The Man Who Rained (10 page)

He pulled out a chair for her, then sat down opposite. He was so big he made his chair look like a child’s, but he sat on it as lightly as a balloon on a lap. He examined her for a moment,
his gaze more direct than any she had experienced before. If someone had looked at her so directly in New York she’d have freaked out or told them where to shove it, but there was something
forgivably curious about the way he regarded her. He had an unfettered manner, as if he were an animal and this was his den.

Eventually he met her eyes and she saw again that his irises were tinged with a stormy purple. Within them his pupils looked imperfect, the black of them mingling with the inner rims of his
irises, just as the eye of a hurricane mixes with its cloudwall. Looking into them made her feel like one of the paper birds hanging in the breeze.

‘Who are you?’ she gaped.

‘My name’s Finn Munro,’ he said.

But she hadn’t really meant to ask him his name. She had meant
what
are you? How can you have eyes such as these and how did you dissolve into cloud? ‘You’re ...’
she struggled. ‘I mean ...’

‘Are you going to tell me yours?’

‘Elsa. Elsa Beletti.’

He took a deep breath. ‘Well, Elsa, I am not like you. I am not like anybody. I used to think I was, but that was a long time ago now. I can’t promise you will understand. I
don’t think many people could.’

‘I’ll do my best.’

‘Like I say, I’m not normal. Even if I’d started out that way, I suppose I’d have become very strange by living alone for so long like this.’

‘How long have you been here?’

‘Eight years. I was only sixteen when I came here. Before that I lived in Thunderstown, in a beautiful old house on Candle Street, with my mother and with Daniel. But I did something bad,
and for everybody’s benefit I moved up here. Since then I’ve sort of stopped thinking in years, just in seasons. I’ve given up on birthdays and calendars.’

‘Wait. Daniel? Fossiter? I’ve met him.’

‘He was my mother’s ... friend. He helped me move up here so I could stay out of trouble. After my mother went away.’

He said those last words as lightly as he could, but she knew how to spot a child’s pain at their parent’s exit. She wanted to offer him sympathy. My dad left home when I was
sixteen, and I can still remember him going, as if it were yesterday. Stuff like that doesn’t really get old.’

He looked up at her gratefully. ‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘it’s hard to forget what happened. But I have made my peace with it. I only mention it to explain that I’ve been
up here on my own for a long while trying to come to terms with myself.’

‘I still don’t understand what I saw.’

‘Okay, put it this way ...’ He laid his hands flat on the table, beside the unfinished paper model he had left there. Up close she realized it was the start of a horse. The long head
and fluid forelegs were complete, but the back of the animal remained only half-folded.

‘I have a storm inside of me.’

She blinked. ‘I beg your pardon?’ But she had heard him clearly. Her instinct was to disbelieve it, but she had seen grey mist fuming out of him. She had to lock her ankles together
beneath her chair to stop her legs from jittering.

‘It’s always been that way. Part of me is cloud and rain and sometimes hail and snowflakes.’

‘But ...’ Her mind hurt, as if she had bitten on an ice cube. Her eyes were drawn again to the half-finished paper horse, and she suddenly realized that she had entirely
misinterpreted it. It
was
finished, it was just that its hindquarters, which she had assumed were in need of more folding, were not those of a horse. They were those of a fish. She
shuddered. ‘That’s impossible,’ she said.

He laughed ruefully. ‘I wish it were. Then I would not have this problem. Because, in a way, it is impossible. Impossible to live like other people do. Like you. I am too ...
unpredictable. The weather can change in an instant.’

He looked at his fingers. It took him a minute to continue. ‘I grew up trying to be normal. My mother did all she could to make my life like that of any other little boy. In the end it
didn’t work out.’

‘You said you did something.’

‘Something happened, yes. And I ended up living on my own in this bothy, trying to keep out of sight. There are people in Thunderstown who might ... react badly if they knew what was in
me. So I spend all day walking the mountaintops and all evening folding animals out of paper. It’s not much of a life. It means I stay safe, but there’s always the weather inside of me,
reminding me that things can never change. I can feel it, see, in my belly.’

She was sitting forwards in her chair. ‘What does that feel like?’

‘Well, it’s different from day to day. Sometimes it’s ice-cold, which makes me apathetic, like nothing matters in the world, and I think I wouldn’t care even if I dropped
down dead. Other times it’s as hot and heavy as a monsoon and I can barely believe there’s so much rain inside of me. That’s when I’m glad that I’m up here alone,
because I get soppy and ridiculous. I bawl my eyes out over the slightest things – a smashed mug, say, or a sad memory – then afterwards I wonder what I made all the fuss about. It
makes it impossible to live life like an ordinary person. So, lately, I’ve started to wonder whether I should keep trying to be a person at all. Would I be happier if I was weather entirely?
And that’s what I mean by coming to terms with myself. With what I really am. A few times now I’ve built up the courage, but every time something’s pulled me back. Just like you
pulled me back at the windmill.’

‘Me?’

‘Yes. You asked me to wait.’

That caught her off guard. She remembered her strong urge for him to stay, but she had put it down to fear. She would never have thought that he would stay because of her.

They sat in silence for a moment. The paper birds flew along their painstaking orbits. The door was still ajar, and the breeze carried in a sudden fragrance of heather blossom. Finn seemed in no
hurry to say anything more. She supposed you learned to cope with silence if you lived alone, in a stone hut halfway up a mountain.

‘Sometimes,’ she said carefully, ‘I feel things I’m not able to define. I’m not, um, part weather, but I mean ... I feel things I don’t recognize, feelings
for which there are no words in the dictionary. Sometimes they frighten me, if I’m honest, and ... well, I’m not saying it’s the same as what you’ve just described ... I
guess I’m just saying that, maybe, you don’t have to feel so alone about it.’

She scratched her cheek. It was an artificial gesture created to give her hands – turned suddenly fidgety – some occupation. She looked sharply around the bothy. She was not used to
talking about her emotions with strangers. In fact, she was not used to talking like this with anyone.

‘Did you just try to say,’ he asked quietly, ‘that you feel like that too?’

A brisk nod. She forced herself to laugh. ‘Well, we have become awfully serious, for two total strangers!’

Again he regarded her with that level, scrutinizing stare, so unacceptable in a bar or café or subway car. Hell, even Peter had never had the nerve to look at her as if he could see into
her like that, as if she were as insubstantial a thing as she had seen Finn turn into.

‘You’re different to the people in Thunderstown,’ he said.

She shrugged, still embarrassed. ‘The world’s a big place.’

‘Thank you,’ he said, ‘for telling me that.’

Suddenly she was talking again. ‘I just started feeling this stuff. It was a bolt from the blue. My dad died, you see, and that put everything out of perspective. Or into it, I can’t
decide. He used to have a picture on his wall of a hurricane seen from space. I found it again after he died, when I went through all his things. A little eye of emptiness wrapped up in a whole lot
of bluster. That’s me, right there, I thought. But I was frightened that, if I let the bluster die away, all I’d be left with was the emptiness at the middle of it all.’

She stopped as abruptly as she’d started. She was surprised to have blurted out so much of herself.

She tapped the table like a judge calling for order. ‘This is crazy!’ she declared, high-pitched. ‘What are we talking about? It’s impossible! You aren’t made out
of weather! You can’t be!’

He was taken aback. ‘But you saw for yourself.’

‘It must have been a trick. One that isn’t funny any more. You have to tell me how you did it. Tell me what you did to me!’

He looked hurt. ‘I didn’t do anything to you. I didn’t even know you were there until you asked me to stay.’

She stood up and straightened out her top. ‘Look,’ she declared, ‘this has gone too far. Tell me the truth about what happened and I’ll leave you in peace.’

He scowled, then he stood up too, and went to the sink. There in a rack some cutlery was drying in the sun. He grabbed a knife and spun around with the blade raised.

She panicked and backed towards the door.

Then he turned the knife point down and used its tip to prick his forefinger. He tossed it aside and raised his hand. She could clearly see the little cut at the centre of his fingerprint, but
no blood welled out of it. Instead, it hissed. It whistled like a punctured tyre. She felt its tiny breeze flowing across her cheek.

‘So,’ he said curtly, ‘all of your questions have been answered. And now you can keep your promise.’

‘What promise?’ She had more questions now, although she did not know how to phrase them.

‘To leave me alone.’

She could see she’d upset him. She wished she hadn’t acted in the way she just had, but she had been so suddenly frightened. She tried to apologize but she was no good at it and she
only mumbled something ineffectual. In the end she had no choice but to give a feeble goodbye wave and leave the bothy.

A few paces across the scraggy mountainside she looked back and hoped to see Finn at the door watching her go. But he had closed it soundlessly behind her and he was not even at the window.

It took the morning sun a long time to light and heat the Fossiter homestead. As it crept westward shafts of it shone in at angles, highlighting the cobwebs and the painted
frowns on the portraits of deceased patriarchs. In a pool of such light, Daniel Fossiter was on his knees, saying, ‘Are you dead? Have you died, Mole?’

Mole, his dog, lay on the wooden floor with her paws stretched forwards and her good eye firmly shut. Her bad eye – the one in which she had been blind since birth – remained open,
marbled black and blue like the shell of a mussel. She had not moved all morning and he could not detect her breathing.

If he was not such a damned sentimental old fool he would long ago have given her one last favourite meal, then led her outside. As it stood, he had let her reach this infirm stage, where every
day seemed like her last.

‘Mole?’ he whispered. ‘Are you still in there, Mole?’

Every Fossiter who had ever walked the mountains had owned a dog, a member of a canine dynasty with a pedigree as meticulously charted as that of the Fossiters themselves. They were
copper-haired, hardy pointer-retrievers, who rarely barked or played, preferring to slink after scent trails with their bellies close to the ground. Daniel had inherited several from his
grandfather, but he also had his father’s pair of clumsy house dogs, who had spent their lives bickering in yaps so shrill that the hunting dogs had never dared to hassle them. For some years
he’d lived with this motley pack, until the time when, as if in competition, the hunters and the house dogs had each birthed a litter of puppies and he’d feared being overrun. How
strange it had felt to be the sole remaining Fossiter of Thunderstown, while all around him the fur-ball progenies of his forefathers’ mutts scrapped and bit and barked.

He had sold the dogs then, all bar one puppy from each litter. In truth he no longer required them in order to hunt. Tracking, trapping and sniping had all become so instinctive that he fancied
he could do all three sleepwalking. When those two puppies had matured and born mongrel puppies of their own, he kept only the runt: a serious, black-furred little pup with a blind eye and a
wrinkled nose. This he christened Mole.

Mole was different from the other dogs he had owned. She was like his shadow. Those other animals he had looked after well, for sure, but only in the way he might look after the upholstery of
his house, or polish some inherited antique whose history he had not learned. Mole was quiet, like her hunting ancestors, but thoughtful and sombre like her master. There were times when Daniel and
Mole would sit side by side on some rocky parapet in the mountains and look at each other with such reflected heaviness that he would touch his face, expecting it to be canine, and Mole’s to
be his reflection in a mirror.

He’d been surprised, then, when Betty met Mole and the two had been madcap together. Betty would chase the dog around the yard, and Mole would bounce after Betty, the pair creating such a
tumult of yapping and laughing and rolling about on the floor that Daniel could only gape and marvel.