The Man Who Rained (6 page)

He whimpered, and she could tell that for the first time he was aware of her presence, and consequentially, that he was entirely naked in it. After a moment – she was still shocked –
she remembered enough formality to look away while he retrieved his clothes. She heard his drenched jeans squelching on.

She turned back to him as he buttoned up his shirt. ‘Um ...’ she began, but had no idea what to say. ‘Um, what ...’ Her heart was thumping. ‘What just
happened?’

He didn’t reply. He looked as if he didn’t know how to.

‘What, I mean ... oh my God, are you all right?’

He nodded. He licked his lips. His irises were grey, and tinged with the same moody purple as a thundercloud. ‘I can’t explain.’

She gaped at him. She felt like she deserved an explanation. A raindrop dangled on his chin. Two more hung from his earlobes. ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘that I’m not going
mad.’

He looked down awkwardly at the grass, the leaves of which balanced so many caught raindrops that it looked as if a diamond necklace had broken there. ‘I can’t tell you
anything,’ he muttered.

‘But ... but ... I saw you ...’

‘I let go. There, now you know. I let go. Then I heard you calling to me and that made me come back.’

The drip on his chin fell free and dashed off the broken lip of one of his shoes. In the distance of the sky behind him, a flake of cloud was blowing north, towards the saw-toothed heights of
the Devil’s Diadem.
A moment ago,
she thought,
you were a cloud just like that
.

‘I don’t understand,’ she said.

He bit his lip. ‘I’m not sure we should be having this conversation. You shouldn’t be talking to me. We should be frightened of each other.’

She pressed her hands over her worried heart. ‘I
am
frightened!’

He deflated. Now he sounded crestfallen. ‘Really? For a moment I thought that you weren’t. I’m sorry I frightened you. Am I really frightening?’

She felt dizzy and had to sit down and stare at the grass, where a little golden ant was nibbling through a leaf. She felt as if, in that instant, the world had grown as limitless as it must
appear to an insect. ‘I’m going crazy, aren’t I?’

‘No. I explained. I let go.’ He waited for a moment, and then he began to fidget. When he spoke again he sounded alarmed. ‘Please don’t tell anyone in Thunderstown that
you’ve met me.’

She rubbed her eyes. ‘It was as if I saw you turn into a cloud.’

‘Yes. Yes, that’s exactly what you did see. And you have to promise never to tell a soul.’

‘I don’t think anybody would believe me.’

‘They might. In Thunderstown, they might. And they might try to get me.’ Again he became worried. ‘I should go now.’ He hesitated, then began to walk away from her.

‘Wait!’

He looked back.

She stood up. ‘You can’t just
go
. Not after that!’

He looked at her sadly, opened his mouth as if he wanted to say something else, then turned and kept on walking across the meadow.

‘Hey! Wait! Hey!’ She stomped after him. ‘What am I supposed to do now?’

‘Just ... leave me alone, okay? Pretend you never met me. Go back to doing, I don’t know, whatever you were doing up here in the first place.’

She stood there, stupefied in the sunlight, watching him walk downhill towards a stretch of the mountain full of furrows and knotted boulders. Three times, lately, life had so surprised her that
she felt as if the planet itself had stopped spinning. First the news of her dad’s death, then Peter’s unexpected proposal, then – perhaps strangest of all – a startled
minute during which she had watched a man become a cloud.

When, at the bottom of the meadow, the bald man reached the place where the path veered out of sight, he paused for a second and looked back at her over his shoulder. Then he vanished around a
stack of boulders.

No sooner had he gone than she felt the urge to run, although she didn’t know whether she should bolt for the safety of Kenneth’s house or chase the man to get some answers. For a
long minute she stood on the spot, held perfectly taut by two opposing forces. But she did not want to wonder about him forever. She set off in pursuit, the soft ground putting a spring into each
pace. Past the boulders the path dropped into a gully, in which there were a great many squares and triangles of slate, but no sign of the man. Then she spotted a wet blot on one of the stones,
then another, and since the sky was bare she reasoned that these must have come from his soaked clothes. She followed their direction until their clues dried up, then pressed on until she came out
on to smoother slopes that were scattered with lonely trees and heads of rock. Here she stopped with her hands on her hips, surveying the mountain for some sign of him.

As she paused she saw a little house built from uneven stacks of slate and tiles, camouflaged by the shadow of a gnarly old bluff it backed up against. It was a bothy, a tiny bungalow, with just
one door and one window, a wilderness shelter similar to the ones she had seen in the Ouchita Mountains, which provided mountaineers and rangers with emergency reprieve from the weather.

She approached it cautiously, for she felt sure the man would be inside. Its walls were plugged up with warty grey lichens, except for in one corner which was furred with a moss as orange as a
mango. It had a stubby chimney bearing the most delicate weathervane she had seen since arriving in Thunderstown: a fox or wolf with paws stretched out mid-leap and snout raised to scent the wind.
Above it the vane branched out into art nouveau curves that drew, in iron, the shape of a cloud.

She knocked on the door but got no reply, so tried the handle and found it to be locked. She thumped the wood with the flat of her palm. ‘Hey!’ she yelled. ‘Can we talk some
more?’

No answer, so she went to the window and peered in.

Someone had clearly been living there, although right now she could see nobody inside. Instead there was a table with a plate on it, and on the plate was the core of a pear, brown but not yet
rotten. There were two chairs, and most remarkably given her initial assumption that this was a shelter and not a home, there were mobiles hanging from the ceiling. She twisted her head to try to
get a clear view. The ceiling was thick with them. Dangling configurations of wire hung with white paper birds.

‘Hey!’ she yelled again, tapping on the glass. For a moment she considered breaking it, and turned around to locate a stone, but then a cold wind blew past her and she thought she
heard a bark. She looked back up the mountain and saw a silver-furred animal slinking over a heap of rocks in the near distance. It vanished into a ditch before she could get a good view of it, and
it did not re-emerge. Still, it had made her feel uncomfortable, and she chewed her thumbnail.

Then, because it was the only way to feel safer, she turned and picked her way back towards Thunderstown.

It had been many days since Daniel Fossiter had last seen Finn Munro, the strange and weather-filled young man whom he protected in secret. Daniel had been to the bothy on Old
Colp once or twice in that time, but had found the stone shelter to be empty. Probably Finn was out wandering the mountains, or lurking in one of his many dens in the foothills, and Daniel had been
relieved not to have had to endure one more awkward encounter with him.

He trudged now down the path from the dusty Merrow Wold, with a dead goat slung over his broad shoulders. He had shot fifteen that morning, before the winds started digging at the shingly soil
and clawing up swathes of dust that trapped him for hours in their powdery fog. By the time he had picked his way clear the best of the afternoon was behind him, but he was untroubled. It excused
him from looking in on Finn for one more day. Because it was tough, just being around him. He and Finn were two leftover corners of a triangle that could no longer be drawn.

Eight years had passed since Finn’s mother left Thunderstown, during which time Finn’s voice had deepened and he had grown taller even than Daniel. Yet being a man was about more
than gender and age. That was something Daniel’s father and grandfather had always been at pains to remind him of.

He sighed and adjusted the weight of the goat on his shoulders. The gravelly earth of the Merrow Wold crunched under his boots. Every step required his concentration, for centuries of ravenous
goats had turned this soil into a slide of rubble. People had fallen to their deaths on the gentle inclines; all it took was one slip, and they would find themselves skidding and rolling down a
mountainside that offered no friction or solid space to arrest their fall. They would be scraped and grated apart by pebbles.

‘Betty,’ he whispered. It did not lessen, his ache for her, even after those eight years. His grandfather would have mocked him for it. His father would have turned away in resigned
disappointment.

On the morning she left Thunderstown, Betty had appeared at his door and asked him to look after Finn. ‘Take care of him for me,’ she’d said. ‘You’re the only one I
trust to do it. And anyway, I’ll be back soon.’ As if there were any chance he might forget her, she sealed the request with a kiss to his lips. Often he lay awake at night remembering
that kiss, the lightness of her skin, the smell of her lipstick, the tension in the muscles of her neck as she went up on tiptoes to reach him. Sometimes it seemed that the only thing in the world
worth holding on to was the memory of that kiss.

Anything anyone could call ‘soon’ had long since passed. Eight years with no sight or sound was not ‘soon’. All the same, he could not be angry, for to be angry with her
he would have to conclude that she had deliberately not written or called, and he could not bear the thought that she might have discarded him so casually. Then again, he could not bear the
alternative, which was that something had befallen her to prevent her from making contact, and so he did his best to skirt around such speculation. All he could allow himself was this simple,
painful, longing for her return.

He plodded downhill, soles crunching on the loose earth. If you found a handful of grass up here you were lucky, and if you pulled that grass even lightly it would uproot, so thin was the Merrow
Wold’s dirt. The stink of goat droppings and fur were ever present in the dry air, but hard evidence of the culprits who had ruined the landscape was hard to come by. On the other mountains
it was easy to spot signs of them: hoof prints pressed into baked mud or the naked blonde trunk of a tree they had stripped of bark. Here there was neither mud nor trunks. In making the Merrow Wold
barren, the goats had made themselves nigh on impossible to track.

His grandfather had believed that on the fifth day the Lord had created every animal on land except for the goat. This he left to the devil, who made them in his greedy image. Upon seeing how
they gobbled up the apple trees of Eden, the Lord gave them tails like knotted ropes, and these caught and snared the goats in the undergrowth. The devil was outraged, but the goats were relieved
– the Lord had spared them from temptation, and for this they were grateful. This the devil could not bear. He bit off their long tails and licked out their eyes and he feasted upon them, and
when he had eaten his fill he replaced their eyes with his own, so that they would never know the difference between restraint and indulgence.

More often than once, Daniel’s father, the Reverend Fossiter, had told that story from the pulpit of the Church of Saint Erasmus. Should any of the congregation have needed further proof
of the tale’s wisdom, they needed to look no further than the way the goats’ long teeth tortured the trees. Putting up shoots was an ordeal in the face of the weather that befell these
mountains. Even the sun could be the enemy of leaves in need of water. Trees that survived up here bent their trunks close to the soil. Branches grew thrust out like arms in a plea for mercy. A
hard enough life, then, without the goats who came to chew away what protective bark they could grow. Daniel had taken it upon himself to guard the saplings whenever he came upon them, erecting
fences of ringed razor wire. Still the goats would come. He would find the razor wire red with blood where the animals had chewed it, ignoring the pain it caused them.

Once he found an old nanny dead with her jaws clenched around the blades of the fence, her beard a brownish red from the blood that had flowed from her mangled tongue. And under the shade of the
tree slept her plump little kid, who had scrambled on to her rump and used her neck as a ladder to clear the fence and chew so deeply on the sapling that it hung like a snapped straw. A kid like
that did not deserve to die quick with a bullet between its eyes. It deserved to suffer with a bleeding belly, to ruminate on its deeds. But Daniel was weak-willed. His father and grandfather had
always said so, and he conceded it was true. He had shown the kid the mercy it had not offered the tree, and killed it with one quick squeeze of his trigger.

Daniel loved the trees. Their blossoms in the spring were as silky and fragrant as rose petals. When the winds blew the blossoms loose they rolled through the air and reminded him of that day
when he and Betty stood side by side in a swirling cloud of them, and two symmetrical petals had landed on Betty’s nose, for all the world like butterfly wings.