2019. Portobello, Edinburgh
It had all happened so fast. Dan’s arms tight around her back. An antler horn button pushing a painful half-moon depression into her cheek. Her feet briefly lifting off the ground. The sucking of air out of her chest. Amy pushing past them into the hall shouting something at the man with no name. The man’s girlfriend getting up off the sofa and shoving past Janet’s enforced embrace.
Scraping sounds in the hall. Cries of pain and alarm from the bathroom. Shouts of I’ve got it, I’ve got it. A female voice replying. Be careful, be careful. The man cursing it’s spitting bloody ice and look out it nearly blinded me. Scuffling footsteps on the wooden floorboards of the hall. A sudden damp cool mist on the back of Janet’s neck. A whining protest from the Perspex box as the lid banged shut. The desperate hammering of hailstones in a confined space. More footsteps, one set with clumpy heels. Her front door slamming. Then quiet. A hellish interminable quiet. He’d gone. Cyril the cloud had gone, and she, Janet, his only source of protection, hadn’t been able to save him.
Janet let her legs slump beneath her. Dan’s biceps went stiff under her oxters, shaking, she imagined, from the effort of keeping her upright. She swung there for a moment, feeling the weight of her body, the scrawny carcass of her rib cage, the brittleness of her bones, the crumbling of her loss. Then he was part carrying, part dragging her over to the sofa and dropping her onto the seat that the young man with no name had sat on so innocuously just a few minutes before.
She flopped back on the sofa, her neck loose, her limbs askew. She was broken, pointless. A mannequin splayed out in a skip. A loose-stringed marionette slung into a box. An elderly single woman without her cloud. She shut her eyes. Wishing the man gone. When she opened her eyes again, he was. Her hands had a new tremble, her feet a new tap tap. She got up, stood still for a moment, took two deep slow breaths, and walked over to the bay window. The knot in her chest wound around itself. Outside in the guttering a clutch of starlings dipped and rinsed themselves in the shallow rain water. Sun turned their feathered iridescence from black to green to black. Tiny droplets of water sprayed up against the glass. She pressed her nose against the window. Felt the coolness of it on her flushed face.
‘Don’t worry, Cyril,’ she whispered to the starlings. ‘I’ll get you back.’ One of the starlings stopped bathing and turned to look up at Janet with its bright black eyes. ‘I might look like a doddery old lady,’ she said to it, ‘but, as that jumped-up prosecutor said, there’s a lot more to me than meets the eye.’
To be continued
SANDERLINGS 