Free Some Rain Must Fall by Michel Faber Page B

say anymore. The effort of thinking of a way to turn money into jobs had exhausted him. Personally, he didn’t see why, if there was a half a million pounds going spare for some Highland town, it couldn’t just be distributed equally among the sparse population. Who’d need jobs then?
    Another idea Robbie had for what could be done with half a million pounds was maybe building a giant cinema complex in some place like Invergordon. All right, so it just happened to be where he lived himself, but it would get loads of customers from the ships and the rigs, surely. Everybody was desperate for something to do.
    Only the other day, Robbie had gone to a terrible disco in Alness, hoping it would transform his life in some way. It was the sort of disco where no alcohol was allowed so everybody made sure to be thoroughly drunk before arriving. Robbie had searched the entire hall, from wall to wall, to find a girl who didn’t look as if she was about to fall asleep, or vomit, or bite him in the neck. He’d found just one . She was very short, seemed very nice, was very bored. She asked him what he did for a living. He said he was a stonemason, that he was doing up a church.
    ‘Oh, that sounds interesting,’ she’d said.
    ‘Em … it’s pretty boring, actually,’ he’d replied.
    ‘Oh,’ she’d said, looking away slightly and tapping her foot to the mechanised beat from London.
    Looking back on it now, Robbie couldn’t understand why he’d said his work was boring. Shyness, he supposed, because it wasn’t true. The challenge of making St Hilda’s look like a proper church again – and not just that, but a different kind of church from the ones he’d grown up with – was pretty exciting, really. Re-attaching an intricately carved corbel, disguising the join with a cunning glue made of dust from the original stone mixed with cement: now that was satisfaction.
    As for the problem of the smashed Virgin, Robbie got on to that promptly. Aware of McNair watching him in what he hoped was admiration, he consulted a telephone book and, using his mobile phone, called a church on the island of Barra, seeing as how it was such a Catholic place, and old-fashioned enough to have a Virgin of the right vintage.
    ‘Hello there,’ said Robbie, when he’d got through. ‘We’ve had a little accident here at St Hilda’s Church in Ross-shire. Yeah. And what I was wondering is, have you got any Virgin Marys you don’t need?’
    McNair covered his eyes and sighed deeply as a harsh cwuk ! sounded through the phone.
    ‘He hung up,’ said Robbie superfluously.
    ‘Let me handle this,’ said McNair, motioning for the mobile.
    McNair rang Barra back, explained who he was, translated the situation into officialese, mentioned the half-million pounds. Dressed up in this way, McNair’s conversation with the Catholic priest managed to last many seconds longer than Robbie’s. It might even have lasted a whole minute.
    ‘No Virgin Marys, eh?’ Robbie enquired when it was over and McNair was tapping his fingers dolefully on the table.
    ‘He says they may be Catholics ,’ McNair said, ‘but they’re Scottish Catholics.’
    ‘Which means what? They do without?’
    ‘No, it means they make do with the one Virgin Mary they’ve got. No spares.’
    The men sat in silence for a minute, gloomy. Outside, a vehicle pulled up, the rusty church gate creaked, the worm-eaten church door groaned, and a fragment of ceiling fell into the aisle. McNair suggested that Robbie go and see to the visitor and leave the Virgin to him. As a contractor of many years’ experience, he had lots of contacts when it came to specialised bits and pieces. There was a place in Cornwall which was brilliant for supplying crenellated moulding, for instance, and another one in Morpeth which was pretty much cinquefoil city.
    Robbie went out to talk to a joiner who had just arrived with two dozen lathe-turned balusters for the gap-toothed balustrades upstairs. McNair took