Bus-stop on a Rainy Day

The zip broke and Jake’s portfolio exploded just as some swine swerved to speed through the puddle near the bus queue.

Rain had already leaked through the gaps and soaked into the cheap seams. Muddy, grimy road-water just added an extra patination to his paintings. The handles slipped as he struggled to hold the portfolio closed and save his work. With rain pouring, no-one could realise that all the tears Jake had dammed up since the tutorial had finally burst their banks and were running down his face.

‘You kids think you know everything,’ said a damp old man ahead of him in the queue. ‘Anyone with half a brain would’ve brought an umbrella.’ He leaned forward, water dripping off a massive, ancient green contraption as he stared into the portfolio. ‘What’s that? Modern art? Bit of rain might improve it.’ He snorted at his own joke, shoulders heaving and more water dislodged in lumps, tipping onto the paintings and sketches. He looked beyond Jake to whoever was behind him. ‘And here’s another one. Umbrella’d spoil what you call your style would it? What are those badges you got pinned on? Save the rainforest? Save the monkeys? They should save you. Even monkeys have got the sense to hold leaves over their heads when it’s raining.’ 

Jake turned so see Cait from college. Cait, who’d glared at his exhibition as if wanting to set it alight with her eyes. He’d wanted to ask why his work annoyed her but as she stood scowling on the slick pavement with her arms akimbo, he knew she must feel like his tutor did. That his art was ‘Too nice. Too hopeful. Not despairing enough.’  Her glare encompassed him and the old man in disparagement of the male sex or possibly the entire human race, then she shoved her hands in her pockets.

Cait hunched in her jacket. The rain had long since soaked all the way through the cloth and she was aware of damp skin cooling. She was unable to suppress a shiver. Even the fortress of her boots had been breached when the motorist went through the puddle. She’d reached out to help with Jake’s portfolio, her hands mottled and blue, but the old man’s words stung. What you call your style…even monkeys have got sense… Why couldn’t people understand? There was so much to sort out – the mess former generations had left through arrogance, ignorance, selfish disregard for the world. The issues were a drowning flood. Cait lay half-awake most nights nearly engulfed by them, trying to dam and steer and navigate those tumbling waters. But she had to push off from the shore and do something, not just drink and eat and sleep her way through life in blind hedonism while the world disintegrated around her. She wanted to save it all – the clean air and the oceans and the animals and even the people who mocked her. She wished she could express what she felt – be kind, be gentle, embrace the sun and the rain and the moon and the sea and the being alive – but her thoughts just came out as furious nonsense. Not like Jake – his art summed up everything she thought. When she’d seen his exhibition she’d wanted to lose herself in his pictures: beauty, joy, hope. She’d wanted to tell him but the words just wouldn’t come. He’d just think her stupid.

Bill had turned to look up the road. He was cold, jealous of the young blood of the two kids who would dry out and forget the rain in no time. Bill was warmed only by thinking of Judith. He was like someone who’d lost a limb but could still feel it aching. Judith wasn’t there but he knew what she’d say, could sense the weight of her arm hooked through his.

But her voice in his mind was disappointed. That was unkind. 

‘Kids should make more of an effort,’ he whispered. ‘Like we used to. Nowadays they’re proud to wear secondhand clothes and have rat-tail hair. Not like you. You were never less than immaculate. Right …. up to the end.’ He swallowed. 

Go on with you, Judith giggled. Remember what the old folk said about our fashions when we were their age? And the girl cares about things. Just like we do.

‘It’s a waste of time. Nothing changes.’

We said we’d never give up hope.

They’d met in the rain on a nuclear disarmament march in 1958. Her umbrella had blown out of her hands as she struggled with a banner and a pet dog sheltering inside her jacket. Dead soft, was Judith. Fierce as a lioness but underneath…

Bill remembered a holiday in the 1960s. Walking along some promenade, they’d passed a hurdy-gurdy man with a dancing monkey, its puckered woebegone face sucking any joy from the tune. 

‘Poor little thing,’ Judith had said. ‘It’s cruel, that’s what it is.’ She’d cried a little and in the middle of the night, Bill agreed to buy the creature and keep it for a pet. But next day, the hurdy-gurdy man and monkey were not to be found.

Perhaps the angry girl was just another Judith. And when had it ever been more important to look right than to do right? 

Umbrella, Judith whispered. 

‘What?’

We always kept a spare folding one in the shopping bag. Give them the old one – you don’t need anything that big anymore.

Bill swallowed, then straightened his shoulders before turning.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Just lost my wife, but it’s no excuse.’ He held out the old battered umbrella he’d had since 1958 and nodded at the portfolio. ‘Take this – protect some of that art.’ Then he gave Cait a trembling smile. ‘Forget what I said. There’s always hope. This umbrella’s big enough for two. Perhaps you’ve got ideas to share. Someone’s got to save the world. It wasn’t me and Judith. But maybe it’ll be you.’

rainy bus stop

Words and art copyright 2020 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission.

Raining all over the World

Rain – comforting, devasting, longed for. To me, there’s nothing quite like lying in a cosy bed in my dry bedroom listening rain on the roof to make me feel warm and safe. Perhaps it takes me back to listening to the steady breathing or heartbeat of my mother while I nestled in the womb. Or maybe the drumming of her fingers on her stomach as she tried to work out whether it was possible to get any bigger. Who knows.

Listening to the rain on roofs of holiday caravans and tents and boats is even more comforting (provided it’s relatively gentle and there’s no wind). I think it’s the smugness of being undercover while yet still somehow in the wild. Your only concern is the hope that it will have miraculously dried up by morning.

In reality this is a feeble hope. I recall damp midnight treks to the loo on a French campsite to find it full of amphibians apparently taking a rain check from the weather. Further back I recall terrifying night-time manoeuvres with the family caravan which had been parked by my ever optimistic father on a cliff top shortly before a storm hit. Even further back than that I recall being bundled into the car during what seemed to be an apocalypse while the tent borrowed from my father’s cousin collapsed in hail and gale force winds (my ever optimistic father had been convinced the weather would hold for one more night). Admittedly I wasn’t bothered about the tent and it was only later that I found out my father’s cousin never quite forgave him for its destruction. I was mostly terrified by the fact that I could not see my parents, or indeed anything outside the car because of the deluge and it seemed as if I was trapped, possibly forever, in a small metal container being rattled by the wind and drowned in rain with my little sister who was howling to ensure she’d get the maximum attention should we ever see our parents again, while I was crying because in his hurry, ever optimistic dad had shut my foot in the door.

Much more recently, I remember being woken as the rocking of the boat we were on stopped being cradle like and started being brain rattling. Listening to the ominously increasing thud of waves and the way the tinkling in the shrouds had turned into to a war dance as the boat turned into a wind which husband (otherwise known as ancient mariner) had promised wasn’t coming until late afternoon, giving us plenty of time to get ashore and home. What made the whole experience more bizarre was that we had to sail back to a mooring then get from the mooring to the shore in a dinghy while being dumped on in all directions by sea and rain. Trying to encourage the children not to be afraid even though I was, I suggested they sang a song. The only thing they could come up with under duress was the one they’d been learning for the school play “Wind in the Willows”. The song? “Messing about in Boats” oh how we laughed. Finally ashore, we realised the water had got inside our very underwear. When we got home, the washing that I’d put out the previous afternoon, assured by ancient mariner that we’d be back in plenty of time to get it in before the weather changed, was wetter than when I’d taken it out of the washing machine. I should point out that this was June.

Rain. I think of myself as a western girl (western in the British sense, I wouldn’t look good in a stetson). This westerly sense of self is based on very little. Twenty-five percent of my genes come from Kent and London.  Born in Edgware, I am technically a Londoner myself, and there is one thin ancestral strand from a long way the other side of the channel. Another twenty-five percent is Irish (which, albeit eastern Irish is still in the West from where I’m sitting right now). But having said that, the remaining set of genes are from the West coast of Scotland and since the age of eight with the exception of three college years in Sussex, I have lived in the West – South West Wales then South West England.

It feels like home, facing the sunset – the unknowable possibilities beyond the horizon – the wilds, the mystery, the distant half visible lands. OK, I know it’s Ireland and the Americas but I prefer to think it’s Tír na nÓg. And while equally I know that beyond the West is the East coming to meet it over the Bering Strait, I prefer to think of the sea cascading over the edge of the world into the … anyway the point is, the West feels like home. It has hills to hide in, sea to stare off into and, let’s be honest: a fair amount of rain.

It doesn’t rain as much as people from outside Britain think. It doesn’t rain all the time. It does stop. It even stops in Wales. People never believe me when I describe a childhood and middle teens of getting sunburnt on the beach and summers so hot the bracken was tinder dry and the local bad boys set fire to it threatening the woods in which we played sunset games of cowboys and Indians. My first summer in Wales was spent in glorious sunshine happily cooling off in a forest or watching water beetles in a small pond under the trees. Admittedly, it was followed by a terrible autumn in our new house when the whole world appeared to turn grey. In October, ever optimistic dad having gone away for the weekend on some sort of training course convinced quietly realistic mum that the dodgy looking extension would be just fine. I remember mum crying quietly as she ran out of saucepans to catch the rain. (The subsequent tarring of the roof leaks was done by me as the only person small enough to climb out of the bathroom window onto the extension roof, apart from my little sister who was deemed perhaps too young. This is the sort of thing only my dad could think of.) And yes, after that, my Welsh teenage years included walking to school down our hill with its double hairpin bend, which turned into a cataract of water chicaning round the bends, the drains unable to cope. At school, we wandered around in breaks with no shelter in the days when you weren’t allowed inside when it rained unless you were a prefect. At the time there was a fashion for duffle coats and fish tail parkas, so that classrooms after a wet break smelt of numerous wet mongrels as we all steamed dry over Shakespeare or quadratic equations. Serves the teachers right, we thought.

Right now sleety rain is being hurled at the windows by a trainee gale. I don’t want to drive in it let alone walk in it. I live in allegedly the sunniest part of England and it still seems to have been raining for pretty much five months. Which is unusual. I am not qualified to argue about global warming. I would only say that my view is that while the climate has changed constantly since the beginning of time, if the steam in the bathroom after a teenager has been showering for forty-five minutes or the smoke in the kitchen when you boil a saucepan dry is anything to go by, then the unprecedented increase in carbon emissions since the industrial revolution must have some sort of impact.

Rain: song lyrics are full of rain, usually representing pain or loneliness or despair, but sometimes it represents something essentialAnd sometimes, it’s just fun. A smirking (male) friend once said that “It’s raining men, hallelujah” should have been our college anthem since at the time the ratio of women to men was five to one.

Rain. It’s a double edged sword. Even in a country used to rain, homes and livelihoods are destroyed by floods. Where there is poverty, damp houses create disease and misery. And while I’m lying in bed lulled to sleep by the pattering on the roof, people, not so many miles away, other human beings, some of whom have trekked in desperation from countries where water is a luxury, are sitting in mud, listening to the rain on makeshift shelters wondering if anything will ever change.

I have, I suppose, a typically British ambivalence to rain. Probably like the apocryphal Inuit and snow, we have a hundred ways to describe rain and can talk about it for hours. There’s the rain which is fine and misty and makes your hair curl and there’s the sudden localised downpour which can drench you to the point you have to strip off immediately inside the front door to avoid soaking the carpets. And like most British people, my definition of a nice summer’s day is one where I don’t need to worry about taking an umbrella. On the other hand, rain in summer is sometimes a miraculous thing: the smell of the drops hitting the parched earth, the sound of them pattering on the hard ground outside the window flung open to catch the tiniest breeze.

I often wish it would go away, yet if we haven’t had it for a while, I am glad when it returns.

Right now, I wish it would go away. I want to see a blue sky for more than a day and I want to feel the sun on my skin. I feel for the homeless and the people on the other side of the channel and the farmers and the businesses and the people in inadequate housing with leaking roofs and damp walls.  But yesterday I took a taxi and said so to the driver and he said “in East Africa where I come from, it hasn’t rained for three years. And you must remember, this country is beautiful because of rain.”

So writing this, and listening to the wind in the chimney and the rain against the glass, I try to think of what it would be like without it. How different we’d be as a nation, how my garden would look without the millions of different greens (all somewhat sodden at the moment) and how much I’d miss the sound of rain on the roof at night to make me feel warm and safe.

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Copyright 2016 by Paula Harmon. All rights belong to the author and material may not be copied without the author’s express permission