Some Rain Must Fall by Michel Faber Read Free Book Online

rustling of his own pillowcase. However, after a while, either because he learned to listen more keenly or because the voices were louder, he was sometimes able to catch their drift. Not that it was necessarily the loudest voices which reached his ears; there was some odd scientific principle at work, causing almost all the millions of human exclamations to dissipate in the troposphere, while just a few were snatched up into outer space, gathering volume in exact proportion to the distance they travelled.
    Occasionally God did hear a great cry which must have been uttered by a large number of people in unison: affirmations of praise and encouragement to Allah, Elvis, Victory, Freedom, Hitler – entertainers, perhaps, or sports teams. They meant little to God, these repetitions of a single, meaningless word, floating down to him out of context. Other, quieter fragments of speech, the little cries and conversations of individuals, had more chance of making sense to him.
    It was the timbre of a voice which appealed to him more than anything, the music of it, which carried with it an echoing picture of the speaker and the speaker’s circumstance. From fragments of a few words each, he could visualise enough to make him feel he’d been part of a life other than his own. Sometimes he was the one who had spoken, sometimes the one spoken to. He was child, man, woman, at any random moment from humidicrib to hospice. He felt himself lifted into a sled by strong gloved hands and a voice describing what the journey was going to feel like.He felt the texture of someone’s naked shoulder as they wept about something he didn’t understand. Anxious friends patted him on the back as he coughed and spluttered over an expensive meal. He hoped his son would do well at school, that his daughter would be all right with such an idiot for a husband, that Santa Claus would give him a Galaxy Mobile.
    No voice, as far as God was aware, ever came to him twice, or if it did, he certainly didn’t recognise it. He did, however, learn to recognise particular calibrations of feeling – specific flavours or harmonics of emotion. Some exclamations, though stridently passionate, did not move him, and he would fall asleep even as they harangued. Others, meek and barely audible, had the power to shock him awake. For them, he would get up out of bed. Not because his name had been mentioned – his name was used so often he figured there must be no end of Gods on the planet – but because of a certain tone of voice, full of love and longing for the impossible. However sleepy he was, he would climb up on his chair and give the globe an extra nudge, to make time go faster, so that whatever was to happen would happen sooner, and whatever had happened would be longer ago.
    Then he would sleep, and dream his dream of visiting his planet and dying there.
    Or, if the last voice he’d heard was laughing, he would dream he was playing at the back of the universe, and finding stuff so indescribably cool that he couldn’t even picture it once he woke up.
    The strangest dream he ever had, though, was just after he’d heard a child’s voice, almost certainly a young boy’s, whispering down to him on an unusually quiet night.
    ‘God?’ The voice was shaky, close to tears. ‘Are you there? Can I talk to you?’
    There was a pause while God and the other child both held their breath, then nothing. God had lost him.
    God jumped up and stood on his chair, putting his face close to the planet as it hung there. Even in the darkness he could see the white of the poles, some jet-streams, clouds. He could not, of course, see the boy who had whispered to him.
    ‘Hello,’ he whispered back, his lips touching the exosphere. ‘It’s me. I’m right here.’ Clouds formed instantly under his mouth, as if he had fogged a window, but that was all. No doubt there would soon be weather too extreme to measure, in exchange for this attempt at conversation, but he was too sleepy