A Town Called Rain: Chapter One

Read the first chapter of Andrew's work-in-progress crime fiction novel.

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There was rain in the bones of this town. So much rain that the people themselves looked half washed away most of the time. Washed away or washed up. They moved like rain on their daily business, from the bakery to the shop, to the greengrocers, to the Post Office, to the bookies, to the pub, raindrops inching their way down a window pane, their only goal to merge and become bigger drops of rain, rain begetting rain. For what is the goal of rain but to beget rain, repeat itself, mimic its family of rain in an endless cycle? 

But, what I’ve just told you is not entirely true. When I speak of the greengrocers and the bakery, I’m speaking of an older time, a time before this one, with its petrol stations masquerading as supermarkets, or vice versa, and when the bookies was a place not just an app, and when a £10 note could buy at least two pints and a bag of Scampi Fries or packet of fags, at least. And when I say the people were like rain, I mean to say they had no choice, in a town like this, even now, especially now. 

I do not sit in judgement of the people of Ballyrain, but give them to you, show them to you as a screen, a monitor hooked up to a CCTV doorbell might catch them passing by, pausing and looking straight at it, so as you may draw your own conclusions. It is not for me to judge the people of the town and what you, dear reader, are about to witness take place there, which I’m sure you’ll have an opinion about, because if I know anything about people today it’s that they have opinions. 

All this town is is a high street, and even that’s been taken away from it. What dominates the place now, what gives it identity are three petrol stations, one at either end of the town on the main arterial road going to Belfast on one side or Patricktown (Paddytown) on the other, and one tucked away behind the chapel. The people of the town - like all towns across this rain bedraggled, rain be-soaked, rain bejewelled province that is the North of Ireland - are sold processed food in cellophane at high prices as part of multi-buy offers, and made to feel grateful for it. 

Irrevocably, the fog of global consumerism has reached this rural Northern Irish village and no wind will blow it; it has settled and will stay, to seep into the soil. 

The petrol stations burn with adverts for high fat, high salt, highly processed, machine-made, multi-ingredient foods, made with palm oil and flavourings and additives and preservatives. And these rain besmirched people have been made to feel grateful for it. 

For those of you who think rural Northern Ireland is all whitewashed cottages and peat fires, and horse and carts and Seamus Heaney poems, and honest-to-God farmer types who carry their big bibles to church on a Sunday think again, and if you come across those types, I'd advise you to look again. Scratch the surface of the shortbread box veneer and you'll see something else, something darker.

A quarter of the way into this century and things have changed here, the modern world was seeping into it, like a toxic kind of rain, like bleach through soil.

Detective Inspector Patrick Blackwood was not old and he was not young. He was not rich and he was not poor. He was not fit but he was not fat. He was not happy but he was not sad. He was not hungry but he was not full. He was not thirsty but he was not parched. He was not married but neither was he in search of marriage. You get the drift.

And at 3.15am, on Sunday 31st October 20__, when his phone thrummed and lit the ceiling above his bed with its blue light, he was not awake but he was not asleep. 

“Sir, it’s bad,” came the voice on the other end.

“Try me,” Blackwood replied. 

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Andrew Jamison is a writer and teacher, and you can read more articles on his blog here or get a paid subscription and access all previous and future posts here. You can also browse his poetry collections and buy signed, first editions of each of them here. A Town Called Rain is his first attempt at a novel.