The Man Who Rained (16 page)

He waited for Elsa to take it in, grimly satisfied at her white face and wide eyes. It was right that she should be appalled. He had no desire to see her this way – it gave him no
satisfaction. But what his father had told him was true – the most important lessons are the ones that hurt the most.

She drained her honey drink, which had now gone tepid, in one quick motion. ‘My dad died last year.’

Daniel scratched his beard uneasily. He had not expected her to say that, nor to look so suddenly composed. ‘I ... I’m sorry for you.’

She shrugged. ‘Thanks, I suppose. It was hard. Until then I thought he was invincible, because he had spent his life walking through storms unharmed. Once he was even struck by
lightning.’

‘And was he hurt very badly?’

‘He was completely fine. He had a blackout, and then was back on his feet. He was storm-chasing again the very next day. So you see, sometimes when it happens, it doesn’t always end
in hurt.’

Daniel’s spirit sunk. He closed his eyes and tried to imagine what her father would have been like. Cavalier, that much was for certain. ‘He sounds,’ he said, ‘either
very lucky or very foolish.’

‘No!’ She jabbed a pointing finger at him. ‘
You’re
the foolish one. If you hadn’t made matters worse for Finn, it might never have become as bad as it
did!’

He gasped. It had been many decades since anyone had dared to call him foolish, and then only his grandfather, cackling at him from his deathbed as Daniel tried to pray for his eternal soul.

‘When I was with Finn yesterday,’ she continued, tearful all of a sudden, ‘I felt like we were aligned somehow. But you couldn’t possibly understand.’

‘No,’ he said; ‘on that we agree.’ He shook his head and pushed back his chair. When he got to his feet his legs felt old and weak. He could not find the strength to
fully straighten his spine. He was trying not to picture Elsa with the same burns he had nursed Betty through, or worse. ‘I have appreciated your time this afternoon, Miss Beletti.’ He
punched his hat into shape and looked at it wearily. ‘I am not a man who needs to have the last word, so this will be the final thing I say. You can have the last word after I have spoken
it.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Everybody thinks that they will be spared. Betty was lucky to survive. Your father was lucky to survive. Not everybody is lucky.’ He put his hat on
his head, tucked his thumbs into his britches, and waited for her to speak.

She stewed in her chair for a minute, pissed off that she couldn’t think of anything cutting to say. In the end she settled for ‘Whatever’ and wished she had simply kept her
mouth shut.

He nodded and stalked away.

She exhaled.

Only once he had gone did she let herself tremble. She wanted to be sick.

The worst was that, even when she’d lowered her head to listen at his chest then pressed her lips to his, even then Finn hadn’t seen fit to tell her about this.

The butterfly she had fed earlier flittered back to her table and fanned its wings there. It took off again and circled in the air until, with a sharp slap, she knocked it down. It flapped about
on its side on the floor. She stood, carefully lifted her chair and brought one of its legs down hard, screwing the bug into the ground. She spat out the taste of her honey drink, and made her way
back towards Prospect Street.

Bad weather ran wild through Thunderstown overnight, rattling latches and tapping on windowpanes. Elsa slept fitfully, woken every so often by the noises of the wind.

Come dawn, she was too tired to be angry. When she had gone to bed she had felt as if she were lying down in her own fury, sinking into it and tucking it up around her. She had been angry at
Finn, angry at Daniel for telling her about Betty and the lightning, angry at herself for letting her defences down, angry with the world for always adding one more complication.

But in the morning she felt neither anger nor anything else. While she slept her heart had curled up into a ball.

She was not one of those people Daniel had accused her of being. She
did
believe that a person should learn from the lessons of others. All she had done was refuse to let him see it,
because she didn’t want to offer him the satisfaction.

She remembered visiting her dad’s storm-chasing friend Luca in hospital. His wife Ana-Maria had been there too, sitting wordlessly at his bedside and picking at the stems of the flowers
Elsa’s dad had bought her. Her father had been just a stone’s throw from Luca when the lightning bolt hit, and he was acutely aware that it could have been him, not Luca, lying in the
hospital bed. Ana-Maria had clearly been thinking just that, and wishing it too.

The lighting that had taken the sight from Luca’s right eye had left a sickle-shaped burn that ran from his eyebrow to his jaw. Likewise it had removed the pupil and the iris from the
eyeball, leaving only a startlingly pink globe which the doctors had covered with a bandage.

It had been the kind of strike every storm-chaser feared. The one against which no precautions could be taken. Dry lightning. That meant a bolt from the blue or, more technically, a bolt from a
storm some ten miles away and perhaps even out of sight, which could fork in an instant across the distance. The sky above Luca’s car had been clear and summery, for they were some miles yet
from the storm they were chasing, which here was but a grey fringe for the horizon. He had sat on the bonnet, humming along to his stereo, while Elsa’s dad took a leak among nearby
bushes.

Had she been offered the choice, Ana-Maria would have accepted Luca’s partial blindness as a lucky escape; compared to the real damage, his blown-out eye was inconsequential.

The doctors explained that no human mind was built to withstand such electricity, and that the lightning had scrambled the natural circuitry of Luca’s brain like a power surge frying a
computer chip. Dreams, memories and learned behaviours had all been carried out of place on the currents, and had settled in new configurations. They warned that, when he came to, Luca might not be
Luca any more. He might be a new man, born again with no grip on his reality. Dreams might have turned to memories and memories to dreams forgotten upon waking. All Ana-Maria could do was wait and
pray. Even she might have become just a dream figure to him, an image fading from the waking day.

Yes, Elsa was well aware of the perils of lightning.

The overnight rain had made all the difference to Thunderstown’s convoluted streets, making the cobbles in Tallow Row shine like a haul of fresh oysters. She did not mind
the drizzle as she walked, nor that her jeans stuck to her thighs and her hair turned slowly bedraggled with the water.

Avoiding the pull of Saint Erasmus, she headed instead for Old Colp. Her route took her west through Tinacre Square, where a charm-seller stood all alone amid the drizzle, her red hair dark and
damp against her neck. From Tinacre Square a quiet passageway led towards Feave Street, a shortcut where the raindrops landed lightly on the walls.

At the end of the passage, before the next began, lay a modest courtyard enclosed by the windowless backs of town houses. It was brighter than the passageway and smelled of new rain on slate.
The drizzle consolidated into heavy drops, each a vertical flicker through the air.

Something landed on her hand. She looked down expecting rain but saw instead a bug, which she swatted instinctively. She made contact, but when she drew her hand away there was no squashed
insect on her knuckles. There was only water. Another bug droned through the rainy air, and she realized that the walls were thick with them. They were the size and shape of ladybirds, but had dull
grey shells without markings. They dotted the bricks and mortar like drops of mercury.

She froze. Something here was amiss. Her stomach had clenched because of it, but her mind took a moment to work out what was wrong. Then she realized that she had left wet footprints across the
courtyard floor, which was bone dry, despite the falling rain.

A transformation was happening at knee-height. She watched a raindrop break there prematurely, shattering against the thin air. Then the shape of its suspended splash became that of spread
insect wings, and then the wings flickered into life and the raindrop flew upwards. Through the wing-blur appeared a bug’s miniscule antennae and dangling legs. It whizzed away to join its
fellows on the courtyard walls.

With timid steps she approached the nearest wall, where she held her breath and leaned in close to inspect one of the bugs. Its body was like murky water, and similarly translucent. Through it
she could see the grit of the bricks. Likewise she could find her own reflection, warped across the insect’s concave back.

She reached out to touch it. It came off the wall and welled into a raindrop on her skin. Its little legs, hairs-breadth eyes and crystalline shell all vanished, and it became only a wavering
drop on the tip of her finger. She laughed with wonder. Then straight away she was unnerved, and stepped back sharply.

‘Finn,’ she said aloud. He had invited her into the world of these insects and the world of his own strange body, and on the threshold she had faltered because he had not been
straight with her about its dangers. She wanted to enter, dearly she did, but she couldn’t ignore the memory of Ana-Maria’s face as she sat at Luca’s bedside.

She hurried on towards Old Colp.

The rain ceased as she climbed, leaving the sky smeared with so many clouds of so many shapes and shades that it looked like a painter’s palette. On the lower slopes, a wind blew cotton
tufts out of the grass. She paused as they floated around her, half-expecting them to transform into insects or birds, but they were just seeds wrapped in fluff. Further up the mountain she came to
a gurgling little brook, its surface glimmering with crescents of sunlight that, for an astonished moment, she believed were carp swimming in the water. They were just reflections, but she had to
splash her arm through the brook to be sure of it. She felt as if all appearances here were but masks, and nothing could be trusted.

When she reached the bothy, a cloud shadow swept across her and she shivered, although she could not tell whether it was from fright or excitement or simply the cold of the shade it cast. A wind
hummed against the rocky bluff the cottage backed against, coaxing deep, eerie music out of the stone.

She knocked fast on the door and folded her arms. ‘Hi,’ she said when Finn answered.

‘You look tired.’

‘So do you.’

‘I didn’t sleep well,’ he said.

‘Me neither.’

He wore a jersey of black wool, frayed and unravelling at the cuffs. He looked just as troubled as her. ‘Daniel told me he’d spoken to you.’

She took a deep breath. ‘And is it true? What he had to say?’

‘Yes. I promise you I never meant to do it. Until that moment I didn’t even know I had lightning inside of me.’

‘I
know
it was an accident. That doesn’t matter. What’s difficult is ... why didn’t you warn me?’

‘I ... I tried to tell you I was dangerous.’

‘But you didn’t say how.’

‘I didn’t want you to hate me.’

‘I
wouldn’t have
. But I might have been more cautious about putting my ear to your chest! Or about kissing you. Now I don’t even know whether I can trust you. What if
I’d found out in the same way your mother did?’

Another cloud shadow fell across them. In its shade his skin looked foggy grey. ‘It wouldn’t be like that,’ he said. ‘Lightning isn’t predictable.’

‘Is that supposed to reassure me? Is there anything else you’ve kept from me? Anybody else you’ve hurt?’ She didn’t want to make him suffer, but she had to have
this out with him.

He hung his head. The cloud shadow lifted, but the soft sunlight that followed could not brighten him and he remained overcast.

‘I’ve only ever hurt one person, and that was my mother, whom I loved very much. But there have been other moments of lightning. In the months after she left, when I missed her so
badly, it kept taking me by surprise. It would come out of me while I ate, or walked in the mountains, or even while I slept. Each time it felt like my spine had been ripped out, but each time it
earthed in the ground. I made sure it could never hurt anyone again, by hiding away up here. I should have told you, Elsa, I should have and I can’t believe I didn’t. But somehow you
made it impossible.’

‘You’re saying it’s
my fault
?’

‘No. I was going to say something else.’ He bit his lip and looked away up the mountain.

‘Well? Whatever it was, you’d better say it now.’

‘I didn’t tell you because you made me feel like my hair was standing on end, even though I don’t have a single hair on my body.’

She was taken aback. She glanced around at the slate and the brown mountain grass, anywhere but at Finn.

‘You ...’ She struggled for the words. Eventually she found some of her old resolve, but was not sure she liked the hard way it made her feel when she said, ‘You still
haven’t answered my question. Is there anything else you’ve kept from me?’