Rain Falls on Everyone Read online

  RAIN

  FALLS ON

  EVERYONE

  CLÁR NÍ CHONGHAILE

  Legend Press Ltd, 107-111 Fleet Street, London, EC4A 2AB

  [email protected] | www.legendpress.co.uk

  Contents © Clár Ní Chonghaile 2017

  The right of the above author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data available.

  The lines from ‘Epic’ by Patrick Kavanagh are quoted from Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn (Allen Lane, 2004), by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency.

  The lines from ‘Dublin’ by Louis MacNeice are quoted from Collected Poems, edited by Peter McDonald (Faber & Faber, 2007), by kind permission of Faber & Faber, through David Higham Associates.

  Print ISBN 978-1-7850790-1-6

  Ebook ISBN 978-1-7850790-0-9

  Set in Times. Printed by Opolgraf SA

  Cover design by Anna Morrison www.annamorrison.com

  All characters, other than those clearly in the public domain, and place names, other than those well-established such as towns and cities, are fictitious and any resemblance is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

  Clár Ní Chonghaile was born in London but grew up in An Spidéal, County Galway. She left Ireland aged 19 to join Reuters in London as a graduate trainee journalist. Clár has been a reporter and editor for over 20 years, living and working in Spain, France, the Ivory Coast, Senegal and Kenya.

  She now lives in St Albans, England, with her husband and two daughters. Her debut novel, Fractured, was published by Legend Press in 2016.

  Visit Clár at

  clarnichonghaile.wordpress.com

  or on Twitter

  @clarnic

  To David, Lucy and Rachel

  CHAPTER ONE

  Theo ran. Feet pounding, arms pumping, chest heaving, heart racing. In this frenzy of motion, the only still thing was his mind. He had to get away. That was the only goal: to put as much distance as he could between him and the pebble-dashed house where a man he knew little, but enough to hate, lay in a pool of sticky, gold-flecked blood. He had to get away from Deirdre’s terrified eyes, from her outstretched hands with the grazed knuckles. He sped through the estate and out onto the main road, his open anorak flapping behind him like the clipped wings of a giant crow.

  He didn’t stop until he was heading west on a country road. He had covered miles, at first frantically and then steadily with his long, loping stride. He stopped, bent, placed his hands on his knees, and still his brain did not engage. He saw the road, noted its silvery greyness, looked up to the half-moon and then over the stone walls, across the fields. He registered the absence of cars. No surprise there at 2 am on a minor road leading out of Dublin. To his right, a two-storey house – a relic from the austere Ireland of the 1950s – loomed like a sentinel, marking the boundary between the sin-filled city and the countryside, where legend had it, maidens once danced at crossroads while boys played hurling without helmets.

  He needed transport. It was his first clear thought since the gun went off. He would never make it on foot. Deirdre might not set the Gardaí on him right away but it’d surely happen. He’d done her a favour, no doubt about that, but sometimes people didn’t want favours. In those first, freeze-framed moments after the sharp crack that marked the beginning and the end, no one had moved, no one had said anything. Deirdre was the first to react.

  “Go, go now!” she hissed, grabbing a notebook and writing furiously. “Go to my father. He will look after you until you can get out.”

  She pushed the paper into his hands. Did her fingers flinch as they touched his? She had written her father’s address, just a few lines of scribbled instructions, a list of villages to pass through, a left and then a right down a lane. A roadmap to oblivion. Before he left, he tried to read the moral relativities in her eyes but he found only fear. It hurt him then and the memory stung now but there would be time for a reckoning later.

  He checked his phone. The battery was nearly dead but who would he call anyway? He clambered over the nearest wall, dislodging the top stone in his wake. It clunked dully onto his toes. He cursed, but in Kinyarwanda. The words had the force of a Taser, freezing him to the spot. He hadn’t used his own language in years. The last time was when he was around sixteen and went to a meeting for African immigrants in a church near his home in Clontarf. Teenage identity crisis, he supposed. He never returned. Instead of feeling at one with the other young men, who sat awkwardly on squeaking plastic chairs in the echo-filled basement down below the world, he felt more like an outsider than ever. The social workers – a pudgy woman in a tracksuit and garish pink lipstick and a man in the kind of jumper most of the young black kids wouldn’t be seen dead in – were kind and well-meaning and utterly clueless about what made the lads around them tick. It wasn’t their fault. They were offering practical solutions – language classes, dole forms, counselling services – when what the young men wanted was someone to wave a magic wand over their heads to make them the same as everyone else. All teenagers need to comply with the pitiless rules that govern their world and they were no different. But because they were black, and had funny accents, and strange, sometimes tragic, tales of foreign lands, they would never fit in. The boys knew it but they didn’t get this far by respecting the limits of the possible. The social workers, who might well have had teenagers at home with their own hang-ups about belonging, didn’t recognise that same desperation in the boys around them, though it was in every snazzily trainered foot, every awkwardly mumbled Dublin colloquialism, every too-sharp haircut.

  There was one other Rwandan, like him but not. His name was Patrice but he called himself Paddy. It made Theo laugh. Patrice was nineteen and had arrived two years before. He was still illegal and still unemployed. During a short break for weak tea and Jaffa cakes, they spoke together in Kinyarwanda, the words dropping thick and clumsy from Theo’s lips. They only talked about Dublin and they kept their voices low, as they had been taught by those who first gave them these words. They did not speak of that which was unspeakable. Patrice was clearly a Tutsi and Theo knew that it was just as clear that he himself was not, or at least not just. He’d no idea if Patrice had been in Rwanda during the killing, he’d no idea where he was from, and he did not want to know. In this new world, Patrice was no more like him than Bono. That awkward evening in the church basement was the last time he’d spoken his language, until now, until the curse words burst from his lips as the jagged stone fell onto his foot. Half-formed anamneses crept upon him – other feet slapping other roads, other mouths panting, a remorseless sun – but he hadn’t come this far to let the feckers in. Anam – soul in Irish. Anamnesis – Greek, but so perfectly expressing itself through another language. Theo had always loved words because of what they showed and what they hid, and how they could, by their very existence, create new worlds, new thoughts, new possibilities. Of course, he knew only too well the flip side of this power. Words could also obliterate.

  He levered the stone off his toes and stumbled through the reeds and grassy hillocks that stippled the field. He vaulted another wall, careful this time, and em
erged onto a narrow country road in front of the house with its lightless window-eyes. He crouched down by the front wall, hidden still by the bushes that swayed like tipsy Wombles in the cheek-clipping wind.

  There was a light over the door and another on the side of the breezeblock garage. Leaning against the garage wall, there was a high-seated black bicycle that must belong to someone who had grown up with the house. An old man with a flat cap, maybe, who cycled these lanes straight-backed, spitting curses at the pace of change. Theo unlatched the small gate quietly, slipped across the front garden, grabbed the bike, lifted it smoothly onto his shoulders and returned to the road. In a few breath-starved seconds, he had left the house behind and was speeding down a hill into the safety of a nave of trees. He could feel the house’s blank gaze on his back and it quickened his big feet on the pedals. He cycled without caution, eyes down, the up-and-down of his knees anaesthetising his brain until he was spinning down a different road, red dust rising beneath the wheels of the wooden scooter that Shema had made him, wind making him cry, going so fast even the sun couldn’t lay its heavy hand on him, sweet breeze filling his flaring nostrils, and his own shadow struggling to keep up. He laughed suddenly and lifted his feet from the pedals, thrusting his legs to the side. Then he wobbled and he was back and there was no sun now. The swollen sky was already paling. When the road forked two kilometres later, he set his face to the darker West, heading towards the bogs of the mid-country and beyond to the Atlantic.

  He cycled until an invisible sun finally managed to poke straw rays of light through the sullen clouds. He knew now he was on the R446 beyond Tyrrellspass. He came off the road and found a stone shed with a balding thatched roof. One corner was dry and there were bags of cattle feed stacked by the wall, as well as two empty sacks. Theo lay on one of the sacks, putting the other on top of him, his right arm under his head. He slept quickly. He had done this before, slept on other floors on another continent, and he was tired.

  An hour or so later, he woke suddenly and got on the bike again, his mind numbed by cold and hunger. He kept heading west, cycling through towns and villages where another day was stirring for people who knew who they were, and where they were going. He cut a strange sight, weaving through Monday morning mini-jams on streets made for donkey carts not cars, but he didn’t slow down long enough to see the eyebrows raised above suspicious squints.

  In Kilbeggan, he stopped at a petrol station and bought a coffee and a bun with thick icing. He went outside to where he had put the bike by the front wall, and stood drinking and smoking. A red-faced hook of a man got out of a battered cream Mazda and as he filled the car, he looked at Theo openly, brazenly, the way old men in small places will do. Even when he’d put the nozzle back in the machine, he pushed his hands into the pockets of his cords and stood staring. There was neither anger nor compassion on his face. He was just looking and when he was satisfied he walked into the shop, fumbling for his wallet in sagging pockets so that he looked like a hunchbacked sailor, unused to land.

  Theo didn’t care. The looking was nothing, less than a nuisance. Things had changed since his arrival in 1995. Then, he was a curiosity to everyone, the freakish survivor of what the ‘blue babies’ got up to when they grew up.

  He’d always thought it was funny that the Irish language described black people as blue. Na daoine gorm. Black and blue. Bruised. Damaged. His Irish teacher in secondary, Máistear Burke, said it was because whenever the first Irish met the first Africans, they didn’t want to offend them by calling them black, or dubh, because that colour was associated with the devil. Theo had liked Burke, even though he was a nutjob with a dangerous habit of picking up chairs and waving them around students’ heads while demanding they conjugate the conditional tense properly. By the time Theo came to him at the age of twelve, his foster parents had mostly managed to piece together the broken child they’d been given. There were still a few bits missing but mostly people didn’t notice. Máistear Burke did but in his gruff way he treated Theo both the same as everyone else and differently. He never spared him, he never excused him, but there was the odd hand-on-the-shoulder, or chat after class that made Theo think the crazy bastard was looking out for him. In any case, Theo loved learning Irish. He was good at it. Better than the Irish themselves, Burke used to joke. Unlike the other kids, Theo didn’t feel it was a burden. They all moaned about learning a ‘dead’ language, but Theo, who had grown up speaking Kinyarwanda, French, Swahili and some English, didn’t see the problem. He liked adding another window to his house of words.

  It was Máistear Burke that Theo was thinking about as he ate his chips on the banks of the Shannon near Athlone. It was mid-afternoon and the pubs were already filling but he was well out of the way of any troublemakers and he would be on his bike in a few minutes. From a little hillock covered with scratchy brown pine needles, he could see over the sluggish water to the town and beyond. No grand vistas here. Just a heatless sun skulking behind flat clouds skimming monotonous estates of identical houses, all satellite dishes and twitchy curtains. He’d better not hang around.

  “Howya? Nice place for yer tea. Might be a bit cold for my liking though. Gonna be a chilly night, I reckon.”

  The voice was to his left, on the other side of the bushes that hemmed the spindly trunks of the trees behind him. A rustle, and a man appeared. Stocky and short, he wore a surprisingly bright blue hat above a thin face and there was a cigarette hanging out of the corner of his cranky-looking mouth.

  “None of my business, of course, but I was wondering what you might be doing here? Not my land, don’t worry. It’s all public property here by the river but other side of the trees, now that’s my field and I like to keep an eye on things round here. You’d be surprised what goings-on you’d be getting at night; kids drinking, smoking drugs, laying into each other. Not like when I was a young one.”

  The man squeezed around the bushes, moving closer with every word. Theo wasn’t frightened; he was far bigger than this red-neck and look what he’d done last night, for Chrissakes. But he didn’t want any trouble here. He nodded vacantly at the man, then returned to his chips.

  “Visiting are ye?”

  Jesus, this guy wasn’t going to let up.

  “Jus’ down to see me mam’s folks, maybe you know them? The Connors?” He laid on the accent.

  The man’s face was a picture. For the first time since the night before, Theo allowed himself a secret smile. To hide the twitching of his lips, he furrowed his brow and then slowly pulled his hoodie over his head.

  “The Connors? Mikey Connor’s lot?” the man said.

  “Naw, Séamus. Maybe you don’t know them. You haven’t been living here long yourself?”

  The man glared at Theo through slitted eyes. He pulled the fag angrily from his mouth, choked a little as he swallowed some smoke, and flung the butt into the water beyond Theo’s feet.

  “Coupla years,” he said sharply. “My family’s from Oranmore.”

  “Ah, right.”

  The man flinched and Theo knew he’d got the dismissive tone just right. His years of being an outsider were paying off. He knew just which buttons to push.

  Theo picked the last chip from the packet, balled the paper and put it in his pocket. He rose to his feet, grabbed the bike and pushed it past the man, back towards the road.

  “Nice talking to ye. Have a good one!” he said.

  He was still chuckling as he rode into the town.

  He parked the bike carefully outside the stone bus station with its vast glass windows. He wondered how long before someone would see their lucky day and grab it from the rack. What an adventure for the black iron horse, galloping across Ireland, free at last. Trup, trup a chapaillín, he muttered, the words of the nursery song echoing across the years from the start of his story in this place. But the image that came with it was from over there and it wasn’t a horse: it was a donkey, grazing by the side of a mist-wreathed track as a little boy with a big belly jutting ove
r a pair of dirty shorts waved a long stick around its arse to get it moving again. Fuck, the walls inside me are coming down, Theo thought, shaking his head as if that could straighten out the tangled mess inside.

  He bought a ticket from the driver and sank into a seat, his whole body fluttering into softness like a shirt dropped from a hanger. He no longer had the strength to hold himself up. He melted into the upholstery. He’d have to change buses again in Galway but at least this way he would definitely get there by nightfall. The bus pulled out, wheezing and chuffing as though it too had struggled even to get this far.

  There were plugs for charging phones so Theo asked to borrow a charger from a stringy guy with a beard and a barbell through his eyebrow, who was chatting to his mate about some ‘deadly’ gig they’d been to in Limerick.

  “Sure, gimme a second. I’ll get it for you.”

  The guy rummaged in his battered green rucksack, handing over the charger with a smile so big and sincere that Theo, after the argy-bargy at the river, felt like bursting into tears. That was the thing about this place: you just never knew which kind of Irish you’d be getting on any given day. The postcard Jekyll or the dark-veined Hyde.

  As soon as the screen lit up, the phone beeped. A message from Cara. One from Deirdre. Both punctuated by question marks.

  He dialled Cara’s number, squeezing down into the seat as far as he could go. He turned his head to the window, to the fields running by jauntily outside and crows wheeling backwards across the grey sky.

  “Hey, it’s me. Yeah, I’m okay. Shush, it’s fine. Really. I can’t talk now. I know, I know. Sorry, my phone died. I’m on my way to Deirdre’s dad. I’ll be there tonight. Don’t cry, Cara. Don’t cry. It’ll all be okay. I just need to be away for now. I’ll try to call tomorrow. No, I don’t think so really but better to be safe than sorry. Listen, I’d better go. Yeah, me too. Sorry, Cara. I didn’t mean… Me too. Bye.”