The Man Who Rained (12 page)

‘Good. That was wise. Nevertheless, I should speak to her.’ He combed his fingers through his moustache and beard. ‘Yes. I shall warn her not to blab to all and sundry about
you.’

Finn frowned. ‘She won’t blab.’

Daniel bit his lip. And now he remembered the look of excitement on Finn’s face when he had answered the door. ‘You know who she is and who she is not, do you? You were hoping it was
her when I arrived here today!’

‘So what if I was?’

In an instant Daniel’s head was full of blood. He gripped the table for support. ‘So what? Damned well remember what you did to your mother!’

Finn shrank in his chair.

Daniel stood up and took a deep, controlling breath. He brushed with chopping motions the crumbs from his hands. ‘I should see about her right away.’ He took his broad-brimmed cap
from the hook on which he had hung it. ‘Good day, Finn.’

Yet even as he charged back down the slopes towards Thunderstown, he discovered that he was oddly grateful to Elsa Beletti. He told himself it was because she’d given him an excuse to cut
short his visit, since his other reason unsettled him. Sometimes his thinkings presented him with sudden emotions or opinions that he did not recognize as his, as if they were intrusions from some
other mind, carried like a tune into his own. This had been just such an unasked-for feeling, which he now snuffed out: he had been pleased to know that Finn had found somebody to smile about, for
when he smiled some angle of his lips reminded him of Betty’s.

Five o’clock in Elsa’s office arrived as slowly as Christmas morning to a child. When it came she hurried at once along the winding roads that led to Candle Street
and the path out of town. From there she was soon climbing Old Colp, en route to Finn’s bothy. As she walked, tiny yellow birds flittered in pairs or trios around her, enjoying the softening
heat of the evening. The sky remained a lazy blue, save for a scattering of cumuli in the east and a white band of aeroplane contrails disintegrating high overhead.

‘Hi,’ she said when Finn opened the bothy door. ‘Me again.’

He was wearing a ropey old tank vest and a pair of shorts that had seen better days, as well as his bashed-up shoes with the holes in their lips. ‘It’s hard to get rid of you,
isn’t it, Elsa?’

She laughed nervously. ‘I didn’t really like the way we finished things last time. I thought I should come to apologize. For, you know, freaking out a little.’

He smiled ruefully. ‘I suppose it’s to be expected. In retrospect I’m amazed that you stayed as long as you did.’

‘Well, I wish I’d at least stayed a bit longer.’

‘It’s probably best that you didn’t. Don’t take this the wrong way, but you shouldn’t come up here any more. It’s not that I don’t like you – I
wish I could get to know you better – it’s just that ... it’s dangerous.’

She didn’t want to be asked to leave again. ‘Surely there’s no harm in a little more conversation?’

He sighed and placed a hand on his chest. ‘The harm is in here.’

She laughed. ‘What kind of threat is that?’

He put his hands sheepishly into his pockets. One of them was a torn pocket out of the bottom of which his forefinger showed. ‘I made something after we talked. I think I’d like to
give it to you. Will you come in?’

‘I’d love that.’

He turned and she followed him into the bothy.

He had been crafting more paper since last she saw him. Birds formed a mound of wings and white tails on the table. Each, she felt, was a work of art, as delicate and innovative as any origami
she had seen, but Finn dug through them as if they were waste paper, sending them gliding left and right down to the floor.

‘Here!’ he exclaimed, and held up a different kind of model. It was a paper skyscraper, built with a pointed paper spire and a roof of stepped tiers. ‘My mother showed me a
photograph once, of New York. Is this right? Don’t you have towers there?’

‘It’s ...’ she said, but she had to stop because her lip was trembling. She was surprised at how upset she was to see the shape of it. In New York she had barely registered
Manhattan’s height – she was so used to it after her first few weeks there – but this paper version felt as heavy as its inspiration. It trapped her hands at her sides and she
could not move them. She was at once homesick and sick of the reminder of home. ‘You don’t like it?’

‘It’s not that.’ She spoke through a tight throat. ‘It’s so very sweet of you, but ...’

‘Here.’ He held it lightly on his palm for a second, then screwed it into litter. ‘Gone.’

After a while she said, ‘I’m really sorry. I don’t know what came over me. I don’t want to seem ungrateful.’

‘I understand. Sometimes there are things in life that you would rather forget. I apologize. I should have made you something different.’

‘No, it was lovely of you. I’m just ... a bit screwed up, that’s all.’

He threw the scrunched paper model across the room and into the bin. ‘Then you’re in good company.’

‘Do you know ... it’s weird, but I felt like I was. When we were talking yesterday.’

He didn’t say anything. She still hadn’t got used to the silences that he was so comfortable with opening up between them. She supposed they were to be expected: he was, after all,
part weather, and weather was not renowned for its verbosity. She waited a minute before he spoke again.

‘Would you like to choose a paper bird instead? You can take as many as you like.’

She began to search through the ones on the table, inspecting each with the diligence of an auctioneer. ‘How do you get them so lifelike?’ she asked when she had chosen her
favourite: a broad-winged goose with a neck straight as a ruler.

‘I don’t really know.’

She laughed. ‘That’s not a very good answer.’

He looked out of the window for inspiration. He had filled a clay jar on the sill with a spray of wildflowers, including one magnificent specimen whose dappled petals formed a yellow orb, like a
world globe made out of gold. He touched its petals lightly as he thought, and she realized that
that
was how he made them, with a rare and gentle precision. ‘Okay, put it this
way,’ he said with a shrug, ‘I just fold on a hunch, and I know there’s really no such thing as flight. That might sound crazy, but it’s true. There’s only really a
kind of swimming in the air.’

She smiled. ‘My dad always used to say the air was an ocean.’

‘Yeah, exactly! Just like an ocean, with currents and tides. And people are like ... like the crabs and the worms on the ocean floor.’

‘That’s very flattering.’

‘I just mean that people are stuck on the bottom level. But to other creatures those currents and tides can be climbed just like a person climbs a tree or a hill. When you understand how
that works, you can fold a paper bird. I’ve watched a lot of birds surfing the air up here on the mountain. I actually look after a few of them.’

‘You keep them? Here?’

‘No, farther up the mountain.’

She placed the paper goose gently on to the table. ‘Would you show me?’

‘Um, I’m not sure I should.’

‘Why not? You don’t want to?’

‘I’d love to, it’s just ...’

‘Then what are we waiting for?’

After a moment he shrugged and got up.

They stepped outside and she followed him uphill. He walked with a centre of suspension that made him look as if he were gliding. She plodded along beside him and paused now
and again to catch her breath. The recent heat had papered the boulders with dust, and so dried out the grass that their shoes left crushed footprints in the turf. In the east, congesting cumuli
teased the prospect of much-needed rain.

They walked in the kind of comfortable silence she thought it took people years, not days, to learn. Then, unprompted, he began to describe how last summer a field mouse had made her nest
outside the bothy and he had learned to entice her inside with a trail of white chocolate. Once he had lured her in he had crouched beside her to make model after paper model. He said he got good
at her tail – a long twist of paper instead of a fold. And then when he had finished the story he fell to silence again, and it delighted her that she could resist her natural compulsion to
fill it.

Then they came upon the fringe of a wiry copse. Around the trees a ditch had been dug and around that a perimeter of razor wire coiled. Clumps of fur hung from its blades.

‘I’m guessing we’ll be trespassing if we go in there,’ said Elsa.

‘No,’ said Finn. ‘These defences are Daniel’s work. To keep goats out, not us. Goats would devour these trees in a day.’

He picked up a plank of wood and leaned it against the fence to create a rudimentary stile. He hopped over and turned to help Elsa. She enjoyed the smooth touch of his fingers as he took her
hand and guided her over the step.

Under the copse’s foliage the world immediately cooled and quietened. The leaves had been parched by summer into early autumn’s hues, but enough still lined the branches to cast a
pied pattern across the floor. Here they stopped, themselves dappled in light and shade.

‘Now, just listen,’ instructed Finn, holding a finger to his lips.

She heard the chirrup of birdsong, and scanning the intertwining branches saw in several places little yellow birds perched in threes and fours. One swept past her, warbling as it went.

‘You see them?’ he whispered.

‘Yes. Of course.’

He grinned. ‘They’re canaries. I’ve put up nest boxes for them. There are thousands of them on the mountains in the summer. My mother told me a story about them once. She said
that on the day the floods finished off the mines, a tradesman was selling canaries in Candle Street. The water knocked his stall down and smashed his cages open. Out flew a hundred canaries, and
they hatched a hundred more and so on. Ever since then there have been wild canaries in Thunderstown.’

‘That’s a nice story.’

‘But it’s not true, because they don’t hatch.’

‘What do you mean? Of course they hatch.’

‘No, they don’t. Look over there.’

She looked along the line of his pointing finger, and saw nothing.

‘You’re too slow, Elsa. Wait ... wait ... Now! Over there!’

At first she thought it was an optical illusion. A trick of the sunlight playing on the fallen leaves. Then up out of a bright patch of loam shot a canary, to join its fellows in the boughs of
the copse. She rubbed her eyes. ‘What did I just see?’

‘It’s happening again! Over there!’

He was pointing to a spot in the leaf litter that seemed more radiant than all the rest. It was as if an ember had touched down there and set the leaves to kindling. As she watched, the glow
became intense. It formed a tiny orb of light that made the roots and twigs around it gleam, and left a sunspot in her vision. It began to shimmer and skew, and then the leaves looked like fiery
feathers and she heard a bird cry out.

The light rose from the leafy floor with a hiss like a sparkler. Then it shot past her ear and she felt a hot breeze bristling her hair to its roots. Its shine dimmed as it flew, until she could
clearly see its wings, a beak and tail feathers steering its ascent. It fluttered on to a branch, where it preened its plumage and tested its song.

‘Whuh ... what just happened?’

‘A sunbeam,’ Finn said, ‘came to life.’

She had too many questions to ask him any.

He grinned from ear to ear. ‘Would you like to catch one?’

‘
What
?’

‘They’re quite friendly. Come on.’ And with that he grasped the lowest boughs of the nearest tree and heaved himself up its trunk.

She was surprised that such a big man could ghost so easily upwards. He grinned down at her from the higher branches and asked, ‘What are you waiting for?’

She shook her head, still stunned by what she’d seen.

‘We won’t catch one on the ground, Elsa. They only like to perch among the branches.’

‘I ... I ...’

He glided back down as swiftly as he had gone up. ‘I’ll help you climb. Here, grab this branch.’

She took hold of its warm bark and stared up through the foliage at a trio of canaries who had squeezed on to a twig, watching her with cocked heads and cooing as if she were the most ridiculous
thing in the world.

She hauled herself upwards with no real method, lifting her feet from the ground and pushing them against the trunk to try to find a foothold. She was surprised by how light she felt, then
realized that Finn had cupped one hand beneath her foot to give her purchase. For a moment she wanted to leave her foot there. Then she pushed on upwards and got up on to one of the branches, after
which it became easier to climb.

Finn floated up the trunk to overtake her and lead her gradually higher, until they sat facing one another on two high wooden arms.

‘Now we have to be quiet, and wait for the birds to resettle.’

She nodded, and they sat with the tide of leaves swaying back and forth around them. She knew he was looking at her and smiling, but she did not look back. She supposed that sights such as these
were ordinary for him, but the strangeness had made her feel as if they had been through a momentous event together. It had always been her assumption that to connect with a person you needed to
have shared so much. Yet here they were, still strangers, and she felt a connection to him as tangible as that between the branch she was sitting on and its trunk. ‘Now,’ he whispered,
‘hold out your hands.’