Rain

by Kate Le Vann

  ‘Are you all right, darlin’?’

  Two boys on bikes, a year or two younger than her, but quite a bit taller, had stopped where she was sitting.

  Rain looked up at them. She nodded, and then sniffed more loudly than she’d meant to; it seemed to echo in the quiet enclave. ‘I’m okay. I’m just a bit emotional.’

  ‘He’s not worth it!’ said the taller of the boys.

  ‘We were saying, we think you’re lovely,’ said the other one. ‘Ten out of ten.’

  It didn’t feel at all as though they were trying it on with her – they’d just decided some boy had broken her heart so they were trying to cheer her up.

  ‘Thanks,’ Rain croaked. The boys stayed with her a moment, and the three of them were quiet, with just the sounds of birds singing and one of the bike wheels ticking as it spun around.

  ‘If you need any help getting where you’re going, just let us know,’ said the taller boy, and they tactfully withdrew to start kicking a little football around in the street. Rain watched them for five minutes, then she got up and waved to them as she set off. They waved back. ‘He’s not worth it!’ repeated the taller boy. ‘Don’t even let him apologise. Don’t have nothing to do with him!’ and they laughed and Rain smiled. She made her way back to her gran’s house. She checked her phone, but there were no new texts. She read Harry’s last one again, but still didn’t reply to it.

  They were both full, with flaky, jammy dishes in the sink and the bits of advertising that fell out of newspapers and magazines scattered all over the floor, when Rain made her move.

  ‘Gran, I need to ask you something very personal about my mum. It may be all new to you and it may be upsetting or … ’

  ‘What?’ Vivienne said. She sounded worried, despite Rain’s attempt to make her voice light.

  Rain had been rehearsing what she’d say outside on her walk, but she was still tempted to slow it down as if the words were just coming to her and she was feeling her way through. That way she could back out and change her mind, run away. As it happened, she just went for it. Vivienne listened as Rain explained. What she’d read in Sarah’s diary, what Harry had said, how her world had been tumbling in on itself since she saw those weird initials, and now she was reaching out, hoping her granny could help.

  ‘Oh Rain,’ Vivienne said. ‘How could you?’ Rain sighed, the breath pulled at her insides, all the way to her stomach. ‘How could you go through all this alone and not tell me you were sad when I could have made you feel better in seconds.’ ‘So you know about this?’ Rain said. Her head had started to feel light and lost; her hands felt heavier, cold and shaky. ‘Who is my real father and how did my dad get involved?’

  ‘There’s no real father!’ Vivienne said. ‘Sarah called your dad Quentin because he was playing in a terrible band when she met him – it was just a silly sort of nickname that stuck for a while. She liked Lavender Sandcastles at the time. But not even that much, so the idea that she was Quentin Vienna’s groupie is quite funny. For one thing, he’s gay.’ Rain looked incredulously at her. ‘Oh, Rain, mothers always end up listening to the crap music their daughters listen to, of course I know about him.’

  ‘Well I know he’s gay now,’ Rain said with a half-smile, carefully getting back to the point. ‘I met his partner, Anthony.’

  ‘Oh, how nice,’ Vivienne said. ‘Does he still seem like a famous person or … ’

  ‘Gran, are you telling the truth?’ Rain was pretty shocked: she was trying to get to the bottom of her father’s actual identity and Vivienne seemed more excited by the fact that she’d met Quentin Vienna. ‘I mean, Dad was in a band? But he’d have told me something like that. I mean, he’s never said anything about it, nothing even like that.’ Rain couldn’t keep the hurt out of her voice. She’d spent so much time with her dad, and here was a big thing she didn’t know about him.

  ‘It wasn’t a proper band,’ Vivienne said. ‘He was just messing about for a few months in one as a favour to a friend. Someone dropped out, I think, and they asked him to fill in. They played a few pubs and maybe that was where Sarah met him. I swear to you, Rain! There’s no mystery here. I’m afraid the truth is not very exciting because it’s what you already know. I didn’t know she called him Quentin in her diary, but she used to call him that to me, and I used to call him Quentin as well, until he started turning up at the house, and then very soon after that it was rather a tense time and for a long while no one was making many jokes at all.’

  ‘You mean when she got pregnant.’

  ‘Yes. I’m … I’ve always worried I wasn’t a very good mum to her at the time. And I think, or I’ve always been convinced that’s why your dad didn’t bring you to see me so much after Sarah died. I’d hate to think he didn’t feel comfortable with me even now, and it had stopped us being better friends.’

  ‘Gran, how can any of that be true? You’re superhip, and this was seventeen years ago, you must have been so young.’

  ‘I was young.’ Vivienne leaned back and stared at the ceiling. She started to smooth back her hair with both hands. ‘I was too young to be rational. I panicked. Before it happened I thought I was incredibly cool and modern. I used to brag to everyone that Sarah and I were more like sisters than mother and daughter. And then my sixteen-year-old daughter came home pregnant. My perfect, clever girl with all her life in front of her and it felt like the end of the world. How stupid.’ She leaned forward again and looked straight at her granddaughter. ‘You were fabulous, from the moment you were born, Rain. We all loved you so much: your granddad, I’d never seen him smile the way he did when he first saw you. Your dad, my God! We all knew he’d do the right thing and be there for Sarah, but no one could have expected him to fall in love with you the way he did. He was smitten, absolutely mad about you. He made up songs, and rocked you in his arms and sang to you for hours in the middle of the night – you were all living with me, and I used to hear him getting up and then two minutes later his bloody stupid songs.’ Vivienne closed her eyes and smiled the most beautifully relaxed smile. ‘Sarah hadn’t ruined anything – something lovely had happened.’

  Rain had to hear it again. ‘You’re saying the QV in my mum’s diary is my dad. My dad, Sam Lindsay.’

  ‘Well duh, Rain, why would we lie to you?’

  ‘But I’ve been worrying about this for weeks!’

  ‘Why didn’t you just ask me?’

  ‘I thought you’d be upset. Or that you didn’t know. Look … there’s no chance you didn’t know and he’s someone else?’

  ‘RAIN! There’s no chance! Let’s find some pictures of your dad at the time and then let’s find some pictures of you and see how much you look like your dad.’ She went over to some deep drawers at the back of the room.

  ‘Thank God I didn’t ask my dad about it.’

  Vivienne laughed. ‘I think he’d think it was funny. I should tell him anyway.’

  ‘Gran, don’t. Please. It hasn’t been funny at all.’

  ‘Here.’ Vivienne came back to Rain and handed her a little pile of photographs. Rain looked through them, feeling her hands getting a little trembly again.

  ‘Oh … ’ she said. ‘It’s Mum and Dad when they were teenagers! Why haven’t I seen these before?’

  ‘I don’t know, you should have,’ her granny said. ‘They’ve usually been packed up or stashed away or something. But when I moved from Germany I found out where some of my more precious things were, so I can put my hands on them again. She was so lovely, wasn’t she? Very like you. But you’re like your dad, too.’

  Rain gazed into the blurry little pictures: Sarah smiling shyly, her dad trying to look cool. He looked like Quentin Vienna. But he looked more like Rain.

  ‘This isn’t what you’ve been doing with Harry, is it?

  I thought you two were doing scrummy romantic things around town, not reading old copies of Smash Hits looking for clues. If I’d known I’d have forced you to do more things with me. I didn’t want to cra
mp your style.’

  Feeling awkward again, Rain started turning the pages of a Sunday magazine. ‘There’s no … romance, Gran.’

  ‘Oh, okay,’ Vivienne said. ‘Well it’s a shame, because he’s a good-looking kid.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Rain said quietly. There was nothing more to say. She didn’t want to hurt her granny’s feelings by being touchy. She read her horoscope at the back of the magazine. It talked about her career plans coming together this week.

  ‘What a mess,’ Vivienne said. ‘I wish you’d trusted me.’

  ‘It was nothing to do with not trusting you,’ Rain said. ‘It was about not … upsetting … things.’ Her body was flimsy, still set up to hear life-changing things. It was like she’d been pushing hard against a door, trying to stop it opening towards her, then it had opened the other way, leaving her falling into nothing.

  ‘I don’t want you to feel bad, Rain,’ Vivienne said.

  ‘I don’t feel … ‘ Rain said, but she didn’t finish the sentence.

  Rain’s diary

  7 August

  I hate this feeling. The emptiness. It’s almost as if I’d wanted Gran to tell me all about my real dad, like I’d wished there really was another story there. I feel guilty for not just simply being incredibly happy. I am happy, I am incredibly happy. But not simply. Before this, I’ve always had to live with never really knowing my mum. Now it turns out I’ve never really known my dad.

  At the back of it all, the thing that feels good – or good isn’t the word, what it feels is SAFE – is that my dad is my dad. The truth is, the real reason that mattered so much was that I was so scared of things changing, and so scared of losing him – HIM: Sam Lindsay – and, if he found out I wasn’t who I was, there was always a chance he might not have wanted to be around me so much. But I never wanted to have to get to know the stranger who had had something to do with my birth but nothing to do with my life.

  I tried to call Georgy, see if she could somehow pick up a signal, but it didn’t happen, then I started writing her an email in case she’d taken a day trip out to somewhere with an internet café. But I binned the email and just came back to my diary because I couldn’t find the right tone, there was too much to say, and I realised I needed to say it to my dad before anyone else. This is weird and wrong, but I’m sort of cross with my dad for the fact that I was fooled, for it all having been a surprise. I know that his life is his own, and he doesn’t know everything I think, and the older I get the less I will tell him. That makes me sad. I don’t have any right to expect him to have told me everything that’s ever happened to him, that he met my mum when he was playing in a band, that she had a nickname for him, or any of it. But I feel like he should have tried harder to tell me about her. I know it must have been hard.

  Also: I feel bad that I blew up at Harry. I was angry because he’d rushed us into doing something stupid and embarrassing, but that wasn’t all, because that was okay, really, Quentin/Colin was nice about it and we’re all still alive. It was … there was something happening, even before Harry said that Madrigal wasn’t his girlfriend. I kept wanting to lean on him and touch him as if it was the most natural thing in the world, and then realising that I wasn’t really supposed to do that, he hadn’t given me any reason to think I could. It’s not so much like he gets me or we’re the same person, it’s just like I want more of him, I want to know what he thinks about everything, and when I think something I want him to know what I think and to tell me something else. I find it hard to stop. But at the same time I’m scared, because Harry’s not a kid and I don’t want to seem like a kid and get it wrong. On Saturday night he seemed to come close to saying something about us, but I didn’t let him because I wasn’t in any state to hear it anyway, because of what had just happened. Then I was horrible, then I ignored him, and I’m left wondering if there’s anywhere else for us to go …

  I’m no good at this kind of thing. Harry is going to have to realise that and be good enough for the both of us, or it’s not going to happen. Ha ha, I talk like I know he still wants it to happen! Is that possible? Or have I been stupid enough to put him off?

  Chapter 13

  On Monday morning, when Rain came downstairs for breakfast, she found her grandmother frowning, distractedly folding the edge of her newspaper into a concertina fan.

  ‘Harry’s not coming in today,’ Vivienne said, looking up.

  ‘He isn’t?’ Rain said. She was nervous, although she didn’t know why. ‘What did he say?’

  Her granny peered at Rain a bit more intently than usual. ‘He said he wasn’t sure when he’d be able to come back, and that something had come up that he couldn’t get out of.’

  ‘Oh.’ Rain felt cold inside. ‘Does that mean … Madrigal’s coming on her own?’

  Vivienne’s frown relaxed into a sudden smile. ‘I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that’s not going to happen,’ she said. ‘I suppose it must be a very last minute thing or Harry would have mentioned it to you on Saturday night. I hope he’s okay.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Rain said, meekly.

  ‘He didn’t say anything, did he?’

  ‘No,’ Rain said, rounding her eyes.

  ‘I don’t really know what we’re going to do without him.’

  ‘Oh, I bet we do all right,’ Rain said.

  But they missed Harry. Madrigal, as Vivienne had predicted, didn’t turn up either. Rain and her gran spent the day sanding doors to prepare them for varnishing, and they were both quickly exhausted and mostly silent. The work seemed harder without Harry’s jokes and sweetly silly questions: making everyone rate each other in order of geekiness (Harry put Vivienne at the top and said she just hadn’t realised what was out there for her yet) or asking them to name their favourite song that told a whole story (Rain’s was ‘Common People’ by Pulp, because it was her dad’s favourite song, Harry’s was ‘The Gambler’ by Kenny Rogers).

  By lunchtime they were hot and hungry, but Vivienne just made sweaty little cheese sandwiches, rather than sending Rain to the deli, which was what usually happened when Harry was around. After Rain and her gran had eaten the sandwiches, neither of them felt like starting work again, so Rain went to call her dad and Vivienne lay on a sofa that was drenched with sunlight from the curtainless window, and immediately fell asleep.

  Rain wasn’t supposed to call her dad today: she knew he was on a field trip. He was halfway up a mountain when he answered his mobile. He was puffing like mad and the line was bad. He apologetically warned her he didn’t really have time to talk. As soon as she heard his voice, Rain was almost drunk on the emotion, she got light-headed and tongue-tied. She felt how much she was missing him. She didn’t have anything to say to him, because she had too much to say, and nothing at all that could be said over a phone to someone on a mountain. He tried to explain how beautiful the view was, while she pressed her phone hard into her head, trying to hear his near-breathless voice through the breaks in their connection.

  She’d really believed she might have lost him, and he would never know.

  Over supper, a takeaway pizza, Rain and her gran mutually agreed to abandon work on the house until Harry came back. But after calling Harry early next morning, Vivienne sat down at her computer and started writing another ad.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Rain said, looking over her shoulder.

  ‘I just can’t tell if Harry’s going to come back,’ Vivienne said. ‘He sounded weird today. He couldn’t come up with a good reason not to come tomorrow, which is why I think he isn’t going to come.’

  ‘But that doesn’t make any sense!’

  ‘It does to me. Rain, did … ‘ Vivienne chewed her thumb. ‘This isn’t about you two, is it?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Rain said, with over-played innocence.

  ‘That’s why I haven’t pushed him harder about coming back,’ Vivienne said. ‘I’m afraid he’s upset you, and he’s staying away.’

  ‘No, not at all!’ Rain protested.
/>   ‘Or the other possibility, of course … you upset him,’ Vivienne said, comically biting her bottom lip. She smiled.

  ‘Oh, Gran, come on.’

  Vivienne had guessed her thoughts. The harder Rain tried to remember what happened when she and Harry met Quentin Vienna, the more it played out in her head as a kind of TV highlights package of her being impulsive and brattish. She’d made it very clear to him how angry she’d been and how much she’d blamed him. After that she’d just run home when he was trying to talk to her. If Harry had given up fixing Vivienne’s house because he was trying to avoid facing Rain, it would be no surprise to her – or, it now turned out, to her granny.

  Rain’s diary

  9 August

  Well, that’s it, then, I’ve totally messed up. Am I being completely egotistical thinking I’m the reason he hasn’t come back? I mean, Gran said it, not me. But it must be me, because why hasn’t he texted me? I mean, APART from the three texts he sent me the night we went to Colin’s house, the texts I totally ignored because I wanted to make some kind of POINT.