One Hundred Days of Rain Read Online Free PDF Page B

She decided to ride to the campus, a good hour away on the perimeter road.
    On her way back from the university, the weather shifted. Morning’s clear skies vanished. The sky turned dark, then let loose. Water fell on her unceasingly, as from a bucket. The streets were slick. A mist before her eyes made it difficult to see. A passing bus threw up a watery frill between her and the road. This is crazy, she thought. Shivering in her suit and overcoat, she pulled over.
    M was home. So you want me to drop everything and come get you.
    Yes.
    Well I won’t. If you cared about what I have to do, you wouldn’t even ask.
    She was so tired when she dragged herself in the back door finally, like a warrior returning from a great battle. Too tired to feel anything. When she took off her coat she saw that the furious rain had leached through to her clothes below. There was a fat spreading line down the centre of her back, where she had hunched over the handlebars. The sleeves of her fine woolen suit wet up to the middle of her forearms, as if she’d plunged them in water. Her brown hair, grown only as far as her neck then, soaked.
    You think I wasn’t there for you but that’s not true, M told her later. They were having one of their fights. She was bringing up things from the past that still bothered her, which you weren’t supposed to do. At that time in her life she read books about relationships, the kind of books she’d always scorned, and tried to follow their precepts. “I” statements. Sticking to the issue. Times she felt like a counselor herself.
    Later she thought M must resent her knowledge. How she remembered, might always remember, hanging on the line and being told no.

28.
    Rain again. Dismayed she goes to the office door. The alley is awash, the pigeons who gather on the asphalt vanished. Their feed lies sodden on the tiny-trampled ground of the neighbour’s backyard. He only does it to annoy.
    The grass has a hopeful spring look, rising in rain’s dark. Its green is almost luminous, in the murky day.
    She would like to deny rain, its very existence. Or if it can’t be denied, to say it’s not so bad.
    She would like to defy rain. To lift a fist and challenge rain: do your worst!
    She would like most of all for rain not to touch her. But even she knows she can’t seal herself off completely. She reminds herself, like a catechism you recite: it’s not so bad.
    You’ll feel better once you’re out in it. You’ll warm up. You’ll see.
    Shivering, unwilling, full of disbelief, she mounts her cycle. On the ride what she has promised comes slowly true. The miracle. By the time she arrives home she is so flushed and rosy from her exertions that when she shrugs off her black coat she imagines herself steaming. So deeply warm that she can no longer even feel rain on her.

29.
    The colour of rain is the very shade of negation. More than anything, rain declares solemnly: I do not exist.
    Ignore me. Really. Don’t disturb yourself.
    As if she ever could, she thinks. As if she can pretend it’s not there, go on as usual. No matter the camouflage colours into which rain considerately shades itself: grey, blue, a kind of pale undersided green like the belly of a floating fish.
    Sometimes rain looks a mirror in the dark, each tiny dropping facet another reflection of what can’t be seen. Sometimes rain grades infinite greys so that there is no near, no far, only what falls between her and them. Sometimes rain winks out the distance. Sometimes rain really is invisible.

30.
    Tomorrow’s deadline looms. She must list all her assets and debt. Estimate her spending on shampoo and conditioner. Add up the magazines. Cost out the price of gifts over a twelve-month period. Indicate her savings. Afterwards she is required to submit: an examiner, a judge. There is a building set aside for the purpose and she trembles to enter it.
    Rather than hunched over