The Man Who Rained (18 page)

The names of his forefathers had all been written in the same scratchy script, in the same ink turned brown by age. His father had completed the final page at the time of Daniel’s birth,
drawing a straight line down from his own name to that of his son. When Daniel had discovered it he had not known whether to hate or pity the old man, for as far as this family tree recorded it,
Daniel had originated out of the body of the Reverend Fossiter himself. To rectify this untruth, he had borrowed one of Sally Nairn’s antique writing pens and a pot of ink that was like a
jarful of tropical ocean, then returned to the family tree to slowly scratch his mother’s name and the line that bound her to him. Only when he had finished writing did he wonder whether he
had made a mistake. He had written Maryam Fossiter, because she was his mother and he had come from her and he was Fossiter in every cell of his body. But she had not been a Fossiter. She had not
even married his father, let alone taken his name, and that had been his father’s pretext for driving her away. ‘It’s as the Lord told us,’ he had said. ‘Those who are
not with us are against us.’

Daniel closed his eyes and let his memories of her take centre stage. He could not picture her face (he had not been able to in decades), only her black hair dangling down to her waist. He could
picture her forearms and hands and hips because he had been so small when she left that those had been the parts of her he saw the most of. He knew he had been in pain when she left Thunderstown,
but it was a different kind of pain to the one that came when Betty went away. He had been too young to understand it. It had been an ocean on which he had drifted.

In his memory his mother hummed and leafed absent-mindedly through his father’s theology books, chuckling now and then as if all those essays by all those learned men were but the amusing
mistakes of little children. His father watched her, incensed by her unbelief but silent nevertheless. That was one of only a handful of memories, which Daniel tended to as diligently in his
thinkings as he did to these family trees.

He had, however, one stranger memory of her, one which did not comfort him but rather left him cold. In it, she sat in a rocking chair, on the porch of the vicarage. He – a little older
than a toddler – had been digging about in the garden and had returned to the house to show her something he had unearthed. To his dismay he’d seen two wild dogs sitting with her, their
muzzles resting on her lap. Their eyes were half-closed while she stroked their heads. He’d shouted, and ran towards her, screaming and waving his arms, and the dogs had sprung up and fled
into the mountains.

He harrumphed. He sometimes wished that that particular memory of his mother would recede into the past, and not present itself every time he recalled the happier ones. He got up and returned
the family tree to the shelf.

Once, long ago, he had brought Betty to the Miners’ Club to show her his mother’s name here, along with all those hundreds from his father’s side. Back then, old Mr Nairn had
cooked in the club kitchen every Sunday afternoon. Mr Nairn had been a man who found vegetarianism a hard thing to comprehend, and Daniel had known that his sloppy potato patties and brown cabbage
would be fried in the gloopy white fat of a swine. Although that risked turning Betty’s stomach, he’d needed to bring her here to help her understand who he was and from what stock
he’d come, and she had seen that and accompanied him with good grace. So many hours of so many Fossiter lives had been idled away in this common room that he could almost see the ghosts of
his forebears holding forth in the armchairs that still bore the imprints of their bodies. He had brought Betty here not to taste Mr Nairn’s cooking, but to introduce her to the impressions
made in the furniture. He had felt so proud to have her at his side. He had always been a big man – even as a child he had towered over his classmates – but with Betty beside him he had
felt weightless, as if he were floating a foot off the ground.

There was a gunshot. He blinked and for a moment did not know what year of his life he was living in. Mole had heard it too and was struggling to her feet, her ears straining and her bad eye
weeping. It had come from out in the street, and Daniel headed straight for the exit from the club, Mole puffing along behind him.

They went a little further down Widdershin Road, where a junction led into tree-lined Foremans Avenue, and from there onwards to Drum Head. Thirty yards along this avenue lived Sidney Moses, who
now stood outside his house with his rifle in his hands. He did not notice Daniel when he approached, for he was too fascinated by the goat that was sitting in the shade of one of the
avenue’s trees. Fragments of bark and lichen were stuck to its panting tongue, and a bullet wound in its neck was flushing blood into its beard. It knelt reposefully, as if dying were a state
as ordinary as basking in an afternoon’s hot sun.

‘You fool!’ yelled Daniel, snatching the rifle from Sidney’s hands. Sidney offered no resistance. Daniel readied the gun, steadied his aim against the anger rushing up from
inside of him, and shot the goat between the eyes. Mole barked painfully as the shot rang out. The goat’s horned head dropped down to the pavement.

The gunshot brought Sidney to his senses, and he looked at his rifle in Daniel’s hands as if he did not remember how it had got there. ‘Mr Fossiter, I ...’

‘What were you thinking?’

‘I shot a goat. It had been eating the trees.’

‘But you didn’t shoot to kill.’

‘No, I—’

‘I know full well that you can fire a rifle, Mr Moses, and I declare that you did not shoot to kill!’

Sidney lifted his rain cap to wipe a line of sweat from his forehead. ‘Of course I shot to kill!’ He puffed out his cheeks. ‘I damned well shouldn’t have been forced to!
This town employs a culler to keep these vermin from its streets. Have you seen him today, Mr Fossiter? He’s a big man with a beard – hard to miss. He would have been useful here
earlier, while this beast was munching its way along the trees of Foremans Avenue!’

‘I was in the Miners’ Club. You know I’m often there. You could’ve at least
tried
to find me.’

Sidney stole another glance at the goat, and there was that same grim fascination. He licked his lips. ‘We never know where we can find you, Mr Fossiter, because you do not tell us where
you are going to be.’

‘Yes you do, Sidney, you all do – you know I am going to be culling the goats.’

‘In the Thunderstown Miners’ Club? I don’t believe there are many goats in there, except for the heads of some your great-grandfather shot. And I see you have even brought that
terrifying bloodhound with you!’

As if on cue, Mole sneezed and shook her head.

‘I don’t need a dog to catch goats.’

‘And just as well – that sorry creature wouldn’t say boo to a goose,’ said Sidney, flourishing his arm towards the animal beneath the tree.

‘Mr Moses. What do you plan to do, now, with your kill? Do you know how to skin the hide and chop the meat, or do you plan to leave it to fester here in Foremans Avenue?’

Sidney shrugged. ‘I own plenty of shirts, coats and jerseys, Mr Fossiter. I have radiators in my house and I have a freezer full of chicken, lamb and fish from the market. So I need
neither fleece, leather or goat mutton. What’s more, I own a motor car and a trailer, with which I intend to drive this carcass out of town and dump it in the ample wilderness surrounding us,
where I fully expect the crows to finish the job.’

Daniel was about to retort, but managed instead to bite his tongue. He knew full well he could not best Sidney at words. Mole sneezed again and shivered as it moved through her. Daniel stepped
briskly past Sidney, grabbed the goat by the horns and made to drag it after him. ‘Do not trouble yourself with your trailer and your motor car, Mr Moses. I will make leather out of
it.’

He began to plod away towards his homestead, with Mole labouring behind.

‘And then what?’ called Sidney after him.

‘I will return to my duties.’

‘Must we be rivals, Mr Fossiter?’

Daniel stopped walking and turned back to him. ‘I have no wish to oppose myself to anyone. You, on the other hand, seem to delight in it.’

Sidney spread his arms and looked hurt. ‘You misunderstand me.’ He put his hands in his pockets and sauntered closer.

‘You would modernize,’ said Daniel. ‘You have talked about helicopters and satellite ... satellite—’

‘Satellite tracking,’ said Sidney gently.

Daniel snorted. ‘Have the goats changed in the last hundred years? Have the wild dogs begun to use helicopters? The methods of my family have always been sufficient. And always will
be.’

Sidney sighed. ‘We’ve talked about this. I don’t want you forever catching goats and wild dogs. I want you to get to the root of the problem.’

Daniel scoffed. ‘I would have to kill every goat within a hundred miles of Thunderstown to get to the root of the problem. I would need an army to do that.’

‘I’m not talking about goats, as well you know.’

Daniel looked away shiftily down the length of the street. A wind blew and ruffled the fur of the goat he was pulling, puffing its dusty smell up into his nostrils.

‘And I have told you before – Old Man Thunder’s just a story. Come on, Mr Moses, there are so many tales here, why must you persist in believing this one? I’m telling
you: not I, nor anyone else, will ever catch Old Man Thunder because
he does not exist
– he never did.’

Sidney smiled, but Daniel did not trust it. He was being tested, he knew, but on what subject he could not guess.

‘People say they have seen him.’

‘People say a lot of things. Words mean nothing, Mr Moses.’

Sidney studied him for a moment, then shrugged and licked his lips. ‘Imagine for a moment that he does! Just pretend, just humour me. Let’s say I did things my way, with all the new
equipment I can lay my hands on, and I found him and brought him to you tomorrow. I dragged him down here to town and presented him to our culler for his judgement. What would you do?’

‘You would need to prove he was Old Man Thunder.’

‘And if I could? If he was stood here before you, riddled with weather, confessing
I am he
. Then what?’

Daniel snorted. ‘Then nothing. This is idle speculation.’

‘Would you do your duty then, Mr Fossiter? If the thing that eluded all of your forefathers was there for the taking?’

Daniel cleared his throat. ‘Mr Moses, I am not sure what more I can say. I do not believe in Old Man Thunder. I have endeavoured to make that clear to you.’

‘No, Mr Fossiter,’ said Sidney sweetly, ‘you have endeavoured to avoid the question. I do not think you could do it. The townsfolk are concerned, and think you have gone soft.
That Munro woman, that one who came from overseas, she took something from you that you have struggled to get back. She left you confused and without ruthlessness, doting over your blind old
dog.’

He bristled at the insult, and his shoulders squared and as they did so the fur of the goat bristled in the wind. ‘Listen very carefully, Mr Moses. Were you to bring me Old Man Thunder,
and were he to exist and be proven to be all that people say he is, I would slit his throat without hesitation. So that’s said, and you can tell the townsfolk to forget their concerns. One
more thing: Betty Munro took nothing from me, and gave me things that you could never understand. If I seem weak-willed to you, it is because I always was, not because of her.’

With that he headed for the homestead, and left Sidney Moses behind him.

After the ceremony they held for her father, Elsa stood in the crematorium garden, drawing in deep breaths of the whipping wind. The flowers were in full bloom in their beds,
bobbing in the blustering air. Elsa wondered whether the owners of the crematorium had planted bird of paradise as a joke, since its orange petals looked like flames wavering in the wind. Then
again, everything became symbolic after a death. She had argued with her mother about the shape and colour of the urn, until both of them, in tears, ceded that it didn’t matter and chose the
least ostentatious one. She had seen a sun dog the other night, a blue and orange half-halo shining to the right of the sun, and had believed it to be a sign from her father, even though she had no
faith in an afterlife and knew that sun dogs were just refraction. Only when she could not decide what the sign meant did she give in to her rational mind, and her rational mind left her to sob the
evening away.

The other mourners remained near the door to the crematorium, chatting and occasionally shooting a concerned glance in her direction. The sharp-tipped evergreens that overlooked the cemetery
sowed their needles on the grass, scenting the air with their aroma of pine. She took a deep breath.

Her mother came up beside her and squeezed her hand, and Elsa turned to her teary-eyed and said, ‘Can I ask you a kinda awkward question?’

‘Anything you want, Elsa.’

‘Well ... you’re a religious person. What do you think happens to Dad now?’