Some Rain Must Fall (24 page)

As far as Morton’s night went, the gist of it was this: Morton had been unaware that in the Scottish Highlands, the word ‘crack’ meant an enjoyable social experience, not smokeable cocaine. Standing in a telephone booth yesterday afternoon, making another attempt to phone Charles in Newcastle, Morton had overheard some teenagers agreeing to meet each other that night at the village hall in Balintore because, they said, there would be ‘plenty of good crack’ there. Was he hearing them right? Yes, definitely: one of them said it again: ‘The crack’s brilliant down there.’

So, that evening, Henry the taxi driver had driven Morton to Balintore and dropped him off at the village hall, where there was a ceilidh in full swing. Rosy-cheeked girls in Highland dress were doing the fling, a rock band called the Reelin’ Creels were playing raucous versions of old Scottish tunes, and everyone was well on the way to dancing and drinking themselves into a stupor. Morton just sat there for hours waiting for a dealer to appear and offer him something.

‘You should have got drunk, instead,’ said Fay, making
conversation across the aisle of the bus while they waited to see if Nick would show up.

‘I
did
get drunk,’ he retorted. ‘I got so drunk I spent the night sleeping in a field. I got so drunk I lost my camera. My special one with the telephoto lens. The film had all the pictures for my new show on it.’

‘Pictures of what?’

‘Sheep.’

‘Well, can’t you take more pictures of sheep?’

‘Through the fuckin’ bus window?’

A Japanese tourist, seated next to Morton, was alerted by this camera talk, and called Morton’s attention to his Minolta compact.

‘State o’ ze art,’ he beamed.

‘Real impressive, pal,’ grimaced Morton.

Encouraged, the Japanese tourist set out to reassure Morton that it was possible, after all, to take good pictures through bus windows, as long as we don’t try to do it with a normal, run-of-the-mill camera.

‘Noh-mal camerah …’ – he mimed taking a photo through the glass – ‘picture of self only … self in glass.’ He tapped the window, the reflection of his own knuckles. ‘
Tzis
camerah … press button … camerah look
through
glass … Picture of world outsigh!’

‘I’ll try and get one of those,’ promised Morton.

On time, the bus pulled away from Tain, without Nick Kline. Morton was nodding off next to the Japanese tourist, who was still pushing buttons on the magic camera and explaining how close you could get to the flowers. Fay was leafing through her copy of
The Glory of the Highlands
. June Laboyer-Suk just settled back and looked through the window, which was just as well, or they might all have missed the extraordinary sight, just outside Alness, of a huge broken
slab of concrete freshly painted orange, and daubed with the indigo message

ARTIST
GLASGOW

There was no one underneath the arrow anymore.

SOME RAIN MUST FALL

Michel Faber’s stories first came to prominence in 1996 when ‘Fish’ won the Macallan/
Scotland on Sunday
short story competition; in 1997 he also won the Neil Gunn prize and in 1998, the title story of this collection was overall winner of the Ian St James award. His novel,
Under the Skin
, published in 2000, received outstanding reviews and has been sold to eleven prestigious publishers abroad.

Dutch by birth, Faber grew up in two Australian cities and has lived for the past seven years in a remote cottage in Ross-shire. Since studying English Literature and learning to read Anglo-Saxon, he has worked as a nurse, a pickle-packer, a cleaner and a guinea pig for medical research. Canongate has published two of his books –
Some Rain Must Fall and Under
the Skin
. He is currently working on his second novel.

Further praise for
Some Rain Must Fall
:

‘For sheer inventiveness and endless variety, [this] collection takes the prize.’
The Independent

‘… the author’s lightness of touch, sense of humour and capacity for wonder conspires to give far more than mere angst … the texture has substance.’
The Spectator

‘… a bulging, jostling, glistening, eerie, babbling explosion of a book.’
The Scotsman

‘Michel Faber has produced a fine first volume … these are well-crafted pieces of quiet and forlorn intensity in a very real world.’
Mail on Sunday

‘[Faber has] an unjudgmental curiosity that nevertheless shapes his stories into moral tales, highly coloured parables whose range of unusual settings prod the senses, and feed them … a gem of inventiveness, a genre-defying, often startling debut.’
Scotland on Sunday

‘Above all Faber has the kind of wide ambition more usually found in his American counterparts.’
Literary Review

‘[Michel Faber has] a seemingly infinite imagination … a mesmerisingly inventive writer.’
The Crack

‘Scotland has a new force in literature. One which, with the publication of his first book of short stories, will reveal an author with a sackful of ideas and the skill to create characters strong enough to carry those ideas through.’
The List

‘He’s nae feart. God, the universe, love, sanitary towels – there’s nothing he won’t tackle. You can sense him out there wondering about the stars and not being too embarrassed to tell you.’
The Scotsman

‘Judging by his debut collection, he’s shaping up to be the Edwin Morgan of short fiction.
Some Rain Must Fall
has an astonishing variety of themes, characters and styles, from delicate psychological probing, to nightmare science fiction, to grotesque, hilarious fable.’ Duncan McLean