Ann Peebles
I CAN’T STAND THE RAIN
It was the first bit of sunshine that we’d had in at least four days, after an extended period of rain, rain, rain.
It also happened to be the first day I was seeing Sheila since my mother’s anniversary.
There had been a quiet day following the church visit, where I responded to Sheila’s messages sparingly.
But mostly, I sat around and panicked about everything I’d told my mother the day before at her graveside.
‘She isn’t going to come back and haunt you, Patti,’ David said that evening over dinner.
‘I wouldn’t put it past her.’
But there’d been no signs of a late-in-the-day haunting, and with a couple of days’ distance from it all I found I was breathing easier again.
So much easier that I’d been able to suggest to Sheila that we make the most of the mild sunshine by going for a walk somewhere.
Meanwhile, David, while I hadn’t been looking, had done the impossible.
‘She’s agreed to have coffee with me.’
‘At her shop?’
There was a lengthy pause while David weighed the question. ‘Yes, I am buying her a coffee and taking it to the shop.’ Another pause followed while he sipped his tea. ‘But I still think this counts as a date.’
I sipped my own drink while I tried to work out the best way to quietly disagree. ‘Okay.’
‘The woman is under my skin, Patti,’ he burst out, his free hand bunching into a fist and his knees angling at a bend that made him look like Michael Jackson giving a song his absolute welly. ‘Is this really because she said no to me to begin with, do you think? I mean, am I truly that shallow?’
I opened my mouth to answer and he held up a finger to stop me.
‘Not a word. It was rhetorical.’
‘You’re not shallow, David.’ I crossed the kitchen and dropped my mug in the sink. ‘But you have always liked a challenge, you have to admit that much.’
‘Eudora isn’t a challenge.’
My eyes narrowed to slits. I’d only known David react like this to a woman once before, and it ended in catastrophe for everyone involved – myself included, given that I was the one who’d spent the best part of two weeks under a blanket with him watching and re-watching romantic films that we’d only ever bothered seeing before to make fun of.
During those horrific days, though, those films were like torture porn for David.
I pinched his cheek softly and then rubbed it with my palm. ‘You’ll mind that old heart of yours, David, won’t you, love?’
He rolled his eyes and shook me away. ‘Anyone would think I was a lovesick teenager.’ David ferreted his phone free from his pocket and pressed it to his ear as though answering a call. ‘Hi, Pot, it’s Kettle here, look I was just calling to say–’
‘Piss off!’ I slapped at his arm that was holding the handset. ‘I’m being caring.’
‘You’re being fretful.’ He put his phone away, then turned to drop his own mug into the sink.
‘But you needn’t be. I’m a big boy and I know what I’m doing.
I promised you a long time ago, Patti, that I’d never make you watch Four Weddings and a Funeral again and I really meant it.
Now, go and get yourself ready for seeing your own heart-throb. ’
I glanced down at my clothes. I was wearing a cream, long-sleeved T-shirt tucked into black trousers with a brown, sleeveless cardigan over the top. ‘I am ready.’
‘Oh.’
* * *
I wasn’t sure how long we’d been walking.
Sheila asked when the last time I took a meaningless stroll around the city was, and when I told her I didn’t know, it seemed that that became our unspoken aim for the afternoon.
There had been peaks and lulls in conversation, where she told me the latest project she’d been commissioned for – ‘They basically want everything in their house to look distressed’ – and I told her about the interesting customers who’d wandered through the shop doorway in that time, too; she told me what she’d eaten for dinner, how she’d slept, her favourite time of day to catch the city in just the right lighting.
But we also said nothing at all for a while, while we held hands and perched on benches and – though I still couldn’t shake what felt like brazenness – kissed in public.
They weren’t show-stopping not-suitable-for-child-viewers kisses, but soft and occasional ones; kisses where I would say something that Sheila apparently found so endearing, or so warming, that she couldn’t help but pause the walk, turn and pull me to her.
I didn’t mind, though I didn’t quite have the confidence to instigate the gesture myself – not when there were so many people around.
‘You’re like a baby lesbian sometimes,’ she said.
‘A baby lesbian? Is that an actual term?’
Sheila laughed. ‘No, it’s just a term that I use with my friends whenever we spot young women in the throes of being gay.’
‘You make it sound like there’s an initiation process.’
‘Sometimes that’s how it feels. Did you not get the handbook?’ There came a slight pause after that before she added, ‘You know I’m joking, don’t you?’
I guffawed. ‘Please, I’m nowhere near as vulnerable as you think I am.’
‘I’m counting on that.’ She squeezed my hand. ‘I just think you’re… not out.’
‘I’m holding hands with a woman, Sheila, how much more–’
‘Would the man who serves you your morning tea be surprised to see you holding hands with a woman?’
Yes, I thought with a vice-like grip around my stomach, because he knows I’m married to a man.
‘Anyway,’ she said when I didn’t answer fast enough, ‘it doesn’t matter. I suppose if you haven’t had many out and out relationships, then you’re not going to be as… open? I don’t know whether that’s the word I mean.’
I’d told Sheila that my relationships with women had been limited in scope.
Not through lack of trying, I insisted. But because of…
well, something else. Lack of out-ness? I wondered then whether if I’d been out with my mother, with more of my friends, with myself, whether life might have looked different up to now.
There was a rumble of something in the background that caused the thoughts to stop before they could take root, though, and I was thankful of that.
‘Christ, was that thunder?’
‘I suppose we’ve been lucky to make it this far without the weather turning.’
‘Oh, actually, let’s not become people who talk about the…’
Sheila’s plea petered out as the first spots of rain started.
The first droplets were a misleading prelude to what soon became a thunderous shower.
The rain hit the pavement around us with such force that it felt for a second like there might have been hail, or at the very least sleet mixed with the downpour.
Sheila’s deliberately messy bun collapsed around her face in a way that made her look like a character from a film.
Though I was only too aware that the slab of hair now sticking to my forehead likely wasn’t doing any such favours for me.
She was smiling, though, and soon laughing and tugging my hand, and I thought that must mean she had shelter in mind.
‘Come on, my house is only a couple of streets away,’ she shouted over the thrash of the waterfall, in the very same instant that a car drove past us, hitting the beginnings of a puddle as it went.
The water leapt from its bed on the roadside and caught both of us by the trousers, but it only prompted more laughter.
‘I put so much thought into this outfit, too,’ I joked as Sheila still pulled me along.
Two minutes and another puddle later we were huddled in the porchway of what turned out to be Sheila’s home.
She fumbled her keys free from the pocket of her skirt and rushed to get the right one in the lock.
During which time our sodden bodies fought for shelter in the small doorway, packed tightly with my front pressed against her back, and like the chorus from a catchy song I found myself quietly thinking, I’m seeing Sheila’s home for the first time, I’m seeing Sheila’s home for the first time, I’m seeing–
‘Get yourself inside,’ she said as she hurried into the hallway.
I followed close behind her, feeling the instant warmth of the place hit me with a force after the thrash of cold rain that it took to get us there.
Sheila was wringing her hair out in chunks, forcing out water so that it leaked onto the tile flooring.
Meanwhile, I fought myself free of my cardigan that had taken on water like a wet rag might; every fibre of wool having gobbled up all the moisture it could.
I dropped it onto the floor, not knowing where else to throw the thing, and it landed with a thud that made me laugh.
When I looked at Sheila, though, her expression was a serious one.
‘Gosh, are you okay?’
Her mouth broke into a smile as she reached across to push wet hair away from my face.
‘It’s so silly, but this is like living out a fantasy in real-time.
’ Sheila closed the distance between us, just slightly.
‘I don’t mean that I’ve imagined us getting soaked to the core by a rainstorm on a sunny day. I just mean I’ve imagined…’
She didn’t finish the sentence, but somehow I knew its ending. Perhaps because from the first time I’d met her, I’d been imagining it, too.