The Man Who Rained (8 page)

Yet since that night he had never found such peace. Shortly afterwards, Finn had arrived.

When Betty told him she was pregnant she said, ‘I swear to God, Daniel, I swear on my mother’s blood, I swear on my father’s grave. I went up the Devil’s Diadem during
the storm, and that was all I did.’

At that he covered his face with his hands. To think – he had been the one who had put that idea into her head! He had told her, without ever thinking she would act on it, a superstition
of his grandfather’s. The old man had believed that if a childless woman climbed to the top of a mountain during a storm, and there in a whisper petitioned it for a child, and then drank
rainwater until she was sick, then, one out of a hundred such times, she might conceive. His grandfather had believed many such things.

Daniel did not know what he found worse. The idea that she had given herself up to some infernal trick of the weather, or the idea that he had planted the suggestion in her mind.
‘Betty,’ he whispered, ‘is there no likelihood that the child is ours?’

‘No. Daniel, I’m sorry. I would have been pleased by that, but there’s no way. What’s happened to me is a miracle.’

Towards the end of her pregnancy he would sometimes catch himself staring morbidly at her belly, while in his own he felt his terrors kicking. He had always been caught between two fears: his
father’s fear of the judgements of the Lord, and his grandfather’s fear of wicked spirits that could conjure squalls out of blue skies. Each man had debunked as superstition the beliefs
of the other, leaving Daniel with no middle way save to abandon belief altogether, which would be the most fearful thing of all. In church he stopped praying and forced his mind to think about
goats and mountains and camouflaged traps. He did this because he feared hearing the whisper of the Lord in his prayers. If the Lord asked him to do something about the baby in Betty’s womb
he knew he would be too weak-willed to obey. Better not to hear the command in the first place. He felt removed from God then, trapped from him as though under rubble, and sometimes he would wake
up with his heart thumping in the dead of night, having dreamed about a little boy holding his hand.

At last the too-late day came. Her phone call.

‘Please, Daniel, no midwife,’ she gasped down the line. ‘Just you. Listen to me, please. Just you.’

‘Betty ... you need ... I don’t know ...’

‘
Please
!’

He set off at once, at a run, leaving the hide he had been tanning to spoil.

He found her sitting on her bed. At once she grabbed his forearm and squeezed so hard he felt like the bones inside it would break. She was shivering and sweat-drenched. Daniel piled blankets
around her, among them the shawl he’d made, but it did no good. She was freezing cold in the hot room. She ground her teeth to stop them chattering. He saw that a layer of ice had
crystallized across the bed sheet. It had tiled the fabric in a snowflake’s hexagonal patterns. Even as he watched (she squeezed his arm harder still) the ice spread and sculpted itself
further across the bed. Icicles creaked over the bed posts and stretched for the floor. Networks of frost coated the insides of her thighs. Then there was a thump at the window and a noise like the
calling of an animal, or a wind shrieking, and he crossed himself and she arced her neck and shouted and then the baby began to emerge.

‘Help me!’

Daniel went to the foot of the bed and set his jaw. He tried to remember the times in his childhood when he had helped his grandfather birth the livestock. The head came first, covered in a caul
of mist. He readied his hands for the body. It followed quickly – so small and so cold, cottoned in cloud and sparkling like hoarfrost. His fingers tacked to it as if to an ice block. It let
out a noise like wind wailing across wastelands. The windows shuddered and the door latch shook. ‘My baby,’ cried Betty, and it took a moment for Daniel to realize that she meant the
thing he held. He deposited it into her outstretched arms. At once the crying ceased. As she placed the child to her breast, the contact released a hiss like a branding iron cooled in a bucket of
water. The smell of burned sugar (for all he knew the smell of hell itself) filled the air. As he stood there, dumbly watching Betty as she held and stroked and soothed, the thing seemed to settle.
It took on a guise more like that of a real baby, with true flesh instead of hardened ice. Betty gave a shout of pure delight. Daniel crossed himself.

‘Hello,’ she whispered reverently. ‘Aren’t you wonderful?’ And then she looked up at Daniel and said, ‘A boy, Daniel! And I shall call him Finn.’

Elsa woke in the early morning to the noise of a wind gusting through Thunderstown. Only when she sat up in bed did she realize that she could no longer hear it, that perhaps
she had dreamed it. Through a crack in the curtains she could see the sky filling up with the dull half-light that precedes a hot sunrise. The air had closed in overnight. Inhaling felt like
breathing through a veil.

She got out of bed for some water. She drank it at the window, pulling back the curtain to gaze out at the sleeping world. Beyond Drum Head’s horizon it would already be daytime, but the
sun had still to labour up the far side of the mountain before its rays could reach Thunderstown. For now the streets enjoyed the last reposeful moments of the night. Even the white flowers growing
up through the cracked paving looked like stars set in a stone heaven.

A breeze came in through the open window and licked the fine hairs on her forearm. She shuddered. She had the feeling she was being watched, but outside there was only the view of the rooftops,
the motionless weathervanes, the steadily lightening slopes of the mountains. She tried going back to bed, but the discomforting feeling had stirred her wide awake and after a few failed attempts
at sleep she made herself coffee and sat by the window to watch the day begin.

When the sunlight came it overflowed Drum Head and rolled downhill to Thunderstown. Walls turned amber and chimney pots gold. Windowpanes lit up with the reflected dawn.

Then, with a start, she realized there was something down there in the courtyard beneath her window. She sprung up from her chair, her coffee dancing in her mug.

As she looked down she saw a wild dog, padding across the flagstones, its brushy tail snaking behind it. It settled down on its haunches and lifted its silvery muzzle to sniff the air. Then it
looked straight up at her, its stare inexpressive and animal.

With a cry she pulled shut the curtains. She paced around the bedroom. She slapped herself on both cheeks at once, told herself how stupid she was being, then reopened the curtains an inch.

The dog still sat there, its pink tongue lolling between its incisors and its eyes fixed on her room.

She didn’t know what to do. She poured herself some cereal and stayed away from the window to eat it. She had to put down her spoon when a surge of dread rose up from her toes, overwhelmed
her and then was gone again.

Once more she approached the curtains. Her hands trembled so much when she drew them open that the fabric flapped in her grip.

The dog had gone.

With a great sigh of relief she hurried to the bathroom and took a long shower. She dressed and brushed her teeth. Toothpaste dribbled over her lip and pattered into the sink. She buttoned up
her jacket and ensured she had packed her keys. She checked the clock. She tried to forget about the dog, just as she had tried to forget about the man she had seen yesterday. After she had come
back down from the mountain she had pictured him diffusing into cloud every time she closed her eyes. She had not wanted to be alone, and had bugged Kenneth to share a glass of wine with her.

Today would be her first day in her new job and she needed to hold herself together. She would be helping in a low-key, part-time role at the town’s offices. It was a step down from her
job in New York, where she had organized other people’s recipes and fashion tips and inspiring real-life stories for a newspaper’s weekend magazine. It had been more like
collage-building than journalism and she had loved that about it: she had been a compiler of all of America’s variety and she had never failed to appreciate it. Only, back then she had been
sure of herself. When the cracks started spreading, each hour at her desk became an ordeal. Every story, every snippet, every horoscope and even every word puzzle made her question who she was,
confused under the weight of all the people it was possible to be. One mid-summer Monday afternoon she broke down in the office. She found it hard to even work out her notice period.

The job Kenneth had helped her find was exactly the sort of thing she needed. Something to forget about come five o’clock. It was only a short walk to the offices, which stood at the end
of a dusty street running west from Saint Erasmus. They rose in a grand old heap of tanned stone, with whiskery grasses poking out of their walls, and culminated in a clock tower that unified the
ramshackle wings and annexes beneath, but in which the hands of the clock had frozen long ago. Craning her neck and shielding the climbing sun from her eyes, she could just make out a wooden figure
on either side of the face, attached to some kind of clockwork track. The first, a man with a rough beard and broad brimmed hat, a pickaxe held in one hand and in the other a hand bell, thrusting
it out into the open air. The second wore black and leaned on a scythe.

Lily, Elsa’s new supervisor, met her in a reception hall panelled with dark wood and hung with row after row of trophy goat heads. Lily was nineteen years old and her jaw wagged when she
spoke, as if the things she said were chewing gum. She led the way up a flight of wooden steps that tapped under their heels with hollow echoes, to an office with a small desk allotted to Elsa.

Elsa spent most of the day at an ancient photocopier. There the hours passed so slowly that they seemed measured by the broken clock.

‘So what in the world,’ asked Lily when lunchtime at last arrived, ‘possessed you to move here from New York?’

Lily made it sound so ridiculous that Elsa hesitated. Kenneth had treated her decision with something like reverence, so it surprised her to hear someone question it. But in this shabby office
it did indeed seem ridiculous.

‘I ...’ she said, ‘I ...’ She was damned if she would belittle herself; Lily could think she was nuts if she wanted to. ‘I did it to try to get my head straight. In
New York my life just ... accumulated. I didn’t feel like I’d chosen any of it, only wandered into it and just started living it. Then earlier this year some stuff happened and it made
me realize that I needed to live a life I had chosen, to be a person I had considered being. So I came here, I suppose, to have the space to find that version of myself.’

Lily looked at her like she thought she was nuts.

When she stepped out of the offices at the end of the day, the shadow of the clock tower lay across the street. She wandered wearily into Saint Erasmus Square to sit on one of the wooden benches
that faced the church. The evening heat was stirred with dust that blurred the details from the rooftops and made the sky look used and flat.

She was exhausted, tempted to lie down right there in the square and sleep, but she was determined to make something from the evening that was emerging, blown full of the scent of wood fires.
She got up and walked until she discovered a bar called the Brook Horse, which spanned five storeys. It had a glorious, hand-painted sign hanging above the entrance, in which a horse swam
underwater, its mane flowing behind it. A grid of eggshell cracks had split the paint, but the deep teal of the water remained vivid. The horse in the sign was no ordinary equine. Instead of hind
legs its body streamlined into that of a fish, its tail fanning out gracefully to propel it through the currents.

Each floor of the bar was a cubbyhole joined to the others by a rickety spiral staircase. A group of girls who would never have been served in the States nursed pots of a sticky-looking beer on
the ground floor, while on the next a woman in a raggedy shawl sewed behind a bottle of wine. The top storey overflowed on to a lop-sided balcony where Elsa sat to watch the heat haze sandpapering
all sharp angles from the rooftops and chimneys. It filled the distance with its dust, and of all the mountains only Old Colp was dark enough to show through it.

She gazed across the street. A weathervane creaked and turned west. In a gutter a crow jabbed at something yellow-feathered. Further off, a wind tugged at washing strung between two rooftops. It
pulled loose one sleeve of a shirt and flapped it about as if it were signalling to her.

She clutched her hands to her face. All of a sudden she was raging inside for the magic of yesterday. A man had turned to cloud and rained before her very eyes. She should have knocked that
bothy door down to get answers, but instead she had run back to Thunderstown and photocopied reports for eight hours. She had to go back. She had to know.

She set off at an impassioned pace, out of town and up the broken slopes of Old Colp. She thought of all the questions she would ask the man. She wondered if he would transform
into a cloud again. Then, abruptly, she was lost.