The Man Who Rained (25 page)

‘Yeah. Yeah, I probably am.’

Silence – apart from the rummaging static of a few thousand miles of crossed air and leapfrogged oceans – but she had learned from Finn that an unfilled silence could be worth more
than a hurried word.

‘And the record?’ her mother asked. ‘It still plays okay?’

‘I don’t have a record player, but that doesn’t matter.’

‘Ah. It was ... I know it’s funny to give you something that’s already yours but, you know ... Oh, Elsa, I can’t believe it’s you.’

Elsa looked down at the telephone cord twisted round her fingers. It wasn’t already hers, it was and had always been her dad’s. Her mum used to infuriate her with such mistakes, but
not today. ‘It’s perfect, Mum. I mean, it’s a massive surprise because it was ... because it was ...’

‘Because it was your father’s?’

‘Yes.’

She could hear the breath passing over her mother’s lips. She wondered whether, if she could but listen hard enough, she might hear the clock ticking on the wall above her mum’s
phone, or the Oklahoman wind blowing through the avenues of Norman.

Mum blew her nose. ‘Sorry, Elsa, it’s just so marvellous to hear your voice. I wonder, did I ever tell you what my favourite line on that album was?’

‘I didn’t think you cared for it, Mum.’

‘“
Like a leaf clings to a tree, oh my darling cling to me. Don’t you know you’re life itself
...” She cleared her throat. Elsa knew it was hard for her
mother to talk about her emotions, even if it was in quotation marks. ‘Your father,’ she continued, ‘played that to me on the night we got engaged, after we got back from the
beach where he proposed to me. Do you want to know what he told me after that?’

Elsa bit her lip and nodded silently. Her mother waited for a moment and continued. ‘He said human beings were like a wind blowing. He said that sometimes we’re loud and sometimes
we’re a whisper, sometimes we’re warm and sometimes we’re frighteningly cold. But however we blow, we blow onwards, and leave no sign of us behind.’

‘Mum,’ Elsa gulped, ‘I think I fell in love.’

She yelped with excitement. ‘What? Love? I never thought I’d hear you say that!’

‘Well, I – he – changed my mind.’

‘Who
is
he?’

‘His name is ...’ she hesitated. She was tempted to say Cumulonimbus. ‘His name is Finn.’

‘And what does he do?’

‘He, er, he makes me happy.’

‘Good. Good. He sounds very mysterious. Although he’d have to be, to cut through all your opposition to falling in love.’

‘Well, you know, you and Dad never really made the best case for it, Mum.’

Her mum didn’t reply at once, and Elsa cringed and wished she hadn’t said that. It was so easy to slip back into the old ways of talking.

‘I loved your father very much, to begin with, but with all his storm-chasing he might as well have had another woman on the go. You won’t believe it, but when I was pregnant with
you, I was the more whimsical, the one who did things on the spur of the moment.’

‘I know. I never even thanked you for all those practical things you did.’

‘Don’t be silly, dear, of course you did.’

‘That’s kind of you, but I know I didn’t.’

‘You don’t need to say something to mean it.’

‘All the same ... thank you.’

Her mum blew her nose again, an explosion of snorts and gasped breath, distorted by the long-distance connection into something truly horrific.

‘So,’ said Elsa when they had both recovered, ‘are you not going to ask me where I’ve gone?’

‘I’m not allowed to, am I?’

‘Oh, Mum, I’m so sorry. I just ... I needed ...’

‘I know. You don’t have to explain.’

‘Well, you can call me whenever you like.’ And she gave her mother her telephone number and address and she told her about Thunderstown and Kenneth Olivier and each of the mountains
and again, eventually, about Finn, although on that subject there was very little more she could say.

By the time Elsa’s phone call had finished, the sun was up and the winds were blowing above the mountains, chasing a bunch of white clouds through the high fields of the
sky. She pulled on her sneakers and left the house, the kite rustling under her arm.

As soon as Finn opened the bothy door, she sprung on him and wrapped her arms around him. She leaned her head against his neck and heard the small swallowing noises of his throat and beneath
that his breath, the expansion and contraction of his chest. Surprised, he returned her embrace. Their bodies fitted together like separated continents.

After a while she took a step backwards so she could look at him. ‘I’ve got something for us,’ she said, and handed him the kite.

He took it out of its packet, the bows shimmering as he shook out the tail. He ran his hand over its glittering surface.

‘I want us to fly it together,’ she said.

‘But I don’t know how to fly a kite.’

‘I’ll teach you.’

A wind came rushing down the mountain, throwing up leaves and dust and humming through the bothy’s walls.

‘It’s the perfect day for it,’ she said.

He leaned forwards and kissed her. ‘Come on, then.’

Old Colp’s higher reaches inclined gently, giving way to meadows of dark tufty grass and dried-out ferns curled up into orbs. Finn led Elsa to one such place, an expanse dotted with
poppies that had – for the time being at least – dodged the attentions of the goats. Their scarlet heads bobbed in the sweeping wind, and the meadow grass keeled left and right in its
currents.

‘It’s easy,’ Elsa said, when they were standing side by side and the wind was eagerly flapping her hair. ‘We each take one end of it, and I hold the guide strings. Then
we run. As fast as we can, and when I shout to let go we throw the kite into the air. Got it?’

He nodded, concentrating, and took his side of the kite. She looked at him, laughed at how seriously he was taking it, then shouted, ‘Run!’

And off they shot, over the springy grass with the wind racing along with them and surging up their backs. The fabric of the kite crackled like a firework about to go off. They ran at breakneck
speed – she hadn’t run this fast in years – and then she yelled, ‘Throw!’ and they launched the kite into the air. It took off with a hungry crackle and ripped upwards
on the currents. They skidded to a halt, and Elsa turned to guide its flight with the strings, although all she really needed to do was to anchor it. It looped high above them in a dazzle, the
sunlight making the colour glitter in its fabric.

‘How do you control it?’ he puffed.

‘Like this,’ she said, demonstrating. ‘It’s easy, especially in this wind. Here, have a go.’

He took the guide handles from her as cautiously as if they were eggshells, but he quickly grew in confidence. He tugged experimentally at one handle and the kite dinked to the side. He grinned
and made it reverse the other way. He had mastered it in no time, just as he had mastered the art of folding paper birds. Now he made it dance a figure of eight, now zigzag across the deep sky. Its
tail coursed in its wake.

Elsa watched Finn’s face. It would not be possible for his grin to be any larger. ‘I wonder if ...’ he mused as he experimented with the strings. ‘Watch this!’

He made the kite move at a blur through an arc and another arc, so that it traced an E in the sky. After that it shot vertically in a straight line, then shimmied back down on itself. Finally it
zipped through a circle, signing off with a dash.

‘You wrote my name!’

He nodded happily, and offered her the strings. ‘Your turn.’

She got through a loosely defined F, then sent the kite crashing down to the ground where its fabric ruffled indignantly, caught in the grass. They picked it up together and dusted it off.

‘Try again?’ he asked.

‘Damn right!’

She began to run. Finn chased along beside her and the kite crackled between them, already straining to ride the wind. They raced across the flowery earth and she was about to shout,
‘Now!’ when she tripped and flew forwards, losing her grip. The sheer surprise of it made him trip too. He yelped and clutched in vain at the kite’s tail as he fell along with her
on to the grass. They rolled on to their backs just in time to watch the kite shoot free, wriggling away like a snake swimming through water.

Elsa laughed.

‘You aren’t cross that it’s gone?’

‘No. It was fun while it lasted.’

He nodded.

She moved across to lay her head down on his chest. There was a noise in there of distant thunder. She lay against him, looking up at the kite until it diminished into a white dot, a star in the
daytime.

‘We should go too,’ he said.

‘What? We only just got up here.’

He became serious. ‘No. I mean, you and I should go away. We should have an adventure together.’

She stared outwards at the great blue atmosphere and wondered how far their kite had flown. There was infinity beyond that cerulean expanse. ‘Where would we go?’

‘I don’t know. That’s the exciting thing about it.’

‘I’ve only just started my job. I might not be able to book the holiday.’

‘Elsa, that’s not what I meant. I meant we should leave Thunderstown.’

‘Oh. Wow. That’s a big step.’

‘Yes. That’s the whole point of it.’

‘Finn, I’ve only just got here. It was only this morning that I told my mum where I’d gone.’

‘You don’t have to lose touch with her again; I’m not suggesting that. But think how exciting it would be to pick a horizon and head off for it.’

What if, she wondered, Thunderstown had never been her destination, but only the starting post for an important journey that was to come? She tested herself to see if she had grown too attached
to leave. She had not fled New York in search of a change of bricks and mortar. She had left it in search of a different life. Kenneth would be disappointed, and she realized just how much it would
hurt to leave him; but they could always stay in touch.

The wind gushed above them, playing the air like a saw. She remembered the dog that had intruded into her room that morning and taken the kite in its teeth. Already now that kite was far away,
lost over undiscovered country.

‘Deal,’ she said.

‘What? Are you serious?’

She yanked his arm so that he followed and lay across her, looking down at her with only an inch of air between them. ‘Deadly. But for the moment let’s just stay here.’

He grinned. Then, once again, that champagne-cloud began to show around the outline of his head, catching the light and giving him a silver lining. A gaseous halo, this time stretched and
snatched at by the wind. She stroked her hand up over the bald dome of his head and the cloud parted at the motion.

‘This is your happiness,’ she whispered, ‘and I am so glad that I helped you to discover it.’

In the morning Daniel trekked up Drum Head, to check the traps he had set there. He could taste moisture on the air – a change of weather was due. The sky was rugged with
altocumulus, apart from in the north where the pointed peaks of the Devil’s Diadem had torn strips out of the clouds. Above him, the sun looked perched on the peak of the mountain, as if it
were considering turning back down the far slopes. Below, in Thunderstown, somebody was having a bonfire: a thin helix of smoke drifted up from somewhere in the vicinity of Corris Street.

He huffed, and turned his back on the town. He was still hurting from his treatment at the hands of Sidney Moses and his followers. He should have done his duty and killed that brook horse, not
indulged a weak-hearted mood that must have made him seem like a silly, bleating little lamb.

He came to a part of the mountain where bristling spears of slate jutted out of the earth. To progress uphill he had to wind his way between them – the slate spears were
as regular as trees in a tight forest. This was a good place to kill goats, for the routes between the stones were narrow and could be laid with traps until the place was like a minefield. He trod
carefully, watching the pebbly ground to ensure he didn’t fall victim to one of his own concealed devices. ‘Hah!’ he cried, the noise ricocheting between the trunks of rock,
Sidney Moses would not last five minutes up here. He would no doubt chop his own hands off when he tried to prime his first trap. Likewise, Hamel Rhys would be done for within moments, and Sally
Nairn too, and even a man such as Abe Cosser, who knew something of the mountains, wouldn’t survive.

The first and second traps he came upon were empty, but in the third he found a young nanny who had died overnight in a vice of steel. He unhinged the metal jaws and slumped her body against a
rock, where it would make quick crow fodder. He reset the trap, winching back the lever that helped open wide the jaws and lock them in their deadly circle, then he stood for a while with his hands
in his pockets, looking at the saw-toothed metal.

If you judged it rationally then of course it was futile. Even his grandfather had admitted that. One man with a rifle and a collection of snares could never hope to keep in check the population
of an entire species. What mattered was the trying. A culler’s real work was not done up on the mountains but in the perception of the townsfolk, where it affirmed that somebody was out there
in the wild, keeping Thunderstown safe.