3

The bells were ringing for the all-clear, and they were surging out of the Watermelon Inn. Someone was turning off the sprinklers; someone was taking these gently from the outstretched arms of Elliot and Corrie-Lynn; others were draping towels around their shoulders and leading them inside.

They brought them into the front room, and Elliot and Corrie-Lynn were whiter than the Magical North, pale and trembling, but every other face was alive with smiles and wonder, and everyone was asking, ‘How did you know to do that, Elliot?’

Eventually, Elliot shook the trembling out of his body, and half-smiled.

‘It was something that a friend told me once,’ he said, and then something seemed to turn over in his face, and his hand reached into his pocket.

‘What’s the time right now?’ he said, and when someone said it was just on ten, he seemed to fly from the room.

They watched through the window as he ran through the carpark and away.

The rain hammered on Madeleine’s head and she stopped laughing, stopped gasping and turned from the parking meter, where there was no slither of white, there was nothing—

And then something happened. It was a fragment of time, a breath of time. It was like being in a car in pouring rain and driving under an overpass, and for just that second there is a profound, powerful sense of reprieve—the utter silence of non-rain.

That was how it was—she was, for a fragment, without rain; she was somewhere silent and warm, and there was the flash of an image—a schoolyard, distant buildings, blue sky, intense quiet, strong sunlight, an odd pile of cement topped with a crooked TV, and beside her, right beside her, a boy in jeans, his head turned away from her; she saw dark-blond hair, a sun-brown neck—

Then the rain again.

She was back in the street with the parking meter, the chaos of the downpour and parked cars again.

But now, in her hand, was an envelope. It was instantly sodden with rainwater, and she sat on the edge of the kerb, let the rushing gutter water swarm over her shoes, soak her socks, let the rain drench and drench her hair, the curling water rush past her eyes and tendril down her cheeks, and opened the envelope.

A handful of little white balls.

Were they children’s sweets? Were they aspirins? Were they mothballs?

Whatever they were, she sat on the kerb, folded them tight in her fist, and the sobs gashed their way through her chest, surging against the flesh of her face, bursting out through her mouth and into the rain.