Pluvial – NK Kingston

Pluvial

by NK Kingston

Gregory is a little surprised to find the market packing up for the day, though he knows he shouldn’t be. His rain-splattered watch proudly proclaims it to be half past two, but the cathedral bells are ringing in quarter to five, and with the weather as it is he thinks it lucky the watch stand is still there at all.

The man under the market stall shakes his head at Gregory’s watch. His frown lines are fractured by the rain on Greg’s glasses, but it’s enough for Greg to know he’s not going to like what he hears next.

“Can’t do it,” the trader says. “These ones– you’ve got to take ‘em to a specialist if you want the battery out, see? I could take it overnight, have a go, if you want.” He reaches for a set of battered screwdrivers.

Greg suppresses a wince and shakes his head. “I need it first thing tomorrow,” he lies.

The man shrugs and hands it back. “Could sell you another. Tide you over. I’ve put half the stock away, but if you want to take a look…” He spreads his hands over a scattered selection of watches, some back in their boxes already. Greg sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose, peering past the gnarled knuckles of his thumb and forefinger. An array of scratched faces, peeling leather and flaking gilt lie on the table, punctuated by the occasional plastic monstrosity.

“That one,” he says, pointing to a slightly battered men’s watch, black strap and gilded buckle.

“Twenty,” the trader says. “I’ll throw in a battery for that too.”

Too tired and wet to haggle, Greg watches him deftly slip a coin sized battery into the back of the watch and wonders what made his old one so different. He empties his wallet in silence and fastens his ‘new’ watch onto his wrist. The cathedral strikes five, making it easy to set, and he realises that he’s about to miss his bus. As he takes out his Over 60s pass the sound of the rain increases.

“Well, at least it’s good for the garden.”

“Aye, it is that,” says the trader.

#

It rains for the rest of that week. Greg’s garden droops miserably – spitefully – under the onslaught.

He stays inside as much as he can, the sound of rain constant, and carefully avoids any further comment on the weather, no matter how provoking the forecast is.

He is unsurprised to hear rain as he dresses on Saturday morning, though the view through his bedroom skylight is of weak sunshine. Closer inspection makes him doubt the pattering of his ears, and he steps out onto the patio. The air has a diluted, watery look and the lawn holds its blades above an obvious bog. Still, it is definitely not raining.

Greg tries to follow the dripping sound but there is no single source. It’s faint and sporadic; the kind of sound that suggests it’s your last chance to get that milk before the real downpour starts. The sky is a pale, damp blue, cloudless, and the air is clear and fresh. The puddles in the grass ripple in the breeze, but are otherwise undisturbed.

He squelches halfway across the garden before it occurs to him it is probably the trees and gutters divesting themselves of the memory of a wet week. He turns back to his bungalow, satisfied.

#

The next day starts much the same, though the world is a drier place now. Greg leaves his radio off on as he makes breakfast so he can listen to the soft dripping. Maybe a hose left on? It’s too much noise to be a single tap; he checks his own nevertheless.

He makes a pretence of tidying his hedges to catch a glimpse into his neighbours’ gardens. No hoses, but Jim is out, trying to resurrect a drowned begonia.

“You didn’t half give me a fright,” Jim scolds him. “Where’s that radio of yours? Never seen you without it. Or heard you.”

“Thought I heard dripping. Wondered if the shed had sprung a leak, so I’m keeping an ear out.”

“Mine has,” Jim says gloomily.

“Mine’s alright.” Greg catches himself, but Jim doesn’t, too busy prodding his plant to see Greg’s wince. “I mean, that’s why I’m listening about. See what else it might be. Sounds a bit like a hose has been left on, don’t you think?”

“What does?” Jim stands up with a groan ubiquitous to men their age.

“The dripping. Pattering. Can’t you hear it?”

Jim frowns, and shakes his head. “It’s your ears or mine. Like, crackling noise, is it?”

Greg considers. “Could be, I guess. Is that bad?”

Jim shrugs. “Something for a doctor to decide. You never know, at our age.”

Greg sighs. “I suppose you don’t. Thanks, Jim.”

“No problem. Hey, book an appointment with the doctor, then come over. Sarah’s making those godawful cakes from the diet book again.”

Greg laughs. “Sounds alright. I’ll see you in a bit.”

#

The doctor peers into his ears with a small torch that wouldn’t look out of place in a DIY shop.

“Well, everything looks fine. Can you hear it now?”

“Yes.”

“I’ll refer you to an Audiological specialist. There’s a nice guy over at the hospital, deals with stuff like this all the time.”

The specialist is a nice guy, though he keeps Greg waiting for almost an hour as appointment after appointment overruns. The receptionist apologises, and lends Greg a copy of The Lost Symbol one of her colleagues has abandoned.

When he’s finally called into the room the specialist is brisk but friendly. Greg puts on a huge pair of earphones like some kind of disc jockey and follows instructions to press a button when he hears beeps. The specialist – after a couple of tries at pronouncing his name Greg settles for calling him “Doctor” – looks into Greg’s ears as his GP did, though his more professional-looking torch is attached to a magnifier.

He doesn’t give Greg his test scores, though he tells him he’s done well for a man his age. They discuss the noise.

“It’s intermittent,” Greg says. “It’s normally only during the day. I can’t hear it with the radio on.”

“Is it a ringing? A crackling?”

“It’s…” Greg considers. “A splashing. It started with just a faint, occasional patter, but now there’s a noticeable splash.” He thinks for a second. “It started after that week of rain.”

The specialist looks something up on his computer.

“Auditory hallucinations,” he begins, “are often a signed of a neurological problem. I don’t think we’re dealing with anything physically wrong with your ears, here.”

Greg agrees but doesn’t reply, as the specialist’s next sentence is obliterated by the boom of distant thunder.

#

Greg cancels his appointment with the neurologist. He spends the allotted hour weeding his flowerbeds, with the radio turned up as loud as it can be.

#

Melissa brings the grandsons to see him for the weekend. Though Greg’s son has left the picture – is in a completely different picture somewhere in Australia – she still feels the kids ought to know their father’s family. Greg agrees, but he could do without their mother’s presence.

“The market?” she squawks when he explains the new watch. “It probably came off the back of a van!”

Greg knows from long experience how she feels about that, and wishes he’d thought up a faster lie. She doesn’t believe in shopping anywhere other than the big chains, and tuts and clucks at anyone who does otherwise. Missing bargains, she says, and opening themselves up to fraudsters. So many scams. More protection, when you know so many other people trust the store. Not like those here-today-gone-tomorrow shops, let alone markets.

Greg finds himself defensively proud of his watch, which hasn’t given him a spot of trouble.

Melissa launches into her usual polemic and he lets the ‘auditory hallucination’ blot her out. Soft rolls of thunder and a constant splatter of rain. He doesn’t care if it is schizophrenia; it’s better than her cawing.

Greg starts when she grabs his wrist and nimbly undoes his watch. The look he gives her would have stopped his son in his tracks back in the day, but Melissa is immune to her father-in-law’s glower.

“See,” she announces, “there’s no way this is new. It’s probably stolen.”

Greg wishes the thunder would come back.

“You should take it to the police. Report the trader. I knew those markets were untrustworthy.”

“He said it was second hand,” Greg lies. “Give it back.”

He feels as petulant as he sounds, and revels in the liberties of his age for a moment. The loose skin of his wrist is rucked up where the watch has been and it isn’t likely to settle back into its bare wrinkles any time soon. He waves the smooth band at Melissa, who grudgingly hands the watch over.

He feels better, putting it back on. More like himself. As her voice sinks beneath the sound of rain, he realises that he missed the background noise when it was gone.

It isn’t until he takes his watch off as he gets into bed that the comforting downpour slackens to silence again. He sits on the edge of the bed, evening pill still in hand, and frowns at his timepiece. He puts it back on, and the rain starts again. He takes it off.

Swallowing his pill, he lies down on his bed with the knowledge that a mystery worth pursuing awaits him.

#

Further experimentation proves him right. Or maybe insane. He’s tempted to abandon the watch altogether and go back to life as usual, but it’s hard to give up the approaching storm, and it makes life more bearable in odd little ways. He can tune out Melissa much more easily, for a start.

He leaves it off when he has the radio on, since there seems no point to it, but he listens to his faithful little transistor less and less. The mystery piques something forgotten in him; a sense of moving towards something in time, instead of away from it. A task that puts his long-learnt patience to work, makes it feel like being able to wait is an achievement, not an act of resignation.

Jim comments that the garden seemed quieter these days and enquires as to the results of Greg’s trip to the doctor.

“Tinnitus,” Greg says. “Unusual manifestation, but that was all. Suggested I listen to the radio a little less and get some earmuffs at night. Still,” he shrugs, “at our age…”

“Aye,” Jim agrees. “Would you like some fat free Mississippi mud pie to celebrate?”

#

He’s out shopping when he realises the slapslap of feet on the pavement is coming from the watch, not the world around him. He’s relieved. He’d wondered if he was being followed, and acted accordingly. His fellow shoppers had been looking at him strangely.

He takes the watch off and nearly misses his bus home. The rain stops when he isn’t wearing the watch. Well, not the rain, precisely, but the time it’s taking place in. He can halt thunder mid peal and reignite it at his leisure, he can split the storm into showers and if he is particularly nimble he can tease it into individual drips. Either the rain isn’t exactly in ‘real time’, in the literal sense, or he’s listening to the biblical flood. He’d wondered if it just cycled through a storm over and over, but the rain never seems to end. There’s none of that faltering drizzle he remembers from the week after he’d bought it, though the storm does vary in intensity. Thunder comes more often at night.

The feet, though, are new, and he saves the sound until he had a nice cup of tea and one of Sarah’s sugarless tarts in the comfort of his own quiet kitchen.

The sound has the pace and rhythm of a person running, with occasional discontinuities as though the runner had tripped or skidded. It’s steady, and as evening fades into night Greg can hear accompanying pants and gasps. He thinks the runner might be female, but he isn’t certain until he hears her speak.

It’s long past midnight, and he half-dozes, lulled by the rain and the rhythmic feet. The words that wake him are indistinct, but the tone of dismay is unmistakeable.

More concerned at first by the prospect of falling asleep sitting up, Greg reaches to take the watch off and go to bed. Fingers on the buckle, he identifies the source of the dismay: a second set of footsteps. If he stops he can pick up where he left off tomorrow, but instead he reaches for the mug of cold tea. Should have made a pot, he thinks. It’s not like I have any pressing engagements in the morning.

The first set of feet is somewhere to his left, speeding towards a point somewhere in front of him. The second comes from behind – heavier, faster, firmer – and they catch up with the first a short distance away, around Greg’s bedroom. Unsteady attempts to approach them just push them further away, like the end of a rainbow, and Greg finds himself sitting on his bed with the impression of eavesdropping on a conversation out in the street.

The voices are indistinct; muffled by the rain and obliterated by thunder. The female voice sobs and trembles, while the male pleads and persuades. As the male grows angry the female grows firm. There is a roar of thunder that ought to have shaken the house, and Greg hears clearly “I will not!” as the thunder grumbles away.

The male response is a wordless growl and the wet smack of fist on flesh. It’s followed by a resounding slap.

There is silence, or noise inaudible under the rain, and Greg sits with his fingers clenched in the counterpane, heedless of his arthritis. He feels a queasy relief when the male voice begins shouting again and that slap of two sets of feet on wet stone stumbles his way, but it’s a relief from tension only. The heavier steps thump catch the lighter tread in his bedroom doorway. There’s a short scream, female, cut off with a splash on his bedroom carpet. Another scream ends in the crunch of bone against stone, muted by water, and Greg can picture a deep puddle. Gurgled sobs and frantic splashing, heavy grunts and short rasps of breath.

The splashes grow weaker and the sobs softer until they are lost under the sound of the rain. The male voice gives a satisfied growl, and Greg hears a splash as the limp flesh is lifted and let fall. The man climbs to his feet with ragged breath and the squelch and rustle of sodden clothes. He stomps away, through Greg’s kitchen.

Greg turns on the bedside radio and the lamp before stumbling around an empty space on the floor to switch on the overheard light. The room is warm and familiar, its cream carpet dry and bland. He kneels stiffly and feels around the plush floor. Twice he glances over this shoulder at the kitchen, and in the end he locks his bedroom door. As the local radio station talks plummily to itself he begins to change for bed, still conscious of the ever-present patter of rain.

He turns out the light but leaves the radio on, and slowly, reverently, undoes the watch strap. He places the timepiece carefully next to the radio – which announces The News at Three AM – takes his tablets, and let them help him to sleep.

#

The next morning he wakes at the usual time, radio warning of traffic jams on the main road. He dresses slowly, leaving the watch where it is and turning off the irrelevant radio. He unlocks the bedroom door with caution.

The kitchen is as he left it, cold tea and uneaten tart included. Late summer sunlight pours through the window in golden quantities. He stares out at the back garden, the glowing green grass and bright borders, the heavy shade of the tree he shares with Jim and the hedge in need of another trim. A bluetit hangs upside-down on the birdfeeder, and out of sight a blackbird warbles. The sky is clear and bright, a single white cloud sitting plumply on the horizon.

He makes tea and toast on autopilot, washes up last night’s relics and rediscovers yesterday’s books. The house is silent; even outdoors it is quiet, too early for anyone to be visiting their parents’ and grandparents’ little bungalowed cul-de-sac.

Greg fingers the wrinkled skin of his bare wrist, and listens to the rain.

---

NK Kingston lives in the historic city of York, where she gets paid to play with swords and cook from medieval recipes. She writes whenever circumstances gang up on her and has a special fondness for things that go bump in the night.

Find an RPP miniview with NK Kingston here!

© 2010 All rights reserved NK Kingston

<-Back to Vol I, Issue 1