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

had appeared at his door and asked him to look after Finn. ‘Take care of him for me,’ she’d said. ‘You’re the only one I
trust to do it. And anyway, I’ll be back soon.’ As if there were any chance he might forget her, she sealed the request with a kiss to his lips. Often he lay awake at night remembering
that kiss, the lightness of her skin, the smell of her lipstick, the tension in the muscles of her neck as she went up on tiptoes to reach him. Sometimes it seemed that the only thing in the world
worth holding on to was the memory of that kiss.
    Anything anyone could call ‘soon’ had long since passed. Eight years with no sight or sound was not ‘soon’. All the same, he could not be angry, for to be angry with her
he would have to conclude that she had deliberately not written or called, and he could not bear the thought that she might have discarded him so casually. Then again, he could not bear the
alternative, which was that something had befallen her to prevent her from making contact, and so he did his best to skirt around such speculation. All he could allow himself was this simple,
painful, longing for her return.
    He plodded downhill, soles crunching on the loose earth. If you found a handful of grass up here you were lucky, and if you pulled that grass even lightly it would uproot, so thin was the Merrow
Wold’s dirt. The stink of goat droppings and fur were ever present in the dry air, but hard evidence of the culprits who had ruined the landscape was hard to come by. On the other mountains
it was easy to spot signs of them: hoof prints pressed into baked mud or the naked blonde trunk of a tree they had stripped of bark. Here there was neither mud nor trunks. In making the Merrow Wold
barren, the goats had made themselves nigh on impossible to track.
    His grandfather had believed that on the fifth day the Lord had created every animal on land except for the goat. This he left to the devil, who made them in his greedy image. Upon seeing how
they gobbled up the apple trees of Eden, the Lord gave them tails like knotted ropes, and these caught and snared the goats in the undergrowth. The devil was outraged, but the goats were relieved
– the Lord had spared them from temptation, and for this they were grateful. This the devil could not bear. He bit off their long tails and licked out their eyes and he feasted upon them, and
when he had eaten his fill he replaced their eyes with his own, so that they would never know the difference between restraint and indulgence.
    More often than once, Daniel’s father, the Reverend Fossiter, had told that story from the pulpit of the Church of Saint Erasmus. Should any of the congregation have needed further proof
of the tale’s wisdom, they needed to look no further than the way the goats’ long teeth tortured the trees. Putting up shoots was an ordeal in the face of the weather that befell these
mountains. Even the sun could be the enemy of leaves in need of water. Trees that survived up here bent their trunks close to the soil. Branches grew thrust out like arms in a plea for mercy. A
hard enough life, then, without the goats who came to chew away what protective bark they could grow. Daniel had taken it upon himself to guard the saplings whenever he came upon them, erecting
fences of ringed razor wire. Still the goats would come. He would find the razor wire red with blood where the animals had chewed it, ignoring the pain it caused them.
    Once he found an old nanny dead with her jaws clenched around the blades of the fence, her beard a brownish red from the blood that had flowed from her mangled tongue. And under the shade of the
tree slept her plump little kid, who had scrambled on to her rump and used her neck as a ladder to clear the fence and chew so deeply on the sapling that it hung like a snapped straw. A kid like
that did not deserve to die quick with a bullet between its eyes. It deserved to suffer with a bleeding belly, to