Some Rain Must Fall (8 page)

‘You mean those ornamental panels sunk into the ceiling? They’re called coffers.’

‘They’re beautiful,’ Catriona murmured.

‘They’re about the only decorative part of this place that’s still in good order,’ sighed Robbie. ‘Everything else needs work or replacing.’

‘Oh, but you’ll do it, won’t you Robbie?’ she asked him.

‘Sure,’ he laughed, a little unnerved, because she sounded as if she was asking him to make some sort of solemn vow.

Noticing his discomfiture perhaps, she pointed at some vaulted arches converging above the transept and asked what the curvy bits underneath were called.

‘Oh, them? They’re called the … ah … groins,’ Robbie said, then blushed.

Desperate to salvage the moment, Catriona asked another question, the first one that came to her.

‘Don’t you think the Virgin Mary looks as if a big pancake’s fallen on her head?’

It was coming up to Christmas when the bad news came through from Dr Prosser. Regrettably, funding had not been approved for a further year’s work. There had been changes ‘at the top’ and the whole project had been put ‘on hold’.

When Robbie found out, he had to sit down; he felt as if someone had spiked his coffee with something fast-acting and maybe fatal. McNair, embarrassed, shrugged his shoulders as if to say it was just one of those things, but Robbie had come to love St Hilda’s. He didn’t care what denomination it was, didn’t even care if he or anyone else ever attended it. He just felt he owed something to St Hilda’s as a building.

On the last day of the contract, McNair and Robbie cleared out the last of their equipment, packed up the last of their tools. The church would be locked up until next year, waiting for another half a million. In the meantime, they could only pray it was weatherproof and vandal-resistant. McNair left, and Catriona arrived an hour later. Dolefully she and her man wandered around the premises one last time. Robbie tossed a protective sheet over the Virgin Mary’s still veil-less head. Shrouded entirely, she looked like a Halloween ghost.

To finish with, Robbie went upstairs and locked the doors to the balconies. When he returned to escort Catriona out, he was annoyed to find that the sheet he’d thrown over the statue seemed to have half fallen off. He stopped, had a good look and gasped in shock. The sheet had in fact been elaborately rearranged with deft folds and tucks, and now
framed the Virgin’s face in an elegant drape: a veil worthy of Michelangelo.

‘Did
you
do this?’ Robbie demanded of Catriona.

She looked up at him in disbelief, then covered her mouth with her hands and suppressed a little splutter of laughter. Robbie, calling upon his highly developed skills of estimation, confirmed she couldn’t be taller than four foot eleven. The Virgin’s head was almost seven feet off the ground.

‘You’ve got a lot to learn about women,’ Catriona smirked as she led him to the church door.

Resisting her for one last second, Robbie faced the statue squarely and pointed an authoritative finger.

‘Don’t move,’ he spake unto her, ‘until I get back.’

UPSTAIRS, A STRANGE man was going through her things.

She could hear the drawers of her dresser being slid open and shut, the awkward little groans of wood against wood.

‘At least he didn’t rape me,’ she thought.

Upstairs, there was a clatter: the contents of her jewellery box. Her senses were so heightened she could distinguish the sound of her engagement ring from that of her mother’s brooch, and so on.

And on and on: the clattering went on and on: he must be trying to sort through the jewellery, to find the valuable pieces. What an odd thing for him to be doing! Why not just take everything and pick through it later? She almost wanted to go up and help him, to tell him that her ex-husband had had all the jewellery valued for insurance purposes, and that the estimates were listed in a little notebook under the stationery in the dining-room cupboard. Always the rational one, she found it difficult to be tolerant of how irrational this man was being, wasting time trying to guess the relative value of rings and pendants in her bedroom when the police might come bashing at the front door any minute.

After all, there had been a gunshot.

His footsteps thudded down the carpeted stairs; she heard the rustle of his soft leather jacket as he rounded the corner on his way to the kitchen. Evidently he was thinking straighter now. Many people kept a stash of money in their
kitchen, in a jar or a drawer.
She
didn’t, but many people did. She could hear him beginning to look, and was surprised to be able to perceive the difference between the scrape of her stainless steel saucepan across the shelf and the smoother shove of the cast-iron one next to it, or between the tangled clatter of forks and the meshing of spoons. Was she imagining it when she felt she could even hear the infinitely muted click of his fingernails on the plastic of the cutlery tray? Surely she must be! And yet – wasn’t that the sound of the serrated Swiss knife she used for onions and tomatoes, being removed from among the others? In
his
hands, that knife was a deadly weapon. Was he going to come back in here and stab her?

Unlikely. After all, he had already shot her.

He was rummaging through the spice racks now, the coffee things, packets of spaghetti. Getting irrational again. Would he be on his knees, pulling long-unused baking dishes from the shelves below the oven, when the police arrived? It was pathetic, but she couldn’t help him. Her body, so overdue for a change of position, perversely refused to move. Her pelvis, knocked 90 degrees askew from her ribcage by the impact, seemed to have settled in to its new orientation. Worse, one of her eyeballs was almost,
almost
touching the fibrous tips of the carpet pile. The carpet was actually swelling up with blood, raising its pile by fractions of a millimetre.

To be honest, she didn’t think she could stand the sensation of nylon fibres tickling her eyeball, and she was right. The instant it happened, she was out of there.

Naked, she padded to the door of the living room and listened through the crack. He had left the kitchen now and gone into the bathroom. Of course he wasn’t looking for money in there; he was using the toilet. She could smell the sudden stench of his anxious diarrhoea, and understood,
with a sort of poignant fascination, that he hadn’t meant to kill her.

The queer thing was, she felt more alive now than she’d ever felt before: even the stink in her nostrils seemed to be vibrating hundreds of tiny cilia on its way up through an intricate maze of sinuses. Experimentally, she pinched her nostrils shut with her fingers: the pressure of flesh against flesh, the awareness of untrimmed nail and porous skin, was startlingly immediate. Next, she reached out to the door handle, but before she could grasp it, the door swung open, as if blown by a draught. At the same time, just outside the house, the sound of a large vehicle pulling up at the kerb made her wonder if police or ambulance had finally arrived. If so, who would they take away?

The curtains of the living room, which had preserved the privacy, the
intimacy
, of her encounter with the man now suffering upstairs, rolled aside at a gesture of her hands, flooding her living room with light. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, and the world out there was brilliant with sunshine after a rainy start earlier on. The vehicle which had parked in front of her house, little more than arm’s length from her window, was a cement truck so massive that only a section of it could be viewed, as if it were an absurdly enlarged detail from a painting, or a huge close-up filling a cinema screen. The enormous metal barrel was painted deep red, textured by corrosion, aged and weirdly organic. It revolved slowly, glistening with raindrops.

It was easily the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.

Next, a workman in red overalls stepped between the truck and the window, his back to her, almost brushing against the window-pane. With a ballet dancer’s grace he slow-motioned his arms in arcs through the air, to guide the great red cement truck through her narrow street, on its way to somewhere else. She was alarmed, for the first time since
hearing the gun go off. He must not walk away, this red-cement-truck man, without seeing her! Urgently she knocked at the window, or thought she did – at any rate, there was a sound of knocking on the glass, causing the workman to turn around. He squinted into her living room, staring straight through her nakedness at vacant furniture, looking down through her legs in case an animal might be trying to get his attention. He saw nothing. Her dead body was out of sight, below window level; her living one was invisible to him. Turning again, he continued his balletic motions, ambling sideways as the truck rolled on past, its barrel slowly twirling. Wherever its secret load of cement was going to be poured out, it wasn’t here.

Achingly, unbearably lonely all of a sudden, she turned to her old self and considered being dead. But slipping back into that body was such a distasteful challenge: it would be like trying to put on a dress that was ill-fitting, torn, soaking wet and slimy. She put a finger in, nevertheless, wondering if she could cope with the cold.

A key screwed in a lock: it was
him
, leaving. On impulse she ran through the house, silent as a torch beam, and joined him at the back door.

He seemed to have changed since she’d seen him last, through other eyes. The hulking psycho who had fired a bullet into her unexpected presence as if by instinct, had shrunk to a round-shouldered fumbler with a lost expression, like a visitor left responsible for a crying baby with a dirty nappy. The gun which had seemed such a natural part of him as he pulled its trigger was in his jacket pocket now, a misshapen lump clacking against her jewellery – Christ! hadn’t he even brought a
bag
? And she could smell, too, that he hadn’t flushed the toilet – Who
was
this man, to have killed her like this? How had he won the right to be the last man to touch her?

His clumsiness in solving the idiosyncrasy of the back-door lock was excruciating; she could sense he would love to batter it open but was afraid of failure or alerting the neighbours, or both. Instead he fumbled on, twisting the key, now gently, now roughly, grunting with frustration.

Again on impulse, she ran over to him and laid her hand over his, slipping her fingers through his, feeling for the key. He shuddered convulsively and the door sprang open.

‘Yes, yes,’ she whispered in his ear. ‘You bastard.’

He heard nothing, and yet he turned, his anxious bewildered face inches away from hers, scrutinising the unfamiliar furniture.

‘Go on, go on,’ she urged him. ‘Get out.’

As if pulling himself together by a strenuous effort of will, he turned away from her and stepped out into the back yard, moving so fast that she had to run to catch up. Once again the supernatural keenness of her senses startled her: walking close behind him, she could hear not only his nervous breathing and the rustle of his clothing, but his heartbeat – distinctly in his chest, faintly in his temples. She could smell the rain-soaked grass under his shoes as he trampled it close to the soil; she could smell the unopened buds on the bushes, the scattered dandelions, the ivy on the back gate, the traces of detergent in her T-shirts and underwear fluttering on the washing line.

The thought that she would never wear those clothes again, that they would hang there until someone got permission to put them into a labelled plastic bag, made her want to weep. She glanced, one last time as she followed him, at the knickers with the faded strawberry pattern, washed so many times, yet still perfect for her, snug, warm, forgiving of the weight she was at … the weight she no longer had.

She could tell from the way her killer was dressed and from the appearance of the sky that it was chilly in the world
today, but she felt nothing, not even the breeze that was fluttering her clothing on the washing line. She
smelled
the breeze, but didn’t feel it. Under her naked feet, as she followed her killer through the gate into the back lane, the grit and cobblestones and shards of broken glass felt no different from the carpet in her house. She wept then, for the irrelevance of clothes.

He had a small blue van waiting in the lane; he opened the door on the driver’s side and she got in immediately, sliding across to the passenger seat. She thought he would get in next to her, but he opened the hatch at the back instead, and retraced his steps to her house. Thank God for that! She hoped he would return with something valuable, to take away the sting of being killed for a pocketful of rings and brooches which the pawnshop might reject.

In the meantime, she examined the interior of the van to get to know her man a little better, and discovered to her bemused distaste that he was the sort who played scuffed and faded cassettes with titles like
Heavy Metal Gold
and
1993: The Big Ones
. But one thing was interesting: even with the van wide open, draughty with fresh air and uncollected garbage, she could easily detect the subtler odours of a woman’s facial cleanser, toner, deodorant, blood. Not the blood of death, either, but the blood of routine fertility.

That was good, good, good: it suited her that he had a wife.

He returned, a minute later, with her television, then went back for her cassette player and her juice extractor. Evidently, that was as much as his nerves were up to. Slamming the van’s hatch shut, he swung himself into the driver’s seat with an anxious grunt and set the engine revving.

By the time they were lying in bed together late that night, she had learned a lot about him, including his name. She
was whispering it now, over and over, into his ear, and every repetition added another furrow on his sweating forehead and deepened the crease between his brows. She could see in the dark, which was something his wife couldn’t do, of course. But then his wife didn’t need to see him, knowing him so well, knowing him so much better than anyone.

‘You’ve been with another woman,’ his wife said, dangerously sleepless next to him in the bed. She had her back to him, her cool hard shoulderblades only a few inches from his corpse-like, clammy body. Inside those few inches between them,
she
lay, fitting easily, yet exerting pressure.

‘What are you talking about?’ he coughed.

‘I can smell it on you,’ came the reply.

‘You’re off your head,’ he retorted. An invisible hand stroked his prick, teasing the blood into it.

‘I told you before,’ stated his wife frigidly. ‘One more time and it’s the end.’

‘I haven’t done nothing,’ he pleaded angrily. In his ear, a woman seemed to be whispering his name, urging him to let go and let it happen. In an agony of undischarged guilt and fear and desire, he reached out for his wife.

‘Take your filthy hands off me,’ his wife hissed. ‘Save it for
her
.’

And in between them, as his vital fluid pumped out silently into nowhere,
she
curled up in the impossible space and went to sleep.