Some Rain Must Fall (5 page)

‘God?’ The voice was shaky, close to tears. ‘Are you there? Can I talk to you?’

There was a pause while God and the other child both held their breath, then nothing. God had lost him.

God jumped up and stood on his chair, putting his face close to the planet as it hung there. Even in the darkness he could see the white of the poles, some jet-streams, clouds. He could not, of course, see the boy who had whispered to him.

‘Hello,’ he whispered back, his lips touching the exosphere. ‘It’s me. I’m right here.’ Clouds formed instantly under his mouth, as if he had fogged a window, but that was all. No doubt there would soon be weather too extreme to measure, in exchange for this attempt at conversation, but he was too sleepy to wait for it. His eyeballs felt swollen and he was shivering.

In bed, he fell into sleep as if from a height, as if he were a single, soft-spoken word falling through space. Then he dreamed of going to the back of the universe, his favourite place for finding new toys. This time, however, he heard, as he approached, the sound of someone rummaging there ahead of him. It was another child, the same size as himself, emerging bum-first from the charred shell of an ancient generator. God dashed forward in an ecstasy of loneliness, desperate to be as close as possible before the child turned to show him if it was a boy or a girl.

He ran and ran, all night, for ever and ever, until, in the morning, he woke, remembering nothing, except that it had been good, and he was happy.

TWO FAIRLY YOUNG ladies, having been friends since convent days, still lived together in a small cosy house. They were terribly used to one another, and took turns to do the scrambled eggs in the mornings.

Miss Fatt, who was not fat, regularly performed such tasks as extracting the different-coloured hairs from the bath plughole, scrubbing the dried toothpaste froth off the bathroom sink, and other jobs which Miss Thinne, who was not thin, detested. Miss Thinne took care of such tasks as washing and ironing, and her friend considered this a fair exchange.

Physicalities are important in this story: Miss Fatt was a slender woman with long legs, big breasts and a face like Marilyn Monroe’s. Miss Thinne was likewise a slender woman with long legs, big breasts and, in her case, a face like Greta Garbo’s, but fuller in the cheeks. Had they been in the habit of wearing each other’s clothes they might have been mistaken for each other, at least in bad light.

But they weren’t in the habit of wearing each other’s clothes (however perfectly these might have fitted), because they considered themselves to be as different as chalk and cheese. This conviction (a totally mistaken one) was based on things like the division of the housework. How could they be even similar, they thought, if one of them retched while the other hummed contentedly over a toilet bowl? How could strangers have trouble telling them apart, when
one of them spent three hours a week ironing, and the other had ironed for perhaps three hours in her whole lifetime?

However, there are deeper truths than division of labour, and in reality Miss Fatt and Miss Thinne were so much alike that they were almost a single organism, growing in two pale branches from an invisible root in the heart of the house.

On a typical day, the alarm went off at seven in the morning, and one of the women would reach out of bed and turn it off, this responsibility being accepted in turns, as the alarm clock was shifted nightly from one bedside table to the other. Miss Fatt might get out of bed, put on her slippers, and shuffle into the kitchen to make breakfast.

At the breakfast table, she and Miss Thinne would talk in the drab private language developed by people who share too many minutes of the day.

After breakfast, the women got dressed, Miss Fatt in her Wonderbra and fashionable clothes, Miss Thinne in her white uniform and regulation cardigan. Then they left for work in the car they shared, Miss Thinne getting off at the Community Health Centre, and Miss Fatt driving on to wherever she was wanted that day.

Occasionally she wasn’t wanted anywhere and would drive back home, but usually she had plenty of work, what with her Marilyn Monroe looks.

Miss Thinne’s duties as a community nurse were many, and she enjoyed every single one of them. She was one of those health-care professionals who had the knack of generating a sort of breezy warmth impossible to distinguish from genuine affection. This allowed her to get along with anyone, especially the sick and elderly.

‘How are you today, Mrs Carbioni?’ she might ask, while changing the dressing on that woman’s perennial ulcer, or:

‘There you go, love,’ as she set a plate of food in front of a shuddering old crone, or:

‘Have you given some thought to what I told you last week about smoking, Mr Sangster?’

She could be motherly when required, or sisterly, or like a devoted daughter. She never failed to get what she wanted, which was the best for her patients.

Her colleagues pronounced her a marvel.

‘Eleanor’s a marvel,’ they said.

At morning tea back at the Community Health Centre there was congenial chat among the nurses. Each nurse discussed her patients’ worsening problems around a large laminex table.

‘Mr Simek is forgetting to go to the toilet and he can’t seem to manage the phone anymore. Becoming very uncooperative too – a real pain!. I think he’ll have to be moved out of home pretty soon.’

‘Poor old soul. He was a lovely dignified man only a few years ago.’ This was Miss Thinne talking, of course.

‘Yes, I suppose he was … It seems so long ago now, I’d sort of forgotten. You remember them all so well!’

‘Eleanor’s a marvel where that’s concerned.’

Miss Thinne blushed, not out of modesty but almost out of shame for being so ideally suited to her chosen profession, as well as so ideally suited to her chosen home life and the companion who went with it: so ideally suited, in other words, to life altogether.

Late in the afternoon she would leave the Health Centre and, if she didn’t see the car waiting by the side of the road with Miss Fatt reading a magazine against the steering wheel, she would stroll to the bus stop.

Miss Fatt worked for a glamour agency, which meant she was a model most days, and more occasionally an actress. Being busty, she didn’t get much fashion work, but there were plenty of other assignments.

On television, she’d played a criminal’s girlfriend (or possibly wife) in an episode of a popular detective series, a good meaty part which had required her to convey Anxiety, Love, Bitterness, and finally Grief and Horror when her boyfriend (or possibly husband) went down in a hail of police bullets.

Her one movie role so far had required rather less acting than that, but at least she hadn’t bared her breasts, unless you were going to split hairs over where exactly breasts began.

Mostly, however, she did commercials, through the agency of Carp & Bravitt. Starring and supporting roles came in mixed succession: one day she might be almost lost in a crowd of women gaping at a man because he was wearing a particular brand of shirt; the next day she might be the star, holding a can of floor polish with a smile. Next time after that, however, she might again be running in a crowd, following a seven-foot rabbit to a supermarket.

Obviously there wasn’t much of a future in commercials, but Miss Fatt had high hopes for her acting career: in a few weeks, she would be playing another, different girlfriend (or possibly wife) of a criminal in another, different television drama, and in about two months she was actually contracted to play a sinister, sexy villainess in
Lethal Weapon VI
, a big-budget international movie. This was certainly a big deal, in any sense of the word.

‘Heard about your film job coming up, Suzie,’ said Mr Carp.

‘Yeah,’ said Mr Bravitt. ‘A real stroke of luck. But you deserve it, Suzie.’

Both men thought she had excellent legs and breasts.

The makers of TV commercials were always very nice to her, too, because it was against their interests to have anyone miserable associated with the product. For Miss Fatt, a commercial meant nothing less than an afternoon of fun. Directors would ask her how she was going, did she want a cup of tea, would she mind awfully doing just
one
more retake?

‘All right girls: big leap in the air now … Come on! I know it’s daft, but let’s all think happy thoughts about getting paid for this!’

In all her years in TV commercials, even as the lowliest extra, Miss Fatt hadn’t had one unkind word said to her. She might not have impressed anyone as a marvel,
yet
, but she was, it was generally agreed, a really nice girl. And, when the shooting was over, Miss Fatt would swing into her little car and drive home.

It was on the 25th of April that Miss Fatt and Miss Thinne first began to suffer from their unusual problem.

Miss Thinne turned off the alarm at seven and slid out of bed into her slippers. It was her turn to make the breakfast, and with dutiful contentment she gathered together the makings, such as bread, margarine, eggs, tea and so on. But when she’d finished gathering them together, the hoard suddenly struck her as a monstrously large one. In fact, it seemed
so
excessive that she was a bit revolted: did she really have such a gluttonous appetite as this pile of food would suggest?

As if to answer her own question, she looked deep into herself and tried to examine her appetite, but glimpsed only
the last trickles of it disappearing into a black hole It seemed to have been lost as helplessly, as inevitably, as water out of a colander. Within a few moments she was entirely taken over by the realisation that
eating was not for her
. she’d been doing it for too long. What on earth was the point, after all, of putting things in your mouth, pulping them up with your teeth, and swallowing them?

‘What’s wrong?’

It was Miss Fatt, come into the kitchen in her slippers and nightgown. She looked at Miss Thinne as if to say, What are you doing just standing there? And Miss Thinne looked back at Miss Fatt as if to say, What are you in such a hurry for?

‘I couldn’t
wait
,’ said Miss Fatt. ‘I’m so
hungry
.’ She ogled the eggs in the egg-basket, but they were hard-shelled and raw, intolerable minutes away from being ready to eat, so she went for the bread instead, snatching up slices of it straight from the packet.

‘Oh my God, what a hunger,’ she mumbled, stuffing herself.

‘Go ahead,’ conceded Miss Thinne. ‘Eat it all. I’m not a bit hungry this morning. Couldn’t eat a bite.’ And she stood there, shivering in her nightgown, marvelling at the ability of a human to do what Miss Fatt was doing.

Miss Fatt frowned in mid-chew and pointed out with some concern,

‘You should eat something.’

Miss Thinne opened the refrigerator and scooped a handful of grated carrot out of a plastic bowl. With uncommon delicacy she took her seat at the kitchen table and, while Miss Fatt continued eating slices of undecorated bread, she stared at the handful of carrot and reflected,

‘You know, this is really quite a lot, when you think about it. It must be … four or five cubic centimetres, at least.
The whole human stomach wouldn’t even be five cubic centimetres, would it?’

‘Oh, much more than that,’ demurred Miss Fatt, gasping in between swallows. ‘Anyway, it stretches.’

‘Ugh,’ said Miss Thinne. ‘I don’t like the sound of that.’ Carefully she transferred some of the carrot to her other hand and nibbled, like a suspicious animal, at the reduced amount.

Miss Fatt swallowed hard on her sixth slice of bread and was comforted by the realisation that if she put some eggs on to boil now, she could continue eating bread until they were cooked.

In due course, Miss Thinne and Miss Fatt went to work.

‘And what do you do of a weekend, Eleanor?’ a co-worker asked Miss Thinne over morning tea.

‘I play the oboe in the Catholic Women’s Sinfonia,’ she replied.

‘You’re joking!’

‘No, I learned it at convent school, and sort of never gave it up. It’s a lot of fun.’

‘Ha! Ha! Good for you!’

Miss Thinne blushed, sipped her tea, but did not touch her biscuit.

Miss Fatt went off to the countryside to be driven around. She was playing the wife of a man who had just bought the right brand of car. A camera mounted variously on the bonnet, the side windows and the back seat filmed the two of them smiling at each other, so pleased with the car’s wonderful performance. Miss Fatt’s seat belt kept her breasts separate, for easy viewer identification; the rear-view mirror was angled towards her, so that she could judge whether the wind was blowing her hair in an unphotogenic direction. If
that happened, she had the authority to order the car stopped so that she could get a touch-up from the hairdresser – now if that wasn’t star treatment, what was? ‘How about a drink after?’ proposed the actor at the wheel to Miss Fatt. There was no sound being recorded by the cameras, of course, so only expert lip-readers would have known he wasn’t expressing his delight at the steering or suspension.

‘Why not invite me out to lunch?’ said Miss Fatt. She had never asked a man anything like this before.

The actor laughed. ‘All right, love.’

Over the roar of the engine, which in the finished commercial would be replaced by exhilarating music, Miss Fatt’s stomach rumbled and whined.

By the 25th of May, Miss Fatt and Miss Thinne were developing rather different shapes from those they’d had for years. The cause was, respectively, eating and not eating.

In the mornings, Miss Thinne ate almost nothing, and Miss Fatt almost everything. Because the grocery expenses remained much the same, neither of the women made any fuss about this new routine; in any case, it had established itself so abruptly and so invincibly that they were forced to accept that it was meant to be.

Only once did they share any apprehension about what might lie in store for them, and on that occasion they merely caught each other’s eye across the kitchen table and, pushing aside for a moment a bowl of porridge and a stick of celery respectively, they joined hands and squeezed until their grip trembled and tears welled up in their eyes.

‘You’re looking awfully smart, Eleanor,’ Miss Thinne’s co-
workers said at first, for her weight loss made her look, well,
willowy
, at least in clothes.

‘How do you do it?’ was also much asked. ‘Whenever
I
go on a diet, nothing happens.’

And then again: ‘Being skinny’s all the rage these days. When I was a girl, you were supposed to be plump and rosy!’

Miss Thinne was
thin
and rosy. The rosy part was from a make-up kit.

Miss Fatt did a lot of exercise each day, to keep her weight gain within reasonable limits. Her belly was still trim, but she was putting on quite a bit on her breasts, thighs and bottom.

‘Shaping up for
Lethal Weapon VI
, eh?’ guessed Mr Carp. ‘You’ll stun ’em, Suzie.’

‘What a body,’ sighed Mr Bravitt, out of earshot.

Miss Fatt’s actor friend took her out to lunch and dinner regularly. A couple of times she’d even accompanied him back to his flat, which had very little in it except a bed and a refrigerator. She’d used his refrigerator, but not his bed, though she knew it was only a matter of time before he demanded some sort of sexual reward for his generosity. The problem was, sometimes his flat was just so much closer, as far as the next meal was concerned, than her own home.