Read The Man Who Rained Online
Authors: Ali Shaw
The Man Who Rained
First published in hardback and export and airside trade paperback in Great Britain in 2012 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Ali Shaw 2012
The moral right of Ali Shaw to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual
persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 9-780-85789-032-0
eISBN: 9-780-85789-798-5
Export and Airside Trade Paperback ISBN: 9-780-85789-033-7
Printed in Great Britain
Atlantic Books
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For Iona
‘These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
Are melted into air, into thin air,
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on.’
William Shakespeare,
The Tempest
21 WERE ALL SPIRITS, AND ARE MELTED INTO AIR
The rain began with one gentle tap at her bedroom window, then another and another and then a steady patter at the glass. She opened the curtains and beheld a sky like
tarnished silver, with no sign of the sun. She had hoped so hard for a morning such as this that she let out a quiet cry of relief.
When the cab came to take her to the airport, water spattered circles across its windscreen. The low-banked cloud smudged Manhattan’s towers into the atmosphere and the cab driver
complained about the visibility. She described how dearly she loved these gloomy mornings, when the drizzle proved the solid world insubstantial, and he bluntly informed her that she was crazy. She
craned her neck to look out of the window, upwards at the befogged promises above her.
She did not think she was crazy, but these last few months she had come close. At the start of the summer she would have described herself as a sociable, successful and secure
twenty-nine-year-old. Now, at the worn-out end of August, all she knew was that she was still twenty-nine.
At the airport she drifted through check-in. She paced back and forth in the departures lounge. She was the first in the boarding queue. Even when she had strapped herself into her seat; even as
she watched the cabin crew’s bored safety routine; even as the prim lady seated beside her twisted the crackling wrapper of a bright boiled sweet; even with every detail too lucid to be a
dream, she still feared that all the promises of the moment might be wrenched from her.
Life, Elsa Beletti reckoned, took delight in wrenching things from her.
Elsa’s looks came from her mother’s side of the family. The Belettis had given her unruly black hair, burned-brown eyes and the sharp eyebrows that inflected her every expression
with a severity she didn’t often intend. She was slim enough for her own liking most months of the year, but her mother and all of her aunts were round. At family gatherings they orbited one
another like globes in a cosmos. She feared that one morning she would wake up to find genetics had caught up with her, that her body had changed into something nearly spherical and her voice,
which she treasured for its keen whisper like the snick of a knife, had turned into that of a true Beletti matriarch, making every sentence into a drama of decibels.
Her surname (which she gained aged sixteen, after her mother had kicked her father out) and her physique were all she had inherited from the Belettis. She had always considered herself more like
her dad, whose own family history existed only in unverified legends passed down to him by his grandparents. One ancestor, they had told him, had been the navigator on a pilgrim tall ship. He had
coaxed the winds into the vessel’s sails to carry its settlers over unfathomable waters en route to a new nation. Another was said to have been a Navajo medicine man, who had survived the
forced exodus of his people from their homeland and helped maintain under oppression their belief in the Holy Wind, which gave them breath and left its spiral imprint on their fingertips and
toes.
Elsa’s mum said that her dad had made both of those stories up. She said he had done it to pretend that his sorry ass was respectable. She said his ancestors were all hicks and alcoholics.
She said it all again on the rainy afternoon when she kicked him out of the house and he stood in the falling water like a homeless dog.
Then, this spring, he had left them for a second and more final time.
The plane took off with a judder. At first all Elsa could see through the window was grizzled fog. She pinched her fingertips together to keep herself calm. Then came the first
tantalizing break in the grey view. A blur of blue that vanished as quickly as it had come, like a fish flickering away through water.
The plane rose clear.
If the world that she left below her had looked like this, she could have been happier in it. Not a world of packed dirt under cement streets and endless houses, but one of clouds massed into
mountains. As far as she could see white pinnacles of cloud basked in the bright sun. Peak after peak rose above steamy canyons. In the distance one smouldering summit flickered momentarily like a
blowing light bulb: a throwaway flash of lightning some two hundred miles to the south. She wished it were possible to make her home in this clean white landscape, to spend her days lying on her
back in a sun-bright meadow of cloud. Since that was impossible, she was giving up everything for the next best thing. Somewhere remote, where she could rebuild herself.
‘Ma’am?’
She turned, irritated, from the view of the world outside to that of the aeroplane aisle and the air hostess who had disturbed her. After the majesty of the cloudscape, the domesticity of the
plane infuriated her. The plastic grey cabin and the air hostess’s twee neckerchief. People loafing in their seats as if in their living rooms, reading the airline’s free magazine or
watching whatever came on TV. A little girl wailed and Elsa thought,
Yes, me too
.
The air hostess outlined the choice of set meals, but Elsa told her she wasn’t hungry. The hostess smiled with good grace and pushed her trolley further down the aisle.
The plane turned away from the country of her birth, from the glass-grey city blocks and the gridlocked avenues, from the concrete landing strips, from the ferry terminals and the boats jostling
in the cellophane sea. She felt no sadness in saying goodbye to all that, although she had bitten back tears before boarding. Against Elsa’s wishes, her mother had appeared at the airport to
wave her off, sobbing into a handkerchief. She had brought with her another unwelcome sight: a pair of presents wrapped in sparkling red paper. Elsa had tried to refuse them – she wanted to
leave her old life behind her entirely – but had ended up cramming them into her luggage regardless.
It had been years since Elsa had properly connected with her mother. Their telephone conversations were dutifully recited scripts, both of them dutifully reciting their lines. Their infrequent
meet-ups took place in an old diner, where her mum would order Elsa the same muddy hot chocolate and slice of pecan pie which she had consumed greedily as a child. These days, the mere sight of
that glistening slab of dessert felt fattening, but Elsa always forced it down. She hoped that by playing along, she might, some day, bring this repeating scene to a close and let the next
commence. But they had been stuck in the same tired roles ever since her mum had kicked her dad out; and Elsa feared that her mother had thrown the remaining acts out into the rain along with
him.