Dance of the Rainmakers

James Coeur

Description

After a decade of social injustice, of political chaos, and the aftermath of Covid-19, Britain has become a fragmented country. Something has to give and a Welsh seaside village on the edge of the nation, one of the forgotten places, is taking up the fight against those who are turning its once-thriving rural community into a hollow shell.Dance of the Rainmakers is a novel in which the battle for a village is played out by the intertwined stories of three characters. There's Lloyd, the village policeman who is caught in the middle of the protest. His nemesis, Meic, a charismatic young politician who is on a crusade supported by a seemingly bottomless supply of cash and a gang of thugs. And then there's Frankie a London media figure who along with her frustrated partner Ruth, has moved to the village and brought the kind of unwelcome change that gives Meic his shot at nation-wide glory.Recent years has been hard on the village: more holiday homes, fewer working opportunities for the young, and a primary school which is about to close. The community feels exploited, ignored and powerless so they take to the streets in protest. This small local demonstration becomes a national news-story as a tense stand-off emerges. Will Meic's plans work? Will Lloyd face his fears and stop the violence? And just what are those rumours concerning Ruth?

Informations

• Publié par: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Date de parution: 11 août 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781800466241
• Langue: English

Extrait

Copyright © 2021 James Coeur

The moral right of the author has been asserted.


Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, companies, events or places is entirely coincidental.

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ISBN 978 1800466 241

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To J. M. with love


Contents
Prologue
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Author’s note
About the author


Prologue
The girl’s voice sounded faint down the phoneline. ‘I’m sweating, my head is hurting, and I have a big fever. I can’t come in today.’
‘Take some paracetamol and go to bed.’
‘What else?’
‘That’s all you can do. You’re young, the symptoms should abate after a few days, don’t worry.’
‘Sorry.’
‘That’s fine, if you’re ill, you’re ill. We’ll survive. If it does get worse, then call me.’
By the time that Kasia, the health centre’s receptionist, had reported sick, the virus already had its talons deep into the village. It would take the discovery, nine days later, of the body of Dr Williams, her boss, for the locals to take the outbreak seriously. And another two years would pass before the fuse lit that March morning would snake its way to what a national newspaper editorial, writing with tinder-brittle hindsight, called “an inevitable explosion of long-suppressed anger”. No one at the same paper had chosen beforehand to think about the village, or the hundreds of small communities similarly adrift across the country. Perhaps, even if they had done, they still wouldn’t have been able to predict the actual form the anger would take. Or the many ways the rage would change lives, change maybe even a nation.
However, if truth be told, back then in 2020 the village itself didn’t at first quite recognise what was going on. Didn’t join the dots, you see. While most of the residents had seen the television pictures, beamed on the evening news from China, bemused at how you could lock down an entire city, but then it was always China, wasn’t it? They’d always had these flu scares, hadn’t they, and no wonder; you should see where they buy their food from. Val and Chris from up on Cantref Gwaelod Terrace had been on a package trip there a few years back and they said that the markets in that country were disgusting – snakes in fish tanks, pickled scorpions and you name it sitting next to the fruit stalls.
And then Italy went into lockdown, with the Pope taking his Sunday mass online, and soon after there were reports of exhausted Spanish nurses crying at the hopeless tsunami of death that they endured through never-ending nightmare shifts. That captured more attention, and there’d be a slight lowering of the chatter in the pub when the images came up on the corner telly. But that was those countries, wasn’t it, not this one. It was just the usual solitary voice of gloom coming from his corner table, malt whisky in hand, which said that this time would be different for everyone. Many eyes were rolled at this pronouncement – hadn’t the same voice said that about Brexit, but the sky hadn’t fallen on that one – even if a handful of customers nervously swilled their drinks. Surely Britain was an island, and maybe while the virus would indeed fester in a place like London, that city was a long way away from a small seaside resort on the west coast of Wales. They’d be all right, wouldn’t they? Get the next one in, Dewi.
It was only about then that the dwindling numbers of local customers at the pub commented on the increase in visitors arriving from across the border. Accents from Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham blocked the bar, hogged the fruit machine, and took up the regulars’ favourite tables, disregarding local custom as carelessly as the summer tourist mob. Around this time, it was remarked that there seemed to be more lights on the holiday cottages on a weekday night – which was quite strange for late winter, when the fleece-cutting wind shrieked in from the Irish Sea. Once-dark off-peak streets were lit by the glow from the windows of prematurely occupied cottages. With them came the boxy Tesco vans, bustling down from Porthmadog, which had quickly become a regular feature on the narrow road down to the harbour area, making food deliveries to those same second homes. Meanwhile, a scattering of muttered complaints was heard in the local shop about the lack of fruit & veg available for sale. This had become a more frequent occurrence, but what could the shop owner do, the holiday crowd were getting there early and buying most of it up, and he had to earn a living, didn’t he?
It was true, the waterfront was certainly busier, but many shrugged it off as a welcome bit of money for businesses in what had been a particularly long, wet drag of a low season. Other services in the village were busy, as well. The wife of one of the pub regulars, who happened to be the village policeman, recounted to her friends over a few bottles of discount Chenin Blanc how she had waited near on a whole hour to see her GP. A whole hour, for goodness sake; she had timed it, queuing behind a group of blooming tourists who were registering with the health centre or seeking treatment. Her friends nodded in shared outrage and the next morning those of them who could afford it carried out a bigger shop than usual at the Co-op supermarket in nearby Dolgellau. Just a few more tins of soup, a couple more packets of dried pasta from the low-stocked shelves, a big slab or two of minced beef for the freezer, and an extra nine-pack of loo roll – better safe than sorry.
That same morning, a few days after his receptionist had called in sick, the village doctor himself placed a call to the health authority in Bangor, having diagnosed himself with the Covid-19 virus. With a frail voice, he informed the duty officer that he’d be self-isolating and requested emergency locum cover to be arranged for the community. He tried to read out a list of patients with whom he’d been in contact over the past week, but was tersely told to email them, as everyone in Bangor was flat out and another call was coming through. That email never arrived, an ill-fated omission for two elderly patients in the village who died alone, abandoned by the authorities which were ignorant of their vulnerability. Afterwards it was generally believed that the doctor had been simply too ill to get to his computer to send the list. He was quite old himself anyway, staying on after the normal retirement age as he couldn’t recruit a new GP to the village surgery. After a call to the local police sergeant from Dr Williams’ worried daughter, who was stranded in Singapore, his body had been found on the floor near his bed. Given the circumstances, no blame could be reasonably attached to anyone, despite the daughter’s call for an inquiry. As for locum cover, like elsewhere in the country there were no spare medics, leaving the practice nurse to close the surgery, and then herself enter isolation.
The news about their GP spread fast through the community, and it didn’t take long for the villagers to make the connection between the loss of their health cover and the influx of holidaymakers and the second-homes pack. Their mood was not helped by the scenes that weekend, as tourists clustered on the beach and outside the shuttered pubs serving pints from the doorstep. They included a peloton of middle-aged, middle-management cyclists who saw no reason to cancel their regular monthly event after one of them had reported to their WhatsApp group that the virus couldn’t spread in fresh air. A graduate student, himself only a village resident since the previous August, draped a bedsheet over a road sign at the entrance to the village, and sprayed the text “Go home, Covid morons – village closed” upon it. That gave an opportunity for one of the peloton to take a selfie where he showed the sign the middle finger, blithely posting it onto Facebook to what turned out to be a brutal online jury.
The following day, the nation went into its first official lockdown, and that we all remember – the otherness it brought, the sense of isolation, and an uncertainty about the future. The police patrols on the border, the tweets from nurses with no protection. Some people hid in their one-storey castles, others acted as if nothing had changed, some partied