Collected Stories

RAIN

From my upcoming short story collection, Hologram Kebab

I got on at Deansgate, where the ferocity of the wind had driven the rain sideways under the mottled roof. Men and women in grey suits with sodden hair kept emerging from the stairwells, swarming around me and my bright red coat. I must have looked like the main character in some stylish movie as they surrounded me, the smell of their wet jackets permeating the air.

I looked up. Above me sat a pigeon in a dip in the corrugated glass surface, floating around clumps of moss. It seemed indifferent to the building storm, a storm which had gotten so bad that the last train had been cancelled. I don't know how that can happen. When they built the infrastructure surely they knew what country they were building it in. But apparently they didn't. What we are left with is a transport network that has seasonal collapses due to snow and heavy rain, issues which you would think would only affect Russia and the deepest jungles.

One of the suited people jostled me, nudging their soaking briefcase past the long tail of my coat. She was late to something probably, checked her watch then checked her phone to check if the watch she had checked was accurate. Impatience doesn't make timepieces inaccurate, so she sighed, which almost sounded like a gurgle, as if something deep inside her was drowning.

The train was due in four minutes and an indeterminate number of seconds. My guess was a thousand seconds. The platform got busier and busier as the rain got harsher and harsher, and briefly I remembered a night out some years before. Back then I had ran through similar weather only to notice all the buses were full. Four in the morning and full. It's like people just show up to get on public transport when it's raining.

Another jostle and I was back to reality. A guy stood to my side swung his arm out and fastened his coat. Across the platform a young family loomed with sodden paper bags from the museum nearby, their kid in a pram playing with a spaceship while the other one swung a dinosaur in wide circles on that otherwise empty platform. Why was nobody going that way? I'll never know.

I waited two minutes then leaned out slightly, catching a glimpse of the train chugging towards us around a slight bend in the tracks. It was on the old viaduct now, an ancient artery that was once used for more than just ferrying people from home to work and back again. I think I realised at that precise moment in my life that it's all just screens to stare at. Has been for a while. Take a date to see a movie, buy a DVD, never watch it because you're too busy watching the news, never pay attention to the news because you're too busy thinking about work, and at work there's another screen on a computer much like the one you have at home, except if you watch porn on this one they'll fire you. My mate Keira told me when I texted her about my revelation. She works from home these days, don't know how she gets anything done.

The train arrived half a minute late and screeched to a halt, forming a funnel for the wind and rain between itself and the glass roof. I could feel the presence of more people behind me now, more suits and soaked fabrics, more dripping glasses and hair. The whole place smelled faintly of day-old kebab, and a part of me wished I had just stopped at the corner shop to grab a wine for the journey home, because this was going to be a nightmare and I was drinking later anyway. I'd have been punctually drunk when I got to Keira's house party if I had made this wise choice, but I didn't.

By some miracle I got a seat on the train. It was a window seat, so I was surrounded by the suits as they wobbled onto the carriage behind me. I had a woman across from me, and a man in each of the other seats. All three were nearly identical, as if their personalities superseded their varying looks, as things should be.

They checked their watches and phones at around the same time. Didn't speak in the same awkward way some strangers sometimes speak, and silently assessed the other suits in the carriage. I heard a faint rattle coming from the throat of the woman across from me, and felt a dank humidity in the air that seemed more like a sauna than a crowded train during a rainstorm. Even the tables were wet, sopping from all the moisture that had billowed in during that almost-minute window when the doors clunked open and shut again.

One of the men twitched slightly. His face looked as if it was melting. The train started moving and I felt as if the world around me was made out of jelly. I was hot and cold at the same time, and the weirdest thing was that nobody was talking. Not a single person. One of them was gurgling something to themselves, but it sounded more like a death rattle than mumbling, as if he was blowing bubbles inside his throat. I sat silently and waited, noting that my clothes seemed to dry faster than everyone else's.

By the time it was my turn to get off, only a few of the suits were still on board. It was raining heavily now, and as I stood up one of them pushed past me and hurried to the door. The platform was crowded with them, all dead-eyed and staring. I wondered again why so many people come out of nowhere every time it rains, why buses and trains are so rammed when it rains, why I feel like I'm being watched when it rains.

And then it happened. You won't believe this, but I'm sure I saw one of them change and slip through a drain on the platform, like they turned into rain.