One Hundred Days of Rain (2 page)

4.

It rained all the week before the day they got married. She was crossing her fingers. Praying even. For the wrong thing as it turned out. The sun finally came out that afternoon, just before time. She counted herself lucky. Thought it was a sign. They had their first argument on the way to the reception.

5.

All day rain continues to threaten. Dark overhang, mutter and threat. Weather in a temper. Something on its mind. Doesn't like to say. Clouds furrowed, roiling heavily overhead. Stirrings in a pot, coming to the boil. She goes to the giant thrift mart to augment her wardrobe. It is all very well to embrace the virtues of simplicity but a few days in one outfit is monotonous, even if you do carefully wash out your underthings each night in the sink.

She has never had much luck at this place, picked over as it is, but today she finds a short-sleeved red sweater and a pink-striped shirt that ties in the front with two bows. They can be worn separately, or one over the other. She stands in line behind the less fortunate, waiting to pay.

Outside the big front windows of the store rain has begun in earnest. This is the rain the denizens of the city know best, the rain they have cause to know. In the days before the weather began to change there would be weeks of it at a stretch. It is said of this rain that it drives people to suicide, that the sodden winter tries the strongest. Apocryphal tales are told of strangers who move to the city, seduced by summer's zephyrs, only to find themselves trapped in the grey world of the coldest months. If you're lucky there's a break in it, at Christmastime; if you are extremely lucky it snows. Otherwise the days without respite pile up: thirty-three in a row had been the record, thirty-three days of rain. Until now.

As for those who were born here rain is their birthright and she imagines that everyone expands just slightly under it, like mushrooms. They all have their different ways of coping. The mountains disappear. They like to drink tea and look out the windows, at least she does. They read newspapers and old novels. Newcomers scorn their ways. They drive harder in their piled-up trucks, headlights blazing, sheets of water parting for them. Mortgages to be paid, work to be done. Pedestrians leaping aside too late. The drivers don't even notice, heads tilted, hand to their jaws: a city of toothaches. Mumble. Astride her bicycle, she sets her teeth and follows in their wake. Her natural enemies, clearing a path.

Meanwhile the rain goes on, indifferent to their various responses. It is unvarying and monotonous: that's what drives the newcomers mad. No sound at all comes from it: no friendly patter or rattle of wind. The skies drip, that's all, and the relentless drip soaks silently into the land. She walks to the café to pick up her son. It's a long walk but she won't take the bus. Once again she is thankful for her thick-soled shoes. The misery of bad shoes, ones that let the weather in, so that your feet when you peel off your squishy socks have a pale, pinched look of reproach. She hopes her son will be wearing boots. The boy just turned five, practicality can't be expected of him. Did they have a party for him, before all this? They must have done but she can't recall. Everything from then turned grainy in her mind, everything except the fight with M receded as behind a screen, only the weather explicable. Only the physical left, to hold her up. Their belongings, inventory, survival, what they have and can see.

6.

The police, bless them, favour this café. They come in on their breaks, line up at the counter, drink lattes and eat muffins. Model citizens. They are there when she arrives, filling up two small tables in the middle of the room, weighted down like divers by belts studded with equipment. The child is with his father on a visit: they are expected in a few minutes. She waits, drinking milky coffee.

M, as she knew she would, arrives too. M looks just as usual: short pink face, the greying crewcut touched with darkness at the temples. The look of a small, surprised animal in the neat alert head and wide-set ears. Her usual outfit: button-down, khakis, pull-on Australian boots. M affects surprise. What on earth is she doing here, M wonders aloud. M decides that if she wants to say hello to her child it's fine. She stares stolidly at a point on the wall. Then the lights of the car belonging to her child's father, sliding across the far wall of the café as it turns in. She stands up and walks to the table full of officers.

Excuse me, she says. This woman, pointing to M, insists on speaking to me.

The officers show no surprise. Two of them stand up, lead the women separately to the thin strip of sidewalk outside the café. It has begun to rain again: she can see the widely spaced dashes on the concrete. A spotty, insinuating rain, an irritant. The voices of the officers as they ask their questions are low, intimate. Words bubble: psychiatrist, assault, restraining order. A third policeman intercepts her child's father as he stands up from the inside of the car. There were scenes like this, worse in fact, in her own childhood: shrieking adults in the driveway, cars and parents coming and going. Never again, she swore.

What is going on? the child's father demands, striding at last into the cafe. Darkness has fallen, the windows to the outside turned glossy slate. The police have cleared out. Even M has gone. Only she and the child remain, survivors on a raft, fortifying themselves with hot sweet drinks.

There's been a bit of a . . . She hesitates delicately. Now that it is all over, now that she has her child by her, she feels faint, like a heroine of olden times.

Apparently you've been acting crazy? You look pretty sane to me. Ah, sanity. Such a subjective opinion. He's the one who went last time around. She recollects her shattered apartment, his words of rage. Now here he is, confirming her soundness of mind. She's even grateful. Imagine that.

7.

They take refuge. It's a modest building downtown, on Barclay Street. Their sixth-floor corner apartment studded with Air Wick fresheners but she fixes that. The heat is always on. A boon given their meagre wardrobes. They're camping out. At least life is simple, she says.

Let's make everything normal.

Let's pretend like nothing bad happened.

Her child wants to call M. Why not. Because M will recognize the number, know where they are. M will call the landlord, who she happens to know. An acquaintance of theirs. Concerned, she'll be. Just thought you should know.

Sure, go ahead. Of course. Her child's treble. Outside, the rain continues. From the sixth floor the sky behind the building opposite (stained stucco, faux-cheerful iron tubing in primary red) is a featureless pale grey, undifferentiated even to the extent of clouds. There is no way to tell it's actually raining: the drops themselves are invisible both in the air, as they fall, and on the ground. Only the continuing darkness of the pavements below explains.

You never get wet in this sort of rain: you never get dry either. The state is an interstice, an amphibious aquatic one. She can see the people outside, on the sidewalk below. They scuttle along with their heads bowed. A whole city of penitents, praying. She knows what they want & need and for what they yearn.

They pray for the clouds to lift.

They pray to see the sun again, however briefly, even once. The sun to them a precious object each person has at some time wandered away from, absently, taking it for granted. Has casually saluted: Oh hi. You again.

Never again. This time I'll. But who will believe them, now?

Sometimes they are given a chance. There is a part of the day, hours after they leave the apartment on Barclay Street, when she receives her allotment. For whole minutes a shaft of sunlight will reach directly into the alleyway behind the building where she works. Their lane an empty bowl filling up with bright. On the way home, framed by the window of the bus, the sun shows itself in the sky above. It's a kind of sleight of hand, the gleaming silver coin winking in the magician's grasp. Then vanished, and the grey curdled over once again. The trick.

There is a jogging track on the low roof of the next building, a rust-coloured oval, dark with moisture, that nobody ever uses. Across the street the red metal railings, turned over the stained frontage of the facing building. Everything built in the past two decades holds the wet. This sort of construction, with its stucco cladding, nobody considered ruinous at first, nobody questioned it. The processes were internal and invisible: for years everybody would have said everything was fine, nothing had changed. There was no excuse for this really: everyone was familiar with the rain, its duration and persistence. Then the walls began to sag and they opened them up and found the rot.

There's an old man in the elevator one day as they come back from their errands, a cheery, sprightly fellow. He has gleaming eyes and springy white hair and if he looks a little grey around the edges so do they all, in the rain.

He begins to tell her about his wife who died in hospital nearby. I've been here since the building was built, he tells them. In 1962.

He probably tells everybody that, in the elevator.

8.

They move to her friend Trouble's apartment in a four-storey stucco complex off a main street where the traffic never stops. Trouble is away for a week and says she is welcome to use the place in her absence. Her lover
S
comes to visit from Seattle that night. The next day M picks up the child for a visit. It's another anniversary, the day they met, although neither of them feels much like celebrating, now.

Instead she and
S
spend the day cleaning.
S
gets down on her hands and knees and scrubs at the oily black smears on the linoleum with a toothbrush. When evening comes M phones. M says she will not give her son back. They drive to the verge of the road a block away from her former home, as close as she is allowed. Pull the borrowed car over to the side. Overhead the hammered sky. Shifting grumbles. A muttered threat. A few drops fall and hang there on the car's curved windshield. The angles all wrong. The speckled sign of rain suspended above.

The police come. She sees so much of the police lately. The social workers too. Seems her reputation precedes her, however unearned. They accuse her of being in unsatisfactory surroundings. They accuse her of not having the child's best interests at heart. They threaten her with foster homes. Is this what you want for your child they say.

Eventually, grudgingly, someone consents to inspect her accommodations. They are pronounced adequate. Can she get her boy now then. Not possible, the social workers point out smugly. Her child has gone to bed hours ago, in M's house. Surely she would not be so cruel as to disturb him.

The weather holds, as she and
S
see the skilled helping professionals to the door. Beyond the breezeway it is almost quiet, but for the sigh of cars passing. No torrent. No drenching. No downpour. The sky has turned black.

9.

The squall that has threatened for days finally breaks. The rain comes in sudden savage bursts. Drops fling themselves at the unprotected faces of pedestrians, sliding sideways under umbrellas and hoods. There is an angry pattering insistence to the tattoo. Their weather is on the march. No more of these sullen sodden half-measures. A mother in a tantrum, the rain exhorts them with angry exclamations. Get busy! Get going! Clean this mess up right now!

They get into the swing of things. They match storm's rhythm. They pick their feet up in the eddying swirls of water that rush for the drains. They stomp and splash in galoshes and boots. They resign themselves to wet socks. Their pants are wicks. Hair under their caps catches rain and curls from it.

On the way to work, lunch must be found for her and her son both. Her native frugality warring against the necessity of buying them readymade. And then the child is so very difficult. How about this. No. How about this. Not that. What then, for the love of God. I can't go on looking forever, she says. You like pasta. Try pasta salad. Knowing he won't. That the salad will come back untouched, inevitable, a reproach.

They buy Pellegrino in little bottles. She half-fills the empties with milk. This she can do. The child confiding on their walk to preschool: I tell the teacher I drink beer.

She halts. Visions of the social workers. Why? Why would you do that? It's not beer.

The child shrugs, nonchalant. I know. I just like to pretend.

At work she coaxes herself like an invalid, small portions at intervals. It all goes. She eats a lot of yogurt. It doesn't help. She knows that she is pining, as she sits staring out at the storm. She reminds weather that it is she who is inside, trapped, but rain still slaps at the glass, demanding to be let out or in, demanding that nothing be put in its way.

10.

The next day puddles hopscotch the sidewalks. Some of them stretch the whole way across, others shrink timidly from contact with the green. Her little son hops from wet to wet. Splashes add to the general ruination. The rain has settled at least. There is a gentle strafing on the multiple surfaces of water, nothing more.

Her lover
S
comes to visit. For two nights they take a room in a hotel. That night they sit in the bar, drinking, while her son sleeps in the room upstairs. There's a street outside, running under their room, and on the right-hand side of the hotel a sort of cobbled courtyard, made out of a section of street taken up and given over to pedestrians. At one point this part of the downtown was a veritable open-air prostitutes' mart, and in response the city created all sorts of one-ways and dead-ends, so that you drive through them backtracking and detouring in maze fashion. The rain falls lightly against the leaves of the trees and shrubs put in to enhance the park-like effect. They can hear it, faintly, from where they sit at the bar. She eddies the ice cubes in her glass in pale sympathy and the bartender looks up alertly to ask if she wants another.

S
says very little. There is little to say.
S
will of course be back, as she was after the child's birth, to help for the enormous work to come. The extracting of the belongings, and the moving, and the dealing with the police, and the days in court that might follow. In between S will return to her own city and thank her lucky stars for distance. But there's nothing they can do now, as the child tosses in one of the big beds upstairs.

In the morning there's a bust across the street. A police cruiser is pulled in to the curb and a skinny, dirty fellow half-lies against it, his arms fastened behind him. The sun has come out again. The light it affords is watery, a warning of impermanence. On the sidewalk the officers stand around, conversing in desultory fashion. She watches them from behind her gauzy nylon curtain. Until recently her sympathies would have been all with the forces of law. Nowadays she is less certain. She glances up at the sky. A few clouds drifting. The weather holds.