that look after the diggers and the trucks, the people who look after the roads up to the mine, the train drivers who take the coal to Lyttelton. And then when people start leaving to find work elsewhere it will be the supermarkets and the pubs and all the shops and the schools. They’re saying in the newspaper the town could halve in size overnight if the mines close. Become a ghost town.

  I pull a piece of teal paper from the wall. Under it is another layer of pink flowers. Roses this time, big petals. I wonder if it they were handpainted and who by, when? Even if they weren’t, someone must have done the original design. Laboured over each leaf, painting each thorn on the stems, the water droplets at the edge of the bottom petal. Someone far away.

  ‘Annie, tea,’ Mum calls from the kitchen.

  We eat casserole from plates on our laps, watching the news on TV. Syria, Iraq, Turkey, the US, Europe. The news presenters ‘caution’ us about the ‘disturbing images’ they’re ‘about to show’.

  ‘Then why show them?’ Dad says, his forkful of food poised halfway to his mouth.

  Mum and I don’t say anything and all three of us watch the bombed hospitals, the dying kids, the men with guns.

  Afterwards I have homework to do, even though it’s Friday night. It’s better getting it out of the way than having it hanging over my head all weekend. I don’t hear Dad leaving for work. The wind has come up and above the rain on the roof there is the roar of the surf on the beach in the distance. I fall asleep listening to the waves.

  The next morning when I go to get breakfast, Mum and Dad are talking again, waiting for the toaster to pop.

  ‘Wouldn’t be the ideal way to get rid of a body,’ Mum’s saying. ‘Could end up anywhere on that beach, especially with that storm last night. Those currents are fierce.’

  ‘Could have got eaten by the sharks,’ Dad says, getting the marmalade out of the cupboard. ‘Nothing to find then. Lots of sharks out there.’

  ‘Just be careful if you go riding on the beach,’ Mum says, waving a butter knife at me.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I heard they’re searching the beaches with helicopters, looking for a body.’

  ‘Pete’s? Do they think he’s dead?’

  ‘No, someone else. Someone Pete was mixed up with.’

  ‘They think Pete murdered someone? Is that why the police surrounded his house?’

  ‘They surrounded his house because he shot up the police station the night before because he got drunk and was dumb. Please, just stay off the beach.’

  I haven’t got time to take Blue out anyway, on the beach or anywhere. It’s Saturday morning and I’ve got basketball practice. And since we didn’t win the game against Kaiapoi High School, our coach will be working us hard.

  I bike past the remains of Pete’s house, still guarded by the police tape, past the cemetery, over the Orowaiti Bridge and along Brougham Street. Ther
e’s no traffic, there’s never any traffic; it’s just that it’s raining. It’s been raining for a whole week now.

  At the courts there are drills and more drills. Liam, our coach, used to work up the hill in the coalmines, seven days on, seven days off, so we only saw him one week out of two, but now he’s always here. He lost his job a couple of weeks back. There’s no other work in town, but he can’t sell his house. So he’s stuck in Westport, coaching basketball, for which he doesn’t get paid, but should, because he’s a good coach. He got paid for digging up coal, which now the world doesn’t want, but he doesn’t get paid for coaching basketball to kids who want him, who need him. And we do need him. In this town there’s nothing else for us to do but play sport – netball, rugby, hockey, basketball, athletics. I’m just glad I figured out early on it’s a good idea to pick a sport that’s played inside.

  The sound of basketballs hitting the wooden floor echoes the rain pounding on the gym roof. Samantha’s shoes squelch every time she moves. She must have worn them here. Sam is in most of my classes. We hang around together a bit. Really, she should have come with dry shoes. There are little puddles of water now all over the courts where we have dripped, and Liam runs around with a towel trying to mop them up before we slip over. Not that we ever do. We’re used to it. The air is humid from the dampness, and after ten minutes of drills the sweat is pouring off us all. Even Liam, who is bald with a round face that gets redder and redder as practice goes on. We don’t make fun of him. For starters his own kids are here bouncing balls as they watch from the sidelines, still too young to play; plus he knows our parents; and also we just don’t do that type of thing.

  After twenty minutes of drills he stops us and talks about the rest of the season, how we have to put the one bad game behind us, and how he wants us all to have individual goals as well as team goals. Then he divides us into two teams and we start to play.

  ‘Hey, Annie,’ he says, stopping me. ‘We really needed you the other day.’

  ‘I know. I just couldn’t make it.’

  ‘I think you had a good excuse. We’ll play them again next year.’

  After our allotted hour is finished, he calls it quits and sends us all home, back out into it. After the sweatbox the gym has become, it’s good to be in the fresh air. I pedal as fast as I can down Brougham Street wondering, for the countless time, if less or more rain falls on you the faster you go. Or is it the time spent out in the rain that matters, instead of whether you’re standing still or moving? It’s a question for the TV show MythBusters, if they haven’t answered it already.

  Whoever designed our house must have had a sense of humour. It’s a rectangle, with the shorter sides the front and the back of the house. At the back is a carport – a covered area where we park the car and leave our coats and gumboots by the door and where Dad hangs up the overalls he wears for work. At the front is a wooden veranda. There are three steps dead-centre from the path that lead to the porch and front door. Above the veranda is a curved corrugated iron roof, and then there is the triangular shape of the real roof. On either side of the front door are big sash windows (the windows to my bedroom and my parent’s bedroom) that have folded-down blinds on the inside. Mum made them, so maybe she was in on the joke as well.

  If you look at the house from the front, it’s like a face – the two windows are the eyes, the blinds Mum made are the eyelids, the door is the nose, the porch is the mouth, the steps up to it is the tongue and the veranda roof is the eyebrows. Last year I borrowed Mum’s good camera, on a day it wasn’t raining, put it in the front garden on a tripod, which I’d borrowed from school, and made a film clip for YouTube of the house winking and then closing its eyes by letting the blinds up and down and taking photographs. It was pretty cool. Last time I checked it had over fifty thousand views. So I’m partly famous; well, the false name I used for the clip is.

  Even though the house isn’t smiling, it’s not frowning or angry or sad. I think it’s a happy face, a serene face, an I-can-cope-with-anything face. It’s the face I wear every time I head through that front door, coming or going. And it makes me feel like I belong here. It gives me strength. This house has been here for so long, has survived the rain and the storms, so if it can, then so can I. I am a West Coaster, and this is my home, my place of belonging. It is who I am. Even though it rains here a lot.

  I’m not sure if Blue feels the same way, or knows any different. He’s lived his whole life here on the same road (apart from going to races), and he’s older than me too. None of which he probably thinks about, especially as we splash across Deadmans, its surface pockmarked by the raindrops. He has his ears forward. Maybe he’s watching for helicopters or maybe he’s on the lookout for the black horse from yesterday. Forget that, Blue. They won’t be here again. Twice in two days would be too much of a coincidence. I know what I’m looking for and that’s a body. If Pete did murder someone, I want to know, and Mum said at breakfast this morning this is where the police are searching. High tide was a couple of hours ago. Let’s see if anything has washed up.

  I nudge Blue into a slow canter just below the tide mark and keep my eyes on the line of driftwood and seaweed. I’ve never seen anything particularly interesting on this beach apart from a dead seal. My parents know of someone who once found a dead penguin. He put it in his freezer and would bring it out at parties as a kind of joke. The last I heard of it was it went skiing on a Canterbury ski field. They took photos of it and put them on Facebook. You couldn’t have done that with the seal I found. It was too far gone. It stank real bad. Even my horse didn’t like the smell.

  Blue has suddenly picked up the pace and is whinnying. I take my eyes off the line of driftwood and look ahead to see the black horse, riding around the same dead tree washed up on the beach. It could be yesterday all over again.

  I slow Blue to a walk, just in case he thinks we’re going to take off down the beach at a gallop like last time, and the boy sees us and pulls his horse to a stop. The horse paws the ground. Maybe it doesn’t want to meet us, but it’s obvious the boy does.

  ‘I thought I would have to come here every afternoon for days until you came back,’ he says, his head tilted to one side.

  ‘Why?’ I ask.

  ‘To see you again, of course. I didn’t even find out your name yesterday.’

  ‘I didn’t find out yours either.’

  ‘It’s Jack. Jack Robertson. This is Tassie. She’s a rodeo horse, for barrel racing. You know, when you go round a barrel?’

  ‘I know what it is.’

  ‘I go to rodeos all around the country and in Australia, the States and Canada. Although Tassie doesn’t go over there, not to North America. It’s too expensive.’

  ‘We don’t have a rodeo in Westport. Not a real one.’

  ‘I’m not here for a rodeo.’

  I’m not going to ask the obvious question. Actually, I have lots of questions, especially as I’m pretty sure guys don’t do barrel racing. It’s a girls-only sport. And was that what he was doing riding around that dead tree? But I sit and wait to see what he’ll say. His horse – Tassie – is picking up her feet, like she wants to go. She doesn’t want to stand here and talk in the rain. Blue is perfectly still, just his ears moving, listening. I’ve got the reins in one hand, waiting.

  ‘My dad is here for work. So I came too – never been here before – and we brought Tassie over, because she needs to be exercised. Because of the circuit, the rodeo circuit, I do school by correspondence, so I can pretty well go wherever.’

  Blue puts his ears forward. I bet he’s thinking the same as I am. This boy does a lot of talking about himself.

  ‘Tassie’s a quarter horse,’ he says and then he suddenly shuts up, like he’s run out of things to say, or he’s realised what Blue and I are thinking. ‘I still don’t know your name,’ he finishes.

  ‘What does your dad do?’

  ‘He’s a cop. Well, a detective. They think this drug dealer has been murdered but th
ey can’t find the body, and the guy they think did it blew up his house the other day so they’re pretty worried because he might blow up something else. That’s why we’re here.’

  I put my empty hand on my knee and lean forward, stretch out my back in the saddle. Absolutely brilliant. So when I was using Blue to scuff out Pete’s footprints on the beach yesterday I was destroying police evidence right in front of the detective’s teenage son. I wonder if I can be charged with that.

  ‘Was it him in the helicopter yesterday?’ I ask.

  ‘No. I told him, though. It was some other cops. He was going to talk to them. That was pretty dangerous, what they did. You got home all right? Your horse is okay?’

  ‘Blue’s fine.’

  ‘Blue. That’s a nice name, for a chestnut.’

  ‘What were they doing in the helicopter?’

  ‘I don’t know. Dad doesn’t talk much about work. He’s kind of the silent type.’

  I don’t reply, but I have to try really hard not to laugh.

  ‘Do you, I don’t know, want to ride down the beach? You were heading that way anyway,’ Jack asks. He looks over at me nervously, obviously worried that I won’t say yes.