The Man Who Rained (20 page)

Elsa stared at the picture.

‘There are some,’ said Dot slowly, ‘who see Cumulonimbus and think he is the power of God himself, or else of witches or devils, for surely something this powerful must come
from more than water and dust.’

Elsa closed her eyes and saw her father in the visiting room, on the last of her visits to the jail, at the point when he’d taken to staring at the ceiling, convincing himself he could see
clouds moving across it. When she had stood up to say goodbye for what would prove to be the final time, he had looked at her with a dumb grin and pronounced, ‘It’s raining,
Elsa.’ ‘Dad,’ she’d said, ‘we’re inside.’ He’d pointed at her cheek and she’d touched it with a finger. She’d withdrawn her finger with a
teardrop glinting on its tip. Then he’d turned again to the ceiling and whispered, ‘See? Raining.’

Now Dot reached across and took her hand. ‘Let me show you something else.’

She opened another, smaller atlas, and began to flick through its pages. When she found the one she wanted she laid it side by side with the sepia cumulonimbus. The page she had selected showed
a frame full of fog. In the fog floated the dark silhouette of a figure, with inhumanly long limbs and a head made of shadows. Dot turned the page and there were more snapshots of the same
phenomenon: a towering shade with black tapering arms and legs.

‘This ...’ said Elsa under her breath, ‘I’ve seen pictures of this before.’

‘It’s a cloud spectre,’ whispered Dot reverentially. ‘A very rare thing. The first recorded sighting was in Brocken, in Germany. A shepherd on a mountain got lost in the
fog and was trying to find his way out when he saw something that looked like this. Imagine it! One minute you’re miles from anyone, the next there’s a figure stalking you through the
clouds. The shepherd was so haunted by the sight of it that for the rest of his life he only ventured out on fair weather days.’

‘But it’s a trick, isn’t it? A trick of the light.’

‘Yes, of course. His shadow projected on to the cloud. But do you know,’ Dot’s tone lowered, and her old eyes sharpened through the giant lenses of her glasses, and the
atmosphere of the room seemed suddenly electric, as if before a storm, ‘that Betty Munro once saw a Brocken spectre?’

Elsa felt her skin tingle. For a moment she could hear the wind outside walloping the masonry. ‘I think I have heard bits of this story. Can you tell me anything about her?’

Dot’s eyes crinkled up behind her glasses. ‘Where to begin? The first time she came to visit me here, it was because she’d heard of an old folk-cure for childlessness. Climb a
mountain in a storm and drink rainwater until you’re sick from it. Yes, I told her I’d heard it said. Should she try it, she asked me, and did I think it would work?’ Dot sat down
slowly on the bed, amid the cloud atlases. ‘I told her it might work and it might not, and it might do both at the same time in ways she couldn’t predict.’ She sighed. ‘I
should have been more to the point, but I underestimated how hard it was for her, knowing she couldn’t have a baby. I gave up on that urge long ago, and I suppose I had forgotten how strongly
it can call to you. Sometimes someone else’s life can be the only thing that makes sense of your own.’

‘She tried it, then?’

‘Yes. She went up into the mountains, hoping for storms. There her hopelessness turned slowly into anguish, and her anguish made her scream at the sky, and stick her head underwater and
yell into empty mountain lakes.
Anything,
she promised, to anybody above or below who could hear her.
Anything anybody asks. Just give me a child
.’

Perched on the edge of the bed, Dot looked like a storyteller poised around a hearth. Elsa sat down cross-legged on the hard floor.

‘One day,’ continued Dot, ‘up in the mist on the mountain, what did Betty see but a figure! A silhouette standing in the fog. No doubt it was a trick, a Brocken spectre, her
own lonely shadow projected on to the clouds. But to her, in that moment, it was someone who had heard her! The next day she came to see me again. She wanted me to explain what she had
seen.’

‘What did you tell her?’ ventured Elsa.

Dot pointed to a glass of water on the window sill. Elsa got up and fetched it for her, and the old nun sipped from it and smacked her lips. ‘What would you have told her?’

‘I don’t know. I guess I would have tried to show her it was just the weather.’

Dot frowned. ‘Well, I would never do anything like
that
. No. It was something to believe in, was what I said.’

Elsa frowned. ‘And that was enough for her?’

‘That was enough. That kept her sneaking up to look for her spectre. I don’t think Betty ever did see it again, but she imagined signs of it in every rock and landslide. Then, one
day,’ Dot lifted up the first cloud atlas, still showing the black tower of the storm, ‘Cumulonimbus came to Thunderstown. Betty was convinced that he was the one she’d seen in
the mists. She said she knew it in her belly. So she climbed Drum Head in the pouring rain and tried to drink the raindrops until nausea overcame her.’

‘And? What happened?’

‘Have you ever tried to catch rain in your mouth? Enough to make you sick?’

‘No.’

‘It’s as near impossible as you’d imagine. And Betty never managed it. Maybe, if she had, the legend would have been proved true. But no. Instead, Betty was struck by
lightning. Bang! A million volts of electricity, aimed right at her belly. And then the storm cleared and it was a fine evening.’

Dot put down the book, and closed it so the balmier skies of the cover hid the cumulonimbus within.

‘What had happened to her?’ asked Elsa.

Dot’s eyes twinkled. ‘This much you already know, Elsa. She had become pregnant. She told it to the search party when they found her sleeping peacefully on the mountain, though they
thought she was raving. Pregnant! Only, it wasn’t quite what she’d wanted. It wasn’t her baby, just as it wasn’t anybody else’s baby. It was Cumulonimbus.’

Elsa was too lost in the story to notice at first that Dot had removed her glasses and plugged up her eyes with her bent palms. She joined her on the bed, placing a gentle hand on her shoulders.
‘What’s wrong, Dot? Why are you crying?’

Dot found a handkerchief from under the pillow and dabbed her eyes. Then she reinstated her spectacles and patted Elsa’s knee. ‘I’m sorry, it’s just that I didn’t
want to stop her. She was so happy to have him that I couldn’t bear to remind her
he’s not yours.
Because she thought he was, you see? And I wasn’t ever sure if it
mattered.’

‘No. I don’t get it. Who else did he belong to?’

‘Himself! He was Cumulonimbus. Elsa, in these mountains the weather can take many forms, but never a person, or so I always thought. A person would be too complicated. But that night,
Cumulonimbus did it! He made himself into a speck of baby, even though it took all of his power to do so.’

‘Wait ... wait.’

Dot reached for her hand and squeezed it with all her small might. ‘You have fallen in love with a storm cloud, my dear.’

‘
Wait
! Nobody said anything about love.’

‘Oh. Forgive me. I thought that was why you came up here.’

‘I ... I ...’ She swallowed. She had kissed him. She had touched her ear to his chest. She had chatted with him and he had been nervous and embarrassed and pleased to be with her.
‘I ...’ she said.

Dot retained her grip on Elsa’s hand. ‘When Finn – Cumulonimbus – was sixteen, he struck his mother with a bolt of lightning. Daniel Fossiter brought Betty here to be
treated, but I did not get to talk to Cumulonimbus, as I would have liked. I must confess, I am somewhat jealous of you for getting that chance. But you deserve it. And I think you do love him,
don’t you?’

‘How could I
love
him? We only just met. I can’t even work out how – if – I can I ever get close to him.’

Dot’s eyes were half-closed. ‘Put it this way: one of the terrifying things about my life is that it belongs to me. It has never been lived before, nor will it ever be again. Every
second is a brand-new possession.’

‘You’re talking in riddles again.’

‘And
you
still haven’t answered my question.’

‘What question?’

‘Do you love him?’

‘You can prove that love is just chemicals and electricity in the brain.’

‘Of course you can, but that doesn’t help you deal with it. Do you love him?’

‘What if I can’t answer?’

Dot shrugged. ‘Be lost, Elsa. That is the best advice anyone can give you, and I get the feeling your father would have approved of it. And now be on your way.’

On the day when Finn had shown her the sunbeam birds, she had made a secret plan to throw him a birthday party. The idea had come to her when they’d returned to the
bothy. He’d kicked off his shoes and left them in the doorway, where they’d looked so tatty and busted open that she’d wanted to bury them. She had sneaked a look at the inside
heels and seen his shoe size in faded ink, then remembered he’d said he had not celebrated his birthday since his mother left Thunderstown. Her plan had formulated in that instant, then been
forgotten amid the distractions of the subsequent days.

Now she stood outside a cobbler’s workshop on Welcan Row, admiring the overstatement of its tradesman’s sign, which read,
Bryn Cobbler: Cobbler.
She pushed open the door and
took a deep sniff of the polished air. Whatever in the shop wasn’t leather was fashioned from wood just as brown, and Bryn Cobbler himself was a tanned man in a buff shirt and hide apron.
She’d envisaged buying Finn a pair of colourful sneakers such as she might choose for herself, but she quickly realized that was out of the question. From moccasins to boots, everything on
sale was made from a leather as brown as caramel. ‘It gives you lucky feet,’ explained Bryn, ‘and makes you tread as safely as the goats it’s made from.’

She bought two pairs of shoes, since the prices were reasonable and she wasn’t sure which would fit Finn better. Then she headed back to Prospect Street, where Kenneth had promised to help
her with the second part of her plan.

Kenneth was chuckling with enthusiasm when she reached him. He had all of the ingredients lined up on the kitchen counter, and when the electric whisk purred too hard and threw
mix all over the two of them he guffawed and she thought,
At least I have made his day, which is a good start.

Then, when the cake came out of the oven, he provided her with the
pièce de résistance
: a set of fine, tall candles, each with a crisp new wick and a scarlet thread twisting
through the white wax. She paused for a moment, staring at them.

‘Everything all right, Elsa?’

‘Yes. Yes. Perfect, thank you.’

She had been remembering a cake that her mum had once baked her: a sloppy chocolate mound with candles drowning in the icing. Nevertheless it had been delicious and she had been happy sitting at
the table with her parents, eating and eating until their bellies could take no more and their chins and cheeks were sticky. Then, after they had cleaned themselves up, her Mum and Dad had given
her a present in a long thin package. She had caught them glancing conspiratorially at each other as she unwrapped it: they knew they’d found her something perfect. It was a parasol, an
artwork of stunning lace, with silky white clouds sewn into its canopy.

She helped Kenneth plug the candles into the cake, and was soon on her way.

En route to Old Colp, in a yard in Auger Lane made green by weeds uprising against the flagstones, a pair of old women had set up spinning wheels. They talked in a hushed pitch as they spun,
only their consonants carrying over the click and whirr of their machines. Elsa slowed to watch them for an engrossed moment, and as she watched the spokes turn and the thread cycle through the
wheels, she remembered the afternoon of that chocolate cake birthday, when they had gone to the hedgerow maze in which she had run off ahead, trying to find the centre on her own. She remembered
trotting along one leafy route and hearing familiar voices from the path parallel to hers. The hedge grew too tight to see through, but she knew the voices were those of her parents, laughing and
teasing each other about who knew best which turn to take. There was no question about it, they would not take different paths, and Elsa eavesdropped with pleasure until at last they headed along
the one chosen by her mother, jibing each other as they went.

When she shook off that memory and left the women to their spinning, she was too distracted to remember where she was going and ended up back at Saint Erasmus. Still, she was pleased to find
that her memory had left her resolute. If she were to be lost, she would be lost along with Finn.

The first thing Elsa noticed when Finn opened the bothy door were the blisters on his cheeks. Each was a cauterized pink and teardrop-sized, such as a case of frostbite might
leave. His eyelids were red and lacerated around the ducts. He looked abject, but cheered up when he saw her. ‘I didn’t think I’d see you again.’