Rain Falls On Everyone ~ @clarnic @Legend_Press #SneakPeek

Today on the blog I have an excerpt of Rain Falls On Everyone by Clar Ni Chonghaile. Published on the 15th of July, 2017 by Legend Press. I do hope you enjoy. Thanks for stopping by.

Kelly xox

9781785079016

Rain Falls On Everyone ~ Sneak Peek

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.

Book Jacket

Theo, a young Rwandan boy fleeing his country’s genocide, arrives in Dublin, penniless, alone and afraid. Still haunted by a traumatic memory in which his father committed a murderous act of violence, he struggles to find his place in the foreign city.

Plagued by his past, Theo is gradually drawn deeper into the world of Dublin’s feared criminal gangs. But a chance encounter in a restaurant with Deirdre offers him a lifeline.

Theo and Deirdre’s tender friendship is however soon threatened by tragedy. Can they confront their addictions to carve a future out of the catastrophe that engulfs both their lives?

Order your copy today ~

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