The Man Who Rained (32 page)

‘Did Finn ever tell you,’ he asked eventually, ‘about my mother?’

‘I don’t believe he did.’

‘Maryam. I have a photograph of her.’

She took it when he offered it. Maryam’s eyes and brow were just like Daniel’s, serious and severe. But there was also something lighter than Daniel in her looks. Or perhaps that was
just an impression made by the wind blowing through her dress.

Elsa held it back out to him. He did not take it.

‘I would appreciate it if you kept this likeness of her.’

‘Daniel, I can’t ...’

‘I insist.’

She sighed. She could not find the strength to argue. ‘I’ll only accept it if you do something for me.’

‘What’s that?’

 ‘Take me to the window. I want to see the storm. In case it’s my last chance. I don’t want him to rain away without having seen him one last time.’

He was hesitant. ‘You’re not supposed to leave the bed.’

‘If you say no, you’re having this photo back.’

He reached his arms under her shoulders and lifted her as gently as he could, but gravity tore at her muscles and she screeched through gritted teeth. At the window he propped her down on her
feet and she leaned against him, one of his arms supporting her shoulders and the other her waist.

‘Can you see?’

She nodded, giddy with pain.

Finn’s storm was spread out over Thunderstown. He looked so still from this distance – apart from when lightning turned all his black billows white – but she knew up close
there would be so much
life.
There would be arteries of arctic cold, pumping fist-sized hailstones around his body of cloud. A heart of water, keeping him alive.

A jagged white line danced across him. Then came a flutter of short flashes and a jolt of lightning the noise of which reached them two seconds later. She savoured the reverberations it made in
her bones, even though they twanged at her muscles. She longed for the next stroke of thunder, so that she could feel him again.

Meanwhile, Daniel watched the lightning earth in the town and marvelled at Elsa’s bravery. She had charged up to the belfry to try to reach Finn, with no thought for her own fragility.
Again the storm flashed bright, and for a moment a line of light coursed out and branched down fifty paths. The sound came seconds later, a bass rumble that washed over them while they stood
pressed together.

‘What possessed you,’ he whispered with marvel, ‘to climb up there and be struck by lightning?’

She laughed bitterly. ‘I told you. It was that thing my dad used to say. I remembered it and for some reason hoped it might save Finn. He used to say, over and over again, that the
lightning is a connection, not a one-way strike. So I thought that maybe I could use it to connect again with Finn.’

He was about to respond, but then he shut his mouth with a
clack
and his whole body tensed. She noticed the hairs on his forearms rising.

‘What’s wrong, Daniel?’

For a silent minute he stared out at the storm, and she could have sworn he did not blink in all that time. Then he turned to her with a mad look in his eyes and whispered, ‘It’s
going to be all right.’

‘Daniel ... I can’t believe that. Now it’s you who needs some rest. I’m not sure if it will ever be all right. I came to before and I thought I could get him back
somehow. But now I can’t see a way. All I know is that I’m going to fall apart when the last of his rain falls. Is that what you mean when you say it’s going to be all
right?’

She broke down again into tears, sobs that were like blows punched into her breastbone.

Daniel stared bluntly back at her.

‘See? See?’ she gasped, ‘It’s no good you saying it will be
all right
!’ She wiped the tears from her cheeks but instantly they were replaced by fresh
ones.

He helped her back to the bed. She let herself be carried, the pain now feeling like a natural extension of the emotions inside her. She had done all she could. She lay back on the mattress and
he tucked her up like an invalid, which she supposed she was.

‘You know,’ she sniffed, ‘when you hear people say that life is short, that you should live every last second to the full. Well, it’s too hard.
Hard
, when trusting
someone can let them hurt you, when you don’t really know your own mind, when the things you want turn out to be the things you never wanted, when you can’t connect with friends and
family, when there are groceries to buy and dishes to be done, and photocopying and filing and timetables and diaries and
distractions
.’

He reached down and she felt him lift her chin, with the exact same gesture her dad used to use to raise her head and restore her confidence when she was a little girl.

And then he did something she had never seen him do before. Not once, she realized, in all her time in Thunderstown.

He smiled.

He had the largest, heartiest smile she had ever seen. His teeth were strong and white and the lines of his face that were usually so set in contemplation or a frown fell away, and new lines
appeared that accentuated the depth of his beaming, heartening smile.

He has gone mad, she thought, to think he has found something to smile about.

And then he let go of her hand, and the smile dropped from his face like snow slipping off a branch. He became earnest again. He met for a long moment her eyes, then nodded and left the
room.

And although she did not know it then, she would never see Daniel Fossiter again.

Daniel Fossiter stood on the Devil’s Diadem in the windless night, with his back to the walls of the nunnery and Finn’s storm still pouring over Thunderstown
below.

The night had become too dark to distinguish the cumulonimbus from the black sky surrounding it. Only when a blade of lightning stabbed down at a chimney or at Saint Erasmus’s belfry was
its shape revealed: a citadel of fumes with towers as high as any of the mountain peaks. Sometimes the lightning revealed steep ramparts of cloud, with battlements reflecting the light as coldly as
stone.

This was not the first storm he had watched from the nunnery’s vantage point. He remembered being up here with his father once, as a child, not long after his mother left, watching a storm
drift away into the east. It had been a red flotilla in the sunset, and Daniel had looked from it to his father and seen – for the only time in his life – the old man on the edge of
tears. ‘Just watch it go, son,’ his father had whispered, ‘and don’t blink. Don’t forget one beautiful second of it.’

Daniel heard his name spoken and turned around. Dot had come out to find him. When she spoke, her voice seemed able to anticipate the lulls in the storm’s noises and to dart between them.
‘It’s getting late. Do you want to come inside for something to eat?’

He shook his head. A blue-white flicker of lightning sputtered inside the storm.

Dot regarded him for a moment: his coat buttoned up to his beard and his broad-brimmed hat wedged on his head. ‘You look as if you are going somewhere.’

He shrugged. ‘I believe I am. Although I am not sure where.’

Thunder passed over them like the beating of wings. Dot waited for it to boom into the distance, then asked, ‘Would you like us to keep some food out for you?’

‘There’s no need. I hope I do not come back.’

She stayed quiet, digesting what he’d just said. ‘I think,’ she said eventually, ‘I understand you. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’

In his childhood memories of this place, she was just as ancient as she was today. He could remember first encountering her, back when he was three or four feet tall. Then to his young eyes her
age had seemed preposterous and grotesque, barely even human.

‘No,’ he said, ‘but someone has to try it, and it should not be Elsa.’

‘Perhaps I can give you something to take with you?’

He laughed. ‘What more do I need, other than my own two legs?’

‘How about a story? When your father used to come up here, when he’d spend long hours in conversations with the abbess ... well, sometimes I was present for those
discussions.’

‘Forgive me, Sister, but I’m not sure that stories of my father are what I need to hear right now.’

Dot ignored him. ‘Mostly we talked shop, but on one occasion the Reverend Fossiter wanted to confide in us.’

‘Confide what?’

Dot drew a deep breath. ‘That your mother, when she left Thunderstown, didn’t go to Paris or Delhi or Beijing, or anywhere like that. She went somewhere both nearer and further away.
She went back to the place she had come from.’ She placed a buckled hand on his arm. ‘Upwards, Daniel. But you had guessed that already, hadn’t you?’

He nodded mutely.

‘Your father said he had fallen in love with a witch. That was what he wanted to confide in us.
A monster of the air
, he called her. He said that he had thought her to be an angel
to begin with, but that after a time she had convinced him she was of the devil, because of the way she would defend the weather.’

Daniel clenched his fists, rueing his father’s superstitions.

‘Of course,’ Dot continued, ‘she was neither devil nor angel. She was utterly ordinary. There are three thousand of her kind present on the earth in any given
moment.’

Daniel waited for this to sink in, but he discovered that his thinkings had already prepared him for it. It was as if they had known this secret all along. ‘If that were true,’ he
scratched his head, ‘shouldn’t I be like them too? I assure you that when I am cut I bleed blood, not air. Only once have I ever – only a day ago, in fact – seen anything
like weather come from inside of myself.’

Dot smiled sadly, her face folding up under her wrinkles. ‘Perhaps some of us don’t see it as often as we might. Perhaps that means we have lost touch. Or perhaps those of us who do
see it need to be better at holding ourselves together.’

‘What about me? Do you think I am enough like them? To do what I have to do now?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose it depends on whether Finn is still there to be saved. I suppose if you believe he is, it may be possible.’ She patted his arm lightly. ‘I think
that is all I can offer you. I wish you well, Mr Fossiter, wherever you are going.’

And with that she pushed him gently in the small of the back.

He set off like a racer at the starting gunshot. When he was some distance down the slope a wind arrived to spur him on, and when on a ridge top he looked back over his shoulder at the now
distant nunnery, the wind smeared his black hair across his eyes so that he could not see and be tempted to turn back.

He raced downhill, towards Thunderstown, but only when he reached its outskirts did he truly appreciate the severity of the storm. The town hid behind a curtain of rain, and he had to hold his
arms up in front of his face to make his way through it. The sky smashed open again and again with lightning. Torrential rain hammered the pavements, smashing off the flagstones like sparks off an
anvil. It stung his eyes and soaked his clothing, bringing with it hailstones hard enough to chip the paint from doors. He shielded his eyes as he got his bearings, then toiled in the direction of
Saint Erasmus Square.

In Welcan Row, old mine shafts were overflowing. Rotten ropes, mushed mosses and scrap metal emerged and were carried away on a stream of filthy liquid that slicked the street. In Corris Street
he splashed through shin-deep water, then headed south through Bradawl Alley, where the cobbles had turned to islands. In each street the floodwater was deeper than the last, but he sloshed onwards
with his boots soaked through and squelching.

In Foremans Avenue, trees rattled and creaked as the storm shook them. With a noise like a record distorting, one cracked down the length of its trunk. The road beneath it popped open and roots
sprang out, then the nearer half of the tree crashed down with a bending squeal and a shiver of leaves. He looked up as he passed the Moses residence, and was satisfied to see floodwater frothing
under the front door, and one window blasted out of its frame by lightning. He hurried on. He had to get to the Church of Saint Erasmus.

Rain pinged off car bonnets, twanged off the pavements, flicked him with hard ice as he struggled, grabbing now and then a lamp post for support, to the end of Widdershin Road and at last into
the wide church square. He could barely see a stone’s throw in front of him, let alone up to the spire. Rain scratched out all visibility. The plaza was awash, gurgling with scummy white
eddies.

He had to wade the final few metres before he reached the high ground of the church’s steps. There he looked back for a moment across the square. Liquid rushed in from every street,
bearing debris and caked scum, churning in the pattern of a whirlpool around the church. Watching it made him dizzy, as if not just the water but the entire town were turning in that gyre.

He battled into the church and slammed the doors behind him, then paused to collect his breath. How still the air was in here. The roof rang with the strikes of so many raindrops that their
echoes combined into a single throbbing note. It was so dark that he was forced to squint his way along the aisle by memory, picturing the place as he had known it through the years. His memory
added the details: his father at the pulpit, with his face bunched in devoted prayer; his grandfather slouched bored or tipsy in a back pew; Betty, watching him with a look he still believed had
been a fond one, on that single time when he had tried to give a reading from the book of his namesake and his tongue had sunk into silence at the lectern. ‘I, Daniel,’ he had read,
‘was troubled in spirit, and the visions that passed through my mind disturbed me.’