The Book of Storms Read online

  “That was me,” she said. “But was it you?”

  Danny nodded. Did cats nod? Would she even understand what a nod was? “Yes,” he said.

  “Odd,” said the cat. “I would have sworn you weren’t a cat. But you’re talking to me. I thought only cats could talk.”

  “Cats … and me,” said Danny. Perhaps if he didn’t try to explain anything, she might not even think to ask.

  Mitz pulled back her paw, tucked it underneath her body again, and regarded him with the same unmoving stare.

  “Strange,” she said. “Very strange.”

  Danny resisted the hysterical laugh that wanted to burst out of his lungs. What was so funny, anyway? He shouldn’t want to laugh, not right now.

  “Were you out in the storm last night?” he asked. “Did you see my parents? They’re not here anymore, and I don’t know where they’ve gone.”

  “I did see them,” said the cat. “Urgh, what a night! I was crouching under the privet by the gate, and even that didn’t stop the rain getting through. And all that horrible dirt, splashed up by the raindrops! I was surprised they came outside in it, to be honest.”

  She gave her white bib a couple of licks, whether in memory or to dislodge actual dirt Danny couldn’t be sure. His heart began to quicken.

  “Where did they go?”

  “They got into the car and drove off,” said Mitz. “That way.” She flicked her tail and turned her gaze toward the end of the street that went out of town.

  What more would a cat know? They’d driven away and hadn’t come back.

  “That’s it?” asked Danny. “They didn’t say anything?”

  “I wouldn’t know if they had, would I?” said Mitz. “They didn’t appear to be able to talk. Though I must say, I’ve always wondered how you humans communicated with each other. You don’t have tails or ears, and you don’t seem to smell things much. It must be difficult.”

  “Not really,” said Danny. “We do talk. Actually … we think that only we can. But … this is just too weird. I’ve got to find my parents, that’s all.”

  He looked at the front hedge. If it could see like the potted plants, it must have seen the car leave. He could try asking it … but what if the plants outside were even angrier than the plants inside?

  Surely there must be some more normal, human way of trying to find his parents. Danny took a couple of steps back toward the house, forgetting that his hand was still in his pocket, holding the odd little stick.

  “Hold on!” called Mitz, pushing herself up onto her furry white paws and arching her striped back. “You can’t just talk to me and run away! I’ve never talked to a human, not ever! The way you’re going about it, anyone would think you’ve been chatting away to cats all your life. You haven’t, have you?”

  She dropped from the fence onto the ground by Danny’s feet. Cats were such silent creatures. They walked, sprinted, prowled, and washed, all without making a sound. Hearing a long stream of words pouring out from one, even though it looked exactly the same as normal, made the mysterious seem a little mundane.

  “No,” said Danny. “No, I haven’t ever spoken to a cat before.”

  “Then why now? How now?”

  Danny fingered the stick, trying not to shake his head in disbelief. “I just can,” he said. “Some people can.”

  Quickly, before Mitz could speak again, he stumbled into the house. The cat followed him, trotting neatly at his ankles.

  * * *

  He tried phoning Aunt Kathleen. She never answered her home phone during the day, because she was a dairy farmer and was almost always somewhere around the cattle yards or fields, tending to cow wounds or disease infestations. Most of the time, she didn’t answer her mobile either, because cows needed to be attended to with one hand and held tightly with the other, but this time she must have had Danny’s cousin Tom with her, because a man’s voice answered her phone.

  “Yup?”

  Not that Tom was a man—he was only sixteen. But he spent so much of his life working, feeding cows and driving a tractor and talking about important things like the thickness of baler twine, that he was a world away from the other boys Danny knew.

  “Tom? It’s Danny.”

  “Hi, Danny, what’s up?”

  Tom sounded busy and short of time. An outraged mooing in the background suggested he was probably doing something to a cow that it didn’t like.

  “I’m … I’m … um…”

  He was what? Alone in his house without his parents? Tom wouldn’t think being alone was anything to get scared about. He’d just tell Danny to stop being a wuss and have some fun.

  Danny’s eye caught the picture of Emma spotted with raindrops. He could have raided the fridge by now, watched all the DVDs he wasn’t allowed to, and invited his friends round to play Grand Motorized Death Squad on his Xbox, safe in the knowledge that no one would appear and tell him to turn it off. His parents were bound not to be away long—he should have made the most of them being gone.

  Instead he was bleating on the phone to his cousin.

  “Oh … I’m sure it’s just something stupid,” he tried, expecting that Tom would ask him exactly what.

  “Oh, okay,” said Tom. “Right you are.”

  “Er…” said Danny.

  “I’m a bit tied up at the moment!” Tom yelped. A loud crunching sound rattled through the earpiece, as if the phone were being chewed by large teeth. “Can it wait?”

  “Er … sure,” said Danny. “Bye…”

  “Bye!”

  Another bellow wailed up in the earpiece as Tom cut the connection.

  Danny stared at the phone in his hand, then replaced it slowly. He could feel Mitz’s eyes fixed on him. She’d climbed the stairs and arranged herself neatly on a step just above the level of his head. He’d always wondered why cats did that.

  He put his hand in his pocket and took hold of the stick.

  “Why do cats always sit in high places?” he asked her.

  “So we can look down on the world, of course,” she said. “Why else? So come on, what’s this about your parents?”

  Danny’s eyes fell to the carpet at his feet.

  “Oh, nothing,” he said. “They’ve gone away, that’s all. I’m going to have a great time without them.”

  “Clearly you’re not,” said Mitz. “You’ve got a face like a Siamese cat eating tripe.”

  “What do you know about expressions?” asked Danny. “Cats don’t have expressions. They just stare.”

  “Bah!” said Mitz, standing up and stretching out her back legs. She began jumping down the stairs, making for the front door.

  Danny panicked. “Don’t go!” he said, his fist clenching around the stick. “You’re right, I’ve got to find them. Will you help me?”

  “I don’t see what I can do,” said Mitz stiffly. “Besides, I have a very time-consuming grooming routine. And I become a complete ogre if I don’t get my beauty sleep. I’ve told you which way they went. Isn’t that enough?”

  Danny looked hard at his shoes, which interrupted the pattern of blue and green swirls on the carpet. He always cleaned his school shoes on a Sunday night. Only yesterday he’d sat down on the kitchen floor, spread out a newspaper, and rubbed polish into them while his mum had chopped potatoes for dinner.

  “I don’t want to be by myself,” he said. It was barely a whisper, but the cat heard it.

  “Why ever not?” She arrived at his feet and spread her plumy tail out along the swirls.

  Danny gritted his teeth. He really must pull himself together—he was eleven, not five. But still. “I just don’t,” he said. “I’ve got to find them, and I don’t want to do it on my own.”

  “Well, where are you going first?”

  He didn’t know. Out the gate, down the street, out of town—and then where?

  “Can’t you just follow their scent?” The cat stalked toward the phone table, jumped up onto the pile of papers, and sat, tucking her tail around her p
aws. “Or the scent of their car?”

  “People don’t leave scent,” said Danny.

  “Of course they do,” said Mitz. “Everything smells of something.”

  “Yeah, I’m sure it does, but people can’t follow scent like that. We don’t have those kinds of noses.”

  “You can’t smell? But how do you tell each other where you’ve been? Or where you’re going?”

  “Just … leave a note, I guess, if they aren’t around.…”

  A note! He could have kicked himself. What if there was a note? Where would they have left it? Not in the kitchen: he’d been there already. Upstairs, maybe? In their bedroom?

  “Yeah,” he said. “There must be something like that. They’d have left something in case of emergencies—a note, or a list of the places they usually go—I’m sure they would. Why didn’t I think of that?”

  And he raced up to his parents’ room again, taking the stairs two at a time.

  * * *

  There wasn’t a note there, either. The more he thought about it, if they’d left him a note, they would have left it somewhere he’d have been likely to find it first thing in the morning—under his bedroom door, say, or on top of the boxes of cereal, or balanced on his schoolbag. Of course there wasn’t a note.

  Danny stood in the middle of their room, looking around for ideas. There had to be something that suggested where they’d gone. Maybe a map of some kind? Some photographs?

  He opened the computer, but, as always, it asked him for the password that he’d never been able to guess. He searched in the drawers, in the blanket chest, and in the boxes under the bed, pulling each box out and tipping its contents onto the floor. Piles of his schoolwork, bundles of cloth, bags of ribbon and old Christmas cards: that’s all there was. Nothing unexpected, nothing new.

  Mitz lay curled in a ball on the bed, her eyes narrowed into watchful slits. Whenever he looked up at her, she feigned sleep.

  The last of the drawers yielded only socks and handkerchiefs. Danny emptied it onto the floor, then stood still for a moment, looking at the empty inside. A nerve bit inside his shoulders, and tiny claws began to pinch at the sides of his eyes. He dropped the drawer, sat down on the bed, and clenched his fists. What had they done? What happened inside the brains of people who decided to get up, run out of their house, and not come back?

  Lying back on his dad’s pillow, he stared at the ceiling. When he moved to put his hands behind his head, something jabbed him in the neck. Twisting, he saw the corner of a thick spiral-bound notebook with a dark blue cover, almost the same color as his parents’ duvet.

  He’d never seen it before, which was odd. When you’d been the only child in a house for eleven years, you got to know most of the things around the place pretty well. Danny had spent hundreds of rainy days trawling through drawers, finding all sorts of bits and pieces to play with: fake-fur hats, bags of feathers, albums full of colorless photographs. But never this notebook. And he’d hardly ever seen his parents writing anything down apart from shopping lists, but the notebook was nearly full. Almost every page was covered in writing.

  He flicked through the pages, then turned back to the beginning. It was laid out like a sort of diary, and the first date was a couple of years before he’d been born. The letters were neat and round: his mum’s handwriting, then.

  The notebook of Anna and John O’Neill. Jan 1, it read. Today we begin a new chapter in our lives. It has to be this way, because we can’t keep going if we try to stay the same people that we were. We have to make our lives new again, make ourselves again, turn ourselves into people who haven’t been through what we’ve been through. We can’t be Emma’s parents always. Not just her parents. We can’t live our lives waiting for her to come back. Because she died in that storm, under that tree that no one ever thought would blow over, and she’s not coming back, not ever.

  The writing became a little shaky at this point, but still carefully, deliberately penned.

  So we’ve taken a decision together. We’ll put our baby girl to bed and wish her sweet dreams, and we’ll find out all we can about the storms that blew down that tree and killed her. And maybe one day we’ll know enough about storms to be able to say, this one will do such and such, at such a time, in such a place, and nobody will be caught in a freak storm again, and nobody will die. Our little tiger won’t return. But other people will live long lives and be all the things they’re supposed to be, and then we might feel we’ve let her live a little, in a small way, and that’s all we can ever do.

  Danny let the notebook rest on his knees. Mitz’s fur brushed his bare arm as she breathed.

  His parents never spoke about Emma. He’d tried asking, a few times, but all they’d ever said was that Emma had died, and that was that. Emma was the photographs in the hall, not even a person, no matter how much he ever tried to think about her. But his parents were obsessed with storms, and that was the reason: Emma had died in one. He thought of the lightning and the sycamore and a tiny child a bit like himself standing lost beneath its black branches, and he saw for the first time something wild and screaming, impossible to frame and hang on a wall.

  What kind of person had she been? Had she liked computer games and green beans and hated melted cheese? Had she even been old enough to know that she liked or didn’t like anything?

  “Emma.” He tried it out for size, but it had never sounded like a part of his family, and it didn’t now. “Emma O’Neill.”

  Why did they never talk about her? Were they worried he’d think he was some kind of replacement? But he was, wasn’t he? That’s why they’d had him and then stuck her silent photos on the wall, to remind him every time he went into the hallway.

  He went back to the book. Tell me about Emma, he urged it. Tell me about my sister.

  The entry for January 1 was finished. There wasn’t another entry until April 12 of the same year.

  Great Butford and surrounding area. Time of storm: 8:20 p.m. until 3:30 a.m.

  That was one big storm.

  Behavior: Oppressive day. Clouds began to gather in the skies above Great Butford at approximately 5:30 p.m. At 8:20 p.m., the first roll of thunder was heard. We were fortunate to be staying in Great Butford at the time and saw the first flash of lightning at 8:49 p.m. The lightning increased in frequency until roughly four flashes per minute were occurring.

  Danny turned the page. The description of the storm continued in minute detail, so he skipped to the end and read what else had been written about Great Butford.

  Questioning the local residents of Great Butford revealed that in the previous two weeks they could think of little out of the ordinary that had happened. Mrs. Simmonds, who runs the post office, had broken her arm as she fell over the hairdresser’s step when returning from having her highlights done. Some children had killed a duck when they threw a suitcase they had stolen from the railway station into the village pond. The weather had been generally normal. Yet, questioning of residents in villages as close by as Little Butford and Stony Hamlington, both just under three miles away, revealed that there had been no storms in these places. Also that many of the inhabitants of these places were of the opinion that Great Butford was a “funny place” they would have avoided had they not been obliged to send their children to school there.

  Well, thought Danny, it was a local storm. There was a last bit about Great Butford.

  In conclusion, we cannot rule out the possibility that the storm was responding to something it did not like (a human or nonhuman factor???) in Great Butford. Although nothing immediately puts itself forward to us as a cause, we fully anticipate that in time we will be able to look back at these notes and understand what happened in Great Butford, at which time a postscript will be added.

  There was no postscript. More of the same followed. Page after page of tiny detail, storm forecasts, graphs of isobars cut out from the newspaper, pictures of lightning. When had they written all this stuff? Now they were into the year that he’d bee
n born. On his birthday, June 21, his father had scribbled in a frantic scrawl across the page, his words defying the lines meant to keep them neat.

  Today our son was born! Daniel Adrian O’Neill. Such a strange thought, that five years ago we thought our family was complete, and three years ago we thought it was destroyed, and now there is this new life, a small boy, entirely himself. We should never compare our children, but he was late and arrived quickly, then just lay there looking around with huge blue eyes. When Emma came she was early, not ready, and she cried as soon as she saw the world, full of strong anger. I think Daniel might be a thoughtful sort of a person, the kind who sees a lot more than he says. And all I wish is that he should live and breathe and be happy, and never have to enter those dark places into which we have followed our beloved daughter.

  Danny turned the page quickly. It felt wrong, reading stuff about himself that he wasn’t meant to see. But it was okay—they’d gone back to talking about storms, and only storms.

  More storms, more years, passed by. Then he came across another entry, dated from the previous summer. They’d gone to a village fete. Actually, he remembered it well: he’d eaten five ice creams, because each time he asked his parents for more money, they’d given it to him without question. They’d been too busy talking to an old man whose beard was long, white, and separated into pointy tufts like hairy icicles.

  August 8. Today we met an old Polish man, Abel Korsakof, at the Hopfield village fete. We’d stopped to exchange a few pleasantries about the weather—he was the father of one of Anna’s friends from her Women’s Institute group. As we chatted, we noticed (and he noticed too, both at the same time, I think!) that we were all referring to last week’s storm in terms that you’d use about people (“he,” “they,” etc.). Anna and I tend to do this between ourselves, but we try to avoid it with other people, as it probably makes us sound strange. But because this Abel Korsakof was doing it too, we just didn’t think anything of it at first. Anyway, after a while he started to drop in references to something he called “the Book.”