Free Some Rain Must Fall by Michel Faber Page A

shuddering, as if the bones were claiming their right to break free from their flimsy prison of skin.
    ‘Feel free …’ were her last words.
    ‘Yes … yes …’ said Miss Fatt, inside herself only. Outside, the Christmas carols were sounding fainter as Miss Thinne’s body grew still, and they had faded away altogether by the time Miss Fatt lifted the dead hand gently to her lips.

Half a Million Pounds and a Miracle
    ROBBIE AND MCNAIR knew the job was going to be trouble when the Virgin Mary fell off her pedestal and smashed to smithereens right in front of them.
    ‘What do you think?’ said Robbie, when they squatted down to examine the rubble. He could see very well the statue was beyond repair, but he felt he ought to defer to his boss’s experience and authority.
    ‘It’s grit for roads now,’ frowned McNair, turning little fragments of the Virgin over and over in his massive hands. ‘Dr Prosser won’t be pleased.’
    Dr Prosser was the ancient official who’d contracted McNair to oversee the renovations to St Hilda’s, a fine Victorian church which had lain derelict for most of this century. Funding had finally been found to rescue it from total collapse – half a million pounds’ worth.
    McNair had had reservations about the job from the start. His company’s trade was restoring neglected old buildings, true, but he’d only done a few churches, none of them Catholic, and none of them in such a rotten state of repair that roof slates fell through the ceiling and you walked ankle-deep in pigeon shit and the statues were liable to brain you.
    ‘Have you not got any Catholic fellows for the job?’ he’d queried Dr Prosser.
    ‘None here in Ross-shire,’ sighed the bureaucrat.
    ‘To do this place up,’ McNair had warned, ‘you’ll need more than half a million pound, you’ll need a miracle.’
    ‘We’ve applied for more funding next year,’ said Dr Prosser. ‘That’s how it’s done. A year at a time. Just do the best you can to begin with.’
    So McNair had taken on the job.
    And regretted it almost immediately. At this stage, weeks in, he’d only just finished clearing the place of debris; he’d had to sub-contract a lot of extra labourers, and many overloaded garbage skips had been carted away. St Hilda’s was still a disaster area. The inner walls were full of holes, spilling out the disintegrating straw its builders had used for insulation. Half the floorboards were rotten, including (probably) the ones underpinning the splendid old stone font. Every structure, surface and fixture in St Hilda’s seemed to be in a sort of renovator’s Limbo: too frail or damaged to keep as it was, yet too solid and expensive to rip out and replace. The stained glass in the windows, for example, was a showpiece of Victorian craftsmanship – a pity only a few jagged bits of it had survived.
    McNair and his apprentice, Robbie, stood in the nave of the church now, dead centre, deciding where to go from here. They’d spent thousands already and the place only looked sadder and emptier. McNair asked Robbie if he had any ideas.
    The lad kicked pensively at the thick layer of pigeon cack on the floor.
    ‘I reckon the only way to get this off is to plane it,’ he ventured.
    McNair sighed. He’d been hoping for something a bit more inspired than that.
    ‘Why couldn’t they have ploughed the money into Scottish industry, eh?’ he exclaimed suddenly. ‘Think of how many jobs half a million pound would create, eh?’
    Robbie frowned, trying to imagine how half a million pounds might create jobs. It was as difficult as imagining how water could be turned into wine.
    ‘They could have built a … a shopping centre, mebbe.’
    ‘Eh?’
    ‘In a place that hasn’t got one. Uist, mebbe.’
    ‘Eh? What are you talking about?’
    ‘I was in Uist once. The shop was always shut by the time I could get myself out of bed. I could’ve starved.’
    Feeling the weight of McNair’s incredulity, Robbie didn’t