One Hundred Days of Rain (5 page)

32.

Why take a bath when it is raining? Why run the water and step in, and then step out again and carefully towel yourself off? Why powder between your toes, wrap another towel tightly around your head, stay inside until your hair is dry, or if you have to go out at once wield the blow dryer?

This morning rain stipples the glass of the overhang opposite, a faintly traced promise. Last night, when she wheeled her bicycle out her office door, the sky had lowered to just above the tops of buildings. The clouds were not their usual almost-raining colour: a pale and uninteresting grey, like mother-of-pearl without the gleam. Instead they had darkened to the colour of slate. The sky sat on the housetops like a headache or bad news from another country. A few stray drops fell on her as she cycled home: at any moment she expected the deluge. But for hours the rain remained stalled, a needle poised above revolving vinyl. Carrying the heavy bag of magazines to her friend Trouble's car she felt it at last, but not the storm she'd been expecting. Instead the rain beat a faint needlelike tattoo on her bare arms and uncovered head. She handed off the parcels hurriedly before running back inside.

This week she is childless. Dinners of dollar pizza slices or Vietnamese subs. No point in cooking. The fruit bowl empty. She works longer hours, goes out at night, stays up late and sleeps in. Always this ache plucking at her, chronic pain, phantom limb, the child missing.

The child's father calls. He says they need to curtail M's visits, says they are bad for the boy. She disagrees. The child wants to see M she says mildly. In fact the child is passionate, certain, declarative. She cannot for any reasons of her own take away the child's belief that he has some little control over his own world. But when she hears herself fighting for M her stomach curdles.

She is so bad.

She is so good.

Why not give in? She is so tired after all, tired above all, an invisible weight that presses on her. Why not say yes.

You do it then.

You're in charge, you make the decision, you arrange it, you explain to our son why.

He wants to lengthen the time each parent spends with the boy. She discusses this objectively. Saying nothing of what she feels. Maybe because it's a given. Maybe it's that this longing feels weak, her need. Maybe she should get over it. Hobbies. Friends. Maybe she should get a dog finally, if it matters that much to have someone by her all the time.

Do you want to come over one night this week, she asks her child on the telephone. No, comes the small clear voice. Stay with Daddy

She is proud of the boy, for being able to define his own desires. But the limb throbs, dragging behind her, useless, imaginary.

They have few real tempests on this part of the coast. There's an island between Vancouver and the ocean's real wrath, taking the brunt of those rolling inexorable furies. Almost nothing about her city is other than as she would wish it. But the occasional storm would be nice. Clear the air. Come, split, cascade. But no. Not for them the relief of the breaking-point, and the flood.

33.

Yesterday it turned warm, sultry even. There was a breathlessness in the air. The first day of spring, she said, even though it was only the sixth of March. Glancing above, the sky was like porridge or curdled milk.

Life has settled into a kind of routine. A rhythm. She has an old thermos for her son's lunch. No more sandwiches to fight over, cajole and convince. She is speaking to her own parents again. M called them first. She'd been acting odd, M said. The fight, and then fleeing like that. M told them she was worried. M asked her parents to keep in touch. Instead they got in touch with her.

You don't sound crazy, her father said. Just mad as hell.

M continues to send her parents lengthy emails describing her dreams. She and M and the children in a truck, fleeing a fire. She throws herself from the truck bed into the spooling road, ignoring their cries. M reaches for her, tries to get her to reach back. To no avail.

They forward the messages to her but she hasn't the stomach to read through to the end.

She's thrown away the baby blues and pastel pinks she wore, for a joke nobody noticed, in the far reaches of the city. Instead she lays out richer colours: a velvety eggplant dress, a close salmon-coloured raincoat, boiled red shirts and sweaters. The shirt is an ordinary snap-up crimson except for being punched all over with tiny holes. She has a frothy kind of ruffled scarlet number for wearing over another shirt, a cherry-coloured silk sash, and red shoes. Hourglass heels and a licked mauve lining, where her foot goes in. Those are some shoes, people say. She remembers to say thanks. Doesn't tell them she needs the colour, to warm her from below. Needs to be anchored, much as she can, in its shifting gleam. The banked coals, smouldering.

34.

When it rains they leave the bikes and take the bus. How much rain is the question. Gauging the rain becomes an important component of the morning. Will it stop. Will it swell into something really drenching and unpleasant. Will it clear and leave all sunny as if these leftover drops were nothing to bother about or even acknowledge. And how cold will it be, how cold will they get, will it become unbearable? When she guesses wrong a choked sob, on the half-bicycle trailing behind her, lets her know.

Mommy, it's too cold. And the child must be swathed in his mother's jacket, sleeves trailing over the trailabike handlebars, for the rest of the trip.

Before that, the paper is a clue. Her lilting voice: Can you find the weather? What does the picture say? The child is only five, he can't even read, but the mother is already asking her son to interpret the forecast. The weather report employs a number of discrete icons, from a thickly filled square of raindrops needing no interpretation to the more ambiguous “Showers,” approximately half as much fallingwater in the same space. There's “Mixed,” sun and cloud vying for space. “Sunny” almost unheard of, coming round once a year if that.

35.

These days keeping dry is her perpetual concern. Somebody buys her child a raincoat. The child has hoods and hats, including one particularly fetching cap with fake sheepskin flaps that his father purchased for him on a snowy day. She bought her boy an expensive duffle coat that same day and they walked about like a model family, in that thickly falling forest.

The little one keeps losing gloves and hats. So does she. For Christ's sake. Not again. She goes back to the store reminding herself that two pairs of gloves in a season is reasonable where she's concerned. The new ones are made of neoprene and have a design all over them, stamped white on the grey fingers. They're designed to be dipped in water and stay warm which makes sense for her world. Looking closer she sees that each blob is a tiny spermatozoa.

Bike shops get used to her pulling the seven-foot-long contraption up to the door. She can't get it in, the child's half-bike joined to hers, there's no way. When she can't fill her own tyres an apprentice is sent to do it for her. She has to buy another light, every time she forgets to take it off it gets stolen. Three lights so far and now another one to scrape up the money for, to put on the card. She's so tired. The practicals, how they grind you down. Unreturned milk bottles, dusty floors, eventual despair. Lack of light.

36.

There comes a time when she is tired of rain. A time when she no longer welcomes or even tolerates the exciting contest between her and the elements, the one where she is determined to remain warm and dry and the rain is determined to penetrate her. Take these outer garments: fold, flap, button and zip. It's March and she is done. How tiresome the endless putting on of clothes, the endless overcovering! And more, and more, and still again more. Her tights are wearing out, holes appear in the toes. Her coats are dirty again and she's washed them once already this season.

She imagines rain, a spurned lover who won't get the hint. Imagines her voice turning harsh like with M, the times M didn't do what she wanted. Can't you see? Don't you know? She'd like to tell rain to see someone, fix its flaws. But rain can't change. Won't. And she's stuck with rain, no way of getting out of this one. Glances up at the sky, scowls. Imagines herself, free.

37.

She is angry all the time. Angry and incredulous. You'd think rain, the eternal damping of it, would temper her fire. You'd think she'd cool down. You'd imagine, she imagines, that nothing can simmer that long without burning dry and cracking, precisely, down the middle.

But she's intact, still. What go are her dishes, one at a time. Her grandmother's china has survived so much: her grandmother's lifetime and then an exciting few years with her. Barely, though. Once a man with a grudge, her son's father in fact, broke into her place and destroyed everything but the kitchenware. Staring at the stacks of dishes on the shelves, order in the midst of the carnage, she realized why. Breaking it would have made too much noise.

Fuck. Shit.

Her son has grown used to her cursing as another bowl slips clattering from her nerveless fingers. They have two left, one with a slowly blackening seam that does not bode well. Each time she reaches for it in the soapy water she says a small inarticulate prayer.

Oh. These are nice, she says to the people who bring her beautiful little tulip-shaped glasses, thick-cut teacups stamped with an unfamiliar name. She imagines the things trembling, as she holds them. Why, to the cruel god of china and glass, must this be their fate? Her faithless and inevitable hands.

It doesn't matter how careful she is. If she makes sure the stemware sits in the extreme inner part of the counter waiting its turn she breaks the glasses in the wash. Reaching out absentmindedly to put something back on the table she misses the surface entirely and over it goes. Once she broke a glass, a thick leaded tumbler, simply by banging it down on the table too hard. She isn't even always drunk, although that certainly adds to the carnage.

She carries her latest victim to the alley. Useless now, like so many other things. Outside it is raining again. Rain, what a democratic notion. Rain covers everything, even her mistakes, with a fine misting, a bumpy covering in the perpetual stand and motion of liquid. Rain is arrested, stilled in its ceaseless trajectory. Rain that bells taut against an internal suspension, wanting fruitlessly to escape itself.

She leaves rain to it. She abandons her loved and broken things to the wet.

38.

Yesterday she and the child plodded from street to street as usual, dodging puddles, dampening. Inside a steamy café she bought her child a hot milk. The woman at the next table was gruff and heavyset, ignoring them. Faintly traced moustache. Oh yes. Her child whined and wriggled and spilt the milk. She fixed him with a Look but to no avail.

Outside the rain continued, the rain in which their coast specializes. It dropped steadily onto the world, all-pervasive, impossible to ignore. She began to pretend. She imagined leaning forward and speaking to the woman, the two of them laughing. The woman would find her child adorable. Now the sun came out, the three of them would walk out together, the adults' shoulders almost touching. Later she'd get to see her naked, the stranger from the café.

On a sunny day a couple of years ago, she remembered, they sat in another coffee place like this one: she, her son, and M. She and M engaged to be married. Outside, so M the sun worshipper could take in the few rays. The child was on her lap, drinking hot chocolate. For a moment she allowed herself to picture the three of them, the fine family they made, to imagine the envy of everyone who saw them. Then the child turned and, without warning, vomited brown all over the front of her coat.

She remembers the limitless blue of the sky, that day.

39.

M kept a couple of old ponchos in the back of the Land Rover, tucked into their pouches. Probably they're there still. When rain came unexpected M would bring the jackets around to the front for them to wear.

In other respects M ignored rain as she ignored her surroundings wholesale. M had an ability, wilful it was, not to notice what was around her: stained carpet, furniture that cut into the backs of your thighs, the damp reaching in from outside. Padding barefoot onto the cold floor of the front porch on wet nights. Carrying her one giant drink. M liked drink, just not much of it; but it was in vain that she explained rum and Coke was unsuitable for cold weather.

Outside, wet licked at the stucco of the house. Lichen crawled up and around its edges. The wet window box balanced on the rail, empty but for soil, soaked it up day after day. Then the bottom gave out finally and the contents collapsed over the path. They skirted it for weeks, leaving the floorless box there, in the sky above.

40.

She listens to rain running rivulets into gutter and downspout, rain snaking down glass and wall. Rain trickles and gushes and goes from strength to strength. This is rain's only desire, to gather and grow. Each raindrop dreams itself a river, rushing towards the sea. Each dribble and dash swollen into an innumerable wall of its fellows. How would the sky look, full of rain? Nothing to see but water, and the city in the bottom of an aquarium with them, transfigured: swimming fish.

Rain slides off these hard smooth surfaces of concrete and glass, unable to stop or even slow its passage. The old ways were better, before man. Damp earth to dig into, wet leaves of curling fern to turn glossy in the storm. Rain making its own way. No sounds but the trickle of earth absorbing its utmost and the sudden soft collapse. The slump.

Rain as a constant condition is unknown to the ancients, or at least invisible in the writing left us. Perhaps before rain was at least partially thwarted by our waterproofs and rubbers, nobody went out in it. Perhaps it was too banal. Perhaps you ignored rain, and this was a rule that everybody knew. A self-evident injunction, not even worth writing down.