The Man Who Rained by Ali Shaw Page A

was wearing those same broken-lipped shoes he’d worn before, and a pair of jeans whose denim had faded almost to white, and a shirt that had
perhaps been red or orange once, but had turned with time to a bleached yellow. ‘Are you alone?’ he asked.
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Okay ... First you have to make me a promise. If I tell you all I can, will you leave me alone?’
    ‘Sure. I promise.’
    ‘And will you promise not to tell a soul?’
    ‘Okay, I promise that too. I only know one person in Thunderstown, anyway.’
    He nodded. Then right away he looked puzzled. ‘Wait ... you’re not from Thunderstown?’
    ‘New York.’
    His mouth made an O. ‘I’m sorry, I should have been able to tell that from your accent. But I don’t hear many voices up here, let alone New Yorker ones.’
    ‘Actually my accent’s kinda Oklahoman. That’s where I grew up.’
    He looked confused. ‘Oak-what?’ he asked.
    ‘La-homa,’ she said, unable to hide her delight that he didn’t know the name. It gave her the spine-tingling assurance that she had come as far away from home as she had hoped
she would all summer.
    ‘You’d better come in.’ He moved inside the bothy and motioned for her to follow him. She held back for a moment on the hearth, then took a forwards step that felt like a leap
of faith.
    The building’s low ceiling and confining walls told of its original function as a simple shelter. The main living space was no bigger than her bedroom in Kenneth’s house, but it
still managed to cram in a sitting area, including a pair of wooden chairs and a small eating table. A door on the opposite wall opened on to a bathroom, and a wooden stepladder fixed to the wall
climbed to a bedroom converted out of a loft.
    But it was the man’s paper models that caught her attention. She had noticed the quantity and variety of them when she had peered in through the window, but inside she kept spotting more.
As well as the countless paper birds that hung on mobiles from the ceiling – which now rippled their wings in the breeze flowing from the door as if they were real falcons riding on the
thermals – there were paper animals tucked in every cranny. On shelves where in other houses books or photo frames might have been arranged, proud paper horses and paper dogs posed among
paper trees with leaves twizzled out of paper branches. Unfolded sheets were stacked up on the table, and it seemed that she had caught him at work, for alongside them was a work-in-progress model:
a half-formed animal she could not recognize.
    He pulled out a chair for her, then sat down opposite. He was so big he made his chair look like a child’s, but he sat on it as lightly as a balloon on a lap. He examined her for a moment,
his gaze more direct than any she had experienced before. If someone had looked at her so directly in New York she’d have freaked out or told them where to shove it, but there was something
forgivably curious about the way he regarded her. He had an unfettered manner, as if he were an animal and this was his den.
    Eventually he met her eyes and she saw again that his irises were tinged with a stormy purple. Within them his pupils looked imperfect, the black of them mingling with the inner rims of his
irises, just as the eye of a hurricane mixes with its cloudwall. Looking into them made her feel like one of the paper birds hanging in the breeze.
    ‘Who are you?’ she gaped.
    ‘My name’s Finn Munro,’ he said.
    But she hadn’t really meant to ask him his name. She had meant what are you? How can you have eyes such as these and how did you dissolve into cloud? ‘You’re ...’
she struggled. ‘I mean ...’
    ‘Are you going to tell me yours?’
    ‘Elsa. Elsa Beletti.’
    He took a deep breath. ‘Well, Elsa, I am not like you. I am not like anybody. I used to think I was, but that was a long time ago now. I can’t promise you will understand. I
don’t think many people could.’
    ‘I’ll do my