Rain

by Kate Le Vann

  They stopped at a little eat-in deli and had really good toasted club sandwiches with fat, hot chips (Rain insisted on paying) and Rain was enjoying herself so much that she could almost for a moment forget that she’d just run head first into the biggest identity crisis of her life, and she was going to have to talk about it or she’d explode.

  She leaned away from the table and studied her granny’s face: still pretty, with soft skin and lines only in smiley places. No. She couldn’t ask her about it.

  When they got back to the house, the living room walls were almost completely stripped. Madrigal was alone in the living room, her blond hair falling over her face as she picked wallpaper-mulch off her scraper. She looked up, saw Rain’s carrier bag and said, ‘Oooh, De Facto, how posh! Let me see!’ and although she was just being friendly, Rain was intimidated and, weirdly, upset by the easy, immediate closeness, and she didn’t want to show this older London girl what she’d got in case it was wrong, somehow.

  She hesitated then took the dress out, and as she unfolded the rustly tissue paper it was safely gorgeous.

  Madrigal whistled admiringly and said, ‘Stunning. Harry and I are going to have to find somewhere to take you in that.’

  Harry and I. That probably meant they were a couple. Rain felt a throb of pain and caught her breath when she realised she was jealous. Could it really be jealousy? Had she fallen for Harry, with his dark beauty and unexpected kindness, and fondness for taking the piss out of her?

  ‘You’ve done masses,’ Rain said, looking at the walls. ‘I should get changed and come down and help.

  I bet you could both do with a break.’ She wanted to ask where Harry was, but now she was frightened even to mention him, as if the way she said his name would give something away about her feelings for him.

  ‘Oh, we’re still going strong,’ Madrigal said. ‘We should have done this whole room by the end of today … well, although it may mean staying till bedtime.’

  Rain had a feeling that Madrigal was trying to tell her not to come and help. Obviously, if she needed the money and Rain came and shortened the job, Maddie wouldn’t want her there. But Rain wanted to help her granny, and Vivienne usually spent most of her time working on the house and she wanted to be with her, not to go out on her own. She stood there hesitantly, trying to make a decision.

  Rain took her dress upstairs and put it on a hanger, which she carefully hung on the outside of the wardrobe door so she could look at it. She loved it. She saw the diary she’d been reading the night before on her bedside table and picked it up again, wondering if she’d been so tired when she read it that she saw something that wasn’t there. Before long she was as engrossed as she had been the first time she read it: she sat on the floor, her lips moving as she whispered her mother’s thoughts aloud, her eyes filling with tears.

  There was a knock at her door and Rain hid the diary under her bed and called, ‘Come in, Gran,’ while wiping her face dry with her sleeve and hoping she looked normal.

  ‘It’s not your gran,’ Harry said from the other side of the door.

  ‘Oh!’ Rain said, getting up and opening the door herself. She gave him a friendly smile when she saw him, but he looked at her and frowned.

  ‘Everything okay?’ Harry said.

  ‘Yeah. What’s up?’ Rain said, as brightly as she could.

  ‘Your gran thought as we’re working so late tonight that we could all go out together for supper. So we’re taking a vote on where to go. Madrigal thinks Indian, your granny says sausage and mash, and I’m … Are you sure you’re okay?’

  She nodded, unable to speak because she always got pointlessly emotional when people felt sorry for her, and her voice would have given her away. But Harry moved forward anyway and somehow pulled her into a gentle hug, and Rain’s head seemed to fall on to his chest and fit perfectly, while his arms held her just enough and she let herself go soft in them.

  ‘Hey, what’s wrong?’ he whispered into her hair.

  ‘I’m just … missing my dad,’ she said. ‘He emailed me, just made me a bit weepy, that’s all.’

  ‘This is the first time you’ve been away from home, isn’t it?’ Harry said, and his hug loosened and Rain stepped out of it, feeling the loss of his warmth. ‘It’s very normal, and I’m sorry I walked in while you were … having a moment. Don’t be embarrassed. Now listen, your gran’s sausage and mash idea isn’t bad, but now that I’ve got you alone, I think I can get you on to my side. I happen to know this amazing Persian restaurant just … Rain, what’s wrong?’

  ‘I told you,’ Rain said. She gave him a very direct look, repeating slowly: ‘I just miss my … ‘

  ‘Have you had bad news? Has something happened?’

  ‘Not recently,’ Rain said, with an attempt at a laugh that sounded horrendously un-laugh-like. Harry stepped into her room, and she told him everything.

  When Rain and Harry came downstairs again, they didn’t realise that they both looked quite guilty because they were keeping a secret. Madrigal gave Harry a questioning look and said, ‘Well, you took long enough! What’s the decision?’

  ‘What decision?’ Harry said.

  ‘What are we eating?’ Madrigal said.

  Rain and Harry glanced at each other. As soon as Rain had started talking about the diary, they hadn’t mentioned food again.

  ‘Rain was convinced by my Persian suggestion,’ Harry said.

  ‘No, no,’ Madrigal said. ‘You had her alone up there too long. I think you tortured her into agreeing with you. I’m joining Vivienne’s sausage and mash team, so that’s two against two.’

  ‘Three against one,’ Rain said, trying to sound normal. ‘I want to be on the girls’ team.’

  ‘Ha!’ Vivienne said. ‘Good girl. Tough luck, Harry.’

  They walked in two pairs, Vivienne and Rain together and Harry and Madrigal behind. Rain wondered if Harry would tell Madrigal what they’d been talking about in her room. Maybe Madrigal would make fun of her and Harry would laugh, because Madrigal was his girlfriend. Obviously it wouldn’t be ideal if Madrigal knew, but Rain had really needed to talk and Georgina was in the remote Highlands, and, once she’d started, it had turned out that Harry had been a very easy person to talk to. He was enough of a stranger for her to be interested in his reaction – how weird the story would sound to someone else. But she knew enough about the way he talked now to have some idea of how truthful that reaction was. He hadn’t been freaked out at all. ‘Oh listen, one day I’ll tell you about some of the scandals in my family,’ he’d said, as they sat next to each other on the floor beside her bed, looking at their feet. ‘My great granddad was a bigamist, for one.’

  ‘Well, but,’ Rain had said, ignoring his smile, ‘it’s my mum. And my dad.’

  ‘I know,’ Harry had said, his face serious again. ‘It’s not the same.’

  As she walked with her granny she only kept one ear on the conversation, and tried to imagine what Harry had meant by that. It must have been one of those things people say, particularly boys, because boys always tried to come up with solutions whereas girls were better at sympathy. She could hear Madrigal laughing and couldn’t shake her paranoia. Gah, she didn’t want Madrigal to know! Why had she trusted Harry?

  Over dinner Madrigal squeezed Harry’s hand sometimes, when she was talking to him, and at one point even reached over and teasingly pulled his cheeks together with her finger and thumb. Rain realised she hadn’t said a word for ages, and that her face was set in a frown; she hurriedly relaxed it. This really wasn’t jealousy, she decided, it was just that perhaps she shouldn’t have trusted Harry when she hardly knew him and hadn’t even liked him a few days before.

  But he had listened so nicely. There was surely no mistaking that dark, true gaze. She had no idea why she’d suddenly opened up to him, but she was glad she had. Rain pulled herself together and got back into the conversation, hiding her inner conflict behind pretend confidence and jokes.

  Chapter 8
/>   Rain got a text at nine the next morning. She was writing an email to her dad that she’d re-started about fifty times, an email that was definitely not going to mention the diary. Her head was still fuzzy from the glass of red wine she’d drunk the night before with dinner, and she’d showered but let her hair dry any way it liked. The text said, ‘I’m outside. Wondered if you want to chat again. It’s okay if you’re busy or would rather not. Harry.’ She thought about how nice he’d been the night before, when she’d talked about her dad. Since then, she’d been worrying about having made a fool of herself. She was afraid she’d talked too much about things that were probably a bit embarrassing for a near-stranger to listen to, although he’d listened nicely. She blushed when she thought about it, and screwed up her eyes.

  Rain and Harry had swapped mobile numbers early in the day when they went to get the chainsaw together, in case they’d split up and then lost each other, but the text came as a surprise.

  ‘It’s Saturday,’ Rain texted back. ‘Don’t you have anything better to do?’

  ‘Nothing comes close,’ Harry texted. ‘Now can I come in, it’s raining out here.’

  Rain glanced out of the window. It was raining quite hard. She could also see the outline of her hair reflected in the glass: it wasn’t good, but hey, so what? She went downstairs to see Harry.

  Her grandmother had left a note on the kitchen table that said: ‘Gone to supermarket for big stuff. Text me if there’s something I’m likely to forget. Text me anyway to remind me to get garlic, I ALWAYS forget.’ Rain let Harry in the kitchen door and sat down at the table to write the garlic text to Vivienne.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ Harry said, pulling out a chair and sitting across from her.

  ‘Fine. I’ve drunk wine before,’ Rain said, pressing send on the phone and looking up at him.

  Harry smiled somewhere over his shoulder. ‘I meant, how are you feeling about what you told me yesterday,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you’re a really champion drinker, though.’

  Rain hid her own smile because she didn’t want him to know she found him funny. She had already decided not to mention the diaries to Harry again, or anything personal like that. He had a gorgeous and slightly possessive girlfriend. She didn’t want to risk starting to really fancy him and making a fool of herself, trusting him like a boyfriend and then having to back off when the real love interest was around. She didn’t want the cool student couple gossiping about her while they were washing magnolia emulsion out of their hair together, being intimate and loved-up.

  ‘I shouldn’t have told you,’ Rain said. ‘It was … silly. I’d just had a shock and I can’t call my best friend, she’s unreachable this summer. I’m honestly absolutely fine. People’s lives are complicated. My family’s no exception. I mean, there’s Vivienne, she’s had two husbands, I don’t know if … ‘

  ‘Look, you don’t have to explain anything,’ Harry said. ‘I hope you’re okay.’

  ‘Of course!’ Rain said, throwing her arms up a little wildly. He tilted his head sideways to gauge her okayness. ‘I mean, I sort of didn’t sleep and stuff, but, you know it’s … ‘

  ‘Yeah, it’s, um … ‘ Harry said. ‘It’s a pretty big deal.’

  ‘The thing is,’ Rain said, finding herself unable to stop again, ‘I just don’t know what to do about it. I feel like I won’t be able to stop thinking about it until I know the truth, but I don’t know who does know, and if I ask the wrong person I could really mess up.’

  ‘There’s not really very much you can do without asking people, though, is there?’

  Rain slumped forward, her head in her hands. ‘That’s it. It’s depressing, but it’s just something I’ll have to do or not.’

  ‘Okay, well. You know. Good luck,’ Harry said. ‘And if I can do anything, I’m always happy to listen and stuff.’

  ‘Thanks.’ There was an awkward pause.

  ‘I was, I was sort of thinking, though,’ Harry said. ‘Did you think about any specific name when you were reading through the diary?’

  ‘No,’ Rain said. ‘My parents moved from London not long after that and I don’t think they’re in touch with anyone they knew from back then. Why?’

  ‘Oh, it’s nothing, it’s stupid,’ Harry said. It looked to Rain as if he was not saying something else.

  ‘What?’ she said. ‘Is there something I should be doing? I really don’t know where to start. I don’t know who any of the names are, so there’s no one I could ask.’

  ‘Really, it’s not my business,’ Harry said. Again, he looked evasive.

  ‘But what?’

  ‘I didn’t say “but”.’

  ‘You sort of seemed about to. Look, tell me what you think, please. Even if it’s nuts, I promise it can only help.’

  ‘Well … ‘ Harry sighed. ‘No, it’s … ‘ Rain gasped in frustration, and then Harry suddenly blurted: ‘Have you heard of Quentin Vienna?’

  ‘Er … yeah. But I don’t know why? Who is he? What’s he got to do with my mum? Oh, right, his initials are QV. You think it’s him, then? Who is he?’ Rain was talking in a joky, bossy way, but she could see that Harry looked rather serious.

  ‘He’s a singer. Was a singer. I, sort of, went home last night and you know sometimes if you hear initials you put words to them, like you fill in the words, even if you don’t know what the initials are for?’

  Rain didn’t do that. She bit her bottom lip and looked at him, waiting for him to finish.

  ‘So I just … didn’t stop thinking about it. Even when we were all out together, I wasn’t really keeping my mind on the conversation, I just kept coming up with the same name for the initials and, hey, shall I make some coffee? Do you fancy some coffee?’

  ‘And it was … Quentin Vienna?’

  ‘Yeah. I mean, he’s not famous, but I know his music. He sang in a band you probably won’t know. They had about two hits, neatly avoiding being labelled one-hit-wonders – all well before your time.’

  ‘But not before yours?’ Rain said, playfully. ‘What was the band? You’re saying my dad was a pop star? What would he be doing going out with a schoolgirl?’

  ‘Oh, listen, I don’t know,’ Harry said, pulling away from the conversation again. ‘It’s pretty stupid, I guess. It’s just that you trusted me with something important and I was worried it was because you didn’t have anyone else you could tell – and I took it seriously because you were. I just thought if I told you it might spark off some memory.’

  ‘No. I’m really glad you told me,’ Rain said. ‘It … doesn’t. But I mean, nothing does. I’m sure he’s not … my dad, and everything, but thanks for thinking about it. I mean, there must be a million QV people out … ‘

  ‘Yeah, that’s the funny thing,’ Harry said. ‘The – really, let’s get some coffee – point is, the initials are too weird. No one else has those initials. Well, okay, there are actually lots of people, I went through the phone book … ‘ He stood up and went to fill the kettle with water.

  ‘You went through the phone book?’ Rain looked at the back of his head as he stood at the sink.

  ‘Er … yeah. Does that seem weird?’ He didn’t turn round to look at her as he asked.

  ‘Um … no?’

  Rain heard Harry chuckle. ‘Well, God damn it, I did, anyway. It turns out there are literally hundreds of people with surnames beginning with V – Vaughans, Vales, Vincents. Some of those, but not many, have Q initials. It’s really not many. And it’s all in alphabetical order, so it didn’t take me very long. You could check it yourself … ‘

  ‘And you came back to this singer, Quentin Vienna?’

  ‘Well, it’s the year before you were born, so, I think we’re talking about a year before his band was big, not that they were ever really big. It’s possible.’

  Rain was about to ask more questions, then stopped suddenly and her stomach lurched as she realised she was almost beginning to enjoy herself. What they were talking about was dead serious –
it was real. Her mum would have been torn to pieces when it happened, when the man she had fallen in love with somehow had to leave her. It turned Rain’s own identity on its head, it would make her question things she thought she knew about herself and her life.

  It would break her dad’s heart.

  Rain sank back in her chair and remembered the pain and tried not to feel the excitement. But her heart was galloping inside her still slumped body.

  ‘What if I don’t want to know?’ she said, her voice husky.

  Harry brought the coffee cups to the table, and Rain breathed in the warm smell. ‘I shouldn’t have said anything,’ he said. ‘You know who you have to talk to. And it’s definitely not me.’

  The silence stretched and Rain heard the clock in the hall ticking.

  ‘If you go now,’ Rain said, blowing on her coffee, ‘you know and I know that I’ll just go straight to my computer and look up Quentin Vienna on Wikipedia, and I’ll wish you were here to ask things because you seem to know what you’re talking about better than me. You’ve told me now and I can’t put the genie back in the bottle.’

  Harry gently held her forearm in his hand without taking his eyes off her face. The warmth of his touch on her skin made her shiver. ‘I don’t know anything,’ he said. ‘It was just silly speculation. You can forget it because you know I don’t know anything.’

  ‘But what if you do,’ Rain said. ‘What if this is right?’

  ‘Well,’ Harry said. ‘Before we worry about that, I think you should get your laptop.’

  Quentin Vienna (singer)

  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  Background information

  Origin England

  Genre(s) Synth Pop

  Label(s) Fruitgum Records

  Associated acts Lavender Sandcastles

  Website Unknown

  Quentin Vienna is a songwriter and singer known for his work in Lavender Sandcastles, a retro indie band with heavy Synth influences, active during the Nineties.