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  one hundred days of rain

  one hundred days of rain

  carellin brooks

  BOOKTHUG

  DEPARTMENT OF NARRATIVE STUDIES

  TORONTO, 2015

  FIRST EDITION

  Copyright © Carellin Brooks, 2015

  The production of this book was made possible through the generous assistance of The Canada Council for the Arts and The Ontario Arts Council.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Brooks, Carellin, author

  One hundred days of rain / Carellin Brooks. -- First edition.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77166-108-9 (EPUB)

  I. Title.

  PS8603.R6593O64 2015 C813’.6 C2015-900471-3

  PRINTED IN CANADA

  About This Book

  In prose by turns haunting and crystalline, Carellin Brooks’ One Hundred Days of Rain enumerates an unnamed narrator’s encounters with that most quotidian of subjects: rain. Mourning her recent disastrous breakup, the narrator must rebuild a life from the bottom up. As she wakes each day to encounter Vancouver’s sky and city streets, the narrator notices that the rain, so apparently unchanging, is in fact kaleidoscopic. Her melancholic mood alike undergoes subtle variations that sometimes echo, sometimes contrast with her surroundings. Caught between the two poles of weather and mood, the narrator is not alone: whether riding the bus with her small child, searching for an apartment to rent, or merely calculating out the cost of meager lunches, the world forever intrudes, as both a comfort and a torment.

  In elliptical prose reminiscent of Elizabeth Smart’s beloved novel By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept, One Hundred Days of Rain exposes the inner workings of a life that has come apart. Readers will engage with Brooks’ poetic and playful constraint that unfolds chapter by chapter, where the narrator’s compulsive cataloguing of rain’s vicissitudes forms a kind of quiet meditation: an acknowledgement of the ongoing weight of sadness, the texture of it, and its composition – not only emotional weight, but also the weight of all the stupid little things a person deals with when they’re rebuilding a life.

  After the neighbour calls the authorities. Reports the fight she overheard. Sets into motion the procedures for arrest and charge. The processes that will eventually bar our heroine from returning to her home. Then it begins to rain. She is not fallacious enough to connect this with her circumstances. She confines herself strictly to the facts. She leaves. It rains.

  There’s one thing, though. Despite how reliably it appears each day, the rain is never exactly the same. At one moment there might be a patter, as of little scrabbling squirrel paws on the roof; at another, a windblown torrent will fling itself against the panes of her room, rocking the window in its frame with sudden violence. She thinks that her own senses must deceive her. Surely there cannot be this many separate sorts of rain. But, as it turns out, there are.

  1.

  All of the noises of the jail are unfamiliar ones. She is surprised by how the procedures resemble those she’s seen on TV, especially the invasive ones. Bend over, say the kindly impersonal guards – guards! – and she realizes, smiling disbelievingly, that they are serious.

  Other things that she could not have predicted. The stamping of her hands, which are covered with rich black ink and pressed onto a special sheet, with sections. Everything has its place and is neatly organized: there’s a sink afterwards, and a special kind of soap, to wash.

  She poses for photos also, side and front, and at intervals is led to a telephone within a giant hood, like the sort of dryer they place over your head in an old-fashioned salon. When she picks up, at the end of the distant echoey line is a voice: a lawyer. There are two charges, two separate ritual calls, but his advice is invariable. What are you charged with? he demands, at once, and when she tells him: Don’t say anything. For he must know that she is bursting to talk to anyone who will listen: I am innocent, you are mistaken.

  The heavy steps of the guards measure out the hallway beyond. There is the reassuring murmur of conversation and, behind that, a patter as of rain, dying slowly away with the distant clanging and clicking of doors closing, so faint that perhaps she has only imagined it. It was sunny when they took her, but hours have passed since then. Someone is screaming in another cell. At times the voice of a guard rises, shouting back. Someone in uniform brings her a bag: inside is an apple, a baloney sandwich, a box of milk. She drinks the milk, eats the apple. More hours pass. She is taken to the telephone again, shuffling, holding her blanket. They have given her a pair of jeans to wear, surprisingly decent ones, and taken away her shoes.

  A justice of the peace is at the end of the line. He will release her but. She cannot return to her own home, own any knives but for cooking, contact her spouse. She questions these strictures. Perhaps, he suggests, she should wait and see a judge in the morning. No, that’s fine, she murmurs hastily, the conditions are fine.

  Now the opposite of what has come before: more forms to be completed, the ceremonial return of the belongings ceremonially removed upon her arrival. Your wife left you a message, the cop at the desk tells her as he hands back her purse. She says to call your psychiatrist, he’s worried about you. Oh, and she says she loves you. She notes, grimly, these misrepresentations. Says nothing. Who here has believed her so far, who cares?

  She dresses again in the clothes of the morning: her dark grey woolen skirt, her pearls, a little cream crewneck sweater. Once again she dons her dead-black tights, and the thick wedge loafers. Her red coat with the blonde fur collar is a beacon, the sharp colour of love in a cartoon; her translucent purse nestles under her arm, a friendly ghost. Today might never have happened. Everything is as before but for the passage of time, and the stain on her, invisible to anyone else. Now you’re sure you’ll be okay? a female constable asks her anxiously, unlocking the door to the outside world. You don’t want to call someone to pick you up? It’s a rough neighbourhood, you know. Several replies occur to her but as with the message she stifles them. She has learned her lesson.

  The rain tonight is her favourite kind: drops so widely spaced as to convince you, until one plops on your forehead or lands on your arm, that you are only imagining them. The sky appears clear but for a few drifting clouds: here on earth, a sudden dollop of liquid rides her skin before flattening and disappearing. A few raindrops speckle the pavement and the fabric expanse of her coat but the wet is indeterminate: at any moment it might stop or begin in earnest. She has always liked that, the uncertainty of it. Rain you can ignore, until it resolves itself into something else. The next morning is clear again.

  2.

  She has been left without the majority of her belongings now more than once. Careless, really. How does she find herself, she asks in her motel room, in these situations, with these people? The last man she dated, her son’s father, went too. After he’d gone crazy she returned to her home to find it wrecked, everything sprayed and crushed and dribbled, a ruin. She fled to M and now this.

  So, an accounting. A short one, for practically speaking she owns only what she carried away with her yesterday morning. A sturdy pair of shoes, ideal for walking, and a good thick coat. The wool sweater and skirt to keep her warm in all weathers. As if she’d planned it, this being left with what’s on her back. They were fighting for days and nights. It went on and on with breaks. Maybe she knew.

  Then the weather. Puffy cl
ouds in an azure sky, as if they’re in the tropics, as if it isn’t still winter and near freezing outside. Brightness sparkles everywhere: on the carapaces of cars, on the metallic chips mixed into the concrete of a pair of giant planters outside the 7-Eleven she can see from her window, even on the rather dingy travellers, with their open guitar-cases, standing between them. Nobody has consulted her on the weather, she thinks with an air of injury only partly assumed. She would have preferred a lowered ceiling of leaden grey, the clouds swollen with their burden.

  It’s not all bad. Travelling soothes her and here she is travelling in her own city. Sometime she will have to call her friends and tell them what’s happened. She puts off the task, unable to describe precisely this catastrophe. Once there, now here. Stunned, blinking. She will have to call her lover S in Seattle who has stuck by her all these years, a love partial and distanced, nonetheless surpassing all others. Maybe. Valentine’s Day is coming. In her datebook she finds a postcard she meant to send S: a photograph of a pole at an intersection with two old-fashioned street signs. Love, they read, and Desire.

  Looking again at the sky, she leaves her motel room a last time. Card in the box. The cheap motel room, like a photograph, a snapshot of everyone who’s ever passed through. The place smells of old dry smoke, curling up from the walls. Its anonymity aggressive, in its own way. Saying: you know there’ll be nothing left of you here, when you go.

  3.

  Manhattan and Vancouver have this in common: looking down an ordinary city street you see, at the end of it, empty sky. Go a little down one of these streets and discover that the sky belongs to water, a thin band of it shining flatly there, like a mirage.

  When the rain comes this water that surrounds her city changes again. Grey and sullen but no less captivating for that, a pretty woman in a sulk. The sea comes in around the city, reaching cautious exploring fingers east: False Creek, Burrard Inlet, Indian Arm. Go out in a boat late in summer and see how salmon leap in the waters. Freighters loom higher than the land in the distance, a trick of perspective, giant shipping containers stacked up on their open decks like multicoloured blocks. Their bridges twelve stories high and stupid in their proportions, tall and thin like skyscrapers affixed to hulls. The men who work these ships enter the city only for short, unscheduled visits: hospital, police station, swimming pool (briefly). The newspaper prints a diagram, a cross-section of a container with its cargo of illegal immigrant. Stuffed toys, sneakers made in China. Nobody gets to go into the port. From afar you can see the orange-painted giant stackers, the lights that blaze all day, the road cresting a hump and then falling again, beyond, where it’s impossible to see.

  Along the edge of the bay is a path that skirts the shoreline. She has plenty of time to walk today. Her schedule with a hole in it, one she’s fallen into, like Alice. The droplets today are fat, if as far between as those of the other night: sudden little explosions, unmistakable. They fall onto the walkers as if the cloud cover, strained to breaking by the effort of holding its watery suspension, has been unable to retain these lone harbingers. Rain like this an advance guard, warning of a squall to come. The raw wind sweeps in from the west. There, though they can’t see them, are islands, and beyond that nothing, so they are told, until Japan. The wind buffets everything impartially: the water, the rocky shore, the few pedestrians she passes. It worries them and flings the drops into their exposed faces. She lowers her head and blinks, repelling the onslaught, caught. Go home it says. If she had one she would.

  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 aga
in: 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.