The Man Who Rained (2 page)

This past spring, the first sunshine and the cherry blossom had brought with it news that had shattered her life as she had known it. Her cell phone had rung, hidden somewhere in Peter’s
Brooklyn apartment. She and Peter had searched for it, lifting up cushions and rummaging in pockets, while it teased them with its disembodied tone. At last Peter had found it beneath a pile of
magazines and tossed it to her. She had been breathless when she answered.

‘Is this Elsa Beletti?’ A slow, Oklahoman accent.

‘Yes. Yes it is.’

‘My name is Officer Fischer of the Oklahoma Police Department. Are you on your own, Elsa?’

‘No. My boyfriend’s with me.’

‘Good. That’s good.’ And then a deep breath. ‘Elsa, I am terribly sorry to have to tell you—’

She’d hung up and dropped the phone. After a second it had started ringing again, vibrating and turning around on its back. In the end Peter had answered and talked briefly with the
officer, and then hung up and wrapped his arms tightly around Elsa.

Her dad had been found in the wreckage a tornado had made from his car – his lungs collapsed, his femurs shattered – a hundred miles west of the windswept little ranch on which he
had raised his only child.

A jolt of turbulence and the seatbelt signs lit up. The plane was entangled in clouds. Elsa gazed out at the grey view. After a long while, it fissured open and she could see a
line of ocean like a river at the bottom of a crevasse. Then the plane shot clear, and below it the wide sea shuffled its waves.

For some hours the world stayed unchanged. Then abruptly the sea crashed against a tawny coast. The land below was a devastated wild country, with drought-dried hills and pockmarked plains. A
settlement passed beneath, its scattered buildings like half-buried bones. A tiny red vehicle crawled like a blood spider between one nowhere and the next. Then, for a while, there was only brown
rock and brown soil.

She still had all the letters her dad had written her after he’d been kicked out. He’d stopped writing when he ended up in jail, and people said they found it difficult to comprehend
how a man behind bars couldn’t find the time to pen a few words to his only child. But Elsa understood him where others could not. She understood how his mind shut down indoors.

She’d seen it as a kid, when an afternoon storm had lifted the gutter off the ranch’s barn, twirled it in the air like a baton, then flicked it at him. It broke his leg. Being holed
up in the house while it healed made him catatonic. ‘I’m weather-powered, see,’ he mumbled once, and it was the best way to describe him. One blustering day he decided his broken
leg had healed. He rose from his armchair and drove into the empty distance of the prairie. She remembered pressing her hands to her bedroom window to watch the dust trails rise up behind his
departing truck. Then the wind scuffed them out. She could imagine him in whichever blasted patch of wilderness he had headed to, stepping out of the vehicle to turn his palms up to the sky, wind
and rain prancing about him like dogs around their master.

Her dad had raised her to love the elements with a passion second only to his, but life in New York had weatherproofed her. Only at her dad’s funeral, as the spring winds wiped her tears
dry and carried his ashes away into the air, did it feel as if that passion had been uncovered again. It was her inheritance, but it had knocked a hole through her as if through a glass pane. All
summer long she had been dealing with the cracks it had spread through the rest of her being.

A pylon came into hazy view below. Then another. Then more, running in a little row towards the dimming horizon. Then came lights all aglitter and white, avenues of the first
trees she’d seen in many hours, a wide blue river, roads chock-a-block with cars. Then everything reverted to rocks, plains and hilly land that looked like a sandpit from this high up. Dusk
came. The speakers crackled with an announcement from the captain: they were coming in to land. The airport floors were mopped so clean that Elsa’s spectral reflection walked with her, sole
to sole across the tiles. Heading for work in New York, she used to catch her reflection in traffic windows or corner mirrors in subway stations. She would pretend she’d glimpsed another
Elsa, living in a looking-glass world where life had not become unbearable.
Now,
she thought as her suitcases slid on to the luggage roundabout,
I’m one of them
. A new Elsa. For
a minute she was paralyzed by delight. She squeezed the handles of her cases so hard she heard her knuckles pop.

By the time she reached the arrivals lounge, jet lag had set in. She stared at the row of bored cab drivers and wondered how on earth she’d find Mr Olivier. To her relief she saw a man
holding a handwritten sign that bore her name. He’d left himself too little space to write it, so its last three letters were crushed together like a Roman numeral. He was a tall black man
with a self-conscious stoop, wearing the same ghastly multicoloured jumper he’d worn in the photo he’d emailed her so that she would recognize him. His hair curled tightly against his
scalp and was flecked with grey. When he saw her reading his sign he smiled with toothy satisfaction and proclaimed in a voice that sounded quiet, even though he raised it, ‘Elsa Beletti?
You’re Elsa Beletti?’

‘Mr Olivier?’

‘Kenneth to you.’

Funny to think that she’d first ‘met’ this man two months back, when she was in an Internet café in Brooklyn, bright sunlight filling her computer screen and making it
hard to read the word she’d typed into the search engine:
T-h-u-n-d-e-r-s-t-o-w-n
.

The computer returned a single match – an advert for a bed and breakfast.
I’m looking for somewhere to stay in Thunderstown,
she’d written in her email,
and I’m
thinking of staying for quite some time
.

Mr Olivier had emailed her back within minutes. In the space of the following hour they’d exchanged nine or ten messages. He described how he’d left St Lucia for Thunderstown in his
late twenties, about the same age as she was now. He didn’t ask her why, precisely, she desired to exchange New York for a backwater of backwaters, a forgotten and half-deserted place many
miles from any other town. She returned the favour by not asking why he’d chosen it over the Caribbean. She fancied she understood his responses instinctively, and that he understood hers,
and that his offer to turn bed and breakfast into more permanent lodgings would prove amenable to them both.

In the arrivals lounge he greeted her by clasping both his hands around her outstretched one. His palms were warm and cushioning. She could have closed her eyes, leaned against him and fallen
asleep there and then.

‘I’m here,’ she said with tired relief.

‘No,’ he laughed. ‘Not yet. There’s still a long drive ahead of us.’

She nodded. Yes. Her mind was wilting.

Gently, he muscled her hands off her suitcases. He carried them as he led the way to a dark car park, eerily quiet compared to the concourse. Here he crammed himself in behind the wheel of a
tiny car. Elsa climbed into the passenger seat and breathed deeply. The car smelled pleasantly of wool, and when she reclined her head against the seat she felt soft fleece covering it. ‘Goat
pelt,’ he said with a smile. ‘From Thunderstown.’ She turned her cheek into it, and it was downy and gentle against her skin. He started up the car and drove them slowly away from
the airport complex into the frenetic urban traffic and parades of street lamps, lights from bars, illuminated billboards. Then, slowly, they left these things behind them.

The steady passing of anonymous roads made her head loll. She opened her eyes. The dashboard clock told her that half an hour had passed. They were on a highway, a line of red tail lights
snaking into the distance, catseyes and gliding white headlights in the opposite lanes. Kenneth hummed almost inaudibly. Elsa thought she recognized the song.

What felt like only a moment later she opened her eyes to find the clock had rubbed out another hour of the night, and the windscreen wipers were fighting rain bursting out of
the darkness. The traffic had thinned. Another car sped up as it overtook them and vanished into the distance. She rested her head back into the fleece.

When she opened her eyes again the rain had stopped. Through a now-open window the night air flowed in, fresh-smelling. Ahead appeared the giant apparatus of a suspension bridge, with traffic
darting across it and its enormous girders yawning. Left and right Elsa could see winding miles of broad river and lit-up boats bobbing on creased waves. A wind hummed over the car and struck the
pillars of the bridge like a tuning fork. All around them the metal hummed. Her head drooped forwards.

She dreamed about being with Peter, before he did the thing that sent her over the edge and made her realize she had to leave New York. In her dream she listened while he made white noise on one
of his electric guitars, back in his Brooklyn bedroom. She sensed all the tenements, all the nearby shops and offices and the distant skyscrapers of Manhattan packing in close around them. Every
window of New York City straining to eavesdrop.

She opened her eyes. The traffic had vanished and Kenneth’s was the only car on the road. The only visible part of the world was locked inside the yellow wedge of the headlights. The road
had no boundaries, no walls or hedgerows, and the car rocking and bouncing over potholes and scatterings of slate kept her awake. A forever road, as if there were nothing more in the universe than
car and broken tarmac. Then it turned a sudden bend and for a half-moment she could see a steep drop of scree, and sensed that they were at a great height.

The road straightened and the surface evened. Her head lolled.

She opened her eyes. The headlights shimmered across nests of boulders and trunks of stone on either side. No grass, only slates splitting under the weight of the car, each time with a noise
like a handclap. Eyes closing, opening. The clock moved on in leaps, not ticks. Either side of the road were trees bent so close to the earth they were barely the height of the car, growing almost
parallel to the shingly ground. A wind whistled higher than the engine noise.

‘Awake again,’ said Kenneth jovially. But she was asleep once more.

Awake again. The moon lonely in a starless sky. Swollen night clouds crowded around it. And beneath those the silhouettes of other giants.

‘Mountains,’ she whispered.

‘Yes,’ said Kenneth with reverence. ‘Mountains.’

Even at this distance, and although they looked as flat as black paper, she had a sense of their bulk and grandeur. They lifted the horizon into the night sky. Each had its own shape: one curved
as perfectly as an upturned bowl, one had a dented summit, and another a craggy legion of peaks like the outline of a crown.

She lost sight of them as the car turned down an anonymous track. The only signpost she had seen in these last few awakenings was a rusting frame with its board punched out, an empty direction
to nowhere.

They had followed that signpost.

‘One more hour to go,’ Kenneth said.

Saying anything in reply took more effort than waking up a hundred times. She drifted off again.

When she came to, the car had stopped and Kenneth had turned off the headlights. ‘What happened?’ she asked, rubbing sleep dust from her eyes.

He pointed past her, out of the window. She turned and straightened in her seat, suddenly wide awake. She could no longer see the mountains in the distance. Stars were brightly visible, but only
in the zenith of the night. She could not see the mountains in the distance because now she was amongst them.

Through gaps in the clouds moonlight glistened like snowfall, brightening mountain peaks where it landed and illuminating their bald caps of notched rock. Elsa could feel the mountains’
gravity in her skeleton, each of them pinching her bones in its direction. Yet they were not what Kenneth had parked to show her. Ahead of them the road descended dramatically into a deep bowl
between the peaks, so steep that she felt they were hovering high in the sky.

At the bottom of that natural pit shone the lights of Thunderstown.

The first time she had seen those lights had been from a plane a few years back, a passenger aircraft like the one she’d disembarked from tonight. She’d been sitting beside Peter on
a second-leg flight, en route to what would prove to be a crappy holiday. He and the other passengers had slept while she leaned her head against the window and watched the night-time world drift
by beneath her. And then she’d seen Thunderstown.

Viewed from the black sky, the glowing dots of Thunderstown’s lights formed the same pattern as a hurricane seen from space: a network of interlocked spirals glimmering through the dark.
And at the heart of the town an unlit blot – an ominous void like the eye of a hurricane. Peter had despaired because on the first few days of their holiday she’d wanted to do nothing
but research the route of their flight, until at last she came upon the town’s name and repeated it over and over to herself like the password to a magic cave.

Kenneth restarted the engine and they began their descent. As they drew closer to the little town, the view slowly levelled, turning the glimmering spiral into an indistinct line of buildings
and street lamps disappearing into the distance. Then the road bent around a towering boulder that jutted up from the earth. Its grey bulk hid the approaching town for a second, and the headlights
opened up the jaw of the night.

There was something out there in the darkness. She saw it and let out a startled cry.

The lights picked out two animal eyes. Fur and teeth and a tail. Then whatever creature it all belonged to ducked out of the beam and was lost.

‘It’s okay,’ said Kenneth.

‘Was that a
wolf
?’

He laughed. ‘Just a dog, I think.’

They cleared the boulder and the buildings drew close enough to make out individual windows and doors.

‘Here we are,’ said Kenneth. ‘Home.’ He spoke that word with deliberate heaviness. An invitation as much as a statement. Elsa had never been to Thunderstown, but –
sitting bolt upright, wide awake now and stiff with anticipation – she did feel a sense of homecoming.