Still Rain
She recognised the look he’d given her from boys picking teams at PE in school. Oh. I’ve got you. Well, tough luck, chunky knits. They were back on an asphalt road, the kind of terrain she liked, somewhere you could drive a black cab. It was also wide enough to walk two abreast so they fell into step, raising their voices to be heard above the clatter of rain.
‘So, weather aside,’ he said, ‘how is it so far?’
‘Very nice,’ she said, but struggled to say more. She was not eloquent about landscape and thought of scenery as just that, a backdrop associated with nature documentaries or movies, so that the mist on the lake’s black water suggested Arthur and Excalibur, while the great churning river to her right made her think of grizzly bears tossing salmon into the air.
‘The River Liza,’ said Michael, introducing them.
‘Liza. I had a friend called Liza. I think more rivers should have normal names, kids I was at school with. The River Claire. The River Martin Fletcher. There’s the Neil in Egypt.’ She was wittering. Don’t witter. ‘The mighty Gemma Bostock, wending her way towards the sea …’
‘This one doesn’t go to the sea. It just feeds the lake.’
‘Okay.’
‘Classic ribbon lake.’
‘I thought so too. Classic.’
They walked a little further. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘It slips out sometimes. The geography. Like wind.’
She laughed. ‘It’s nice to learn new things. Remind me, your surname?’
‘Bradshaw.’
‘Classic teacher’s name! I’m sure if you’d been my teacher …’ she said, but the thought petered out. ‘I remember as a kid we had this world atlas, huge, the size of a coffee-table, something I could only get out on very special occasions, like the record-player and the SodaStream. I remember it always made me feel a bit dizzy, there was so much of everything, all those vast empty spaces, either that or everything crammed in far too tightly. It was the only book that made me feel like that. A bit overwhelmed.’
‘So what were you good at? At school.’
‘Not much. Keeping my head down.’
‘English, surely.’
‘I was okay. Not great in exams. Just as I was getting the hang of it, it was over. Books were my TV, except I was really obsessed. “Go outside,” Mum and Dad always said. I didn’t see the point of outside. All that space and nowhere to sit down. Fresh air, it’s a myth. It’s the same air, no matter what they tell you.’
‘No family walking holidays?’
‘Country parks, you know, in the car, for ice-cream. We went outside but only so we could go to a different inside.’
‘But look at you now!’
‘Look at me now!’
‘No such thing as bad weather.’
‘Norway, I retract.’
‘Hey,’ he said, stopping suddenly, holding out his palm. ‘Have you noticed?’
‘Oh, my God,’ she said, ‘you’re right.’ The rain had not stopped but there was a change in its intensity, as if someone had complained about the noise. Tentatively, they lowered their hoods, like astronauts removing their helmets. Why not? She was already soaked, could feel a large wet patch on her back, the water making its way around into the lining of her sports bra so that there’d be two wet triangles on her sweatshirt, like a bikini on a Greek beach, and while her boots had yet to leak, the water was being drawn down through her socks, the skin beginning to rub. Only her trousers held out against the rain, trapping sweat inside so that it condensed on the fabric, like vapour on the lid of a casserole.
Still, she was determined to go on. Rather this than sit around, restless and bored, and besides, she wanted to reset the relationship with Conrad. If she stayed, she’d only spend money. She loved Cleo but, like many of her old friends, she took prosperity for granted, the shared restaurant bill, the taxi, the spontaneous train. Nothing was more humiliating than telling a friend, ‘I can’t afford it,’ and since becoming freelance she could rarely afford anything. The single self-employed life gave her the freedom to fret at any time, at night in particular, and a great deal of her working day was spent writing passive-aggressive emails to finance departments, wondering if it might be at all possible, et cetera, or choreographing the movement of funds from credit card to overdraft to gas bill to rent.
She wondered: did Conrad realise she was … well, not poor but not secure? She appeared to maintain a stable metropolitan lifestyle, shelves crammed with books, neat clothes, a trip to the cinema now and then, but the cuffs of her winter coat were frayed, and the best part of her wardrobe dated from a Whistles sample sale in 2016. What would happen if, God forbid, the work dried up or there was a sudden unmanageable rent rise? How long before AI could copy-edit Twisted Night in a nanosecond? Her old work pension promised an income of two pounds twenty a week, and she furiously resented belonging to a generation whose future security depended on their parents’ death, so that only orphans could afford a holiday.
All of these anxieties came garnished with rage, not least because of the disputed fifteen grand kept back from the sale of their flat, money that Neil held for ‘legal expenses’. They’d argued about it the last time they’d spoken, two years ago now, Neil sighing and implying that, as a father, repaying the debt would somehow involve selling his offspring’s shoes and toys. He would ‘see what I can do’, though it was ‘not a good time’. Clearly the needs of a young family trumped the petty demands of a single woman and she’d not had the energy – the courage? – to ask again, though the subject always sent Cleo apoplectic with rage, directed as much at Marnie as Neil, He’s walking all over you, even now, little shit, get it back, get a lawyer, forgetting that lawyers required payment to retrieve the money required to pay them.
Circular anxieties, ancient regrets, there wasn’t a mountain in all England that could obscure them. She felt the rain breach her collar and prayed her laptop was still dry – she could never afford a new one. A thousand-pound loss versus the cost of a taxi ride: how many decisions had been tilted the wrong way by this kind of calculation?
Too gloomy to think about. The walk had turned into a trudge through acre after acre of lousy Christmas trees, in some areas the firs lying rotten and desolate as if trampled by some giant. On and on it went and she thought, At least on a treadmill you can watch pop videos. The rain stiffened again and they put up their hoods, the path roughening and rising until they reached a small hut at the valley’s end, mountains looming abruptly on every side, their peaks obscured by clouds. She was a spider in a bathtub, with no way out.
‘So this is a cul-de-sac, yes?’ she said. ‘Is that the right term?’
He laughed. ‘I suppose so. Except we’re going to climb over and into the next valley.’
‘Okay. Okay. Really?’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘Climb? With ropes?’
‘More of a clamber. We’ll take it slowly. It’ll be fine.’
‘How high?’
‘About six hundred metres.’
‘You see, that means nothing to me.’
‘So, less than a kilometre.’
‘Obviously, but—’
‘But vertically.’ And he pointed into the air. ‘It’s a scramble, really. You’ll need to eat something first.’
The hut was unoccupied so they sat on the bench outside, the water falling in a curtain from the eaves, steam rising off them, like boiled potatoes. Michael lowered his hood, drank coffee from a flask, ate his apple and named the peaks in his nice voice. At least she felt in safe hands.
But any relief from the rain felt horribly temporary and the banana she’d transported so carefully from the fruit bowl in Herne Hill had bruised and blackened. She fingered the sweet mush into her mouth. ‘Costa Rica’ said the sticky label. What was this banana doing here? What was she doing here?
He passed her the coffee cup and she raised it in a toast. ‘To holidays!’
‘Holidays!’
‘You know,’ she said, ‘I’ve thought about it and I don’t think I’ve ever in my whole life been this far away from another human being.’
‘Well …’
‘Except for you, of course,’ she said, and nudged him with her elbow. As they sat and steamed in their temporary shelter, peering through the veil of rain at all that hidden majesty, she longed for a vision, the yellow light of a passing black cab.