Categories
Author: Kirsty Lewin
2019. Portobello, Edinburgh
The ferret had been living behind the floor-length linen curtains in Janet’s bedroom for two days before Katherine rang with an update on the kidnappers. The ferret, not keen on door buzzers or ringing phones, ran straight up the curtain and swung there, claws through the black-out lining, until Janet was able to shake it down with one hand while scrabbling to answer the phone with the other.
Katherine had news. They needed to meet up. Would Janet be free for lunch the following day? Janet, transfixed by the cleaved curtains that had been made to measure by John Lewis and taken seven whole weeks to order, deliver and hang, nodded in agreement.
‘Are you still there?‘ Katherine asked.
‘Yes, sorry. What time?’
‘Let’s say two, at the Espy.’
‘Yes.’
‘Are you OK, Janet?
‘No, yes. It’s the ferret.’
‘A ferret did you say?’
‘Never mind,’ Janet said, I need to go. See you tomorrow.’
Janet didn’t know how to explain the animal to Katherine. It was one thing having a cloud, a kidnapped cloud at that. But introducing a ferret took on a whole new dimension. Janet was in danger of jumping her own shark. Although, if she was completely candid, she’d never quite understood what the expression meant.
She’d visualised it though. Her, out there in the Forth on a summer afternoon, back in her yellow polka-dot swimsuit, her skin salted caramel smooth, her knees bent, her feet strapped onto the water skis, the shark circling, the speedboat captain giving her a thumbs up and a huge squeeze of the throttle. Picking up speed. The wind hosing her long dark hair back from her face. The spray cool and fresh on her bare shoulders. The crowds falling silent on the beach, watching her with crooked smiles, holding their children’s hands too tight, their camera phones high in the air, wanting and not wanting Janet’s jump to fail, the shark to jump, the jaws to snap, the salted caramel limbs to bloody, and disappear, flailing, thrashing, down, down into the brine of the chopped up sea…
Couldn’t she just backtrack? Get back into that queue at the fishmongers and not jostle the young woman who happened to be Amy? Not succumb to vanity and keep her phone number to herself? Not give her contact details, and then open her door, to a gang of fanatics? Just delete the last twenty-one episodes and start again?
No, too much work involved with that. And how could I, the author, yes me, murder my own darlings? But I do need to get this story back on track. This ferret malarkey is taking Janet down a rabbit hole. It may have worked for Alice but Janet is not seven. She’s seventy plus. She needs to focus on Cyril. Cyril isn’t just a bit part. He’s the star attraction. And, at this point in the proceedings, it’s hard to imagine how a curtain-climbing polecat can be of any use at all.
Janet put the phone down on her bed, opened her window wide and leant out. The moon was rising up out of the horizon (had it been in Fife?), slipping in and out of the gappy spread of stratocumulus as it banked left towards Musselburgh.
‘Lacunosus,’ Janet whispered. ‘Finally.’ Was Janet correct in her identification? If so, she’d struck lucky. Lacunosus is a big tick for cloud collectors. Identified by the gaps between the clouds elements rather than the cloud itself, it is fleeting, rare and elusive. Janet smiled. It was a good omen. She was sure of that. She padded through to the kitchen and shredded some ham into a saucer for the ferret.
‘Make the most of that,’ she said as the ferret climbed up her trousers and opened its dainty pink mouth. ‘I have it on good authority that you won’t be around for much longer.’
To be continued.
Categories
#MeToo
He sits there, bold as brass, brassy bold, his legs apart, his belly folding over the waist of his trousers, and I wonder why, why me, why would Big Col accidently pick me?
It’s the week before the trial, his trial, not mine, and he’s bungled into the wrong stair and chapped the wrong door, not so much chapped as punched, raw-knuckled, and before I’ve checked, before I’ve peeped through the peep hole that monsters even the most fairy-like, I’ve let him in.
There he is, a soft damp frogspawn of a man, oozing liquid gel on my carpet and he’s asking for Laura and I’m saying there’s no Laura here, wrong door, wrong trousers (he has them on at least) and he’s walking through my flat, looking behind doors, peering into cupboards, then still brassy bold, folding himself down on the leather sofa, you know the one with the milk stain from the Spanish students back in 2011, and he’s demanding a cup of tea.
Men like him, they have a smell about them, and he’s no different. The smell of something fermenting under musk, something slithering under cologne, something dank or musty, not quite putrid but definitely on the way there, you know like the taste of blue-furred mould on a bread slice that’s slipped down behind the chopping board and been resurrected for toast with just the crust cut off.
So here we are, him and me, and when his mouth opens, the audience roars, or so I think he thinks and I mirror him. I sit with my legs apart, my shoulders slouched, my chin doubled, and I lean forward like I’m really interested, expecting something ground-breaking, something biblical, something on a colossal scale and we both lean in like that for some time until he says more sugar, honey, you’re not sweet enough, and I think I might explode.
His eyes are traveling down my legs, so my eyes travel his. His socks are not what I would have expected. One blue, the other black, and the skin of his ankles, yes, I see them, once seen never forgiven, the skin is mottled, the way lichen craves a gravestone, and it could have been scraped back that yellow foliose, the granite kept all clean and nice, but it’s never a good idea to prevent the living from colonising the dead.
His right shoe taps and I know he’s nervous. No one taps their foot when they’re confident, right, not unless there’s a fiddler in the room, and there isn’t, unless, no I can’t say it but we all think it, there’s just me and this big man, and we’re both tap tapping and you know what? Big Col’s not larger than life at all, he’s really rather small, the shine long gone from his brasses, and a small pool of pond life lapping the inside of his shoes.
1966. On board the SS Himalaya
It was a mid-afternoon in late October when the ship baulked and kicked and snorted its way into the dock in Sydney Harbour. A great throng of swans were gathered along the pier to meet it, their long white necks swaying in the hot sun. Some of the swans were waving paper streamers or balloons. Others were cheering. Many held pieces of cardboard taped to sticks with names written out in clumsy red or black felt-tip pen. Janet, leaning against the railings with the cat in her arms, blinked and looked again. How stupid. They weren’t swans at all, but the elegant white-gloved arms of women waving a welcome to the passengers.
The ship’s tannoy coughed into life. Welcome to Sydney, folks. Welcome to your new lives. There were further instructions about disembarking. About immigration. About how to collect luggage. But Janet didn’t absorb the detail. She was looking at two men on the pier who didn’t fit in with the gay cheerfulness of the crowds. Janet was sure they were policemen – black uniforms, black hats, aloof somehow, standing solid, their legs slightly apart. Were they here for her? Did they know? Had whoever been with Philip that night dobbed her in after all?
The cat, clearly irritated by the new tightness of Janet’s grip, wriggled free, jumped down and walked through the crowds of passengers towards the dining saloon. Janet struggled through the milling people, trying to follow it. ‘Hetty, Hetty,’ she called. But the cat’s ramrod tail disappeared through the legs of an elderly woman who was doubled over, stuffing a half-eaten packet of biscuits into a basket.
‘You can’t take it anyway. It’s not yours.’ Edward’s voice was at her shoulder. ‘Dad says you’ve to come down to the cabin. Now. We’re waiting’. Janet looked at the old woman again. She was upright now, the wicker basket slung across her arm. There was no sign of the cat.
‘I don’t want to,’ Janet said. ‘I don’t want to live here.’ Edward looked at his elder sister. His expression wasn’t kind. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Dad said it would take hours if we don’t go now.’
Janet wanted to ask him to look at the men in black. To ask what he thought of them. She needed someone else’s opinion. Bessie would have known. Would have figured out their posture. What they were up to. Bessie had always been able to read people. Especially men. But Bessie was back in Edinburgh. Just started at art college. And Janet was certain she’d never see her best friend again.
‘I can’t,’ she said to Edward. ‘I want to go home.’ Edward’s mouth crumpled. His cheeks reddened. ‘Stop messing about,’ he said. He grabbed her arm and pulled her towards him. Janet shook him off. The slap was sudden, flat and ferocious. Janet staggered backwards, bumping into a man with a toddler in his arms. The toddler howled. Her cheek stung and tears bled from her right eye. ‘Dad should have done that to you,’ said Edward, his fists clenched by his side. ‘But he didn’t have the guts.’
Two hours later, the family, four instead of five, walked down the covered gangplank. Janet’s father was at the front. Janet took up the rear. They were intercepted by two police officers just as Janet’s feet landed on Australia.
To be continued.
Categories
Looking Out
She is sitting at the table. Top floor. Looking out. Yes, the woman could be doing something more interesting. Windows are such overused mechanisms in the arts. But, if she didn’t look out of the window, what would be the point of windows?
The woman is watching a window cleaner. The man is on a ladder, leaning into his work, wiping cloudy water off the glass with a scraper. The man has the trousers of a painter and the belted toolkit of a carpenter. The woman is surprised to see the man. She doesn’t think window cleaning is an essential service. On Easter Friday too. Although, considering the issue for a bit longer, she changes her mind. If eyes are the windows to the soul, a dirty window is not what we need right now. Never have souls been so important. And never have we needed so badly to be able to look into them. She won’t report the window cleaner. She used to be one to make a scene. Not any more.
There is a cat going about the woman’s legs. The cat, under-fed, though probably over-loved, is making small sad sounds that continue, unabated, as the waves do, lapping on the nearby shore. Without further explanation you’ll come to your own conclusions.
The woman is too poor to feed the cat.
Cat food is no longer available.
Or the woman is a witch.
The sun, bright through the naked window, does seem to be throwing the shadow of a coned hat across the light and dark of the room. In this scenario the cat is definitely black.
The plain truth is that the cat is on a diet. The cat must lose 300g in weight. The woman is doing her best to make that happen. She doesn’t always get it right. The cat is the only corporeal thing in the woman’s life right now. Sometimes the woman buries her face in the cat’s soft white underbelly and weeps. Or does she?
Beneath the woman’s feet are wooden floorboards. Beneath those, a child is laughing. A younger child is singing. It’s not possible to know whether they are boys or girls or one of each. You assume that that the children are alive. I’ve already told you that the woman is on the top floor, looking out. But if the woman is indeed a witch, the evil kind, even though the cat’s only on a diet, the children may be dead. Dead and dried and mewling. Wraiths warbling up out of the black ash and crushed shells that separate this floor from the one below.
But in this time of pandemonium and pandemics and a run on pancake flour, desiccated children are simply not required. Readers, and I include you in this, need to be consoled, cossetted, wrapped up with velvety words and slubs of reassurance. There are no dead children under the floor boards. If there had been, I would have been sure to mention the smell.
The other sound, above what is a rather lovely tinkle of young children being young, is the wind. The zephyr, thrilled finally to be taking centre-stage, is poking around the corbels, rattling spits of gravel on the window ledge, sending wisps of plastic whimsy spinning and whirling above the empty street. The woman opens the window to let the new sounds in. The swathe of silence inside has been in danger of becoming a shroud.
A pigeon lands on the guttering. The woman hears the bird’s toes click and curl around the lead rim. The woman catches the pigeon’s eye. The woman and pigeon sit there for a long time, eye to eye. The woman is pondering the shape and colour of the pigeon’s soul. You’ll have to decide for yourself what the pigeon is pondering, if anything. They sit together for longer than is comfortable for the woman. Less so, perhaps, for the pigeon. But the woman cannot stop looking out.
Categories
Protected: The Sound of Sirens
2019. Portobello, Edinburgh
Janet knew that the scrabbling at her door that night wasn’t Cyril. How could it be? Clouds don’t scratch around at the sordid base of things. They’re clean creatures. Verging perhaps on the compulsive obsessive. There’s nothing worse than a dirty cloud. Clouds with silver linings are particularly fanatical. This is why you’ve never seen a cloud scuttling around in filth or detritus.
Clouds hang out in skies for a reason. Skies are unsoiled. The ground, for the most part, is not. Could a cloud open a door, climb stairs, sit on a doormat and beg to get in? Perhaps. But it’s simply not going to happen. No cloud worth its vapor is going to take that sort of risk. No, if Cyril had managed to make his way home he would have appeared outside Janet’s kitchen window, pressing his nebulous maws to the glass, and discharging a few icy sparklers to get her attention. Cyril would be a young man throwing quartz pebbles at the window of his pretty long haired lover. Not a cat with a headless sparrow stripping out another layer of British Racing Green paint on a fire-proofed front door.
So Janet opened the door with a mix of hopeless realism and pointless faith. She looked up before she looked down. The glass cupola was clear. And the ceiling corners had nothing but the feint webbed threads that the spiders spun that everyone in the stair just let alone because there’s nothing worse in a tenement stair than the buzz of an incarcerated bluebottle. Then she looked down.
She half expected to see Hetty. Dear Hetty, with her black patched right eye and her tortoiseshell saddleback. Dear Hetty, who’d snuffled and purred more than fifty years ago as Janet had smuggled her into the ship’s cabin and coddled her under her thin blanket. Dear Hetty, who’d lanced Edwards’ right shin when he’d seen her and gone berserk because how could she, Janet, bring a cat into the cabin when she, Janet, knew Philip was allergic and didn’t she, Janet, have any respect for the dead?
It wasn’t Hetty at the door. It wasn’t even a cat. It was a small, short-haired animal, with a bandit face, a pink nose, and dark curved claws at the end of its dainty paws. Compared to Hetty, it was petite, with a thick black chest and a chocolate-coloured rump. Its tail was black-tipped and waving. It didn’t have a collar. Janet stared down at it. It sat back on its hind legs, raised its two front paws and looked up at Janet. It caught her eyes and locked on. It took Janet a breath or two to work out what it was. She cycled through small animal names. Racoon. Stoat. Weasel. Rat. No, none of these. It was a ferret.
‘What are you doing up here?’ she said to the ferret. The ferret made a soft popping nose, a cork loosed gently from a bottle. It cocked its head to one side. Janet bent down and put her hand down to its head. It rested a paw on her finger. Janet’s stomach loosened. Her shoulders relaxed. She smiled at the ferret. The ferret smiled back. Could a ferret harm a cloud? Janet didn’t know. Didn’t really know anything about ferrets at all. Except that they were dangerous. Aggressive. That they killed rabbits and ate raw meat. But that paw. That little gangster face.
‘You better come in,’ she said, standing up and opening the door wider. ‘I’m about to make some supper. I imagine you’d like some ham.’
To be continued.
1966. On board the SS Himalaya
The angst that hung around Janet’s family on the rest of the journey was akin to a plague. The day after the remembrance service, the Chief Steward had offered them a larger cabin, a suite, where, he said ‘they could be together, be more private.’ Janet knew it was nothing to do with that, that they were being sequestered away, banished from the other passengers to prevent contamination.
The new cabin had a double bed for her parents, a living area with a small built in sofa and two chairs, and two bunks set back in a private alcove by the bathroom door. The bunks were for her and her brother Edward. They moved in late in the afternoon, parents first, then Janet, with Edward an hour or so behind. Edward came into the cabin red-faced, carrying his own, and Philip’s, luggage. He shoved Philip’s things into the narrow wardrobe, threw his camera equipment in on top of it and slammed the door.
‘You were the last person to see him alive,’ Edward hissed at Janet as he climbed up onto the top bunk. ‘You must have had something to do with it.’ Janet rolled onto her stomach on the lower bunk and put her pillow over her head. Why had Philip had to sit up on the railing? It was his own bloody fault. She sobbed into the hard starch of the white cotton sheet. The pain in her chest was visceral, septic. It bullied her breathing into short sharp gasps. It peeled through layer after layer of her thoughts until only the cold, hard truth lay open and bare, exposed, a naked cadaver on a shining steel tray.
Grief skewered the family into the semblance of a routine. Janet’s father could do little but pace and weep and pace. His face changed shape, thinning and lengthening until he took on the look of an elderly rickety horse. He did manage to take charge of the basics. Opened the door for their room service. Tipped the waiter. Put the dirty plates outside their cabin door to be collected. Every evening he’d put on his jacket and leave the cabin at nine o’clock. He’d come back ninety minutes later smelling of smoke and diesel and whisky and something that might have been boiled potato. Janet, watching him go into the tiny bathroom from under her blanket, would see that his fingers were oily black and grease-stained. No one ever asked him where he’d been or why.
Janet’s mother spun herself into a mute cocoon. She trembled under the husk of her silence and, for most of each day, stood with the stain of her face pressed to the glass of their large porthole. After two or three days of staring, Bernadette developed conjunctivitis and the ship’s nurse would come twice a day, pat her trembling arm and administer eye drops. And, as soon as the nurse had left, Bernadette would be back at the porthole again. Janet wanted to tell her it was no good, it was too late, what was the point of all that staring out to sea, Philip was long gone and she, her mother, would end up going blind and then they’d all be even worse off. But Janet didn’t say anything. Couldn’t risk opening her mouth. Couldn’t let the truth bubble to the surface and gurgle out.
Twice Janet went looking for Angus. Once she thought she saw his back disappearing at the end of a corridor and she’d rushed after him, turned the corner, only to see one of the cleaning crew pushing a large trolley stacked with stiff white linen and navy blue towels. On the second trip, tiptoeing through the areas reserved for the crew, she came across a cat. She was bent over stroking its head, smiling at the arch of its back, when a man in overalls emerged from a metal hatch just in front of her. Janet pulled her hand up and leant back against the wall to let the man past. Waited for the man to tell her off. But the man turned to her and looked her up and down.
‘Hello,’ he said. You must be the Waters girl?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, ‘I am.’
‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘We did everything we could.’ He looked down at the cat that was curving in and around Janet’s legs. ‘Do you like cats?’ Janet nodded. ‘Well,’ he said, picking the cat up, ‘we’re still ten days from Sydney.’ He cradled the cat on its back in both arms. ‘Why don’t you hang on to her until then.’ Janet shook her head. ‘I couldn’t…’ The man interrupted her. ‘Of course you could. She loves company. She doesn’t get enough down here.’ Janet put her hand out and stroked the cat’s belly. The cat lay docile, its front paws massaging the air. ‘What’s her name,’ she asked. ‘Hettie, the man said, passing the cat over to Janet. ‘Take her now and I’ll be up later with some food for her.’
Janet walked slowly back up the steps and along the corridors with Hettie lying in her arms. The cat was soft and doll-like. Janet had never known a cat like it. The cats at her Pop George’s cottage were fierce and untouchable. They spat and ran and clawed and ran again. She’d never even been able to stroke one let alone cuddle one like this. She put her face down to the cat’s nose. Let its whiskers tickle her cheeks. The cat stared, unblinking, and purred. For a moment, perhaps even a couple of seconds, Janet forgot about Philip, forgot about Angus, forgot about her accusing brother and her grieving parents. Forgot even that she, a felon, was on her way to Australia. She only had eyes for the cat.
To be continued.
Categories
Protected: Corvid 19
2019. Portobello, Edinburgh
Janet sat on the rim of the bath in the dark, running a finger up and down the edge of the shower screen. She hadn’t had a shower since Cyril had arrived. Hadn’t wanted to encroach into his space. Or risk the fragile filigree substance of him with hot steam. She’d adapted quickly. Standing naked on a towel each morning with the sink half full of tepid water. Wetting and soaping her face, then her neck, then her underarms and finally across, between and under her breasts. She used a facecloth someone must have given her for Christmas. She’d never bought a face cloth in her life. Then she’d pat herself dry with a hand towel.
After that, and a cursory glance in the mirror to look for further sagging, for further gravitational pulls on bits that used to point out and now lunge downwards, she’d move on to her lower half. Same process with a piece of towel she’d cut up especially for the task. She must have learned that from a grandmother. Or an old aunt. Making things go further, not buying things that could be made out of other things.
There was something about separating the top bits from the bottom bits that seemed important. Essential almost. Janet wasn’t obsessive about hygiene. She was tidy, and she kept things clean. But she didn’t fixate on germs. Didn’t scrub at her hands. Didn’t bleach or sterilise. Didn’t use anything with the word antibacterial on the label. She’d seen products in the chemist that implied she might be getting this wrong. That there was a thing called feminine wash and wipes now. Bottles of pale peach Femfresh Intimate Hygiene. Or handbag-sized Femfresh Instant Skincare Pocket Wipes. What did women do with these things? When did they use the wipes? At their offices? At the gym? After traveling on public transport? After riding a bike or a horse? Even if she knew how to phrase the question, she had no one to ask.
Perhaps she should take a shower now that she had the chance? But it was all wrong. Like gambolling on Cyril’s grave. How could she lie back in the amniotic water, all warm and bubbled, and look up at the Cyril-shaped hole above the shower head? She had taken the occasional bath when Cyril had been in the kitchen. He’d be pressed up against the window pane watching a great flank of weather froth up the Forth. He’d spend at least an hour there, leaving her to soak and overheat with Middlemarch or Ulysses. She’d liked to think that he was scrutinising his feral cousins, discerning cumulus from nimbostratus, or counting the shredded clots of the cirrocumulus.
She got up from the bath, walked through to the kitchen, and rested her cheek on the cold glass of the window. It was only an hour since she’d said goodbye to Katherine outside the café. Only five hours since Cyril had been kidnapped. But already the slight, cold, breathy feel of his presence had disappeared from her flat. And her scalp itched from prickly heat without the brief cling of his crystals to her hair when he was alarmed or out of sorts. What was it Katherine had said? Something about a bigger boat? She’d had a brief flash of the great ship’s white hull. Of her mother staring out to sea for so long, hours turning into days, that for months afterwards she hadn’t been able to focus on anything close in. She couldn’t even read.
What was that? Something scratching, scrabbling at her front door. It couldn’t be, surely? He’d found his way back! Got into the tenement stair all on his own! She padded quickly through the dark hallway and peered through the peep hole. There was no one on the landing. One of the lights was out and the stair was dim and thick with gloom. The scrabbling started again. It was down near the bottom of the door. She took the chain off the lock and opened the door, just wide enough to let a chink of light fall through onto her stocking feet.
To be continued.
SANDERLINGS 