The Man Who Rained Read online

  First published in hardback and export and airside trade paperback in Great Britain in 2012 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Ali Shaw 2012

  The moral right of Ali Shaw to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

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  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Hardback ISBN: 9-780-85789-032-0

  eISBN: 9-780-85789-798-5

  Export and Airside Trade Paperback ISBN: 9-780-85789-033-7

  Printed in Great Britain

  Atlantic Books

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.atlantic-books.com

  For Iona

  ‘These our actors,

  As I foretold you, were all spirits, and

  Are melted into air, into thin air,

  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

  The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,

  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

  As dreams are made on.’

  William Shakespeare, The Tempest

  Contents

  1 THE CLOUD-CAPPED TOWERS

  2 AN EXECUTION

  3 CLOUD ON THE MOUNTAIN

  4 A HISTORY OF CULLERS

  5 WILD IS THE WIND

  6 PART WEATHER

  7 OLD MAN THUNDER

  8 THE LIVES OF THE CLOUDS

  9 THE SOLEMN TEMPLES

  10 BETTY AND THE LIGHTNING

  11 THE GORGEOUS PALACES

  12 GUNSHOT

  13 OLD WIVES’ TALES

  14 BIRTHDAYS

  15 PAPER BIRDS

  16 BROOK HORSE

  17 KITE

  18 THE LETTER FROM BETTY

  19 THINGS SPIRAL

  20 AS DREAMS ARE MADE ON

  21 WERE ALL SPIRITS, AND ARE MELTED INTO AIR

  22 THE LOVER OF THUNDER

  1

  THE CLOUD-CAPPED TOWERS

  The rain began with one gentle tap at her bedroom window, then another and another and then a steady patter at the glass. She opened the curtains and beheld a sky like tarnished silver, with no sign of the sun. She had hoped so hard for a morning such as this that she let out a quiet cry of relief.

  When the cab came to take her to the airport, water spattered circles across its windscreen. The low-banked cloud smudged Manhattan’s towers into the atmosphere and the cab driver complained about the visibility. She described how dearly she loved these gloomy mornings, when the drizzle proved the solid world insubstantial, and he bluntly informed her that she was crazy. She craned her neck to look out of the window, upwards at the befogged promises above her.

  She did not think she was crazy, but these last few months she had come close. At the start of the summer she would have described herself as a sociable, successful and secure twenty-nine-year-old. Now, at the worn-out end of August, all she knew was that she was still twenty-nine.

  At the airport she drifted through check-in. She paced back and forth in the departures lounge. She was the first in the boarding queue. Even when she had strapped herself into her seat; even as she watched the cabin crew’s bored safety routine; even as the prim lady seated beside her twisted the crackling wrapper of a bright boiled sweet; even with every detail too lucid to be a dream, she still feared that all the promises of the moment might be wrenched from her.

  Life, Elsa Beletti reckoned, took delight in wrenching things from her.

  Elsa’s looks came from her mother’s side of the family. The Belettis had given her unruly black hair, burned-brown eyes and the sharp eyebrows that inflected her every expression with a severity she didn’t often intend. She was slim enough for her own liking most months of the year, but her mother and all of her aunts were round. At family gatherings they orbited one another like globes in a cosmos. She feared that one morning she would wake up to find genetics had caught up with her, that her body had changed into something nearly spherical and her voice, which she treasured for its keen whisper like the snick of a knife, had turned into that of a true Beletti matriarch, making every sentence into a drama of decibels.

  Her surname (which she gained aged sixteen, after her mother had kicked her father out) and her physique were all she had inherited from the Belettis. She had always considered herself more like her dad, whose own family history existed only in unverified legends passed down to him by his grandparents. One ancestor, they had told him, had been the navigator on a pilgrim tall ship. He had coaxed the winds into the vessel’s sails to carry its settlers over unfathomable waters en route to a new nation. Another was said to have been a Navajo medicine man, who had survived the forced exodus of his people from their homeland and helped maintain under oppression their belief in the Holy Wind, which gave them breath and left its spiral imprint on their fingertips and toes.

  Elsa’s mum said that her dad had made both of those stories up. She said he had done it to pretend that his sorry ass was respectable. She said his ancestors were all hicks and alcoholics. She said it all again on the rainy afternoon when she kicked him out of the house and he stood in the falling water like a homeless dog.

  Then, this spring, he had left them for a second and more final time.

  The plane took off with a judder. At first all Elsa could see through the window was grizzled fog. She pinched her fingertips together to keep herself calm. Then came the first tantalizing break in the grey view. A blur of blue that vanished as quickly as it had come, like a fish flickering away through water.

  The plane rose clear.

  If the world that she left below her had looked like this, she could have been happier in it. Not a world of packed dirt under cement streets and endless houses, but one of clouds massed into mountains. As far as she could see white pinnacles of cloud basked in the bright sun. Peak after peak rose above steamy canyons. In the distance one smouldering summit flickered momentarily like a blowing light bulb: a throwaway flash of lightning some two hundred miles to the south. She wished it were possible to make her home in this clean white landscape, to spend her days lying on her back in a sun-bright meadow of cloud. Since that was impossible, she was giving up everything for the next best thing. Somewhere remote, where she could rebuild herself.

  ‘Ma’am?’

  She turned, irritated, from the view of the world outside to that of the aeroplane aisle and the air hostess who had disturbed her. After the majesty of the cloudscape, the domesticity of the plane infuriated her. The plastic grey cabin and the air hostess’s twee neckerchief. People loafing in their seats as if in their living rooms, reading the airline’s free magazine or watching whatever came on TV. A little girl wailed and Elsa thought, Yes, me too.

  The air hostess outlined the choice of set meals, but Elsa told her she wasn’t hungry. The hostess smiled with good grace and pushed her trolley further down the aisle.

  The plane turned away from the countr
y of her birth, from the glass-grey city blocks and the gridlocked avenues, from the concrete landing strips, from the ferry terminals and the boats jostling in the cellophane sea. She felt no sadness in saying goodbye to all that, although she had bitten back tears before boarding. Against Elsa’s wishes, her mother had appeared at the airport to wave her off, sobbing into a handkerchief. She had brought with her another unwelcome sight: a pair of presents wrapped in sparkling red paper. Elsa had tried to refuse them – she wanted to leave her old life behind her entirely – but had ended up cramming them into her luggage regardless.

  It had been years since Elsa had properly connected with her mother. Their telephone conversations were dutifully recited scripts, both of them dutifully reciting their lines. Their infrequent meet-ups took place in an old diner, where her mum would order Elsa the same muddy hot chocolate and slice of pecan pie which she had consumed greedily as a child. These days, the mere sight of that glistening slab of dessert felt fattening, but Elsa always forced it down. She hoped that by playing along, she might, some day, bring this repeating scene to a close and let the next commence. But they had been stuck in the same tired roles ever since her mum had kicked her dad out; and Elsa feared that her mother had thrown the remaining acts out into the rain along with him.

  This past spring, the first sunshine and the cherry blossom had brought with it news that had shattered her life as she had known it. Her cell phone had rung, hidden somewhere in Peter’s Brooklyn apartment. She and Peter had searched for it, lifting up cushions and rummaging in pockets, while it teased them with its disembodied tone. At last Peter had found it beneath a pile of magazines and tossed it to her. She had been breathless when she answered.

  ‘Is this Elsa Beletti?’ A slow, Oklahoman accent.

  ‘Yes. Yes it is.’

  ‘My name is Officer Fischer of the Oklahoma Police Department. Are you on your own, Elsa?’

  ‘No. My boyfriend’s with me.’

  ‘Good. That’s good.’ And then a deep breath. ‘Elsa, I am terribly sorry to have to tell you—’

  She’d hung up and dropped the phone. After a second it had started ringing again, vibrating and turning around on its back. In the end Peter had answered and talked briefly with the officer, and then hung up and wrapped his arms tightly around Elsa.

  Her dad had been found in the wreckage a tornado had made from his car – his lungs collapsed, his femurs shattered – a hundred miles west of the windswept little ranch on which he had raised his only child.

  A jolt of turbulence and the seatbelt signs lit up. The plane was entangled in clouds. Elsa gazed out at the grey view. After a long while, it fissured open and she could see a line of ocean like a river at the bottom of a crevasse. Then the plane shot clear, and below it the wide sea shuffled its waves.

  For some hours the world stayed unchanged. Then abruptly the sea crashed against a tawny coast. The land below was a devastated wild country, with drought-dried hills and pockmarked plains. A settlement passed beneath, its scattered buildings like half-buried bones. A tiny red vehicle crawled like a blood spider between one nowhere and the next. Then, for a while, there was only brown rock and brown soil.

  She still had all the letters her dad had written her after he’d been kicked out. He’d stopped writing when he ended up in jail, and people said they found it difficult to comprehend how a man behind bars couldn’t find the time to pen a few words to his only child. But Elsa understood him where others could not. She understood how his mind shut down indoors.

  She’d seen it as a kid, when an afternoon storm had lifted the gutter off the ranch’s barn, twirled it in the air like a baton, then flicked it at him. It broke his leg. Being holed up in the house while it healed made him catatonic. ‘I’m weather-powered, see,’ he mumbled once, and it was the best way to describe him. One blustering day he decided his broken leg had healed. He rose from his armchair and drove into the empty distance of the prairie. She remembered pressing her hands to her bedroom window to watch the dust trails rise up behind his departing truck. Then the wind scuffed them out. She could imagine him in whichever blasted patch of wilderness he had headed to, stepping out of the vehicle to turn his palms up to the sky, wind and rain prancing about him like dogs around their master.

  Her dad had raised her to love the elements with a passion second only to his, but life in New York had weatherproofed her. Only at her dad’s funeral, as the spring winds wiped her tears dry and carried his ashes away into the air, did it feel as if that passion had been uncovered again. It was her inheritance, but it had knocked a hole through her as if through a glass pane. All summer long she had been dealing with the cracks it had spread through the rest of her being.

  A pylon came into hazy view below. Then another. Then more, running in a little row towards the dimming horizon. Then came lights all aglitter and white, avenues of the first trees she’d seen in many hours, a wide blue river, roads chock-a-block with cars. Then everything reverted to rocks, plains and hilly land that looked like a sandpit from this high up. Dusk came. The speakers crackled with an announcement from the captain: they were coming in to land. The airport floors were mopped so clean that Elsa’s spectral reflection walked with her, sole to sole across the tiles. Heading for work in New York, she used to catch her reflection in traffic windows or corner mirrors in subway stations. She would pretend she’d glimpsed another Elsa, living in a looking-glass world where life had not become unbearable. Now, she thought as her suitcases slid on to the luggage roundabout, I’m one of them. A new Elsa. For a minute she was paralyzed by delight. She squeezed the handles of her cases so hard she heard her knuckles pop.

  By the time she reached the arrivals lounge, jet lag had set in. She stared at the row of bored cab drivers and wondered how on earth she’d find Mr Olivier. To her relief she saw a man holding a handwritten sign that bore her name. He’d left himself too little space to write it, so its last three letters were crushed together like a Roman numeral. He was a tall black man with a self-conscious stoop, wearing the same ghastly multicoloured jumper he’d worn in the photo he’d emailed her so that she would recognize him. His hair curled tightly against his scalp and was flecked with grey. When he saw her reading his sign he smiled with toothy satisfaction and proclaimed in a voice that sounded quiet, even though he raised it, ‘Elsa Beletti? You’re Elsa Beletti?’

  ‘Mr Olivier?’

  ‘Kenneth to you.’

  Funny to think that she’d first ‘met’ this man two months back, when she was in an Internet café in Brooklyn, bright sunlight filling her computer screen and making it hard to read the word she’d typed into the search engine: T-h-u-n-d-e-r-s-t-o-w-n.

  The computer returned a single match – an advert for a bed and breakfast. I’m looking for somewhere to stay in Thunderstown, she’d written in her email, and I’m thinking of staying for quite some time.

  Mr Olivier had emailed her back within minutes. In the space of the following hour they’d exchanged nine or ten messages. He described how he’d left St Lucia for Thunderstown in his late twenties, about the same age as she was now. He didn’t ask her why, precisely, she desired to exchange New York for a backwater of backwaters, a forgotten and half-deserted place many miles from any other town. She returned the favour by not asking why he’d chosen it over the Caribbean. She fancied she understood his responses instinctively, and that he understood hers, and that his offer to turn bed and breakfast into more permanent lodgings would prove amenable to them both.

  In the arrivals lounge he greeted her by clasping both his hands around her outstretched one. His palms were warm and cushioning. She could have closed her eyes, leaned against him and fallen asleep there and then.

  ‘I’m here,’ she said with tired relief.

  ‘No,’ he laughed. ‘Not yet. There’s still a long drive ahead of us.’

  She nodded. Yes. Her mind was wilting.

  Gently, he muscled her hands off her suitcases. He carried them as he led the way to
a dark car park, eerily quiet compared to the concourse. Here he crammed himself in behind the wheel of a tiny car. Elsa climbed into the passenger seat and breathed deeply. The car smelled pleasantly of wool, and when she reclined her head against the seat she felt soft fleece covering it. ‘Goat pelt,’ he said with a smile. ‘From Thunderstown.’ She turned her cheek into it, and it was downy and gentle against her skin. He started up the car and drove them slowly away from the airport complex into the frenetic urban traffic and parades of street lamps, lights from bars, illuminated billboards. Then, slowly, they left these things behind them.

  The steady passing of anonymous roads made her head loll. She opened her eyes. The dashboard clock told her that half an hour had passed. They were on a highway, a line of red tail lights snaking into the distance, catseyes and gliding white headlights in the opposite lanes. Kenneth hummed almost inaudibly. Elsa thought she recognized the song.

  What felt like only a moment later she opened her eyes to find the clock had rubbed out another hour of the night, and the windscreen wipers were fighting rain bursting out of the darkness. The traffic had thinned. Another car sped up as it overtook them and vanished into the distance. She rested her head back into the fleece.

  When she opened her eyes again the rain had stopped. Through a now-open window the night air flowed in, fresh-smelling. Ahead appeared the giant apparatus of a suspension bridge, with traffic darting across it and its enormous girders yawning. Left and right Elsa could see winding miles of broad river and lit-up boats bobbing on creased waves. A wind hummed over the car and struck the pillars of the bridge like a tuning fork. All around them the metal hummed. Her head drooped forwards.

  She dreamed about being with Peter, before he did the thing that sent her over the edge and made her realize she had to leave New York. In her dream she listened while he made white noise on one of his electric guitars, back in his Brooklyn bedroom. She sensed all the tenements, all the nearby shops and offices and the distant skyscrapers of Manhattan packing in close around them. Every window of New York City straining to eavesdrop.