The Man Who Rained (24 page)

Daniel stared at the hide in the puddle. The crowd whispered to each other, and then someone said, ‘Hear hear,’ albeit cautiously. Daniel felt as if he had woken from a blissful
dream to find himself in the dock of a courtroom.

‘Let’s not get carried away,’ said Sidney, regaining confidence enough to raise one commanding finger. ‘Mr Fossiter evidently needs rest. He needs time off. Should, after
that, he decide to honour the wishes of his employers and return to work, well, then I’m sure we shall be very glad to consider it.’

Somebody at the back of the crowd hit a few claps of applause. Somebody else crossed themselves and stared at Daniel as if he had been unmasked as a witch. Daniel looked at the dead brook horse
and the last liquid flowing out of it and searched himself for the feeling of a minute earlier. Where before he had felt free and liberated, now he only felt lost.

When he arrived, shaken and pensive, back at the homestead, Mole was dead beneath the table. He crouched and rubbed her back, but there was no warmth in her. He lifted her and
carried her outside and laid her gently on the grass. Thirty yards from the homestead a lifeless, slanting tree made a circle of shade over a row of small gravestones. He found his shovel and
plodded over to this tiny cemetery, reading the names of all of the hounds who had been buried there. Flint, Hunter, Sharpeye, the list went on in this fashion. Then Esme and Prosper, his
father’s housedogs. Then the patch of green grass he had been keeping watered and soft so it would be ready to dig on this day.

He looked back over his shoulder at the small black shape lying by the homestead. ‘Get up,’ he urged, beneath his breath, and tried with all his might to will it into happening. The
grass shifted in the breeze. A speckling of cloud blew across the sky. He put his shovel down. ‘Don’t worry, Mole, I won’t make you rest with these.’

He went to the workshop and collected his axe. Then he returned to the dead cemetery tree and began to chop at the parched lower branches. When he had severed a good many, he split them into
lengths and carried them in armfuls to a good flat place to pile them.

Once he had got the fire going around Mole, he crouched at a distance with his sleeve across his mouth and nose. The black fumes came up from the flames, dancing and leaping. A plaited column of
smoke rose high into the air. He thought about the days when Mole and Betty had chased each other across this very spot, and rolled in it laughing and barking, and he wished he could go back, and
fall about with them in the green grass.

A dragging day of work followed, in which she filed the photocopies she had made on her prior shifts there. At lunchtime she overheard her supervisor Lily gossiping about her
with another girl who worked in the offices. Lily was recounting what Elsa had said on her first day at work, about coming to Thunderstown
to find out what I wanted life to be.
At this both
Lily and the other girl giggled snidely. ‘She thinks this is another world,’ sniffed Lily. ‘And she left New York for it. Can you believe it? New York!’

She spent the day with the click of the hole punch, the snow of its emptied paper circles, the snap of the ring binder opening and closing. In the evening she ate, with Kenneth, a coal pot stew
he’d cooked with so many chillies that, after her final mouthful, she slumped exhausted in her chair and could think of nothing but an early night. Her bedroom was hot and she slept without
sheets. In the small hours she woke from the heat and pushed both the windows open. It did little to lower the temperature, but it brought in a dry air that smelled of heather blossom.

Just before dawn she woke to a thump above her. She propped herself up on her elbows and listened. Another thump, then another, as if something were moving on the roof of the house. A tickling
breeze came in through the open windows. The sky was a navy blue, with a pale fuzz building along the outline of Drum Head.

Then, rushing through the window and welling in the dead end of her room, came a wind. Her hair fluttered and a book she had left on the bedside table opened its cover and flicked its pages. A
paper goose that Finn had made her took off from the shelf where she’d decided to display it. The wardrobe door – which she had left ajar – swung open.

Suddenly, something more than blown air came in through the window. She shrieked and huddled backwards against the headboard. A pour of grey fur had landed in the shadows at the foot of her bed.
It looked up at her with navy eyes and its ears pricked up. She bunched her fists against her mouth, too petrified to call for help.

The dog lost interest in her almost at once and lowered its nose to the floorboards. It sniffed along the wood until it came to the opened wardrobe. Placing its forepaws on the base, it ducked
its head inside and snuffled around among her things.

When it backtracked out of the wardrobe it had the presents her mother had given her held lightly between its teeth. They were, of course, still wrapped in their sparkling red paper, but even
though she had left them unopened her heart lurched at the idea that the dog might steal or damage them. It carried them across the floor and pounced up on to the window sill.

She threw herself out of bed, yelling, ‘Wait!’

The dog seemed unfazed by the three-storey drop. It tensed its grey haunches and bent its knees, as if preparing to leap.

She reached out her arms. ‘Give those back! Please!’

It wagged its tail. The fur thudded against the window frame.

‘Please.’

It crouched. It was going to jump.

She lunged forwards to seize the packages, but at the last minute it dropped them gamely into her reaching hands. As she cuddled them to her chest, the dog flickered its tongue out across its
nose and stepped casually out of the window. When she looked out after it, it was nowhere to be seen. There was only a weathervane turning south.

She closed the window and collapsed on to the bed, still cradling the presents. She did not know whether to laugh or cry or just sag with relief. Nor did her diaphragm, which made her hiccup
with a mix of gratitude and fright.

After a minute she wiped her eyes on her t-shirt and placed the presents side by side on the mattress. Both were flat and square, but one was rigid where the other flexed. She realized she loved
the scarlet glitter of the wrapping paper her mother had chosen, and when she slid her finger under the tape of the first present she did so with the utmost care.

When she saw what was beneath she had to look away and wait for the beaded tears to drop from her eyelash. She heard the wind hum back past the window.

It was her favourite record. Nina Simone’s
Live at Town Hall.
She must have been five years old when she stole it from her dad’s record collection and determined to carry it
with her everywhere she went. ‘Just think what good taste you have,’ her dad remarked once, but she had taken it because it was his favourite too. She had loved other records since,
records that had arrested her with an incisive lyric or a melody that cut straight to the heart, but it was for this LP that her affections endured. She’d grown up on its songs, turned back
to them in times of need. Just the other day, in fact, she’d been missing this record, when all along it lay wrapped in her room. It was the only possession of her father’s that her
mother had not thrown out with the man himself, and it had been Elsa’s soundtrack to becoming a young woman, her soundtrack to leaving Oklahoma. On her first nights in New York she had played
it as loud as her cheap record player could bear. Played as the walls rattled when the subway passed, or when she sat in the window frame as she had had the habit of doing back then.

In the weeks before she’d left New York for Thunderstown, she had sold off or scrapped all of her possessions. Only a handful of them survived the clear-out, and these she had delivered to
her mum’s house in Norman, to be stowed there in her attic. Her mother must have found the record among those items, and recalled at once its importance to her daughter. With no means of
playing it now, she held the record in her hands and stared at the photo on the cover, which showed Simone from a distance and from behind, on a stage in the spotlight, absorbed in her piano. Elsa
thought of her mother, all alone in her living room in Norman.

There was no need for a record player: the songs struck up of their own accord in her head, made her mouth hum them and her tongue sing their lyrics on the edge of her breath. She remembered
splashing about in puddles when she was younger, trying to recreate the moody chords of Simone’s version of ‘Fine and Mellow’ by whistling through a cardboard tube. She remembered
discovering with a thrill that the plinking notes of the piano sounded like falling rain, and Simone’s voice like the breathy cooing of the wind itself.

Likewise she had listened to that song on the day of her dad’s release from jail, when she had played it on the car stereo as she drove excitedly to meet him, taking with her his old
plastic raincoat. He’d loved that watertight coat, which was as yellow as a fisherman’s, because, as he liked to point out, ‘Fishermen and weather-watchers are like family.
Spending all of their time staring into water. Hoping for a sight of something.’ She’d hoped it would bring back some of his old cheer. In her final few visits he’d been a total
wreck, and all he could talk about was weather. ‘The lightning doesn’t strike,’ he’d repeated on each occasion. ‘It’s a connection made in secret by the earth
and the storm. Only when it’s made does it catch fire, hotter than the surface of the sun.’

‘Yeah,’ she’d said. ‘Yeah, you told me about that before.’

Then he had lied to her about the time of his release and when she enquired at the gate she discovered to her horror that he had left the jail four hours earlier and was long gone on his way
into the prairie. She had held his plastic coat in her arms, sitting in disbelief in her car outside the prison gates, a copy of this album playing on loop on the stereo.

She put the record down on the bed and dried her eyes again. Just as those songs could still disturb the air, should the needle take its slow spiralling journey towards the centre of the vinyl,
memories of her father could still stir up such intense feelings in her that she could barely breathe. She looked at the phone in the corner of her room and wished there was a number she could call
which would lead to his voice breathing down the line. She wanted badly to tell him about Finn and what she had found in him. But there were billions of combinations of digits you could punch into
a telephone and not one single string of them could connect her to her father.

She put the record aside.

When she tried to unwrap the second gift, her hands were trembling and she had to put it down again. She considered for a moment picking up the handset and miming the act of dialling her
dad’s old number. Then she could pretend he had answered and let him know all the things that she felt. There was so much to tell him that she would not know where to start. Perhaps she would
start by telling him that ... Perhaps she would ...

She fanned her face because the blood had rushed to her head and tears were threatening once more.

She would tell him that he was a bastard. He should have been there on that day when she – the only one who still cared – arrived at the jail with his beloved yellow raincoat and
Nina Simone playing on the stereo and money saved up to help him get back on his feet. Instead he had vanished, found himself a tornado to die in, left everything
unfinished.

He had made her feel as if he loved storms more than he loved his daughter.

She grabbed a handkerchief and blew her nose. Then, with bleary eyes that meant she tore the paper, she opened the second present.

It was a kite.

A diamond-shaped kite made from quartz-white fabric. The tail, bunched up in polythene, was tied with silver bows. As she took it from the packet the tail fell to its full length with the grace
of a waterfall. Her chest tightened and her shoulders bunched forwards. She picked up the phone and this time she did not mime but punched in the numbers. The clicks and crackles of receivers
connecting across continents. Then the ringing tone that itself reminded her so much of her mother.

‘Hello? Who is this?’ Her mother sounded shattered, and only then did Elsa realize that it would be the middle of the night in America.

She had no idea what to say. She pressed the handset tight against her ear and cheek.

‘Who’s there? Do you know what time it is?’

‘Mum ...’

‘Elsa! Oh my God!’

‘Hello, Mum.’

‘
Elsa
!’

‘Um, thank you, Mum, for my presents.’

If her mother was cross with her for not calling, or upset that she had only just now opened her gifts, her voice didn’t show it. ‘You liked them? Elsa, I can’t believe
it’s you! Have you flown the kite yet?’

‘No, I ... I’m going to fly it today. With someone I met here.’

‘I’m so pleased, Elsa. I’ve got the receipt if it’s no good. But I guess you’re a long way from the store ...’