17 A Rain Of Many Things (1/2)

”. . . putting rain in my eyes tears in my dreams

and rocks in my heart . . .”

– Billie Holiday

Without warning, the rain came down with a rush, a big deafening rush that washed away the rest of our argument, just swallowed up the hot words and doused the flaming tempers, so that we were just there mouthing empty things that no longer had any bite in them.

f.u.c.k, the sky had not even covered its face with dark clouds as it usually did, or growled down a threat; it had just opened its mouth wide and emptied this mighty water upon us, drowning the din of our madness out – it was as if the louder we screamed, the harder the rain came down . . . You can't beat Nature, they say. So we shut up, and sat down, on the edge of the bed. And as if the rain had been watching us, it quieted down, gradually, until it was just a murmur above us – the patter of children's feet on the roof.

We began laughing. She laughed first, the sound of her laughter prodding mine up out of the remnants of anger that still lingered in my heart, and both laughters bounced back and forth between us, the same way our boiling words had been colliding just a few minutes ago within that same s.p.a.ce.

She closed the s.p.a.ce with a thrust of her bosom and pulled me into the bed with her. 'You're f.u.c.king crazy, you know this.'

'I do,' I said.

'Then you may kiss the bride.'

She didn't wait for me to; she ate the laughter off my mouth. Yeah, that's how she kissed – like she was f.u.c.king devouring your entire face; her mouth over your mouth, over your nose, eyes, even up to your f.u.c.king forehead and behind your ears! Just trying to take it all in.

'You're going to swallow my head whole one day . . .'

She giggled, and closed her eyes, like a medium – 'Hmmmm,

in the spirit of swallowing heads . . .' – and fingered my zip . . .

'Argh-f.u.c.k,' I groaned. 'Every time I'm about to leave, it starts raining, and when it starts raining it never stops, and the f.u.c.king streets are all flooded and you can't go anywhere and . . .'

'Maybe it's a sign.'

'That?'

'That you should stop leaving.'

'Babe, if I start living here, one day one of us will wind up dead.'

'And the other would join him.'

I snorted, 'Romeo and Juliet did not happen, doll; it was written, imagined.'

'Like your bible?' she smirked.

f.u.c.k-no, I was not going to get into that with her today; I rose, zipped up my trousers, and was putting my feet in socks, sitting on the edge of the bed, when she threw me a kick from her lying position – the top of her foot connecting with the back of my neck like a backhand slap. 'Stop being f.u.c.king sensitive about that book! I don't child up when you take my G.o.d of Small Things apart with an academic razor on your f.u.c.king tongue! I argue back. That's the whole point of being an intellectual and having a rational mind, the whole f.u.c.king point of all your years of formal education . . . Prove to me that the contents of your book are not the products of somebody's fecund imagination. . .'

f.u.c.k-yes, she was comparing a Holy Book – no, The Holy

Book – to a f.u.c.king c.r.a.p G.o.d of something book . . . Holiest-f.u.c.k save me . . . Yeah, and she's the only girl I know that would use a word like fecund in an informal conversation . . . f.u.c.king fecund indeed . . .

I swallowed my response, and rose to buckle my belt.

'I told you I wanted to tell you something,' she said, a little more quietly.

I couldn't find my car keys in the pockets of my trousers where I usually left them. She must have hidden them.

I had to get back home, where there was some sanity; too much sanity, in fact.

I opened the door, and stopped. The rain had become something else; it was a grey curtain before me, hanging from the heavens to earth.

'You can't go in that rain, without your car . . . Just– '

I parted the curtain and stepped into the grey world beyond, and her words were lost.

I don't know why people run in the rain; run, walk, crawl,

fly, you'll still get beaten to a soggy pulp . . .

I walked.

There was not a soul in sight.

A tropical downpour is a terror like that; men scamper for cover, animals cower in hiding, trees bow in obeisance, gutters and streams offer up offerings of urban rubbish, as the almighty rainstorm strides through empty streets, majestically; its watery train sweeping elegantly behind it, sweeping up everything in the path of its liquid wrath.

And the city remains a ghost town throughout this reign of

terror . . .

* * *

f.u.c.k, he had left his phone behind.

It was singing that Amy Winehouse's Back to Black, that jaunty

dirge I hated so much; it made me feel there was a dead person in the room with me and that my heart was tear-logged, heavy with grief . . .

. . . with his same old safe bet me and my head held high and my tears dry get on without my guy you went back to what you knew so far removed from what we went through and I tr–

I looked at the green screen: Luv

I couldn't hear what she was saying. The rain had grown angrier, shouting, threatening to break the door down, pounding the roof . . .

I hung up, and put the phone down.

She sent a text: Baby pls stay whervr u r, u cnt drive in ds rain n all d streets

here r flooded. U r coverd in d blood of JESUS, IJN. AMEN.

See? He should have listened to me and stayed, the obstinate b.a.s.t.a.r.d. It's a good thing I had hidden his keys. I'm sure he'll come back soon. You can't go very far in this b.i.t.c.h of a rain, on foot. Luv did not stop calling . . .

. . . we only said Goodbye with words I died a hundred times you go back to her and I go back to . . .

Wives, they are f.u.c.king annoying like that, like houseflies, f.u.c.king persistent, keep buzzing around a particular subject until you can't take their s.h.i.+t anymore and they get smashed to nothing. . .

That's why their husbands always c . . .

The bellowing thunder shut my thoughts up.

At 23 Missed Calls I turned the phone off – ARGH – and went to the window. Where the f.u.c.k are you? There was nothing outside but the thick grey of the rain . . . The rain was a terror.