The Man Who Rained (21 page)

‘Finn! What happened to you?’

‘I’m okay,’ he said. ‘I suppose I just can’t hide the things I feel.’

‘Finn, I was angry at you.’

‘You were within your rights to be.’

She plunged her face forwards and seized his lips with her own. She reached up her hands to hold his bald head. She realized when he whimpered that she was holding him as tightly as a treasure,
almost biting to hold his lips between hers. She pulled back and loosened her grip.

He looked astonished. ‘I thought—’ he said, but she silenced him with a finger over his lips. With her other hand she traced lines between the sores on his cheeks. At her touch
they gave up little whispers of steam that followed her fingers.

They kissed again, and once more she couldn’t help but cling hard to him, locking her arms around his back and shoulders. When they stopped he gave a bewildered gasp. She savoured his
breath against her face, breathing it in. It smelled like dew at the crack of dawn. It made her lungs feel fresh and full of him. Then she noticed a diffuse glow across the side of his scalp. It
was a fine haze of cloud picked out by the sunlight, and then it was gone in the blink of an eye.

‘Finn ...’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘There was... a kind of haze across your head. It’s gone now.’

He rubbed his head cautiously.

It had been such a fine, ethereal substance that she could not find it frightening. ‘Never mind,’ she said, and kissed him again. Then she squeezed his hand and said, ‘Happy
birthday.’

‘Um ... it’s not my birthday.’

‘It is now.’ She opened the cake tin to show him. ‘I just need a plate and a knife.’

In the bothy, all of the paper birds had gone, although the bin overflowed with white litter. In place of them Finn had been making paper people. With these he seemed to have been having
difficulty, and had only managed a dozen.

He cleared his throat with embarrassment when she saw them, then hastily began to scoop them up to press them into the bin. She grabbed his arm to stop him, and took the damaged models from his
hands to admire. Half of them were paper women and half paper men, and she knew without asking that they were meant to be the two of them.

‘Yesterday I visited the convent on the Devil’s Diadem.’

‘That old place? What were you doing up there?’

She took a deep breath. ‘Asking an old nun some questions. She made me realize that I’d treated you badly.’

‘No, Elsa, you were right. I should have told you about what was inside of me.’

‘But you were right too. I might have freaked out and we’d never have got to where we are now. And anyway, it’s not
what’s inside of you
, is it? It’s what
you are.’

He hung his head. ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

‘See, I think it’s wrong to be upset by that. It’s what makes you who you are, and it’s the reason that I, you know ...’ She gulped. ‘Like you. I mean ... the
reason why I more than like you.’

He blushed gratefully. ‘I more than like you, too.’

‘You know, Finn, I think we can work. I’ll trust you as long as you trust yourself. Then you’ll know, I reckon, and be able to warn me if things become too much.’

They kissed to broker the deal.

‘And now,’ she asked, ‘have you got any matches?’

‘Matches?’

‘For your birthday candles.’

After she had pulled the curtains and brought the cake through with its tiny flames wavering in time with the tune of her happy birthday song, he blew them all out in one great big puff. She
thought of the blowing cloud faces carved into the wardrobe in her room in Thunderstown, and about huffing out the sinking candles of that sloppy chocolate birthday cake, and about being blown
loose from her old life and drifting into this one.

‘There’s a present, too. Two presents, actually, but they’re both the same. I just hope one pair fits.’

The larger ones were just right for him. He walked around the bothy with a grin on his face, and the new leather creaked luxuriantly with each step. As he walked, she saw again a momentary
gleaming brushstroke of cloud across the top of his head, such as she had seen after kissing him earlier, and then it was gone. She sat back and reckoned she would be happy just to watch him walk
in circles, around and around forever.

On the morning of Betty’s departure, Daniel had paid an unexpected visit to her house on Candle Street. It was a chill day, a premonition of autumn adrift in summer, and
over the rooftops the sky was pressed white by clouds as fine as swan feathers.

He was surprised to discover her car parked on the curb, its boot open. Two bags had already been packed inside it, and now Betty hurried from the house carrying a third. She jumped when she saw
him, then collected herself and put down the luggage.

She looked cold there in her threadbare jumper. Her blonde hair was a damp mess and her makeup had been applied in a hurry. ‘Hello, Daniel,’ she said. ‘I was just on my way to
see you.’

He looked suspiciously from Betty to her car. He disliked the distance a vehicle put between a person and the ground, which was a damned deal more than its foot or two of suspension.
‘You’ve a lot of luggage for a trip across town.’

‘Daniel, listen, I’m ... going away for a bit.’

He frowned. ‘Where to?’

‘Just somewhere I can find some perspective.’

He panicked, although he didn’t show it. He wanted to dismantle the car’s engine and run his knife through its tyres. He licked his lips. ‘Can I come with you?’

‘I’m so sorry, Daniel. No, you can’t come with me. Nobody can. I need space. Everything that’s happened ... it’s just too much.’

He had to look away for a moment, up the street towards Old Colp’s ebony dome. ‘What about Finn? Are you taking him?’

‘No, and he doesn’t know about this just yet. He’s gone up into the mountains today.’ She gestured to the open front door. ‘Come in out of the cold for a
minute.’

He had forgotten the temperature, but he followed her gratefully into the house. The rooms were the cleanest he had ever seen them. Everything had been put away, unless it had been packed into
the final bag lying in the hall. The house was as tidy as a show home.

He held a hand to his forehead. All of a sudden his knees and ankles felt like nuts and bolts worked loose. ‘Betty,’ he managed to ask, ‘how long are you going for?’

She shrugged.

Commit every detail of her to your memory,
he thought to himself. He stared into her face, at the green hue of her irises, the diamond-shaped space where her lips parted.

‘Daniel?’

The mole on the underside of her chin, the patterns of her earlobes, the drift of freckles over her narrow nose and the tops of her cheeks.

‘Daniel.’ She stepped forwards and wrapped her arms around him. She pressed the side of her face against his throat, her head fitting neatly between his beard and collarbone. His
back was too broad for her arms to wrap tightly around it, so her hands held to the knobs of his shoulder blades. Her thighs touched his, her hips his, her breasts his ribcage. She was warm and
skinny and smelled of fresh soap and water. He looked down into her hair and refused to blink, knowing there was no second worth losing, and no hope of committing this to memory in all its
fullness.

‘Betty.’ Her name came out of him like the groan of a beast bleeding in a trap. ‘Don’t go.’

She stepped apart from him. Very carefully, he reached out to support himself against the wall.

‘I have to. I’m sorry.’

He could barely feel his legs. His belly was in free fall. He knew if he were to let go of the wall he would collapse into a heap on the floorboards.

She emptied a smile at him. ‘Please do something for me. While I’m gone.’

He managed to nod.

‘Take care of Finn for me.’

He would do anything she asked.

‘Okay, then,’ she said.

She stepped up on tiptoes to kiss him, then backed away and picked up her final suitcase. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I think that’s everything. Will you lock the house for
me?’

He nodded.

Then, as if a leash she had been straining against had suddenly snapped, she sprang out of the door and down the path and quickly climbed into her car. He staggered out into the yard to watch
her disappear along Candle Street. When the car turned out of sight he let himself drop. He hit the paving like a stack of stones. He stayed there for a long time, staring down the length of the
road. Then at last he dragged himself back into the house and moved slowly through it, sitting on every chair, inhaling the air of every cupboard, pressing his face into Betty’s pillow.
Eventually he came to Finn’s room and noticed on top of a pile of his things an envelope, crisp and newly sealed, with
Finn
written on it in Betty’s beautiful handwriting. When
he picked it up it weighed as much as all the jealousy and confusion that accompanied the discovery. Why had she left no envelope addressed to
Daniel
?

He slipped the letter into his shirt pocket, and when he returned to the Fossiter homestead, that was where it remained.

Take care of Finn for me.

He realized he did not know how he would do as she asked. He could keep a roof over the boy’s head and keep him well stocked with groceries, but there was another duty implicit in
Betty’s request, one that required more than practical measures. How to shepherd the weather in the boy? He turned to the memories of his father and grandfather for guidance, but they were
cowering away from him and telling him to do the thing the darkest part of his heart instructed, the thing he would not do because the love of his life had requested that he
take care of Finn
for me.
He reflected that during his own formative years his father and grandfather had abandoned him to deal with the turmoil inside of himself alone. There had been times in his youth when
his emotions had risen up from the depths of him as implacably as floodwater, and he had felt as if he were drowning. He had cast around for help then and found neither his father nor his
grandfather present. All he could do was try to tread water until the flood receded.

He had ignored the damage those waters left in their wake. For just as a flood in a house leaves an aftermath of warped timbers and weakened foundations, he recognized there was a rotting and
ruined layer inside of him too.

He knew by these criteria that he could not look after Finn, and within an hour of Betty’s departure he had already failed in the task, when he told Finn the news and the boy asked,
disbelieving, ‘Did she not leave anything for me? Not even a note?’

‘No,’ he replied, ‘not a thing.’

With those few words he had made it impossible to ever hand over Betty’s letter. So he clung on to the envelope, and never told Finn of its existence. Eventually he become too fond of it
to think of it as belonging to the boy in the first place. For that single specimen of her handwriting was the freshest piece of Betty he had left. To begin with he kept it tucked in his shirt
pocket. For days and restless nights it remained there, on his person at all times like a locket. When finally he had to wash that shirt, that her fingers had brushed against and her chest had
pressed to, he transferred the now crumpled letter to the pocket of his new shirt, and continued to carry it with him everywhere he went.

Eventually it had grown so dog-eared that the seal had started – tantalizingly – to peel open. This at last made it too much for him to carry around, so he locked it in his trunk
with his father’s Bible and his grandfather’s violin and still did not tell Finn it existed.

Time passed. No call, no mail or message from Betty. And as the long months congested into the first half-year of her absence, the letter in his trunk took on a new significance. Secreted in its
envelope were words of hers, words he had not heard before. Not only did he long for the sight of her handwriting, but he hoped that to read it would prompt the sound of her voice in his head. He
began to want badly to unseal the letter and read it for himself. She would be disappointed in him, of course, and the threat of that guilt kept the letter locked up and safe.

Further months passed. Betty neither returned nor made the slightest contact. He tried fruitlessly to track her down. He sought out the telephone numbers of old friends and relatives, but they
knew nothing of her whereabouts and were as anxious about her as he was. Still he resisted reading the letter, although as time slouched by his motives for doing so shifted. Now fear stayed his
hand instead of guilt. Were he to read it, there would be nothing new of her left to experience. He did not know whether he could cope with that. So he kept the letter sealed, even though every so
often he took it from the trunk for his fingers to play at its corners, teasing him of their own accord.

He began to dream about the lifeline of her handwriting, but he could no longer imagine her voice with clear diction. When he tried to replay things she had said she sounded suppressed, as if
she were talking on the other side of a wall. He strode the mountains with his thoughts bent on the envelope in his trunk, hoping that to read her words might return her voice to him.