The character who would not come in out of the rain

The first real storm of the season came in off the sea yesterday at about four, the kind that turns the afternoon the colour of a bruise and makes the dogs go quiet. I had the window open longer than was sensible. There is a smell that arrives just before it, dust and hot tin and something green, and I have never found the word for it, so in my books I just call it the smell of the sky deciding something.

I was stuck. I had a girl standing in a doorway in a sky village, monsoon coming on, and every grown up in the scene telling her to come inside, and she would not. I had written her going in. It was tidy. Her grandmother wanted her in, the wind was up, the kites were being hauled down all along the ridge. In she went. And the chapter died on the spot.

So I sat with it while the real storm arrived, and I understood what she already knew and I had forgotten. She was waiting for someone. Not a someone who was going to come. A someone who used to stand in that doorway with her and does not any more, and the only place left in the whole village where she could still almost feel them was right there, in the wind, getting wet, being told off. Going inside was not safety to her. It was giving up the last of a person.

I did not write any of that down. That is the trick I keep learning and keep having to learn again, writing for readers who are nine and ten and nowhere near as breakable as we treat them. You do not tell them she is grieving. You do not use the word. You let her stand in the doorway one beat too long, you let the grandmother stop scolding and come and stand there too, both of them getting rained on, and a child reading it will know exactly what the scene is about without once being handed the label. They have all stood in a doorway waiting for something that was not coming. They simply did not have a sky village to do it in.

The storm blew itself out inside an hour, the way the early ones do, all noise and no staying power. I closed the window. The girl is still in the doorway. I think she will go in at the end of the chapter, when she is ready and not before, and her grandmother will have the sense to wait with her.

Children know when you are rushing them. So, it turns out, do characters. I am learning to let both take the time the rain gives them.

Girls who will not be told are the best company, and in When the Island Lost Its Name it is Nemi who sets out to bring her vanished island back into view.