The Man Who Rained by Ali Shaw Read Free Book Online Page A

mountaineers and rangers with emergency reprieve from the weather.
    She approached it cautiously, for she felt sure the man would be inside. Its walls were plugged up with warty grey lichens, except for in one corner which was furred with a moss as orange as a
mango. It had a stubby chimney bearing the most delicate weathervane she had seen since arriving in Thunderstown: a fox or wolf with paws stretched out mid-leap and snout raised to scent the wind.
Above it the vane branched out into art nouveau curves that drew, in iron, the shape of a cloud.
    She knocked on the door but got no reply, so tried the handle and found it to be locked. She thumped the wood with the flat of her palm. ‘Hey!’ she yelled. ‘Can we talk some
more?’
    No answer, so she went to the window and peered in.
    Someone had clearly been living there, although right now she could see nobody inside. Instead there was a table with a plate on it, and on the plate was the core of a pear, brown but not yet
rotten. There were two chairs, and most remarkably given her initial assumption that this was a shelter and not a home, there were mobiles hanging from the ceiling. She twisted her head to try to
get a clear view. The ceiling was thick with them. Dangling configurations of wire hung with white paper birds.
    ‘Hey!’ she yelled again, tapping on the glass. For a moment she considered breaking it, and turned around to locate a stone, but then a cold wind blew past her and she thought she
heard a bark. She looked back up the mountain and saw a silver-furred animal slinking over a heap of rocks in the near distance. It vanished into a ditch before she could get a good view of it, and
it did not re-emerge. Still, it had made her feel uncomfortable, and she chewed her thumbnail.
    Then, because it was the only way to feel safer, she turned and picked her way back towards Thunderstown.

 
4

A HISTORY OF CULLERS
    It had been many days since Daniel Fossiter had last seen Finn Munro, the strange and weather-filled young man whom he protected in secret. Daniel had been to the bothy on Old
Colp once or twice in that time, but had found the stone shelter to be empty. Probably Finn was out wandering the mountains, or lurking in one of his many dens in the foothills, and Daniel had been
relieved not to have had to endure one more awkward encounter with him.
    He trudged now down the path from the dusty Merrow Wold, with a dead goat slung over his broad shoulders. He had shot fifteen that morning, before the winds started digging at the shingly soil
and clawing up swathes of dust that trapped him for hours in their powdery fog. By the time he had picked his way clear the best of the afternoon was behind him, but he was untroubled. It excused
him from looking in on Finn for one more day. Because it was tough, just being around him. He and Finn were two leftover corners of a triangle that could no longer be drawn.
    Eight years had passed since Finn’s mother left Thunderstown, during which time Finn’s voice had deepened and he had grown taller even than Daniel. Yet being a man was about more
than gender and age. That was something Daniel’s father and grandfather had always been at pains to remind him of.
    He sighed and adjusted the weight of the goat on his shoulders. The gravelly earth of the Merrow Wold crunched under his boots. Every step required his concentration, for centuries of ravenous
goats had turned this soil into a slide of rubble. People had fallen to their deaths on the gentle inclines; all it took was one slip, and they would find themselves skidding and rolling down a
mountainside that offered no friction or solid space to arrest their fall. They would be scraped and grated apart by pebbles.
    ‘Betty,’ he whispered. It did not lessen, his ache for her, even after those eight years. His grandfather would have mocked him for it. His father would have turned away in resigned
disappointment.
    On the morning she left Thunderstown, Betty