One Hundred Days of Rain (4 page)

22.

Once more rain has come back, faithless unwelcome friend. Bad penny. Everyone bumping around outside like the invitees in the hallway of a party that isn't going. Slowly fighting to get out. Avoiding rain's gaze. Rain doesn't seem to notice. Once more rain coats the glass with tiny bumps and rivulets. Once more rain nyah-nyahs her with the damp of its embrace, to forsake shelter, to brave rain. How she will come home smelling of the wet, how gradually her things will dry, how squelchy and generally mussed she will feel: only she knows these things. Rain has no conscience, it thinks of nothing now or ever beyond the wet earth and always down, down, into and inside. Rain is inexorable and dumb, it can't even speak except in a tiny drumming.

Yesterday it seemed rain had gone for good. How bravely the sun shone, how careless were the few clouds in the sky. Us? Harmless, we tell you. And she believed it, they were so fluffy and light, like pancakes.

Her city is a rainless one, it will always shine on her this way: these are the kind of lies she believes when the sun spreads out with such rich abandon. She's good at forgetting, not remembering. A survival skill, maybe. Yesterday she wandered the shopping street near her place in a half-daze, meeting nobody's eye. Clothes in brilliant windows, fancy magazines with bright covers, and the pedestrians, a little out of place in all the gleam. The women not quite right in some way, their clothes too old, their faces too fat, their expressions peevish or distracted. All passing under her indifferent undifferentiating gaze.

This morning she gets up and oils her boots. The leather gradually darkens, the creases turn almost black, the scuffed tops take on a sheen. They will be proof against anything: puddles, infidelity, mutual accusations, even her private and wild despair. She developed a passion for these boots in the store, even though – or perhaps because – they are like nothing else she owns. They were outdoorsy and pretend-rugged: they reminded her of starlets gamely trekking wilderness trails for photos. There was a fey, almost girlish quality to the two buckled straps at top and bottom, despite the gesture towards practicality in the stacked wooden heels. Yesterday she was getting dressed when Nurse phoned. She had nothing on but the boots over a pair of socks. She stood and talked to Nurse, who she's dating in desultory fashion, and sorted through receipts, looking at herself in the mirror all the while. Monstrous self-satisfaction. When rain next comes she will be ready.

23.

The smell of rain is ozone, smoke, earth, and cloud: a smell impossible to duplicate or bottle, though people try. “Spring Rain”-scented detergent. “Summer Rain” cologne.

“Winter Rain”: disinterred ski suits, mildew, urine and chill.

“Autumn Rain”: clouds of leaves left to moulder on the ground, skunk spray in the park, a sharp overtone of dog waste.

Springtime. Find a field, a park will do, and one of those days that cries out with the promise of it. Smell the green. Listen to the soft patter across the grass like tiny rabbits running away from you. Run with rain. No coat.

Wait until summer. Night falls, later than anyone could imagine. The rain starts up again as if it has been waiting for this: a soft insistent patter, gentle as faith. Looking out into the night there is no way to believe in rain, invisible.

Go out to the nearest body of water in which it is permissible to bathe, or more practically one with a low fence. Go out to the sea.

It should be high summer. August, when the heat is at its peak, when you pant a little just breathing, when exertion seems unthinkable. When you are covered with your own moisture, visibly. When you wait for night like the answer to a wish.

Slip into the water, the ocean, the salt: slip into the warm liquid from whence we are rumoured to have come. The ocean and the air are practically the same temperature: it's like floating in a cool bathtub.

Turn on your back, let yourself float belly-up, let the rain cover you with little x's.

Of course take off all your clothes.

Watch autumn rain from behind a window, warm cup in your hands. Curl in the frame of the window if possible. Wear your most touchable clothes, the loosely woven chunky sweater, the velveteen pull-on pants. Wear woolen socks that don't itch. Feel your feet in them.

In winter wish for snow.

24.

This morning rain is faint, almost Victorian. Rain totters about with a skim-milk wrist held to its forehead, collapses on the divan. Rain seems not to be long for this world.

Outside the cars swish on by, ignoring rain, the possibility of it, the outside world. Who cares! Rain has nothing on them. Rain can't get in behind these sealed windows. Rain is barely there, not worth noticing, another dismissable part of the world nobody quite inhabits anymore.

Rain's days are numbered, it seems. The way rain does things is not the way things are done, not any longer. Rain doesn't have any interface, it isn't mediated. It lies there shuddering. Not very long now, rain murmurs quietly to itself.

25.

In Victoria overnight to attend a conference, she emerges onto wet streets in the morning. There is no sign of rain. The city's ordinary residents seem unastonished by this. So far as she can tell their normal temper, a mild ever-present sweetness, remains unchanged. They live in a slower simpler town. Not so much of this hurry hurry and let's go. Everyone has umbrellas and hats at the ready of course, that's the kind of place it is. But there's no need. Rain has vanished from above the quiet city, leaving only the evidence of its passage: a stain, to fade in turn.

A different kind of wet awaits as the ferry pulls itself towards Vancouver. Another ship draws close, displaying an enormous confidence. Giant and balletic, the white boats pivot around an invisible central axis, toot their mournful whistles one to the other. This is the narrowest part of the passage, here between these rocky islands with their houses levered out from the slope, above the meagre skirts of sands.

Ahead rain gathers on the slopes of the nearer islands. You can't see rain until you draw closer, into its midst. The clouds thicken into a white concentration in the folds of the hills rising sternly in their turn from the mist.

In Vancouver the sun is a sudden shining, a punchline. She turns her face up to it: brevity, and the bright quaver of the light.

26.

Heading out into the shrouded afternoon rain has obliterated all else. Heavy, wet drops cover the known world. They are splashing like a curtain wrapped around her as she bicycles with her head down.

In a few seconds she feels the wetness trickling into her shoes. Her face all slick. Plastered to her is the hair that creeps out from under her helmet. She thinks she can feel rain working its way into the vents above her head. Rain is coldly furious. It finds the hidden ways inside coat & covering, seeping through to the tender skin of her neck. Her scalp.

She arrives at the office drenched. Her tights heavy at their bottoms with trapped moisture. She takes off her soaked shoes under the table where nobody can see. Her dripping black overcoat. There is nowhere to hang it so she settles for the back of her chair. The arms of the silk shantung jacket she picked out this morning before school are bleeding at the insides of the elbows. Dusty rose blooming a shocked pink. She takes that off too – she has to – and hangs it discreetly from her chair's arm. The chill settles in. This is what is worst about rain: the getting inside, the wet left on her. She is stained by her journey, short as it was: the marks of passage are upon her. It is all very well to say that she will dry but what nobody counts are these silent dripping hours in between, and the shiver. Rain has ruined her.

27.

In the years she and M lived together their duplex was on the southern edge of the city. She wrote grants for the arts consortium that rented out space from the university. Working mostly at her computer. Occasional days she visited.

She and M lived at the top of a hill. You could see weather coming, clouds in the far sky or wisping round the mountains, and the brown smudge that blurred the hills across the way. On a bicycle you were in it for the long haul, unless she called on M's near-vintage Land Rover. It looked all right that day. She decided to ride to the campus, a good hour away on the perimeter road.

On her way back from the university, the weather shifted. Morning's clear skies vanished. The sky turned dark, then let loose. Water fell on her unceasingly, as from a bucket. The streets were slick. A mist before her eyes made it difficult to see. A passing bus threw up a watery frill between her and the road. This is crazy, she thought. Shivering in her suit and overcoat, she pulled over.

M was home. So you want me to drop everything and come get you.

Yes.

Well I won't. If you cared about what I have to do, you wouldn't even ask.

She was so tired when she dragged herself in the back door finally, like a warrior returning from a great battle. Too tired to feel anything. When she took off her coat she saw that the furious rain had leached through to her clothes below. There was a fat spreading line down the centre of her back, where she had hunched over the handlebars. The sleeves of her fine woolen suit wet up to the middle of her forearms, as if she'd plunged them in water. Her brown hair, grown only as far as her neck then, soaked.

You think I wasn't there for you but that's not true, M told her later. They were having one of their fights. She was bringing up things from the past that still bothered her, which you weren't supposed to do. At that time in her life she read books about relationships, the kind of books she'd always scorned, and tried to follow their precepts. “I” statements. Sticking to the issue. Times she felt like a counselor herself.

Later she thought M must resent her knowledge. How she remembered, might always remember, hanging on the line and being told no.

28.

Rain again. Dismayed she goes to the office door. The alley is awash, the pigeons who gather on the asphalt vanished. Their feed lies sodden on the tiny-trampled ground of the neighbour's backyard. He only does it to annoy.

The grass has a hopeful spring look, rising in rain's dark. Its green is almost luminous, in the murky day.

She would like to deny rain, its very existence. Or if it can't be denied, to say it's not so bad.

She would like to defy rain. To lift a fist and challenge rain: do your worst!

She would like most of all for rain not to touch her. But even she knows she can't seal herself off completely. She reminds herself, like a catechism you recite: it's not so bad.

You'll feel better once you're out in it. You'll warm up. You'll see.

Shivering, unwilling, full of disbelief, she mounts her cycle. On the ride what she has promised comes slowly true. The miracle. By the time she arrives home she is so flushed and rosy from her exertions that when she shrugs off her black coat she imagines herself steaming. So deeply warm that she can no longer even feel rain on her.

29.

The colour of rain is the very shade of negation. More than anything, rain declares solemnly: I do not exist.

Ignore me. Really. Don't disturb yourself.

As if she ever could, she thinks. As if she can pretend it's not there, go on as usual. No matter the camouflage colours into which rain considerately shades itself: grey, blue, a kind of pale undersided green like the belly of a floating fish.

Sometimes rain looks a mirror in the dark, each tiny dropping facet another reflection of what can't be seen. Sometimes rain grades infinite greys so that there is no near, no far, only what falls between her and them. Sometimes rain winks out the distance. Sometimes rain really is invisible.

30.

Tomorrow's deadline looms. She must list all her assets and debt. Estimate her spending on shampoo and conditioner. Add up the magazines. Cost out the price of gifts over a twelve-month period. Indicate her savings. Afterwards she is required to submit: an examiner, a judge. There is a building set aside for the purpose and she trembles to enter it.

Rather than hunched over her table, cudgeling her brains, she prefers to be outside where paper is an impossibility. Here are no receipts and half-remembered purchases, only the stores they were taken from, their windows square behind the ceaseless falling of rain.

She has no hat, no umbrella. Bareheaded she goes out into rain. Her hair takes the brunt of the weather, the brown deepening again to black as it twists imperceptibly into rope. Under its protection she hardly registers rain's steady fall. Then a large wet plop falls on her head, soaking through, and lays a cold fingertip on her very scalp. She shudders, scowling, and shakes herself like a dog. Then hurries on.

31.

M calls and asks to speak to the child.

She says stiffly that her child is not with her.

M's voice hesitant, carefully correct.

Rain pummels tiny fists on the window. Tinkles and dances, a small drumming like fingers on a tabletop. Rain gusts and smatters against the glass, pushed by wind. She imagines herself reaching through the phone cord, along the wires, to change that voice to something gasping and frightened. A desire so vivid she feels her hands clutching, the strain of the tendons.

She would like the voice to go away, so that she never has to hear it again in her life.

M calls again the next night and asks for her son.

Again she says the child is not there.

M calls and asks for her child.

By nightfall the sound of rain has died away. Outside, as she hurries down the street in tippy-tippy heels, her feet bent nearly perpendicular or so it feels, she hears nothing at all. The only way she can tell that rain is still with her and not gone away again is the darkening deepening wet of the streets, under streetlights and traffic lights and before the shining fronts of shops. Rain a man waiting around the corner. Shadow, breath. Following something or someone. Black and white.

She enters a building, goes into an auditorium. She has been invited to read from her work in progress. The sound of her own voice, when she mounts the stage, loud and comforting. She uses it like a caress and whisper. Rain has taught her that at least, how to speak.