One Hundred Days of Rain Read online

  Let’s just get home, M said. Their anniversary was over.

  53.

  She looks out another highrise office window, past another lawyer at another wide desk. Below, the city spreads itself, the normally hidden rooftops slowly darkening with moisture. Today the report came true. One hundred percent chance of precipitation.

  The lawyer begins to describe the advantages of divorce. She interrupts.

  It’s not about that, she says. It’s about keeping my vow. I made a promise.

  Who keeps their vow arguing, moving out, battling over furniture? One thing she can cling to. She never asked for a divorce. She stayed with M, well, maybe not with M exactly, maybe miles off, in the same city, but the idea remains, they’re tied, somehow.

  So it doesn’t make sense. Why one thing and not the other? To make herself feel better. To salve her burning conscience.

  What does she have to feel guilty about?

  Not being able to endure.

  54.

  M who is still her spouse phones her. She glances out the window at the fallen night. Wet as usual. She remembers that her bicycle is still out in the drip, has been out since the afternoon in fact, and will stay there overnight, contrary to her rule. Tomorrow morning at the latest she must collect it.

  After the first flat, two days ago, she patiently transferred her steed from bus to bus, five in all, to the repair shop and then home. Her son patient too, accompanying her. One of the drivers lectured her that the bus she was on, despite its rack, should not accept her bicycle: the route was not designated for them. He would let her on, this once. She forebore to argue, unusual for her. Her arm still aches from lifting that weight to the height of the bus racks, over and over, and muscling it into place.

  Yesterday, as she rode through the same intersection, another thunk and report. She ignored the obvious conclusion until it was forced upon her, the rubber pancaked against the pavement. She remembered then that this is the way flat tyres come: none for months, anything up to a year, and then a cluster of them. She rolled the once again suddenly useless machine to the nearest post and affixed it.

  I’m late again, she said on the phone to the school. She was at the same corner, calling from the same endangered public phone.

  Afterwards she got on the bus. A young woman embarked at the next stop. The young woman didn’t have all of the money for the fare and said so plainly and nicely. The driver ordered her off. Too late she realized she could have paid the extra for the girl. Should have. Too late, as the bus pulled away from the stop. Patient girl, and she failed her.

  Later, after she has dried out and changed, eaten until her stomach is a drum, and put the child to bed, M calls. M wants to know, though she doesn’t say so, why her visits with the child are suddenly curtailed. The answer, what she won’t say in reply to M’s unspoken question, is that her child’s father persuaded her to it, against her own better judgment. Her son’s grief for artifact.

  I called him but he never called back, M says instead. What exactly is happening tomorrow?

  Call him.

  He didn’t call me back.

  M asks to talk to her son. She says the child is asleep.

  I don’t believe you.

  It happens to be true. She laughs and says goodbye and hangs up on another one of M’s threats.

  55.

  This morning rain goes from scattered drops to downpour in a seeming matter of moments. The mechanic glances outside the windows of the bike shop where he bends over the slowly revolving wheel.

  Another lovely day.

  I’d still rather be biking, she says, thinking of her adventures on the bus yesterday, and the day before that.

  Wheeling her fixed machine out of the shop, she hunches ineffectively against rain going about its work. The noise of rain, the not-noise really, blots out anything else. A rushing, a pushing, a surround. The world through a screen, a fine mesh. Even traffic exists far behind it, an afterthought. Soon enough the rain becomes aggregate. The individual drops melt together and hang on her, their weight palpable. Soon after that rain takes over entirely. A mass of rain, a mob of it. Soon afterwards she gives up. Nothing happens, only she knows she’s drenched and accepts it, as it’s said you eventually accept death.

  A leap of rain. A plummet of it.

  A suicide of rain, falling.

  56.

  They were still living together. M never liked to be called her wife.

  I’m your spouse.

  Trying to humour M was tiring, especially when there was no return on it. Eventually she gave up.

  They were arguing in a hotel room on their annual trip to the resort. M had promised to give up the rum and Coke. She’d come back to the used glass, the discarded tin. So obvious. She’d been in the bowels of the building, reading the historical plaques. She found the pint in M’s suitcase.

  That’s mine, M cried. Her child watched as they sawed back and forth.

  Not in front of the child.

  Give it back.

  She took the boy and left the room. M followed her, jumping up into her face. Outside rain smattered them both. She took the steps turned dark down to the gritty beach under the hotel. Instinct, going to the sea which had always soothed her. The shore coloured slate, sky and water both, private docks and boats in the cove with that deserted wintry look. Nobody was coming back for them for quite some time if ever. The wood under her feet felt slick with the rain that lay on the boards where they were hollowed out by clanking landlubber feet, the boards themselves swollen with moisture. She knew this weather inside out, it ran in her veins. The interminable view of fat splattered drops and sullen indifferent sky.

  M bobbed in front of her, trying to get a rise. I’m going to follow you around the beach the whole way. I’ll follow you all day. How do you like that? Huh? Huh?

  It’s okay, she said. I’m always trying to get you to take walks with me.

  M turned abruptly and went back to the glassed-in lounge.

  There were a lot of arguments and most of them not even that cute. Why couldn’t they fix things anyway? Ah that was the question. The psychiatrist was avuncular, he sat back in his big chair and gave advice. The therapist who phoned her afterwards concerned. Another one told them they were in the conflict stage. You don’t say. Once they got a man at the plumbing store to arbitrate. It worked as well as anything else.

  57.

  A radio outside her building, invisible around the corner, squawks to faraway life. Question and report. A fine rain stipples the outside of the screens.

  In the afternoon rain begins in earnest. Soon rain comes billowing out of the sky, a celestial housewife shaking her sheets. What light there was fades to dark but the dark is not complete. Caught in it dancing are these gusts and eddies, the innumerable drops highlighted by street lamps.

  Going down the short slope of Thurlow Street on the way to the station to pick up S she sees water running over the pavement. It cascades in serried ranks, a series of broad rounded scales descending in swift and stately fashion towards lower ground. A couple passes her, a lady of a certain age, a man wearing a homburg under his giant black umbrella. The woman smiles as they cross. Figures from another era. These days nobody would walk in such conditions, not unless they had to.

  She goes to the station to wait for S’s bus. It’s an hour late as a rule. All these back and forths, the sheer numbing weight of them. Time. The constancy. How this partial and unspoken connection has become her mainstay, a thin thread connecting their separate cities. Her lover’s shoulders bowed, the legacy of a father absent at the time and since vanished entirely. Slender enough, for the weight of both of their various failures. Marriage being only her most visible, the sign. Neither of them talk to their relations: they exist in peculiar fashion, the issue of springs or tree branches, as in the myths.

  The next day it is still raining. She and S walk across the art deco bridge, with its towers in the middle. There are viewing platforms built into the
skirts of the towers, there are steps up from the ground beneath as the bridge rises from the side of the hill. As always she measures the distance to the water with her eyes: toy boats beneath, the bay a misty bowl seeded over by rain’s fierce attentions, the pocked surface churned in its depths. How easy it would be, she thinks as ever, to balance there, with the water’s promise beneath. To vault over or step off. Just do it.

  As always she keeps these thoughts to herself.

  As pedestrians she and S are soon enough undone. Her hat turned sodden, S’s stained ball cap dripping, their same-sex boots wicking up the splash in mahogany profusion. Their coats heavy on their backs. Where her shoulders stick up into the air she can feel a thin line of wet running across the top of her shirt. Weather getting in.

  In the movie theatre they’re just in time for the feature. They hang their outerwear on adjacent seats with a fine sense of futility. The movie takes place in a misty warm country. The heroine wears a lot of filmy dresses. Her body heavy and delicious, like fruit. How old is the ripe young actress? Twenty-two? She has read the number in a gossip magazine but it’s like so much else, slipped past, submerged.

  When they pick their coats up afterwards, shuffle back to the lobby as the credits roll, their suspicions are confirmed. The coats have if anything become wetter, the soak settling in. They walk glumly to the noodle house with its bench seats. Jostling boys at the next table.

  My dad’s going to give me the UBC apartment if I go to UBC, she hears one of them say. These are West Side kids, she thinks, thinking also that nobody she knows would utter such a sentence, ever.

  Their coats are still heavy. Defeated, they queue for the bus and ride across the bridge. Wet and steamy there, inside, but at least warm. The rain continues. The whole of S’s visit, in fact, it never stops.

  58.

  Three trips in the wet black, wearing her flower-pot hat as she dashes into cars, into stores. The design on the back of her plain dark coat picked out in reflective tape. The irregular starburst she applied herself lies dully against the black fabric until, catching the light briefly, it flares into sudden brightness.

  I thought a bull’s eye would be too obvious, she tells anyone who asks.

  Her pal Trouble parks, walks, orders harshly, lifts the café cup trembling to her lips. Trouble has problems as always. She has scant time for Trouble, still more than anyone else from what Trouble tells her. Something foamy in the depths of the cup, a smear across Trouble’s upper lip.

  Later that night, having seen Trouble off, she waits for a ride from Nurse. They are still dating, in curious suspended fashion. Curious only to her maybe. She has lost her faith, if she ever had it. Imagining that she could understand anyone else, what they’re thinking or will do next. Just as dangerous, throwing up her hands in this way, as she has reason to know, but the alternative not to be contemplated, the dark nights without even a television for company.

  Hours ago the dark descended, or rather the orange-tinted not-dark that the city offers. Down the lanes red tail lights explode sudden flowers. Nurse slides the big vehicle from street to street like a dealer handling cards.

  They come to rest, engine off: Nurse leaves her. Immediately she is surrounded by the sound of rain. The vehicle a blind for the hunting of rain. Pattering, smattering, tinkling, trickling. Pale rain shadows puddle overhead, on the arching glass. They gather and streak across, shadowing the broad plastic expanse of the dash with their trails. As soon as seen, gone again. As if protesting this, rain kicks. It tickles the roof, pounds miniscule fists, drums tiny heels on the body of the car. Streaming, rain drops at last, its weight insupportable. In the back, the bicycles steam. Her coat emits its fetid smell of damp.

  The next morning, a message from her lawyer. M, surprise, has been calling the lawyer, demanding replies: each response to cost hundreds of dollars, as she knows from experience. The lawyer is too smart for M though. She doesn’t respond and then reports. This is what happened. Let me know if your instructions change. If only everyone would act like this, do exactly as she tells them.

  59.

  On the weekdays, scanty showers, driblets, interspersed with peekaboo sun or sullen cloud. On the weekends, rain, sudden and torrential. All-encompassing. Week after week and month after month this pattern continues.

  It’s easy, someone says. There’s all this traffic. Monday to Friday. Then it stops.

  The explanation can’t be right but the pattern imposes its own truth, or logic. Saturday comes, a torrent. Water pouring between buildings, the hollow drowning fall of it. In the morning she lies in bed listening to rain. It’s early, there are no noises to get in the way. The very occasional swish of a car pursuing its blind blunt way down the hidden street outside, at the front. The water a cascade, a cavalcade, a call to arms, a march. It depresses one, the very regularity of it. The inevitability. You will get wet again. Yes you will, no matter if you buy cute rubbers and a bright mackintosh. No matter where you store your umbrella. Despite the magazines that exhort you to this new colour or kicky print. Dots.

  Lying there she imagines that the deluge comes from somewhere closer than cloud, a discarded hose pouring. Loosed hydrant in the sky. The little trees on the windowsill skewed. Cascade on the glass. Rain continues inevitable.

  60.

  November. She attends a criminal trial where her fate is to be decided. The accused. She wears the same clothes she wore on the day she apparently viciously assaulted M: the skirt, the little sweater, the wedge heels. Even the pearls.

  Do you accept. Has it been proven that. Two days of this, increasingly removed. The details of this trial are sealed, their publication banned. In vain she argues against this.

  Her son’s father attends both days. He slouches in the visitor’s gallery wearing an uncouth T-shirt. At the recess he walks her to lunch. Outside it is always raining, lightly, but she doesn’t feel a thing on her as they pass over the brick streets with their allotment of grey. They end up in a warm cloudy restaurant, full of people whose innocence is not in doubt. Try to eat, he says.

  Back to the judge, who says simply: I don’t know who to believe. She is acquitted on all counts. I frankly do not think this belonged in a courtroom, the judge says.

  I am sure she believes what she says is true, he says of M, kindly.

  M stands up after the verdict, all five foot three of her quivering. The small head lifts in an invisible wind. Bullies always win, she says bitterly.

  Unusually a riposte comes to her at once. Not this time, she replies, before the bailiffs crowd in.

  61.

  Saturday again, raining again. Looking out the window at the sliver of air between her and the next building she sees no space into which her body, the size of a human being, might insert itself. The wet presses down so unrelentingly that she turns to her son.

  Let’s just leave.

  And the child, all of six, replies at once: Okay.

  They take the elevated railway to the bus station. The bus for Victoria has gone, another will not come for hours. Outside again, the rain unchanged, they dash for the el station where she has left the transfers for anyone who needs them. Nobody has. They are still there on the floor, only slightly damped.

  They get on a bus in the rain. They get off. They get on another bus in the rain. They get off. They get on another bus in the rain. They get off. They get on the last bus, the one that will take them to the ferry. Movement, she’s decided, is what she needs, that and some distance from the piles of paperwork she should be doing. In her pack are a couple of pieces of paper, a pen, but no matter how long she sits and where she goes she knows she won’t even uncap the lid.

  The next ferry to Victoria won’t leave for an hour and a half. The cashier glares at the man in front of them as they idle in his wake. He is buying a ticket for the boat to Nanaimo. She tells him he has ten minutes.

  You’re lucky you’re getting on, says the cashier sourly. Behind them, outside, the rain is a soft, unrelenting mur
mur on the concrete apron of the drop-off area. The automatic doors whisk open and shut. Drops linger in their hair and speckle their bags. It’s the last ferry of the night, continues the clerk.

  Two to Nanaimo, she says.

  The cashier tries to glare at them too, but has used most of it up on the man in front. I’m busy, she says instead, when asked about buses into Nanaimo. I don’t have time. But she has time to give them instructions, extremely detailed ones, about how to get to the ferry’s car deck.