Some Rain Must Fall by Michel Faber Page B

top’ and the whole project had been put ‘on hold’.
    When Robbie found out, he had to sit down; he felt as if someone had spiked his coffee with something fast-acting and maybe fatal. McNair, embarrassed, shrugged his shoulders as if to say it was just one of those things, but Robbie had come to love St Hilda’s. He didn’t care what denomination it was, didn’t even care if he or anyone else ever attended it. He just felt he owed something to St Hilda’s as a building.
    On the last day of the contract, McNair and Robbie cleared out the last of their equipment, packed up the last of their tools. The church would be locked up until next year, waiting for another half a million. In the meantime, they could only pray it was weatherproof and vandal-resistant. McNair left, and Catriona arrived an hour later. Dolefully she and her man wandered around the premises one last time. Robbie tossed a protective sheet over the Virgin Mary’s still veil-less head. Shrouded entirely, she looked like a Halloween ghost.
    To finish with, Robbie went upstairs and locked the doors to the balconies. When he returned to escort Catriona out, he was annoyed to find that the sheet he’d thrown over the statue seemed to have half fallen off. He stopped, had a good look and gasped in shock. The sheet had in fact been elaborately rearranged with deft folds and tucks, and nowframed the Virgin’s face in an elegant drape: a veil worthy of Michelangelo.
    ‘Did you do this?’ Robbie demanded of Catriona.
    She looked up at him in disbelief, then covered her mouth with her hands and suppressed a little splutter of laughter. Robbie, calling upon his highly developed skills of estimation, confirmed she couldn’t be taller than four foot eleven. The Virgin’s head was almost seven feet off the ground.
    ‘You’ve got a lot to learn about women,’ Catriona smirked as she led him to the church door.
    Resisting her for one last second, Robbie faced the statue squarely and pointed an authoritative finger.
    ‘Don’t move,’ he spake unto her, ‘until I get back.’

The Red Cement Truck
    UPSTAIRS, A STRANGE man was going through her things.
    She could hear the drawers of her dresser being slid open and shut, the awkward little groans of wood against wood.
    ‘At least he didn’t rape me,’ she thought.
    Upstairs, there was a clatter: the contents of her jewellery box. Her senses were so heightened she could distinguish the sound of her engagement ring from that of her mother’s brooch, and so on.
    And on and on: the clattering went on and on: he must be trying to sort through the jewellery, to find the valuable pieces. What an odd thing for him to be doing! Why not just take everything and pick through it later? She almost wanted to go up and help him, to tell him that her ex-husband had had all the jewellery valued for insurance purposes, and that the estimates were listed in a little notebook under the stationery in the dining-room cupboard. Always the rational one, she found it difficult to be tolerant of how irrational this man was being, wasting time trying to guess the relative value of rings and pendants in her bedroom when the police might come bashing at the front door any minute.
    After all, there had been a gunshot.
    His footsteps thudded down the carpeted stairs; she heard the rustle of his soft leather jacket as he rounded the corner on his way to the kitchen. Evidently he was thinking straighter now. Many people kept a stash of money in theirkitchen, in a jar or a drawer. She didn’t, but many people did. She could hear him beginning to look, and was surprised to be able to perceive the difference between the scrape of her stainless steel saucepan across the shelf and the smoother shove of the cast-iron one next to it, or between the tangled clatter of forks and the meshing of spoons. Was she imagining it when she felt she could even hear the infinitely muted click of his fingernails on the plastic of the cutlery tray? Surely she