The Man Who Rained (19 page)

Her mother didn’t look Elsa in the eye, but squeezed her hand all the firmer between both of her own. The wind tore through the high branches. Green needles rained on the path. She wiped
her eyes with her sleeve and said, ‘The thing is ... the thing is, Elsa, that your father didn’t live a good life.’

The wind that had been hurrying through the pine trees paused. There was a heartbeat’s silence. Then it flew on, whooping and howling.

Elsa tugged her hand away and shoved it as a fist into her coat pocket.

‘You did ask,’ her mother said in a small voice.

Elsa stamped away up the path. She didn’t think about the direction she was taking and the path led to a dead end where wasps hummed above the crematorium’s trash cans. Her anger
changed to embarrassment. She had to turn back the way she’d come and pass her mother (who was now in tears) to get back to her car.

‘This little car,’ said Kenneth Olivier, slapping the vehicle’s white bonnet fondly, ‘was Michael’s. It’s small, but it’s good enough
to take you up the Devil’s Diadem.’

Elsa was setting off to make good on her promise to Sister Dot at the nunnery. I am old here, Dot had said, and Elsa hoped that age could offer her some perspective. All night she had lain
awake, thinking about the way she’d left Finn crying diamond dust in the heart of the mountain.

She climbed into the car and felt the seat beneath her depress comfortably. It must have been a long time since Michael had driven it, but it still smelled faintly of a young man’s
fragrance: allspice and moss and bonfire toffee. Kenneth sat down on the passenger seat beside her, ostensibly to demonstrate what buttons operated what, but she could tell from the heavy way his
ribcage swelled with each intake of breath that he had got in to absorb just a little of his boy’s scent.

‘Kenneth,’ she said, ‘can I ask you a kinda awkward question?’

He folded his hands on his lap. ‘Anything you like.’

‘What, um, what do you think happens?’

He looked at her patiently. ‘I’m sorry, Elsa, I’m not sure I follow you.’

She cleared her throat. ‘Well ... you’re a religious person, aren’t you?’

She waited in silence.

‘Ah!’ he declared suddenly. ‘
Ahh
, I think I understand.’

She stared at the car keys in her hand.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

She closed her eyes.

‘Does that disappoint you?’ he said.

‘No ... it’s just ... I thought ... my mum’s religious, too, and she told me ...’ She wished she had a bottle of water, because her tongue was so dry.

‘Is this about your father?’

Elsa nodded.

‘Well, let me tell you, I thought long and hard about this after Michael died. He didn’t believe in anything, you see.’

‘So ... so ... Does that mean you think he’s ...’

Kenneth began to chuckle, then tried to hide it and failed so spectacularly that his laughter escaped in great splutters. ‘If you are trying to ask whether I believe my son is in
hell
simply because he was not a religious man when he died, then no!’ He wheezed, and mopped his eyes with the sleeve of his jumper. ‘No, Elsa, dear me, no. To believe in hell
would be to compromise who I am.’
But
, if you were to ask me where else I think he might be, then my answer would depend on when you asked me. Sitting in his car right now, how can I
believe he has simply vanished? I am surrounded by him. I can smell him here, for goodness’ sake! Then again, ask me in the winter, when the rain is beating down on the windows, and
nobody’s ringing the telephone and nobody’s at the door. Then I suppose I might say that a person stops existing when their body stops breathing.’ He began to chuckle again.
‘Am I allowed this kind of answer, Elsa? One in which Kenneth Olivier has no damned clue? Am I allowed to say I change my mind depending on how miserable I’m feeling?’

‘No!’ she said with a smile, wiping her eyes. ‘You were meant to have an answer! Isn’t that the whole point of believing in something?’

Then, quick as clicked fingers, he was serious again. ‘I would love to have an answer. But what I believe is that I
can’t
have one. Which is a good deal healthier than
believing that I can, and then only accepting the worst answer I can think of.’

She rubbed her face. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I miss my dad, that’s all. And I’m not good at being stoic like you are.’

‘It takes time,’ he said sagely, ‘and a great many cricket matches. You do know you’ll never stop missing him, right?’

They watched a leaf fall on to the windscreen. It was pink, with scarlet edges. There were no trees nearby; the leaf had been placed there delicately by the breeze.

‘Right,’ Elsa said.

Kenneth cleared his throat and jingled the car keys at her. ‘You will need these. And you have the map there on the dashboard, although there is only one road.’

She nodded. ‘Thank you.’

He got out of the car. ‘Safe journey,’ he said. He closed the door behind him and slapped the bonnet to wish her on her way.

The slopes of the Devil’s Diadem were pitted and potholed. Streambeds scored the earth, long since abandoned by water and filled now only with briars and the bones of
those unfortunate animals who had slipped into them and become trapped.

As she left Thunderstown it felt good to be driving again. She’d not driven often in New York, but back in Oklahoma she’d loved to race an old truck flat out over the long roads even
when it made her mother freak out. Now, as she relaxed into the sensation, the command of wheels gave her a liberating buzz, like she’d had in that truck. Then she started driving up the
mountain’s steeper road and the winds came out to meet her. She had to slow right down, fearful that a gust might flip the car on its back, so powerfully did they howl at its chassis.

Driving higher and closer, the many peaks of the mountain seemed to her like the altars of a pantheon, summoning winds to the slopes below. She felt the gusts throwing themselves at the
windscreen. Then one hit the boot and threw her forwards. The seatbelt jerked her shoulder and her teeth came together with an enamel crack.

She was glad, then, when she neared the base of one of those peaks and saw, in the shadow between it and the next, the dark cube of a solitary building. As she drove closer it gradually enlarged
into a walled complex, containing a small tower on which a crucifix was mounted. The outer walls were pebble-coated stone and had eroded until none of their buttresses or edges were defined, so
that the whole place had the crumbling appearance of a sandcastle. Even the crucifix had weathered. Wind wrapped around it like the tremor of a heatwave.

This was the nunnery of Saint Catherine, and there was no need for a car park, given the hard, blow-dried dirt on which it was built. Elsa parked on a patch of it, took a deep breath and stepped
out of the car. At once the wind grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked her back towards Thunderstown. Shocked by its ferocity, she grabbed the car for balance. Dust rushed into her eyes and she
had to turn her back on the nunnery to rub the grains away. The wind did everything it could to shove her off course as she approached a tall white door in the nunnery wall. It had a large brass
handle and – she was surprised to see – a lucky horseshoe nailed into the wood. She twisted the handle and to her relief found the door to be unlocked. With the wind buffeting her she
half-stepped, half-tumbled inside, where she had to grit her teeth and shove with all her might to close the door again. It slammed back into its frame and the wind roared and pounded against
it.

She had entered a small antechamber, a kind of airlock against the elements. Straight ahead was another large door, which she supposed led into the convent’s cloister. She tied back her
hair, which had become weather-tangled, and bracing herself for another assault from the wind, she opened the door.

A deep lawn coloured the cloister a lush green. Delicate plants grew in various flowerbeds, with brown bees hovering above their still petals, patiently exploring them for nectar before
returning to a hive box fixed to a wall. Some of the plants boasted orange flowers as big and wafer-thin as paper crowns, and stalks so slender she supposed a single breath could snap them. Yet all
was motionless, without a breath of an air current. The wind still flared high above (looking up she saw the blue sky shimmering with its disturbance), but not a flutter blew down to this
sanctum.

Then she noticed that all over the walls, numbering into their many hundreds, were charms such as the one that had hung from the sill of her bedroom that she had destroyed on her first night in
Thunderstown. They were made from feathers, coins in pairs, scraps of fur and canine teeth. There were so many of them it was as if they, and not the mortar, propped up the nunnery.

In another wall stood a dovecot from which drifted the smell of bird droppings and down. Opposite this, above a turquoise double door and two stained-glass windows, stood the parapet of the
chapel. She wandered across to it and heard high-pitched, wavering voices singing within. The nuns were finishing prayers. She turned around to look for somewhere to sit, and then noticed an
elderly man sitting on the ground with his back against one wall and his hands folded over his knees. Although he was clean-shaven, one or two white hairs spiralled perfectly amiss on his
olive-skinned face, wrinkles as dark and deep as his nostrils. His eyes were pearly white, without even a fleck of a pupil or an iris. A bee buzzed unnoticed across one of his ancient cheeks,
examining one of those rogue white hairs as if it were the stamen of a flower.

At that moment an old lady emerged from the dovecot with a dove perched calmly on her shoulder. She wasn’t a nun, but all the same was dressed entirely in grey. She walked in a doddery
zigzag to the place where the old man sat, and joined him on the ground.

Elsa copied them by sitting down, choosing a spot of soft grass where she too could rest her shoulders against the sturdy stone of the courtyard wall.

She kept thinking about Finn. In her few minutes of sleep last night she had dreamed a nightmare in which she swept around and around a whirlpool as dark as her sleep. In the water with her were
the bones of lost miners, all loose and mingling in the gyre. Through lap after lap she span, until in a final dizzying plunge she dropped into the whirlpool’s dark heart.

The doors of the chapel opened, interrupting her thoughts, and the nuns filed out, chattering. Elsa sprung to her feet, worried she might not recognize Dot amongst the identical habits and
diminutive bodies, but no sooner had she thought it than one of the nuns hooted and hobbled over to her: Dot, her face crinkling up with excitement. ‘Ah!’ she croaked, ‘My young
cloud-spotter!’ She reached out and pinched Elsa’s bare arm with her buckled fingertips.

‘I hope I’m not disturbing you.’

‘Not at all,’ said Dot, eyes a-twinkle, ‘In fact, I have been expecting you. This way!’ She took hold of Elsa’s hand and pulled her busily towards a door in the
wall. Bees droned around them as they walked, and buzzed among the tall flowers and the elderly pair sitting on the bench.

‘That man over there,’ whispered Elsa, ‘and that old lady with the dove on her shoulder – neither of them are nuns.’

‘Well, obviously,’ laughed Dot. ‘William and Beatrice are two of our patients. We’ve several folk up here who medicine can’t mend.’

‘What’s wrong with them?’

They had reached the door. It opened on to a cool, bare corridor, and only once they were inside and Dot had closed it behind them did she explain in a low voice, ‘They were struck by
lightning. It’s a small wonder they survived, and in some ways you might say they did not. William lost his sight when the lightning struck him. But now he says he can see things that others
cannot: angels and suchlike. As for Beatrice ... she can no longer maintain a conversation, unless it is with the birds. She says she has forgotten English and learned to speak Doveish
only.’

Elsa thought of the lightning that had hit Luca, and Betty, and her father.

‘That’s awful,’ she said in an unintended whisper.

They proceeded along a plain corridor and up to the second floor. Here they entered Dot’s own room, a cell simply decorated with a reed mat, a reed cross on the wall, a small window and an
electric lamp. Dot reached happily under the bed and struggled to lift out a pile of huge, thick books, each the size and weight of an atlas. Elsa couldn’t help but take a sharp, thrilled
breath. These weren’t atlases of the earth, but of the sky. Books like the one her dad had given her, which had been her pride and joy until she had hurled it out into the rain after him on
the day he left. Her mother had thought that good riddance, but Elsa had done it not to be rid of him, but to try to show him how desperate she was for him to stay.

‘I used to have one of these,’ she said, staring sadly at the cloud atlases as Dot laid them out on the bed.

The nun smiled and laid her fingertips on the cover of the largest and oldest, which was leather-bound and Bible-thick. Stuck to its cover was a sepia photo of stacked storm clouds blocking off
the sun’s rays.

She opened it to the first page. The spine creaked like a hinge and set free the aroma of dried ink and paper. She turned the pages through more sepia shots: single puffy cumuli or mackerel
skies. Then she came to a photograph of a giant cloud made from black mist. It was like a rook from a chess set, a black tower with blistering battlements. Lines of rain tethered it to the ground.
At its heart it was so black that Elsa could see Dot’s reflection in the page.

‘A storm,’ said Elsa.

‘Cumulonimbus,’ whispered Dot, and the word was like the hiss of snaking winds between grasses, or the dry creep of a thunder fly. Cumulonimbus, the storm cloud. Elsa had read the
name so many times in books, lumped in with cirrus, altocumulus and the rest. Yet rolling over Dot’s tongue the word sounded like it had when her dad had pronounced it. Like the name of an
archangel.

‘This one,’ Dot said, tapping the picture, ‘was larger than Mount Everest. He had as much energy charged up inside of him as in five of the bombs that blew up Hiroshima. The
lightning in him burned ten times hotter than the surface of the sun. And all this is commonplace in Cumulonimbus.’