The Man Who Rained (14 page)

She was right, and triumphant for a moment as Kenneth led her through the door, then disappointed that there was no mystery within, no soul of the building present like a phantom. The church
felt barren, its walls whitewashed and bare, the cold confines of its stone keeping the hot day out. A tuneless organ played as the congregation entered. Depending on how you looked at it,
attendance was either exceptional or dire: every uncomfortable pew was full, but there were very few pews in the church. Most of them had vanished along with its statues and gargoyles and, given
the rich mahogany they’d been joined from, Elsa suspected they had all been pawned. Surrounding these few rows of worshippers spread a sea of grey flagstones, chiselled with the names and
titles of the bodies interned beneath. Mosses sprouted through the cracks, and the stones were smattered with the droppings of those feathered church regulars who lived in the rafters.

Then she saw Daniel Fossiter in the front row, head bowed in piety, a conspicuous space between him and both his neighbours.

Kenneth went to sit with his choir so Elsa found a spot on the end of a back pew, as far from Daniel as possible. She’d been sitting there barely a minute when a diminutive nun wearing
enormous glasses sat down beside her.

‘New here?’ she asked Elsa, in an ancient, impish voice.

‘Quite, yes.’

The nun unfolded her hands in her lap. When she spoke her teeth showed, each one whittled away until it was set apart from the next. ‘I’m
old
here,’ she said. She
unfolded her ancient fingers to indicate she was not only old in this church but old in the streets outside, the uplands and the mountains beyond.

‘Dot,’ she said, and pinched Elsa mischievously on the arm.

‘Elsa.’

‘And you’re staying with Mr Olivier.’

‘Yes,’ Elsa replied, surprised at what this old lady knew. ‘Kenneth, yes.’

Dot tapped the side of her crooked nose with an even more crooked finger. ‘Kenneth told me to look out for you. Said you’d sit at the back. So I stuck my bones down here. I
won’t hear much of the sermon this far away from the lectern, but there’s no harm in that, is there?’

Elsa laughed, a little too loudly, and her laughter rippled off the vault of the roof, where wings thrashed in response.

‘And how was your journey?’ Dot asked.

‘We just walked. Kenneth doesn’t live so far away.’

‘No. Your journey to Thunderstown.’

‘Oh,’ she said absent-mindedly, ‘Beautiful. You know, when the clouds are like a landscape and you want to run across them? And everybody else has their head in a book or their
eyes closed and you feel like you’re the only one in the world who still thinks there’s magic in flying.’

‘Look here,’ said the nun, reaching into her crisp grey habit to pull out a little pouch. After trying unsuccessfully to remove its contents with her bent fingers, she reached across
and took one of Elsa’s hands, turned the palm upwards into a cup, and tipped the contents into it. On to her palm fell a fresh red flower like a baby tulip, a big yellow button, a canine
tooth and a passport-sized photograph. This last item Dot picked up and showed to Elsa.

‘I haven’t got a husband to carry in my purse with me,’ grinned Dot, ‘unless of course you count the good Lord himself, who doesn’t pose for photographs. But this
is the next best thing.’

The photo didn’t show a face but a dark mass of clouds with the sun bursting behind them, so that the cloud edges were lined with a brilliant light.

‘It’s a silver lining,’ Elsa said.

‘I’ve got more, many more.’ She began to repack the things into their pouch. ‘You should come and visit me sometime.’

Before Elsa could answer, the organ ceased playing and the priest stood and cleared his throat. He was all jowls, and had no hair on his spotted head except for a pair of eyebrows that were
thick and black like rat fur. ‘That priest,’ Dot whispered, leaning so close that Elsa could smell her (and she smelled heady and sweet like pudding wine), ‘was young here when
this church was glorious. When the windowpanes were still full of stained glass.’

After an opening address and prayer, the priest informed the congregation that it was time for the choir to sing. Elsa recognized one or two of its members from around town, but she now knew all
of them by name and vocal range, thanks to Kenneth’s enthusiastic descriptions.

That man with the tufty moustache and greased, combed hair was Hamel Rhys, who claimed he had been suckled on bottles of beer instead of breast milk. Behind him stood Hettie Moses, wife of the
town busybody Sidney, and alongside her a pair of austere old sisters, identical twins who still lived together. These Hettie had befriended, and she had done all she could to curl her hair and
dress as if she were their triplet. The final member of the choir was little Abe Cosser, who kept a flock of sheep on the fields of Drum Head. It was said in Thunderstown that just as a dog
resembles its owner, so too a shepherd resembles his flock, and true to form, little Abe Cosser possessed spread eyes and the slanted, reaching teeth of a ewe. Yet he also had a beautiful falsetto,
and when Kenneth raised his hands (Elsa could see the nerves jittering in his left leg) and the choir began to sing, Abe’s voice fluted mournfully over the amateur tones of the other members,
lifting their plain song into a melancholy harmony made almost supernatural by the lofty echoes of the church. Dot closed her eyes and exhaled with pleasure, and when the singing stopped Elsa had a
momentary pang of something almost like grief at its ending.

Then came the priest’s sermon, addressed to the gathered faithful in his reedy voice. It was a losing battle with the acoustics of the building. The congregation cupped hands to ears to
try to make out the words above echoing interruptions from sneezes, cleared throats, dropped hymn sheets and the constant commotion of pigeons up above.

Unable to follow the sermon, Elsa settled as comfortably as she could into the pew and watched the light playing across the plain frosted glass of the windows. Outside, the clouds were passing
across the sun, sifting shadows down on to the town.

She remembered waking before first light on a Saturday, the door to her bedroom creaking open, and her dad appearing with a finger to his lips. Slipping out of bed, she’d padded after him
and shadowed him down the stairs. There in the hallway he’d dressed her in her coat, and together they’d tiptoed out of the door with him carrying her shoes by the laces. She
couldn’t risk putting them on inside, in case her footsteps echoed on the floorboards. Dark mornings were different from night-times, especially when you were still brimming with sleep.
She’d crept along, hand in hand with her father, obeying the only rule he imposed whenever they did this: this stays our secret, you don’t breathe a word about it when we return to the
house. But that would happen long after absorbing fleets of altocumulus in the dim morning glow, or the eerie disc of a lenticular cloud, floating like a spaceship above the distant Ouachita
Mountains.

She kept their rule. Never told her mother she’d been up and outside long before the day had started. Told her instead that her dad had taken her to dance classes while her mum had snored
through her weekend lie-in. She had to learn a few moves now and again to feign a performance, but she didn’t feel bad in deceiving her. She knew her mum would go berserk if she found out
what they were really doing, and besides, these trips were just as important to Elsa as they were to her dad.

Now, thinking back to it, she wondered why her dad had never come to church with them on Sundays? If he’d done that it could have been a pact: storms on a Saturday and services the day
after. She knew right away why he hadn’t: he was addicted. On Sunday mornings, too, he’d head out cloud-watching before dawn broke. But to Elsa those Saturday mornings felt more
spiritual than the Sunday ones. It was no surprise to her that, once upon a time, people had equated storms with gods. The first time she saw a town that had been sucked up and spat out by a
tornado, it broke her heart and made her question the immense indifference of the universe, just as others might question the indifference of a deity. That was what storms were: they behaved with
all the splendour and barbarity of ancient deities. Clouds were not just an ornament of godly imagery, clouds were the inspiration for pantheons, awesomely real and intangible at the same time.
There were thousands of them swarming across the planet at any given moment, and yet under the shelters of roofs and ceilings it was so easy to forget their existence.

The church of the sky was something she’d so often dreamed of while the hoo-ha of the Sunday service carried on around her. There seemed to her infinitely more God to be found by staring
up at the never-ending universe than by looking glumly around a building of bricks and stone.

Her father’s holy books were written by meteorologists. His preferred prophet was the lightning: he was on a one-man crusade to explain the inner workings of a lightning bolt to anyone he
could, as if they held some revelatory value. Cab drivers, waiters, shop assistants: no one was safe. ‘The lightning doesn’t strike,’ he would tell them, and if they made the
mistake of asking him to elaborate he would do so until they managed to excuse themselves. ‘It’s a connection, you see. The storm reaches for the ground with an electrical feeler,
invisible to the naked eye. The ground does the same, and it’s like two arms trying to grasp each other in the dark. Then, if they manage to find one another, their connection is so strong it
catches on fire, and is hotter than the surface of the sun.’

Not long after Elsa moved to New York, her dad received his first prison sentence. She had been hosting her flat-warming party on the night he phoned her to say he was in trouble again with the
police. It was not the first time he had been caught stealing. On previous occasions he had escaped with fines and community service, but this time the judge had ruled that his repeat offences
warranted something more severe.

It had been a surreal revelation. She knew he had been broke for years, but he had hidden the extent of it from her. It was because he was a storm junkie. When she was a kid he had worked at a
big weather centre in Norman, but his employers had noticed the peculiar pattern of his sick days. Every time he got news of some big hurricane forming off the coast, or some mega-tornado predicted
in the prairie, he’d set off in his truck to be in its company. After they fired him he got other, crappier jobs, but these exerted even less of a hold on him and his absenteeism only
increased. Eventually he had no money left and stole a bag of candy bars from a mart.

She had wanted to support him at the hearing. She’d been able to see what he’d done in perspective: it was only a damned packet of candy bars, whereas he was her precious father. But
he had lied to her about the court location and only subsequently did she learn of his later, escalating crimes, which had culminated in the theft of the purse of a single mother of three.

She was the only one who visited him in jail. Not her mother, not her father’s side of the family, not even the storm-chaser friends who – she had always felt – had never been
on his wavelength anyway. They were thrill-seekers, whereas her dad had no interest in storms as a joyride. His reasons for following them were more spiritual than that. He was the high priest of
the hurricane, the liturgist of the lightning, and this image was the one she clung to, even if she knew it was only a part of the picture that was her father.

Before he was interned, Elsa had hoped that prison would knock sense back into him. Then, on her first visit, when he’d mumbled, ‘I’m weather-powered, see,’ she’d
had a kind of premonition of how he would go to pieces behind bars.

One time, after she’d drunk a little too much bourbon, her mum said she was calling his weather-powered bluff. He was not fuelled by the energies of storms and tornadoes. He was fuelled by
the company of his only child, and he had stopped functioning because she had left him for the bright lights of the city. Perhaps she had drunkenly exaggerated, but even so the idea sent
Elsa’s mind reeling in horror. Could she have destroyed her father through the inevitable act of growing up? She tried to ask him about it, once, in the space between that first jail term and
his second, but he was too prickly to speak on the topic.

Remembering this forced her to dry her eyes. She sniffed conspicuously, but there was only the priest’s mumbled sermon to distract her from her thoughts, and it had no power to do so.
Then, to her comfort, Dot’s tiny, buckled hand reached sideways and squeezed hers. She breathed out, bit back her tears, and got a grip. Dot turned her head and gave her a long, studied look.
Elsa met it, and the two women regarded each other for a minute before the nun smiled and returned her attention to the rambling priest.

Eventually the sermon was over and the priest was leading a prayer of grace Elsa did not recognize. It was murmured by everyone who was not her, addressed equally to everyone
who was not her (save for Dot who turned to her to recite it) and then the service had ended. Spines clicked and creaked as the worshippers rose to their feet, making their way back towards the
closed front doors, around which an outline of daylight glowed. Elsa looked over at Daniel Fossiter at the front of the church. He rose slowly from his seat, stretched out his spine, then glanced
back across the pews and caught Elsa’s eye. She looked at the ground immediately.

The priest had opened the doors, but had backed up into a slice of shadow, and she shook his frail hand on the way out and wished him well for the week before stepping out hurriedly into the
late morning. She wanted to get away from the church doors before Daniel Fossiter strode out of them. The sky had filled with a sheet of grey cloud, binding the town and the surrounding mountains
together.

‘Altostratus,’ she thought, then realized somebody else had said it out loud. It was Dot, emerging behind her.

Dot winked at her. ‘You look like you’ve other places to be. Don’t worry, I won’t keep you. But we fellow cloud-watchers should never abandon each other. You must come up
to see me at the nunnery. Kenneth can give you directions. And don’t wait too long about it. I could show you things. More pictures. I have a great many pictures up there.’