Author: Kirsty Lewin

Categories
serial

The Cloud Episode 58

April 2021, Edinburgh

Janet keeps her eyes wide open. Sees clouds where there is no sky. Fingers where there are no hands. Liquid where is no container. Janet studies these oddities not with surprise, but with intent. They are telling her something important, she just needs to learn the code.

Janet knows her carrot soup from her stewed apple. Feels the cold of the vanilla ice-cream and the heat of the minced beef and tatties. But the swathes of material on and around her are incomprehensible. She plucks and scratches and writhes and undresses herself several times a day. They have tied her up. They have kidnapped her and they won’t let her go.

Janet knows her left from her right. Understands up and down. She is also clear that one foot is lucky and one is not. On weekdays she must set off on her ten steps an hour from the left foot. On weekends, she must start with the right. She hasn’t told the physiotherapist this. This is one of her secret weapons. And no one gets to know.

Janet knows the name of each fidgeting fairy that tiptoes along the table beside her bed. Can recognise the one with the limp, the one with the itchy back, the one that likes to cover her face with a perfect starling feather fan. The fairies don’t talk to Janet. There’s no need. They communicate with facial expressions, or a crooked finger, or the raising of an arm. Speaking is too dangerous. They all agree on that.

A woman in a red trouser suit with tangerine lips and green sludge above her eyes turns up with small machines and pens and notebooks and lays them out in front of Janet on a tray. Asks Janet if she can record the sessions. Asks Janet to pick up her pen. That she should write her memories down. Janet knows this woman is a secret agent. This woman has been sent to trick her. Janet lets the pen roll loose in her hand. Sometimes she draws a cloud the way a child would. A cloud that would be a sheep if four short lines were added. Janet doesn’t add the four short lines. Janet is not going to give the woman in red a single clue. Especially not about the sheep.

Through the long, never dark enough, nights, Janet knows the voice from deep within her mattress is different to that one in the ceiling, and that coming up the pipes and into the hand basin. Janet knows these voices have a pecking order, that the voice in the ceiling is in charge, that the one in the mattress is still finding its way with pronouns and adverbs and complex nouns. The voices speak to each other more than they speak to Janet. Sing song voices that only she and they can hear. Janet never looks in the direction of the voices. She knows not to give the game away.

Janet has stopped asking Sergi where she is and why can’t she leave. Sergi seemed to struggle with such questions. But Janet knows Sergi isn’t as stupid as he looks. Sergi is monitoring her. And she, Janet, must never lower her guard. Janet relaxes when Sergi enters the room. Leans back on her pillows or into the chair and opens her eyes slowly.

Ah, Sergi, she says. It’s you. Could you close the blinds a little. The sun is terribly bright. There are no blinds to close, but Sergi goes through the motions. And the smallest of crinkles crease around Janet’s eyes.

To be continued

Categories
fiction Flash fiction

Old Mr Rasmus

He sits in the shade on what’s left of the sawn-off log towards the north west boundary of the park. Knees up around his chest. The breeze, still bitter, is at his back, round his kidneys. They ache. Tommy tightens his scarf. Should have worn a thicker coat.

The log is being devoured, oh so slowly, from deep within its interior. Trickles of spewed out wood sit in miniature pyramids beneath Tommy’s feet. He senses, rather than feels, the vibrations. The gnawing. The microscopic mandibles. The marching and carrying and breeding and laying and hatching and marching again. He’s out of sight of the other folk drifting around the park, behind the raspberry canes and the blackcurrant bushes and the gooseberries that the kids never dare pluck because of Old Mr Rasmus.

Old Mr Rasmus is, of course, not a man but a tree, a great gnarled bowed overhung overwrought weeping creature that spits tears and fires needles and curses in the wind and sighs in the sun and sends little children to their certain death in the shallow pond under the willows by the swings.

One child has died in the pond. One that Tommy knows about anyway. But it doesn’t stop the fear of Old Mr Rasmus running through generations like perilous DNA. It was sixty years ago, maybe even seventy, and only folklore provides the details that vary on the who tells and the season of the telling and whether the teller is anywhere near Old Mr Rasmus at the time.

Wee Kathie is the expert with the lowdown. It was an awful affair, according to Wee Kathie, she being not that wee but being the daughter of Kathie Ronald, one of several Kathies in the area, and there’s a need to discern who is who. Wee Kathie is pushing 75, crooked with spondylosis, a proper fairy tale limp and a mouth that won’t stop gobbing.

Wee Kathie was there on the day, so she says, sitting demure, her words, all of these are her words, under Old Mr Rasmus, with her aunt Mathilda, her Uncle Ben and her cousin Big Donald. Big Donald would have been ten, eleven maybe. A soft spreading tummy on the lad, fat pink cheeks and a scramble of ginger curls damp around his forehead and pinned back behind his ears.

Aunt Mathilda is pouring thick dark tea from a metal flask for her and her husband Ben, and Wee Kathie is pouring home-made ginger beer for her and cousin Big Donald. Woman and girl pouring, man and boy waiting to be served.

It was like that in those days, probably still is, Wee Kathie says, pausing to hoik and spit in the docken leaves behind her under the oak tree, or to blow her nose hard into an already used tissue in the community shop, or to take her tea two sugars no milk, hen, in both hands to hide the trembling and stop the spilling.

Well they are both pouring and Uncle Ben is leant back on the big green and black tartan blanket, borrowed from the sofa in the front room, leaning back on his rolled up tweed elbows, taking a puff of his pipe, when there is the most almighty scream.

Jesus wept, Aunt Mathilda says and the spouting tea shoots across the blanket and scalds Wee Kathie’s bare knees. Wee Kathie shrieks and in turn dodges and twists and the spouting ginger beer shoots across Big Donald’s belly and into the groin of his shorts. Looked like he pissed himself he probably did, her eyebrows raise on the telling. Another scream, this one different, louder, even more blood curdling.

Both screams from over there, Wee Kathie always pauses at this point and waves a hand in the general direction of in front of her. By the pond. Well of course we get up and we run. Run towards the screams. All four of us although Aunt Mathilda isn’t’t that fast on her feet what with her good shoes and her Sunday dress and not wanting to leave the best blanket unattended you couldn’t trust anybody in them days not even on the Sabbath.

Tommy rocks back and forward. Tips his head back and stares up at Old Mr Rasmus. The branches spin and jitter in the breeze. Something jumps up up leaping from branch to branch. Needles whirl to the ground. A couple land on his knees. A squirrel? Too fast and too camouflaged to see. The tree smells of disinfectant. The stuff he used to clean floors with. Before pine went out of fashion and they all moved to peach and bleach.

It was such a sunny day, you know, warm, and the park was full of folk, families mainly and when we get to the pond, at this point she always drops her voice, well, you couldn’t believe it.

There’s a boar, you know the black ones with the bristles and the patches of pink and the great tubular snout that is iron-fisted in its strength that boar is standing in the pond with the Keenan’s wee lad under its front trotters, only three he is, that boar, it has him face down in the water and it’s pushing him down pushing pushing, and the boar is roaring and stamping and no one can get near all of them men running into the pond and trying to haul the boar off but it’s too late far too late, that boar did for him, Bob Archer’s prize boar killed wee Jamie Keenan right there in front of us all.

Tommy hugs his knees tighter in. A brown ant crosses his red sneakers, then another and another. Several seem to be carrying tiny grains of white rice. A chain of ants with work to do. He doesn’t have work to do, not this week, not any week. He shakes his feet and the ants keep going. Sticky feet cling-ons. Ants so busy they don’t even notice they’re trucking over his shaking shoes. Him so out of work he doesn’t even notice the day of the week never mind the time.

There’s a plaque on Old Mr Rasmus, about as high up as a small boy could reach on tiptoes. It doesn’t mention the boar, or the wee lad by name. It’s wooden, square, dulled coffee brown with age, the size of a large dinner plate. It just says ‘Prayers’, likely done with a hot black poker, and there’s an outline of what could be a balloon on a string. The plaque is right there on Old Mr Rasmus, like the tree was somehow involved.

But how come the tree, anyone who can think things through in logical steps always asks Wee Kathie in a tone challenging enough for enquiry but not enough to be rude.

Tommy plays through the possibilities. The boar hiding behind the tree. The boar hiding in the tree. The boar waiting to take its chance.

They say Old Mr Rasmus helped the boar, Wee Kathie says, rubbing behind her back with fingers that have long since lost their shape and willingness to scratch. Wee Kathie stops then. She’s got things to do. People to see. Honestly she doesn’t know why she gabs so much.

No one can remember who first found the plaque or even went it went up. You see, says Wee Kathie on other days, no one went to the park for a year or two after that, not even the men with their pipes, certainly not the women. The women took the tram across town, kept the children close. Bob Archer gave up the pigs. No one spoke of the Keenan lad, no one mentioned his name. You didn’t in those days, Wee Kathie says. It was awfully bad luck. No one wants to be touched by that do they. The Keenans, well they moved away. Some said they went to Airdrie, others mentioned Paisley. Either way, they needed a fresh start. You would, wouldn’t you.

Tommy studies Old Mr Rasmus. His bark, his crooks, his knots, his intertwines. He spots his own face up where the trunk separates in two. It’s definitely him. The square jawline. The drooping eyelids. The right ear with its torn lobe. Wee Kathie’s face is further down. He sees the knitted hair. The mouthy lips, the neck too puffed up by thyroid.

And just below, to the left of what might be Wee Kathie’s shoulder, the savage curl of a boaring snout. Around its nostrils a glimpse of bristles. Thick boorish whiskers that stub across its face. Above the snout drilled out holes that are surely eyes. A bee hovers, buzzes, and disappears into the left hole. A fly lands on a protrusion – what must be a tongue. Down on the ground dirt is kicking up on its own. The prints on the ground are cloven. There’s no doubt about that.

Old Mr Rasmus grunts and rumbles. His needles blather and gab. The ants on Tommy’s shoes about turn and march towards the pond. All of them gone. Not a single straggler. Tommy stands up, shakes his jacket. Takes a step towards the trunk.

From deep within Old Mr Rasmus a throaty gargle. A whine that starts shallow and ends deep. A slice of bark falls to the ground. Then another. And another. The Prayer plaque trembles and loosens, its right hand screw falling, landing in the soil that is still digging itself out of the ground. The plaque stills, skewiff.

The smell has changed. From disinfectant to sulphur. Sulphur and urine and shit.

Behind Tommy a rustle, somewhere beyond the raspberry canes. He turns. A small face in amongst the leaves. Blue eyes. A red sunhat. Old fashioned somehow. A chubby hand reaching towards him. Something like pond weed in his grip.

Old Mr Rasmus splitting and cracking. A terrible rupturing roar.

Tommy thrown to the ground by a stinking heaving bristling gallop. Left winded on his back across the log. His head leaking thick sticky blood.

The shriek of a small boy.

And then an adult.

Jamie!

Categories
fiction Flash fiction

Irene

She’s standing staring into the window. Nose pressed hard on the glass. Steam builds up in the shape of her face and every few seconds she wipes it away with a tissue, and presses harder. The glass is uncomfortable, too cold, but it doesn’t deter. If anything, it makes her more determined.

The two women inside the shop, those with the name badges and the pursed tangerine lips and the pencilled American tan eyebrows and the tight electric green pencil skirts and the arms that fold firm across large white satin covered chests when they don’t get their own way, those two women, they’ve noticed her. They stop fidgeting and faffing and pinning the ivory gown in the centre of the shop to stare back at the elderly woman hard up against their window display.

Irene doesn’t catch their eyes. Irene has learnt from experience that it is a mistake to catch anyone’s eyes but the eyes she needs. Especially shop assistants. Best thing is to keep going. Keep leaning in. She switches her weight from one leg to the other, puts her shopping down on the pavement, and heaves her bosom to the glass. Her breasts flatten, and the bulge of her stomach moves towards her hips. Behind her, the voice of a small boy. What’s that lady doing, Mummy, is she trying to get in? Shhh, she hears a woman say. It’s rude to stare.

Irene moves her nose from side to side, up and down. Does a little jig. The two women in the shop have stopped fretting over the gown and have moved towards Irene, but kept behind the window display, the mannequin bride with the crimson wedding dress and the mannequin mother of the bride in violet teal tulle. Irene lifts her arms up, flattens both hands on the glass. She’s a glass angel, spreading her wings. Her nose is blue white disappearing into the gap between her cheeks.

Irene feels a crowd building behind her, muttering and whispering and rustling with the artificial click clicks of camera phones. Then a cooling of sound and an authoritative voice.

What’s all this then, the male voice says.

Irene presses her knees to the glass, swivels her eyes towards the crimson robed mannequin bride. The perfect breasts, the beautiful calves, the long blue lashes, the pure curving smile of the pouting lips, the impossibly held in waist. That colour, crimson, though, it’s no good with the model’s skin. Irene is skilled with colours and that dress is all wrong for that woman. Irene wore crimson once. Low cut and above the knee, a white chiffon train, scarlet lips, green eyeshadow and a shimmering ruby in her crown. She walked a crimson walk, talked a crimson talk, and danced with a crimson king.

Move back everyone, move back.

Hand on her shoulder.

Irene presses still further into the glass. Plants her old feet firm and far apart. Resistance is everything. She is resisting.

The two shop assistants have backed away. Put the counter between Irene and the glass and the mannequin bride in the wrong coloured outfit. One fidgets with the pile of white tissue paper. Another is filming Irene with a large phone.

Step away, Madam, you’re frightening the other customers.

Irene doesn’t answer. She kicks her foot hard backwards into the officer’s shin. He gasps and clucks his tongue.

I said step away, Madam.

She’s wearing the wrong dress, Officer.

What do you mean the wrong dress.

It’s Miranda, there in the crimson gown. It’s all wrong. Does nothing for her skin tone. Makes her look dead. She’d be far better in brink pink.

The officer’s hand comes down on Irene’s shoulder. The fingers tighen through the thick of her wool coat.

She kicks him again. Another gasp. He lets her go. A voice from the crowd says something about leave the old lady alone, she’s nay harming no one.

Irene taps her finger on the glass. Tap tap. Over here. Tap tap. The mannequin bride turns to look at her. Catches her eye. Irene motions to the gown. Shakes her head and her hand with a no, no.

I know, the mannequin bride’s lips move. They made me put it on. I much prefer the salmon pink.

Categories
serial

The Cloud – Episode 57

2021 – Edinburgh

Katherine cannot find Janet.

Katherine has been to Janet’s street several times. Pressed hard down on the buzzer, a tissue between her finger and the brass, with no response. Janet has tried the neighbours in the same stairwell. The neighbours, all seven of them, refuse to speak to her, refuse to let her enter to push a note through the letterbox, and all seven end the intercom conversations with a breathless ‘no’ before Janet can even explain.

Katherine has called the police and the police tell Janet they have more important priorities that a woman who has lost a cloud and isn’t even a relative and by the way don’t break any covid regulations dear in this hunt of yours you’ll stay at home if you know what’s good for you and have you tried mental health services (for yourself not your imaginary friend).

Katherine has called the hospitals and has been lectured on privacy and confidentiality and interrogated over her mask wearing habits and her personal hand sanitation.

Katherine has called the courts and has been put on hold for hours at at a time as someone, generally a woman called Marjory, disappears to ask a superior and never returns.

Katherine has called the prison, Cornton Vale, and been met with a surprised scoff and a read out response on confidentiality and the prisoners’ charter.

Katherine has called the airlines and has been given three options only: press one for rebookings, press two for refunds, press three for traveling with pets.

Katherine has sent a press release to the local Edinburgh paper and asked them to run the story. Katherine has never heard back. Katherine has noted that the local Edinburgh paper is more interested in stolen puff puff dogs than actual people.

Katherine has lost Janet and Janet has lost her cloud and Katherine needs to be a lot more cunning.

To be continued.

Categories
exercise musings

Endings

The bed was just as it always was. Military corners tucked in tight. The coral stain on the pillow half a purple sun.

That’s it, I suppose, he said.

Anyway, you always said I drank too much, she said, draining the glass. It was a lie and she knew it and he knew it.  

There’s always yesterday, I said.

You knew that of course. You had always known. Even though you weren’t there. You’d never been there. And that, you would say if you were here to say it, was the whole point.

She kicked the gull’s skull into the sea. It tumbled, recovered, and right way up, bobbed out into the grey sheet of the outgoing tide.

The surviving shoe lay upside down in the hall for the longest time. For several years, the new owners of the house still felt it unlucky to move it.

She had something important to say, she said, gesturing to him to sit down on the boulder beside the well.

Everywhere, all about her, the stench of singeing songbirds.

He chuckled. He’d been right, the flat-earther, right the whole time.

Tuesday seemed as good a day as any for all of them to stop crying.

He dipped one end of the oar into the water. Felt the heavy stickiness of it in his palms.

He would get another puncture that day.

Maybe the prices would rise tomorrow. Maybe they would fall. Either way, she still had the tractor.

And so this story, with its fully pronounced end and final full stop, was never about life at all.

Categories
serial

The Cloud Episode 56

1966 – Sydney

‘Just nipping to the boys’ room,’ the Inspector said as they filed out into the large marbled hall after the verdict. Janet watched his back as he hurried away down the long corridor, listening to the echoing clack clack of his leather soled shoes on the marble floor, seeing for the first time the white skin at the back of his neck above his tan line. A new haircut. Must have had it done especially. It was cool in the building but she needed air. She spun out through the revolving doors too fast, catching her elbow and wincing, out into the damp heat, and stepped to the side, leaning back on the smooth grey stone of the building. She’d wait for him. She wished she’d brought something to drink.

‘Come on, Janet,’ her father said as he helped her mother down the steps past her. We need to get home. ‘Your mother needs to lie down.’

‘I’ll be along in a minute,’ she said. Neither Bernadette nor Eric replied. Edward came out of the building and caught up with their parents. The three of them walked side by side down the road towards the car, heads bowed as if in prayer.

Janet checked her watch. Checked again. What was taking him so long? Each time the doors revolved she readied a smile, slumping in disappointment when someone else emerged. Where was he? Why didn’t he come out to speak to her? Comfort her. Tell her well she’d handled herself. Put his cool hand on hers. Squeeze her fingers. Tell her it was all over. What a relief. The Coroner was sensible and had come to the right conclusion and they could all move on now and perhaps Janet would like a swim in one of Sydney’s more secluded bays, he could take the day off?

But he didn’t come out and Edward was shouting at her to hurry up, what was she hanging around for?

Barbara was there, though. Barbara had come out a minute or so after her parents, had caught them up in the street and appeared to be asking each of them in turn for a comment. Barbara, laying a hand on her father’s shaking arm. Barbara putting her arm around her mother, offering her a clean white hanky. Barbara looking at Edward, saying something that seemed to make him smile. Barbara scrawling notes on her small pad and motioning with her hand towards the photographer, who stood still in the shade of the neighbouring building, a black bag full of kit, waiting for his instructions.

Barbara had apparently run out of sympathy by the time she returned to Janet. She clipped up the steps, seemingly oblivious of the heat.

‘How do you feel,’ Janet, she said, her pen poised, ‘as the last person to see Philip alive. He was so young, only thirteen. It must prey on your mind.’

‘It was an accident,’ Janet said, ‘that’s what the Coroner said, ‘a terrible accident.’

‘You know what I think’, Barbara said, not waiting for a reply, ‘I think you know more than you said in there.’ Janet put her hands in her pockets and started down the steps with one final backwards glance. The journalist followed her.

‘Leave me alone, I said everything I knew.’ Janet quickened her step. Barbara did too.

‘You can run, darling, but you can’t hide from yourself. No one’s ever achieved that.’

Barbara slipped her notebook into her bag and looked at her watch. ‘Need to get going. Colin hates me waiting. See you around, Janet. This story isn’t going away.’

To be continued.

Categories
fiction Flash fiction

thongweed

Nobody says a word. I mean, would you? I push my way into the circle and it widens to let me in then closes in again. The way a puddle pulses out and in out and in when you drop a stone in it. There he is, naked but for the faded yellow swimming trunks and mismatched socks, one brilliant white, one olive green, face down on the sand, spread-eagled, his long dark hair thick with limpets and winkles and thongweed.

Muttering.

Call me old fashioned but I prefer my corpses dead. And silent. But this bloke, well, he won’t shut up. The crowd had gathered by the time I got there. Encircled him, the way it does a belly dancer or a pair of prize boxers or a princess bride. The crowd gives him space, mind. A good four metres so the circle must be eight metres in diameter at least. The safe distance may, of course, be for the smell, not the respect. For he smells, alright. Not so much in a nauseating dry retching sort of way, but more fantastical, out of this world.

Ever wonder what a mermaid smells of? Well this is it. Salt, brine on the spine of the wind, Nori seaweed served up with California sushi rolls, the sugar dusting sweetness from a candyfloss machine several metres downwind. Undertones of arcades, slot machines, of a Scottish summer, of vinegar on chips, of a long sunny beer-riven day that isn’t quite warm enough but taps-aff anyhows.

Muttering.

The circle is silent but for the clicking and burring of camera phones. Can they not leave him alone, the fully sprawled man? A man in one of those swimming dressing gown robes that everyone seems to wear these days pushes a small boy forward. You can touch him if you want, he says, to see how cold he is. The boy shakes his head and purses his lips and buries himself under the robe between the man’s legs. The man tuts and taps something into his phone.

Muttering.

Leave him be, I say. Then louder. Leave him be. The circle shifts and shuffles and studies hands and phones then starts up again, staring and recording and instagramming. A yellow helicopter is hovering down the far end of the beach, buzzing and prancing, apparently searching for a safe space to land amongst the gathering onlookers. The rotors whip up the grey waves and flush them up towards us. Towards the sprawled man. Somewhere beyond the Promenade sirens scream and the beach flashes blue white blue white before dropping back to bleach. A small black and white terrier barks and falls silent. Then barks again. Then digs violently, kicking up sand over the second layer of onlookers.

Muttering.

A young man muscles in beside me. He smells of mint and cucumber and deodorant ordered from a parfumerie. I’m a doctor, he says. Let me through. His hand is cold on my arm. His fingers stiff. I watch the tremor of his wrist. Note his bitten down nails. The purple scar that leers around the back of his neck just below his hairline. Shall I help you, I say, if you need a hand. He shakes his head. Hold them back, he says. Hold them all back. I regard each of them in turn with steady eyes. I am proud of my unflinching. Three seconds is enough to hold their eyes until they drop. Straighten my back and widen my stance. Go home, I say. There’s nothing to see here.

Muttering.

A girl in a navy sweater and red shorts that cling too tight around her thighs blushes. Tugs open her bag and drops her phone into it. Turns away from the muttering man. Come on, Jay, she says to the boy beside her. We’d better go. She takes his hand and leads him up the beach, his head twisting for a final view. They both wear their sneakers tied together and strung around their necks. Two others follow them, and then two more. The circle splits. The splitters trail up the beach for a minute or so then stop, and turn. There they stay. If they are not tall they stand on tiptoe. Tenterhooks. Nothing to see here. Except for a helicopter and flashing blue lights and a man in faded yellow trunks with turquoise painted finger nails that glitter tiny stars and half-moons and a knotted silvery ring on every finger apart from his thumbs. I return my gaze to those intent on staying.

Muttering.

The man who says he’s a doctor kneels in the sand beside the man’s bare shoulder. Places a hand on the square of the pale back. He concentrates, the doctor. He may be counting. Or checking for breath. Can’t he see, the doctor, that the man is muttering. I should tell him, look I should say, listen I should say. The man is muttering. He may have something important to tell. But I don’t say this. I don’t say this because I have just understand, right this minute, that I am the only person who understands the man is muttering.

Muttering.

The man who says he’s a doctor beckons to someone to pass him a coat or a towel or something to cover the man. A woman, too old to be hanging around the beach rubber-necking a corpse, passes him a pale grey cardigan with mother of pearl buttons. The buttons flash and guild. The doctor drapes the cardigan over the man’s shoulders, tucking the sleeves in under his chest. He strokes the man’s hair.

 Muttering.

The man who says he’s a doctor twists his neck to look at me. Get rid of them, he says, I can’t concentrate with all that glare. I want to argue with the doctor, tell them yourself I want to stay. Instead I shoo the people. Shoo them with my flapping arms the way I used to with the twin lambs when they tried to follow me home after their bottle feed. Please, I say. You’re not helping here. You need to go away.

It’s alright, the dead man says, I’m used to it now. Let them do their thing.

The man who says he’s a doctor is flushing red. The leering scar cannot stop the flush. Colour leaches up his neck and through his ears and across his cheeks. He pulls the cardigan up over the man’s head. I’m only a student, the man says. In my third year. But I know the man is dead.

Categories
serial

The Cloud – Episode 55

April 2021, Edinburgh

On the other side of the city, in a quiet park lined with oak and beech trees, two women sit two metres apart, each on their own blanket. It is still early, perhaps around nine thirty in the morning. There are few others in the park. A slim woman running under the trees in pink leggings with a blond bobbing pony tail. An older man in the middle of the vast expanse of grass with a chestnut spaniel straining at the end of a long leash. Two men in hi-viz vests with black bin bags and litter pickers propped against their knees sitting on a metal bench smoking cigarettes.

Sun is burning off the harr and the light is shifting, brightening.

Both women are dressed for an early cold spring. Thick coats, thin scarves and woolly hats. If one was to make a judgement, Lisa appears the more elegant of the two. She has chosen greys and blacks and charcoals. Her wool is fine, the cut of her coat neat and narrow, and there’s no skin gap between her matt black ankle boots, her dark socks and her black corduroys. She holds a takeaway coffee cup an inch from her lips, steam pushing up past her nose and eyes.

The other woman, Katherine, has bright lips and matching orange nails, and a green pompom so large on her yellow woolly hat that it seems to tilt her backwards when she laughs. Her legs, clad in thick red tights under a navy pinafore dress, are splayed out across her blanket and cross and uncross in an apparent attempt to find some comfort on the hard ground. Lisa watches the legs without comment.

It is their first meeting in person, beyond a few text exchanges, and they have been talking about lockdown and pandemics and vaccinations and survival. It takes some time, ten or fifteen minutes, for Katherine to steer the conversation to the point.

‘You must have had some odd cases,’ she says, pouring milky coffee out from her flask into its matching metal cup. Lisa smiles, puts her own cup down, and leans back on her elbows.

‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but not as many as everyone thinks.’ Katherine laughs.

‘God, everyone must ask you that, sorry.’

‘Most of it’s divorce stuff, affairs, money, lost family members, you know. Straightforward.’

‘I didn’t even know private detectives existed beyond the telly’.

‘Private investigators,’ Lisa says. ‘Detectives are employed by the police.’

‘Sorry,’ says Katherine.

‘You really need to stop saying sorry,’

‘I know, sorry, no, I take that back.’ Katherine laughs and the green pompom does a rapid cha cha before settling to the right of her head. ‘What about unusual pets, stolen ones, ever investigate those?’

Lisa sits up again, crosses her legs into a lotus position, and faces Katherine. She is no longer smiling. ‘Is there something specific you want to know, Katherine?’

Katherine takes a sip of the luke warm coffee. Puts the cup down on the grass beside her.

‘Yes’, she says, ‘I guess there is.’

Lisa gets up to her feet, lifts the small cream blanket, brushes it down and folds it up, doing up its three leather buckles.

‘I never break client confidentiality,’ she says, pushing the blanket into her bag.

‘Lisa, please. You’re misunderstanding me. It’s not about a case. Not exactly anyway.’

Lisa picks up her coffee cup and looking around the park. Her eyes settle on the bin in the far corner.

‘I trusted you, Katherine,’ she says as she walks away.

Katherine is up on her feet, calling after her. ‘My friend is missing, Lisa, please. She hired you before all this covid stuff. To find her damn cloud kidnappers. Now she’s disappeared herself.’

To be continued.

Categories
musings poetry

blue

I take the kettle to the sink, flick open the lid, turn the tap on. The tap is stiff, needs fixing but of course I’ll never fix it. I never fix anything. The bulbs from the two hall lights died within seconds of each other three winters ago. They sit, after a friend who is good with his hands took them down for me, gathering dust and guilt, on a piece of white paper on the upside down printer’s drawer that operates as a table in the living room. The printer’s drawer, in turn, sits on the Iranian carpet I bought in Wellington out the back of a white van from three men with warm eyes, in grey anoraks and beige sweaters, cash only. It was a lot of money in those days, that carpet. I ummed and ahhed and ummed and ahhed before offering around 80% of the asking price. They accepted immediately. Exchanged smiles with each other and slammed the van doors shut. Drove off with a surely illegal puff puff of diesel exhaust. I spluttered, and kicked myself for months afterwards. The reds of the rug have faded now, but the blues have stayed. Staying blue, stalwart, true.

I fill the kettle just under a third full with whatever temperature the water happens to come out of the tap. I can see it’s just under a third full as it’s an eco-kettle, transparent, or would be if I cleaned it. A third full is enough for a mug of hot water with a mint sprig and just enough water for the hot water bottle I keep on my knees eight months of the year when I’m not moving. The hot water bottle has printed the pale thinning skin of my stomach and thighs a pink tartan cross-stitch. It would be hard to explain this pattern to any doctor or nurse. Sometimes I tell people about it and they laugh and I laugh but I don’t show them the pattern. The hot water bottle is itself reddish pink, which is ironic in a way. Feeling its way onto my stomach and leaving its mark. Staying pink, private, stalwart, true.

I flick the switch on the kettle. Kristine gave me the hot water bottle and the cover seven years ago. She was dying of a cancer that started in her eye and worked its way down to her stomach and everywhere else. She knitted during her various therapies as she thinned and misshaped and she knitted me a hot water bottle cover. She said the pattern was easy and she didn’t need to concentrate. Green and blue and yellow and pink, sock wool, I think they call it, so that when you knit the socks they come out stripey. The stripes are a kind of miracle. I cried a little when she gave it to me. Held it to my cheek. It was rough smooth, two plain two pearl, and smelt of lanolin. There was no miracle for Kristine.

I pinch the top of two mint sprigs from their glass on the window ledge. Drop the leaves into the mug.

Neither was it a miracle that the moth babies ate Kristine’s hot water bottle cover three or four years after she died and I spent three months working up the courage to drop it into the bin in the kitchen. The bin was a Christmas present from a lover who lived here once. We agreed on the bin present so it wasn’t as bad as it sounds. The bin was after Kristine’s eye cancer but before it woke up and tore her apart.

In the meantime the moths did what moths do and bred and flew and travelled and bred and flew and travelled and the moth babies moved onto other precious articles – a Mediterranean blue cashmere sweater once owned by a now dead aunt – and a black Icebreaker t-shirt – a present from Bronwyn in New Zealand. Bronwyn took me on a tour of Christchurch after the earthquake, after I’d been to my father’s memorial tea party in Hobart, and showed me what was left of the houses that weren’t insured, and the houses where the owners refused to move out despite being in the Red Zone.

The kettle boils, spitting bubbles at its lid and I turn it off just before it turns itself off. I like to get ahead of the kettle. In my mind I’ve mixed up Bronwyn’s two categories and I imagine a family living under a blue tarp under a street sign, in amongst the hebes that have shrubbed up over the leftover roads and paths, so that even the people who should know, the lawyers and the surveyors and the engineers, no longer understand what they are looking at and they spin around and around, pointing and gesticulating at the street with no houses, no sheds, no BBQs, no trampolines, no swimming pools, not even a roof tile, until they leave too fast and moist-eyed in oversized black or navy SUVs with official logos branded proud white on bonnets and boots.

Moths are efficient eaters of memories, especially the hand-knitted variety. I pour the boiling water into the blue handmade mug I bought on the west coast of Ireland on a camper van holiday. I buy pottery and hand-knitted socks on every camper van holiday. It’s become a thing. Sometimes I keep the socks for myself, sometimes I give them away as presents. The blue of the mug is the same blue as the still blue in the Iranian carpet. I hold the mug to my chin. Inhale the fresh mint. I put the mug down, twist the stopper out of the hot water bottle, pour the rest of the boiling water into it, and reseal the bottle. Kristine’s husband, Kenny, told me never to pour boiling water into a hot water bottle. That it perishes the rubber. I don’t know if that’s true. It sounds kind of true. Like it could be. Me doing to the bottle what the moth babies did to Kristine’s hand-knitted cover.

I carry the hot mug and the hot rubber bottle, which of course doesn’t resemble a bottle at all, through to my study. Place the blue mug on my desk, plump up the cushions on my seat, and sit down. I hug the bottle on my belly. It burns a bit. Adding a bit more pink. Private, stalwart and true.

Categories
serial

The Cloud – Episode 54

The year that drops our of Janet’s life is the flutter of a dying oak leaf, spinning flailing gliding flying until it settles quiet in the shadows a few metres away from the host trunk where it may lie and decay, unless disturbed by a blackbird or a hedgehog or a stag beetle or the tread of a non-slip waterproof walking shoe.

Janet is, initially, a wisp of her former self. Her hands do not comply with orders. Her fingers shake and struggle to grasp the half-filled plastic cups of luke warm tea. Her feet are too far away and too discoloured and too full of fluid and too uncertain to walk without a frame or a physiotherapist holding her arm. Her tongue and lips form words that are uneven, clipped, that take time to get going. Her mind toys with her, teasing, playing hide and seek, scrabble without the full set of letters, a favourite jigsaw with a missing piece. There is no one to ask and no one to tell her. No visitors, they keep saying. And she’s too afraid to use the phone.

Some days Sergi helps her to get up and dressed and she sits on a reclining chair by the large picture window in the room that used to be reserved for visitors. She wiggles her toes under the blanket, counting them in and counting them out. Over and over until she is sure. She has ten. She has ten. She has ten.

The room has been emptied of anything interesting, of any visual cues, of anything that connects the institution to the outside world. No calendars, no posters, not even an old newspaper or a magazine. She leans back and watches the sky. Watches the Altocumulus clump and roll and dodge the sun. She measures the clouds with her fingers, counting off the inches, checking them against the horizon of the long pale flat of water that sometimes glistens, sometimes doesn’t.

How do you know their names, Sergi asks her one morning as she points out the Cirrocumulus.

That cloud, she says, is six miles high. Imagine that. They’re made of ice crystals. Rare.

I didn’t know, Sergi says as he measures her pills out and signs off her chart.You know a lot about clouds, he says, handing her the pills. Were you a weather lady?

It takes Janet a minute to reply. I don’t know, she says. I’d be on the telly, wouldn’t I. I’d remember that.

To be continued

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