The Town That Sold Its Rain

How it begins

The tank arrived before the council understood what it had sold.

It came on a flatbed lorry, pale and enormous, with the words YOUR RAIN, OUR FUTURE printed down one side.

Fiona Ward watched from the school office as two contractors measured the roof. The children were inside for lunch. Outside, a man in a branded jacket explained that the gutters now belonged to a partnership.

'Whose partnership?' she asked.

'The community's.'

'I'm asking for a name.'

He offered a leaflet.

The agreement had been announced as a publicity stunt at the summer fair. A ceremonial pound, a photograph, the mayor holding an umbrella beneath a cloudless sky. Fiona remembered laughing at the headline. She had filed it beside the school newsletter and forgotten it.

Now a contractor was marking the gutter brackets with red chalk.

Owen Brooks arrived because the caretaker had called him, not because the partnership had. He read the leaflet once and asked where the overflow would go.

The man in the jacket pointed to a diagram.

'That's a logo,' Owen said.

'The technical team has assessed everything.'

'Which technical team?'

Fiona heard the same pause that had followed her question about the name.

Across the playground, the first drops struck the tarmac. The contractors looked up with satisfaction. Owen did not.

He showed Fiona a clause near the bottom of the leaflet. Roof collection, storage and distribution were described as ancillary rights. The school roof had never been listed separately. Apparently it did not need to be.

'Can they do this?' she asked.

'Not because they printed a leaflet.'

A drop fell onto the page, blurring the small word exclusive.

Fiona folded the leaflet and put it in her pocket. The rain had always seemed like the one thing in town nobody needed permission to receive. She was no longer willing to leave that assumption unsigned.