Rain Falls on Everyone

by Rain Falls on Everyone (retail) (epub)

  “Where else would I be at this hour?” Theo said. “Jeez, Neville, what’s up?” He stopped outside his building so he wouldn’t wake Precious. Neville, usually so calm and quiet, was nearly shouting. He could hear his footsteps down the line. It sounded like his friend was running.

  “It’s too complicated to go into now but I think I fucked up, Theo. I need somewhere to keep my head down for a while. I’m coming to yours. I’m about thirty minutes away. Is Precious there?”

  “Yeah, she’s here but she’s sleeping, at least she was. I nipped out for a while but I’m back now. Text me when you get here and I’ll let you in. Alright? Don’t ring the bell and don’t knock. I don’t want to wake her again, she’ll go mental.”

  “Fine.” And Neville was gone.

  Theo let himself in quietly. He stood in the hall for a second after he clicked the door shut. There was no sound from the bedroom so he took off his shoes and padded into the living room with its tiny built-in kitchen. He poured himself a glass of water and sat on the couch, suddenly dead with exhaustion.

  What a night. He leaned back and closed his eyes. His head was spinning, like one of those sparklers kids carried at fireworks, only instead of flashes of light wheeling off, there were images – dead bodies in fields, his father in that eternal killer’s pose, Cara’s tear-stained face, the sneer of disgust on Tommy’s face, and now Neville, an image from a better time, his floppy fringe falling over his face as he punched Theo playfully on the shoulder. What the hell had Neville gotten himself into now?

  After Michael’s warning a few weeks ago, Theo’d told Nev to be careful. But Neville had laughed at him. They were sitting together in a corner of the pub down the road, waiting for the girls to turn up. Neville hadn’t said much about the new girl he was going with, just that they’d met at the library a couple of weeks ago. That was Neville for you, alright. Picking up birds in bars was not his style.

  “Don’t be such a mother hen, Theo. Things are fine. Alright, a couple of lads asked me to give them some gear on tick but they’ve paid up now. I was just a bit short for a couple of weeks and I think that dumbass Michael told Gerrity I might be skimming the product. But I’ve sorted it now. I’m not scared of Michael, he’s a right Mickey Dazzler. Wants to make you feel that he owns you and him nothing more than a lackey himself. Don’t worry your pretty black head there. I’ve got it under control.”

  “And you’re sure you’re not nicking the stash for yourself? I’m finding you very perky this evening, Nev.”

  Theo was only half-joking. Neville was not stupid, far from it, but sometimes he did things that only made sense in his own fired-up brain where neurons and synapses snapped and sizzled thanks to the weed and coke pumping up the base all around his body.

  Before Neville could answer, a tall girl with a fine pair of legs poured into tight jeans was leaning over the table, giving Theo’s friend a nice, warm kiss on the lips.

  “Theo, this is Grace Walsh.”

  She was a good bit younger than both of them, Theo realised as he nodded to her and pushed back his chair to let her onto the bench beside Neville. Couldn’t be more than eighteen. She was wearing heavy eyeliner and too much foundation but she was pretty enough and, when she smiled, there were dimples in her cheeks. There was something about that mouth too.

  “Have I seen you around somewhere? You look awful familiar,” he said as Neville went to the bar for another round.

  “Nah, don’t think so,” Grace said. “I think I’d have remembered ye if we’d met before.”

  She smiled to show there was no harm meant. Theo liked that.

  “Are you in school?” he said.

  “Just done the Leaving. I guess I’ll be able to answer that question better next month when we get the results.”

  And that’s when Theo realised who she was. Walsh. Of course, this was Deirdre’s girl.

  “Small world,” he breathed.

  “What?” she said.

  “I’ve just realised I work with your mam, down in The Deep. Your mam’s Deirdre, right?

  “Yeah. Okay, so you’re the lad from Rwanda, the one who grew up here? I didn’t know yer name. Mam might’ve told me but I forgot. And Neville’s been on about his friend Theo, but he never said… I mean, I didn’t know…”

  Theo smiled. “Yeah, Neville never tells anyone that I’m black. He likes them to meet me fresh the first time. He says it’s his fight against racial stereotypes. I think he’s onto a loser there but he likes to watch people do a double-take when they have to match what he’s told them about me with what I look like. He says he can literally see the wheels in their brains whirring.” They both laughed although Grace was blushing too. “Mind you, it was different when he met me for the first time,” Theo said.

  And he told Grace the story. Well, some of it. He didn’t mention that he’d only been in Ireland for four months, or that he was sniffling with fear and clinging to Sheila’s arm when he’d arrived in Mrs Newton’s class on a wet, spring morning in 1995.

  He glossed over all that. He’d leave mixing tragedy with comedy to Shakespeare.

  “So anyways, Mrs Newton, she was nice, not the smartest but nice enough, says, ‘This is Theo, from Africa. Now everyone say a big hello to Theo.’ Of course, nobody did because I was the first black person most of them had ever seen. She sent me to sit by Neville, he was at the back. He never said a word that whole morning, just stared at me. Finally, just before lunch, he said, ‘D’ye not like washing, then?’”

  Grace laughed. And so did Neville who had joined them again now.

  “I was eight!” he said and he feigned a punch at Theo, pulling Grace to him with his other arm so he could kiss her head.

  Later that night, as Neville left to see Grace home, always the gentleman, he again told Theo not to worry, everything was cool, everything was under control.

  Now, sitting on his couch, the sky pinking over the high-rises across the street and the night flashing through his brain like lightning, Theo knew with a dull certainty that everything was very much not under control. It was as though the sofa under him was drifting towards the wall, towards the window, leaving the apartment behind. Wouldn’t it be great if he drifted right up out of the window into the sky, away above the city, across the sea? Maybe he would land in his childhood and Shema would be there, cackling, and his father, all of them sitting under the mango tree, all of them together, untainted by the future. Before. As he slumped further into the sofa, Theo felt a lump in the pocket of his jeans. Tommy’s knife. He chucked it beneath the settee. Fat lot of good a scrawny penknife would be to him. His eyes closed and when he jolted awake again, he’d been out for an hour. It was nearly 6 am. He checked his phone. No missed calls. No texts. Where the fuck was Neville?

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  When Precious stumbled into the room a few hours later, Theo was still on the sofa but he was no longer tired. He felt wide awake, jittery, like that time he took a yoke, just to prove to Michael that he wasn’t a wuss. He’d never taken one again. He didn’t want to be the dealer with the habit, like Neville. It was too much of a cliché. And he was already a cliché. The tragic, black African, family wiped out by the mass slaughter that exploded when the ‘savages’ went mad, a bereft child with bare feet taken in by white saviours. No, if he was going to fuck up the life that had been so inexplicably saved – and today it felt more than ever like he was – then he’d decided he was not going to be another stereotype while doing it. He checked his phone again. He’d texted Michael an hour or so ago but he hadn’t replied. Theo was sure the jackass knew what was going on. Maybe he could call him now? It was after eight. He might be up.

  “Have you been awake since you got up?”

  Precious fell on the sofa beside him, her head dropping onto his shoulder.

  “More or less, couldn’t sleep. I went for a walk, like I said, and… then I sat here. I think I dozed a bit.”

  Theo didn’t want to go into the whole Cara story with P
recious. She’d met the younger girl the night he went to the Warwick on Jarvis Street with the restaurant crew as he scouted for new clients for the coke Michael had raved about. He’d sold a fair bit, word got round the club quickly that the silent black in the corner was the one to see, which was just as well as that supply line from Spain was really coming into its own now and Gerrity was gaining a rep for dealing in weight, cementing his place at the top of this particular pyramid. At some point during the night, Theo was chatting to Cara when he caught Precious giving him the dirty eye. He wasn’t up to anything; she just happened to come along as he was standing alone, eyeing the room for potential buyers. He was only half-listening to her, to be honest, but Precious didn’t like it. He’d taken his arm from the wall where he’d put it as he leaned in to hear Cara over the music, straightened up and flashed Precious a smile, but her face remained stony and she was quiet on the way home.

  No point now going into what happened on the street. Precious’d be mad and suspicious and it would only give her another stick to bash Cara with. For some reason that was not quite clear to him, Theo didn’t want her going on again about how Cara was ‘like a skinny little dog, all wanting and needing’, as she’d done when they got home that night, before he managed to caress her anger away. Anyway, he’d no time to think about all that now.

  “Listen, Precious, I’ve to go out and then I’ll be off straight to the restaurant. I know, I know,” he said, as she lifted her head and opened her mouth, “I said we could go down to Temple Bar and get breakfast before I went to work but something’s come up. Neville’s got a problem and I need to… to go see that he’s alright. Sorry, love.”

  “Bloody Neville. He’s always up to something,” Precious growled as she heaved herself off the couch.

  She slammed on the kettle in the tiny kitchen area. The crockery was going to get it, Theo thought.

  “Is it drugs? Is that the trouble he is in? Are you going to bring him money again?”

  She was standing at the edge of the kitchenette now, one hand on her jutting hip. Even in his baggy Cure t-shirt, with a face on her that would sink ships, she looked like a ride. Her breasts, like buns with cherries on them, were rising and falling as she puffed her anger and he felt himself getting hard. She looked fine, her stance brazen, her hands twisting elegantly from the wrists at the end of each sentence, like flesh-and-blood question marks.

  “No, nothing like that. I mean, I don’t think it’s cash. It’s…”

  “What, Theo? What has he done that you have to go out at the crack of dawn at the weekend, leaving your woman alone?”

  “Precious, I’m trying to tell you if you’ll give me a chance.”

  Theo was on his feet now. Somewhere in his brain, below the hum of anxiety about Neville and the unsettling sense that gravity was getting loose, there was a throbbing that said, ‘a shag is probably just what you need right now’. He made a move but she was onto him.

  “You can wipe that look off your face too. There is no way you’re getting any of this now.”

  Theo sighed and went to grab his jacket from the chair. “I just think he’s in trouble. He called me last night, this morning really, and I can’t reach him now. It’s probably fine but I’ve got to go and check on him, to be sure. I’ll text you later.”

  “You can text all you like.”

  But as he opened the door, she came to him.

  “Theo, I know Neville is like a brother to you. I know he was good to you when you were new here but he’s like quicksand. He’ll drag you down and me too. He mixes with a bad crowd and he’s stoned out of his head most of the time.”

  Despite the harsh words, her face was soft. Theo bent and kissed her hard and long on the mouth. She cared about him more than anyone, except perhaps Jim and Sheila. And, of course, Neville. And those ghosts in his head, if you could fool yourself into thinking love kept going when the body stopped. He cared about her too, had told her more secrets than most, and she was the best ride he’d ever had. He should just drop this whole drug thing, get her up the duff and settle down, move to another city maybe, in Ireland or somewhere else. But he’d never dared speak to her of these wild ideas and he never would because he knew that, despite what they had here in this Dublin bubble, she was going home one day. Her family was rich and he knew, as well as he knew his name, that they would not want her to be with a Rwandan orphan. That’s why he never talked of the future. She was a swallow, her migration route was sure. He was like those parakeets that Neville told him had settled in English parks, lost, out-of-place and never going home to the foothills of the Himalayas where they had first come from years ago.

  “I know that, Precious. I know Nev’s a mess. But he’s my mess.” He smiled down at her, fishing for forgiveness. “I have to see if he’s okay. I’ll tell you all about it later. I’ll be finished around 10. Will I see you here then?”

  “You might.”

  But she was smiling too now because his right hand had found her breast and that pert nipple. She stood on her toes and put her mouth over his, nipping and biting and squeezing and sucking so that for a rainbow-behind-the-eyes moment, he was gone from himself. Then his phone bleeped.

  That’d be Michael.

  “I’ll see you later. Stay hot for me.”

  On the street, he read the text.

  Ha’penny Bridge. 10 am.

  At least that was something. He’d run over to Neville’s place first on the off chance that he might be there, then walk into the city through Phoenix Park. He had time and the walk might calm him. He tried Neville’s mobile again. Still nothing. He headed down the street, pulling his earphones from his pocket. He needed someone else’s words in his ears to silence everything else. There was nothing he’d not thought of that could reasonably explain Neville’s silence. If he kept thinking, he’d only end up scratching the same scab he’d been picking at since the phone call and then he’d be no use to anyone.

  There was no answer when he hammered at the cracked red door to Neville’s basement flat. Theo wasn’t surprised. If he was honest with himself, he’d admit it was a dead cert that Gerrity’s crew had taken Neville. What else? But he didn’t want to be honest yet. Not even with himself because once he accepted that as fact, he’d have to do something and then there’d be no going back.

  He climbed the steps back up to the street and pulled out his phone. He couldn’t do Yeats today – he’d get lost in all that mysticism and oblique imagery. Then he’d be back on the where’s-Neville mental merry-go-round and until he met Michael, there was nothing else he could do, was there? No point calling Grace. Neville never told her anything about dealing drugs. He’d said that dragging her into it would be the real crime. Theo knew what he meant.

  He scrolled through his podcasts. He’d downloaded a weekly arts show after he’d heard a bit of it while he was washing up last weekend, before the rest of the team came in and turned the radio over to Kiss FM. He might try Heaney. He hadn’t listened to this one yet and they’d studied some of Heaney’s poems at school. He’d liked them, especially Digging. That one reminded him of Kavanagh’s work. It was the same kind of ‘old world’ poetry, harking back to a different Ireland, not this one of hard eyes, quick money and broken dreams. Okay, so maybe that old Ireland was no utopia either – no joke to be scrabbling for mould-covered potatoes in a cold field, however beautifully it was described – but these poems evoked a simplicity that, however phony or manufactured it might be, made Theo feel like he could see above the clouds. Some of the poems also made him think of his own childhood, as though where he grew up was not just in his past but in The Past, further away than linear time and geography could account for on their own. Something about these rose-tinted visions of rural life in pre-boom Ireland spun him back to Kibungo. He called them wordy worm-holes.

  He decided to walk straight through the Park – up Acres Road and then down Chesterfield. It was a beautiful morning, light soft as a lullaby, easy breeze, a curtain of mist risi
ng off the grass. There were a fair few joggers out and the odd horse-and-cart, looking for early-bird tourists. The trees clutched pockets of shadow to their trunks. If only he was just taking a walk. Or going for a run. Then, this would’ve been a great start to the day.

  As he moved deeper into the park, he started to feel a little calmer. He used to roam the city a lot when he was younger, sometimes with Neville but mostly on his own, on a mission to discover his new Dublin. Sometimes the things he found helped him remember old places, old ways, so that the unfamiliar became a lens through which he could look back.

  The first time he’d come across red deer in Phoenix Park, it was a frost-edged winter’s day and he was stunned. He nearly missed them because the wind was pinching his face so hard he’d buried his chin deep in the collar of his duffle coat and had his eyes on the ground. He hadn’t expected wild animals to be roaming free in the heart of the city. He stood watching them, his mind rushing back to Kibungo, that lost world where shy duikers would dart out of the bushes as he sped by on his scooter and where colobus monkeys hooted in the trees in the morning. He’d not thought of these things for years – it was just because of the deer. He supposed his walks around Dublin were really a kind of therapy, reviving memories that his mind had put to sleep.

  He got to Ha’penny Bridge way too early so he thought he’d take a wander to the south side of the Liffey. He wasn’t really paying attention to where he was going and found himself back in Harry Street, in front of Phil Lynott’s statue. He checked his phone again. Still nothing. Still early. He’d have a coffee. There were a few young lasses, sounded like they were from Cork, taking photos with Phil. One girl put her hand on his forever-frozen Afro, another stood mimicking the singer’s stance, one leg out, thumb hooked in the pocket of her denim shorts, another girl gave him a hug. They were all long hair, endless bare legs and giggles. They were too young to have really known the music and too white to understand what Phil Lynott meant to someone like Theo. But they were having a good time and Theo felt sure Phil would be loving it, wherever he was.