Some Rain Must Fall (7 page)

‘Prader-Willi Syndrome.’

‘Glandular dystrophy.’

‘Staple her stomach.’

‘Shorten her intestine.’

‘Step up the reducing diet.’

‘Suprarenal tumour.’

‘I’d go for Cushing’s Disease myself.’

Miss Fatt, for her part, had only one thing to say, only one suggestion to make.

‘Feed me!’ she cried. ‘I’m hungry!’ Her voice was squashed into a hoarse bleat by the fat in her throat pressing in on her vocal cords.

‘You’ve
had
your thousand calories,’ snapped a nurse. ‘At breakfast.’

‘Then kill me!’ sobbed Miss Fatt. ‘I want to die!’

‘Don’t be stupid, Mrs Fatt’ was the nurse’s retort. Like all the nurses, she found the fat woman in Room 13 monstrous and loathsome, but felt professionally obliged to pretend that she found her merely annoying and difficult, in case the patient might be shamed into making a recovery.

On December the 25th, Miss Fatt lay on a cot, or rather two cots pushed together, in the psycho-geriatric wing of a large hospital far from the residential part of town. She was naked, not because of her almost constant feeling of suffocation, but because no institution nightgowns were big enough to fit her and, as no one was paying for her stay, it wasn’t worth getting one specially made.

Miss Fatt was under treatment for suicidal tendencies arising from her delusion that she would continue to gain weight no matter how little she was given to eat or how many experimental drugs she was injected with. The room in which she was locked was free of edible substances and sharp implements; free of everything, in fact, except for the cots and a naked lightbulb overhead.

Trapped inside a quivering mass of fat, the tortured spirit of Miss Fatt was capable of nothing but stubborn outrage.

‘I – need –
food
!’ was all she said to her keepers, her voice almost strangled to a squeak.

‘You’re just an animal,’ a nurse accused her one day, as she warily cleaned up the enormous droppings smeared all over Miss Fatt’s cot-sides. Her slim, well-proportioned body was trembling with disgust and awe.

Others said: ‘Slut.’

Others said: ‘Cow.’

Miss Fatt just lay there, waiting for her meals. Her only distractions from the unbearable hours of longing were her agonies of breathlessness, headache, angina, sinusitis and thrombosis. The doctors were making bets among themselves as to what would be her eventual cause of death, and thrombosis was the favourite. Miss Fatt had heard one of them prophesy as much, while he was kneeling at her feet, examining her blubberous legs. He smelled strongly of an
aftershave which Miss Fatt had once nuzzled in a TV commercial. Perhaps the seductive eyes, the bee-stung lips, the subtle cleavage of her former body had persuaded him to try that aftershave, once upon a time. Now here he was, dwarfed by her mass, telling her she would die soon of thrombosis. She ignored him, secure in the knowledge that she would not die of thrombosis or anything else he could understand: she would die of her unique condition. Only at mealtimes did she glimpse death, knowing that the food she wished for so desperately would kill her by and by.

Miss Thinne was supposed to be dying in an inner-city cancer hospital, but on this Christmas night, taking advantage of the relaxed security procedures on Jesus’s birthday, she was instead able to be elsewhere.

She was in a taxi speeding towards Miss Fatt’s hospital.

Her ischia, jutting out through her fleshless buttocks, made shallow dents in the cab’s back seat as she excreted the last of the intravenous fluids from which she had disconnected herself hours before. A stolen overcoat hid from the driver’s notice both her nakedness and the fact that she was too wasted to live much longer.

Having reached the hospital gates, Miss Thinne swung open the cab door and limped without paying into the dense, unlit greenery. There she waited, not breathing, listening for the sound of the taxi driving away.

As soon as the air was silent she walked up to the long cast-iron fence and slipped through the bars, needing only to shed her coat to achieve this feat of insubstantiality.

She didn’t need to be told where Miss Fatt lay imprisoned: this final meeting was as inevitable as the metamorphoses themselves.

‘Suzie’

Miss Fatt’s slit eyes looked up at the high but unbarred window and saw, poking through there, the face and arms of her companion. Only the hair and skin lent some recognisable individuality to what was otherwise the common human skeleton.

‘You’ve come,’ squeaked Miss Fatt.

Miss Thinne heaved herself on to the window-ledge like a nightmarish white praying mantis, and lowered her spindly legs carefully down into the dark and humid room. Her forklike feet dangled more than a metre from Miss Fatt’s helplessly supine body.

‘Can’t reach,’ panted Miss Thinne.

‘Just let yourself fall.’

Surrendering her balance on the window-ledge, Miss Thinne allowed herself to drop, landing safely on the soft mound of flesh below.

Sprawled on top of Miss Fatt, who had so very much flesh and no discernible bones, while
she
had such very obvious bones and hardly any discernible flesh, she understood for the first time that the way they had become alienated from each other was strangely natural, like the separation of liquid from solid in curdling milk.

Both exhausted, they lay together, silent, while in the corridors outside, Christmas carols were sung to those patients for whom there was deemed to be some hope of remission. A faraway firework lit up the outside world and cast a rectangle of bright light on Miss Fatt and Miss Thinne. For the last time they tried to use their estranged bodies to show their love for one another, but for the first time this proved impossible.

‘I’m so hungry,’ lamented Miss Fatt, the tears trapped in swollen creases at the corners of her eyes. ‘But I know that if I eat anymore, even
one
more thing, I’ll die. I mean it.’

‘I know.’

‘My heart will just stop.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you? ’

‘Me? I’ve … had enough.’ This statement alone drained Miss Thinne perfectly white, her pitiful reserve of moisture and pigment apparently exhaled along with the words. Then finally:

‘There it goes …’

She meant the last of the contents that had nourished her, and indeed her body started shuddering, as if the bones were claiming their right to break free from their flimsy prison of skin.

‘Feel free …’ were her last words.

‘Yes … yes …’ said Miss Fatt, inside herself only. Outside, the Christmas carols were sounding fainter as Miss Thinne’s body grew still, and they had faded away altogether by the time Miss Fatt lifted the dead hand gently to her lips.

ROBBIE AND MCNAIR knew the job was going to be trouble when the Virgin Mary fell off her pedestal and smashed to smithereens right in front of them.

‘What do you think?’ said Robbie, when they squatted down to examine the rubble. He could see very well the statue was beyond repair, but he felt he ought to defer to his boss’s experience and authority.

‘It’s grit for roads now,’ frowned McNair, turning little fragments of the Virgin over and over in his massive hands. ‘Dr Prosser won’t be pleased.’

Dr Prosser was the ancient official who’d contracted McNair to oversee the renovations to St Hilda’s, a fine Victorian church which had lain derelict for most of this century. Funding had finally been found to rescue it from total collapse – half a million pounds’ worth.

McNair had had reservations about the job from the start. His company’s trade was restoring neglected old buildings, true, but he’d only done a few churches, none of them Catholic, and none of them in such a rotten state of repair that roof slates fell through the ceiling and you walked ankle-deep in pigeon shit and the statues were liable to brain you.

‘Have you not got any Catholic fellows for the job?’ he’d queried Dr Prosser.

‘None here in Ross-shire,’ sighed the bureaucrat.

‘To do this place up,’ McNair had warned, ‘you’ll need more than half a million pound, you’ll need a miracle.’

‘We’ve applied for more funding next year,’ said Dr Prosser. ‘That’s how it’s done. A year at a time. Just do the best you can to begin with.’

So McNair had taken on the job.

And regretted it almost immediately. At this stage, weeks in, he’d only just finished clearing the place of debris; he’d had to sub-contract a lot of extra labourers, and many overloaded garbage skips had been carted away. St Hilda’s was still a disaster area. The inner walls were full of holes, spilling out the disintegrating straw its builders had used for insulation. Half the floorboards were rotten, including (probably) the ones underpinning the splendid old stone font. Every structure, surface and fixture in St Hilda’s seemed to be in a sort of renovator’s Limbo: too frail or damaged to keep as it was, yet too solid and expensive to rip out and replace. The stained glass in the windows, for example, was a showpiece of Victorian craftsmanship – a pity only a few jagged bits of it had survived.

McNair and his apprentice, Robbie, stood in the nave of the church now, dead centre, deciding where to go from here. They’d spent thousands already and the place only looked sadder and emptier. McNair asked Robbie if he had any ideas.

The lad kicked pensively at the thick layer of pigeon cack on the floor.

‘I reckon the only way to get this off is to plane it,’ he ventured.

McNair sighed. He’d been hoping for something a bit more inspired than that.

‘Why couldn’t they have ploughed the money into Scot
tish industry, eh?’ he exclaimed suddenly. ‘Think of how many jobs half a million pound would create, eh?’

Robbie frowned, trying to imagine how half a million pounds might create jobs. It was as difficult as imagining how water could be turned into wine.

‘They could have built a … a shopping centre, mebbe.’

‘Eh?’

‘In a place that hasn’t got one. Uist, mebbe.’

‘Eh? What are you talking about?’

‘I was in Uist once. The shop was always shut by the time I could get myself out of bed. I could’ve starved.’

Feeling the weight of McNair’s incredulity, Robbie didn’t say anymore. The effort of thinking of a way to turn money into jobs had exhausted him. Personally, he didn’t see why, if there was a half a million pounds going spare for some Highland town, it couldn’t just be distributed equally among the sparse population. Who’d need jobs then?

Another idea Robbie had for what could be done with half a million pounds was maybe building a giant cinema complex in some place like Invergordon. All right, so it just happened to be where he lived himself, but it would get loads of customers from the ships and the rigs, surely. Everybody was desperate for something to do.

Only the other day, Robbie had gone to a terrible disco in Alness, hoping it would transform his life in some way. It was the sort of disco where no alcohol was allowed so everybody made sure to be thoroughly drunk before arriving. Robbie had searched the entire hall, from wall to wall, to find a girl who didn’t look as if she was about to fall asleep, or vomit, or bite him in the neck. He’d found just
one
. She was very short, seemed very nice, was very bored. She asked him what he did for a living. He said he was a stonemason, that he was doing up a church.

‘Oh, that sounds interesting,’ she’d said.

‘Em … it’s pretty boring, actually,’ he’d replied.

‘Oh,’ she’d said, looking away slightly and tapping her foot to the mechanised beat from London.

Looking back on it now, Robbie couldn’t understand why he’d said his work was boring. Shyness, he supposed, because it wasn’t true. The challenge of making St Hilda’s look like a proper church again – and not just that, but a different kind of church from the ones he’d grown up with – was pretty exciting, really. Re-attaching an intricately carved corbel, disguising the join with a cunning glue made of dust from the original stone mixed with cement: now
that
was satisfaction.

As for the problem of the smashed Virgin, Robbie got on to that promptly. Aware of McNair watching him in what he hoped was admiration, he consulted a telephone book and, using his mobile phone, called a church on the island of Barra, seeing as how it was such a Catholic place, and old-fashioned enough to have a Virgin of the right vintage.

‘Hello there,’ said Robbie, when he’d got through. ‘We’ve had a little accident here at St Hilda’s Church in Ross-shire. Yeah. And what I was wondering is, have you got any Virgin Marys you don’t need?’

McNair covered his eyes and sighed deeply as a harsh
cwuk
!
sounded through the phone.

‘He hung up,’ said Robbie superfluously.

‘Let me handle this,’ said McNair, motioning for the mobile.

McNair rang Barra back, explained who he was, translated the situation into officialese, mentioned the half-million pounds. Dressed up in this way, McNair’s conversation with the Catholic priest managed to last many seconds longer than Robbie’s. It might even have lasted a whole minute.

‘No Virgin Marys, eh?’ Robbie enquired when it was over and McNair was tapping his fingers dolefully on the table.

‘He says they may be
Catholics
,’ McNair said, ‘but they’re
Scottish
Catholics.’

‘Which means what? They do without?’

‘No, it means they make do with the one Virgin Mary they’ve got. No spares.’

The men sat in silence for a minute, gloomy. Outside, a vehicle pulled up, the rusty church gate creaked, the worm-eaten church door groaned, and a fragment of ceiling fell into the aisle. McNair suggested that Robbie go and see to the visitor and leave the Virgin to him. As a contractor of many years’ experience, he had lots of contacts when it came to specialised bits and pieces. There was a place in Cornwall which was brilliant for supplying crenellated moulding, for instance, and another one in Morpeth which was pretty much cinquefoil city.

Robbie went out to talk to a joiner who had just arrived with two dozen lathe-turned balusters for the gap-toothed balustrades upstairs. McNair took the opportunity to ring his old friend Alistair at Glasgow Cemetery Supplies and asked him what he had knocking around in the religious statues line.

‘I’ve got quite a few graveyard angels, all sizes,’ offered Alistair.

‘Any that could do for a Virgin Mary?’

‘I dunno. The Virgin Mary hasnae got wings, has she?’

‘Wings could be knocked off. The important thing is the dimensions and … em … the expression.’

‘What sort of expression?’

McNair thought hard.

‘Like … like those women in advertisements for instant coffee, just when they get to sit down and have their first sip. Except more serious.’

‘I’m with you, I’m with you,’ Alistair assured him.

Months went by. Painfully slowly but impressively surely, St Hilda’s began to come good. Sealing and retiling the roof made a big difference, of course, especially to what was left of the half-million pounds.

Meanwhile, in the outside world, Robbie met the girl from the disco again in the Invergordon supermarket. She worked there as a checkout assistant.

‘How’s the church coming along?’ she asked him as she scanned his paltry basketful of bachelor groceries.

This time he didn’t downrate himself or St Hilda’s, but told her a little about the challenges and how he was solving them. The girl had a lovely smile and looked quite pretty even in a supermarket uniform. Her name was Catriona. Unfortunately, she finished scanning Robbie’s groceries in hardly any time at all, and had to ask him if he was saving coupons for the tartan teddy bears. He said no and before he knew it he was outside on the street. A good problem-solver when it came to stonemasonry, Robbie was at a loss here: he couldn’t very well buy his groceries twice, could he? He supposed that meant it was all over between him and Catriona.

Back at the church, a stone angel had arrived which Robbie was turning into a Virgin Mary. He’d knocked the wings off no bother, sanded and polished her back, fixed her firmly to the pedestal. The angel had come without a few of Mary’s trademark features, but Robbie was adding these himself.

The missing cord around her waist was easy: Robbie merely cut a length of thin rope, soaked it in cement fondue, tied it on and let it dry. Adding a veil to the angel’s bare head was more difficult. Despite several attempts involving underwiring and gauze to give the cement-soaked fabric a full and flowing shape, it still looked as if the Virgin Mary
had been flipping a freshly rolled pizza base in the air and it had landed on her head. Every few weeks Robbie had to admit his veil was rubbish, knock it off the statue’s head and try again. All around the Virgin, the church of St Hilda was emerging from the rubble, but the veil refused to come good. Evaluating his latest attempt with a frown, Robbie wondered: how would a real Italian like Michelangelo have done it?

It turned out that Catriona was a bit of an expert on Michelangelo. Robbie knew this because … well, he’d seen her a few times lately. At the supermarket, and also at her mum’s house. Catriona’s dad was actually an artist but, due to lack of work opportunities in the Highlands, he’d moved to Edinburgh, and seemed to have forgotten to take his wife and daughter with him. He’d left his art books behind, though, and Catriona knew these intimately. With eyes closed, she could picture the Sistine Chapel ceiling better than her own bedroom, she said, then blushed.

In time, Catriona asked if she could come and see him working at St Hilda’s some time. He said he’d discuss it with his boss, though in truth it was his own shyness which prevented him taking her along right away. There was a particular expression workmates had told him he wore when he was concentrating, a sort of dumb intensity, which he wasn’t sure he wanted her to see. Also, he’d be covered in dust and glue and God knows what else, whereas when he visited her he always spruced himself up.

And so, putting off Catriona’s visit a little while yet, he returned to St Hilda’s and worked like a slave. McNair was impressed with the wonders his apprentice managed as the year wore on. Only the veil remained, frankly, crap.

One day, about eight months into the project, Dr Prosser
came to visit the church and, in due course, he stopped to appraise the renovated Virgin.

‘Her eyes are supposed to be closed,’ said the good doctor.

‘Closed?’

‘Closed!’

‘Well … she’s got to open them some time, has she not?’

‘Also, she looks as if a pancake has fallen on her head.’

‘No bother, easily fixed,’ grimaced Robbie, pulling his mallet from a loop in his belt. ‘It was a … an interim measure, like.’

He tapped the statue’s headgear gently but firmly with the mallet, and it fell away in shards.

By winter St Hilda’s was sound structurally; the weather proved it by raining and hailing down on it night and day without getting in. The floors were smooth and solid, if uncarpeted, and the aisles were symmetrical with repaired pews. The windows were sealed with wire mesh and ordinary glass: an interim measure. As a whole the place looked impressive but cold and rather bare. Resting at the end of a working day, Robbie and McNair drank coffee and discussed St Hilda’s finer potentials.

‘You know,’ mused Robbie, ‘I’ve been looking at them old Italian churches. Fellows like Michelangelo did some cracking stuff there, you know. Huge great paintings on the ceilings and all.’

‘Yes, well,’ said McNair, ‘Michelangelo’s passed on a few years ago now.’

‘I thought mebbe there might be some painters living around here who might like to have a go at these ceilings,’ persisted Robbie. ‘You know: job creation.’

‘I’ll raise it with Dr Prosser next time he comeS round.’

Robbie thought McNair was being sarcastic, but a few weeks later it turned out that McNair
had
raised it with the
bureaucrat. Word came back that when the basic renovation of the church was finished, in 1999, the board might then consider the possibility of commissions ‘Of an artistic nature’.

‘It’ll be the next century by then,’ objected Robbie.

‘A millennium project,’ grinned McNair. ‘They might get Lottery funding.’

It was late November before Robbie found the courage to invite Catriona to the church. McNair was away for the day, of course.

Catriona stood in the transept, enchantingly back-lit by one of the big portable tungsten lamps. She had walked all around the aisles, shyly explored the chancel, but she kept returning to this spot, standing perfectly still, looking up at the ceiling.

‘What are those?’ she asked Robbie softly, not pointing with her hands, which hung at her sides as if she’d forgotten she had any. Robbie followed the line of her pale throat up through the air until he, too, was staring straight up.