Rain on the Revision Notes

Rain on the Revision Notes

The flat felt smaller with Mavis resting in the bedroom, as if the quiet had taken up the space where her voice usually lived. Hazel sat at the dining table with her maths worksheet, the numbers blurring into the margin drawings she kept adding instead of solving for x. Julian was across from her, his Sec 3 notes stacked in three uneven towers, his fringe falling into his eyes as he read.

The keys rattled in the lock at half past six.

Hazel looked up. Her father stepped inside and closed the door behind him with more care than usual, the way someone might handle something breakable. His shirt was damp across the back and under the arms, the fabric gone dark with sweat, and his hair, usually combed neat, had separated into wet strands at his temples.

“You’re back,” she said.

He nodded and set a thin sheaf of papers on the table, next to Julian’s tallest pile. The top sheet had a letterhead she didn’t recognize, and below it, a block of small print with his name typed halfway down.

“They took you,” Julian said. It wasn’t a question.

“They took me.” James pulled out the chair at the head of the table and sat, and Hazel watched his fingers rest on the edge of the contract without opening it. “Assistant manager. The hours are six to close, five days a week, and the pay is what it is.”

“What is it?” Hazel asked.

He told her. She did the arithmetic in her head, comparing it against the factory salary she’d overheard her parents discuss a month ago, and understood that it was less. Not by a little.

“It’s a start,” James said, and his voice was the same measured courtesy it always was, as if he were explaining inventory to a new hire. “First shift tomorrow.”

Julian turned a page of his notes without reading it. Hazel saw the movement for what it was: her brother buying himself a second to arrange his face.

“I’ll make dinner,” James said, and stood, and went to the kitchen to wash his hands.

The rain began while they were eating. It came without warning, the way tropical storms did, a sudden drumming against the windows that made Julian glance up at the darkening sky. James had made rice and stir-fried cabbage with minced pork, the same dish he’d cooked three times in the past week because it was cheap and fast, and Hazel ate it without comment because she’d learned, over the past two weeks minimum of her mother’s rest, that some things were not worth saying.

Julian finished first and returned to the table and his notes. The Mid-Year examinations were four days away. He’d been studying every evening after dinner, his lips moving silently over biology terms and physics formulas, his handwriting growing smaller and tighter as the hours passed.

The lights went out at eight thirteen.

Hazel knew the exact time because she’d been watching the clock, counting the minutes until she could reasonably abandon her worksheet. The darkness was sudden and total, the kind of black that erased the difference between open eyes and closed ones. The rain was louder without the hum of the refrigerator beneath it.

“Don’t move,” Julian said, and his voice was higher than usual. “My notes.”

Hazel heard rather than saw his hands sweeping across the table, gathering pages. A chair scraped. The window above the dining table was open a hand’s width, and she felt the spray before she heard the water hitting paper.

“The window,” she said, and stood, and her hip caught the table’s edge. Something slid. Julian made a sound she had never heard him make before, a short exhale that was not quite a word.

She found the window by touch and pulled it shut. The latch clicked. In the kitchen, James struck a match, and the flame threw his face into brief, sharp relief before he touched it to the emergency candle they kept in the drawer beside the stove.

The candlelight reached the table in a low orange wash.

Julian’s notes were everywhere. The three towers had collapsed into a fan of pages across the tabletop, and the rain had reached the ones nearest the window. The ink on the top sheet had bloomed into illegible purple clouds. The sheet beneath it was worse: the water had soaked through, and the careful diagrams Julian had drawn in blue pen were now smears of colour that might have been a cell structure or might have been nothing at all.

“It’s only some of them,” Hazel said.

Julian didn’t answer. He was separating the wet pages from the dry ones, his fingers moving too fast, and Hazel saw that his hands were trembling.

James set the candle on the table. “How bad?”

“I don’t know yet.” Julian’s voice was tight. He picked up a page and held it close to the flame, and the paper dripped onto the table. “This one’s gone. This one’s gone too.”

Hazel reached for the pile of dry pages and began sorting them by subject. She recognized the physics notes from the equations, the biology from the labelled diagrams, the history from the dates. She made three new stacks, smaller than the originals, and left space for the ones Julian was still assessing.

“Give me the ones you can’t read,” she said. “I’ll see if I can make anything out.”

“I can do it.”

“I know you can. I’m helping.”

He looked at her then, and in the candlelight his face was all shadows and sharp angles, and she understood that he was embarrassed. Not about the notes. About needing her.

“Which pages do you want me to rescue?” she asked, and the question landed differently than her offer had. She saw it in the way his shoulders dropped, a fraction of a release.

“Biology first,” he said. “The cell division ones. I can’t redraw those from memory.”

She found four sheets with the characteristic circles and lines of mitosis diagrams. Two were legible. One had water damage along the bottom edge but the drawing was intact. The fourth was the page Julian had already declared gone.

James brought a dish towel from the kitchen and spread it on the table. “Lay them flat. They’ll dry better that way.”

They worked in the candlelight, the three of them, sorting and blotting and laying out pages. Julian’s breathing slowed. Hazel watched him arrange the salvageable notes in the order he would need to study them, his fingers careful on the damp paper, and she thought about how long he must have spent on those diagrams, drawing each chromosome in exactly the right position, labelling each phase in his small, neat handwriting.

The power returned at nine oh six. The lights came on all at once, and the refrigerator hummed back to life, and the candle on the table looked suddenly small and unnecessary. James pinched the wick between his thumb and forefinger.

“I need to check on your mother,” he said.

He went down the short hallway to the bedroom. Hazel heard the low murmur of his voice, and then her mother’s reply, softer and slower, the way she’d sounded all week. When James returned, he was holding his phone, and Hazel saw him check the time.

“She has water,” he said. “She says the rain woke her, but she’s all right.” He paused. “My shift starts at four tomorrow. I’ll be gone before you’re home from school.”

Julian looked up from his notes. “Who’s making dinner?”

“I’ll leave something in the refrigerator. You’ll manage.”

Hazel heard the strain in his voice, the effort of making the answer sound simple when it wasn’t. She thought about the contract on the table, the thin sheaf of papers that meant her father would be gone six evenings a week, and about her mother in the bedroom with the door half-closed, and about Julian’s notes spread across the dish towel in careful, uneven rows.

“We’ll manage,” she said, and she wasn’t sure which of them she was answering.

James nodded. He picked up the contract and tucked it into the drawer where they kept the bills, and then he stood for a moment with his hand still on the drawer pull, looking at the table where his son’s ruined notes lay drying beside the space the contract had occupied.

“Leave the towel,” he said. “They’ll be dry by morning.”

He went to the kitchen to wash the rice pot, and Hazel helped Julian lay out the last of the wet pages, and the rain kept falling against the windows, gentler now, a sound like someone tapping their fingers on glass and then thinking better of it.