They scoured her fingers for the band but all they saw were peat-soiled hands and the scars of fish bones, life-line deep.
Her child had the mussel eyes of a mariner, the uncertain smile of unilateral love, and the whine of whipped sheets in the wind.
2019. Portobello, Edinburgh
Cyril didn’t want to go. Janet had pulled his Perspex travel box out from under her bed, taken it into the bathroom and waved her hand towards the open lid. The cloud was having none of it. He floated out of the room, well above her reach, and made his way to the kitchen ceiling, spreading his wisps out across the Roman white plaster until he was only around an inch thick. Janet followed him, calling that it was alright, alright, there was nothing to worry about. The first ice-crystal, the size of a pea, hit her brow. The next few stung her lips and cheeks. One of them drew blood. She retreated into the hall and patted the blood off with a tissue.
The crystal shower stopped. She pondered. The weather wasn’t the problem. It was a cool, clear evening. Nothing in the sky apart from a few planes, and a pale half moon rising up behind the sea. The instruction manual showed pictures of a smiling person with their happy cloud dropping into its box as soon as the lid was open. And if that didn’t work, to use the cloud catcher. Janet thought that was a bit extreme. It was one thing for Cyril to drop into the catcher voluntarily in the mornings and then arrange himself over her hair. It was something else to use it in apprehending him against his will. She wouldn’t like to be grabbed from behind by a fine steel mesh net on the end of a stick. It would be like using a choker chain on a dog. The problem was the owner, not the animal. So she didn’t use it, and now she was out of options. She’d have to go without him.
She arrived at the bar ten minutes late. She hadn’t wanted to be first. Sitting there like a lemming on her own, people staring, pointing, or worse, ignoring her altogether. But as soon as she entered, Amy shouted across the bar.
‘Over here’, she called, ‘over here, Janet.’ Amy was waving a glass at Janet. ‘So pleased you could make it!’ Three men sitting up at the bar turned around and looked, appraised Janet, and went back to their beers. Janet tripped over the rug at the entrance, blushed, and made her way to the back of the room where a large group were laughing and talking. Amy was at the head of the table, telling someone to get Janet a seat. There was shuffling, and moving, and switching around, and Janet found herself pushed down onto a chair beside Amy and handed a pint of dark frothy beer.
‘You do drink,’ Amy said to her, ‘or would you prefer a glass of wine? Or gin even?’ Janet hadn’t drunk a whole pint of beer for at least thirty years. Nowadays she preferred a vodka tonic or a small bottle of pear cider. But she wasn’t telling them that. ‘Now’, Amy said. ‘Let me introduce everyone.’ Janet stopped listening after Olivia. Or maybe Charmaine. There were two Erics. She got that at least. And there was the friend Dan, draped over Amy’s shoulder in what looked like a chocolate brown cashmere sweater. There were at least eight in the group and all of them must have been under half her age.
‘Cheers,’ one of the Erics said, raising his glass. ‘To Janet. And her pet cloud!’ There was more laughter and clinking and reaching and gulping. Janet took a mouthful of the beer and screwed her eyes up. It was bitter, far too bitter.
‘So,’ said Olivia or Charmaine. ‘We want to know everything. But first, where’s the cloud? One of the Erics, sitting beside her, dug the young woman in the ribs with his elbow. Janet leant back in her chair, trying to get out of the young woman’s immediate line of sight. The woman frowned at him and pushed a pile of thick blond hair back behind her ear. She shuffled forward, put her arm out and pointed a finger at Janet. ‘You haven’t killed it have you?’
‘That’s enough, Char,’ said Amy. ‘Let her be, she’s only just arrived.’ Janet looked at Amy and nodded a thank you. ‘They’re just disappointed, that’s all. They wanted to see the cloud. To check, you know.’ One of the young men who wasn’t an Eric interrupted.
‘But we do need to know it’s alright. That you’re doing the right thing by it.’ He looked at Janet earnestly. That’s why we’re all here, right?’ He waved a hand around the group.’ We couldn’t stop the sales but now they’re in captivity we can still protect them.’ Janet stomach knotted. Heat rose up her neck and into her cheeks. Her hands trembled. Cyril had known. And she hadn’t listened. Hadn’t listened to her cloud.
To be continued.
She sits on her haunches, thighs straining, cupping the hard dry soil in both hands. She lets it slide through her fingers, sieving it into a small mound on the glossy lawn. Richard’s lawn. Richard’s pride. Richard’s fake lawn. A fake lawn for a forsaken love. The worm sits in her hands, unmasked, disrobed, one tip curling down, twisting away from the light, the other tip wiggling and pointing up towards her face. Rhona opens her palms wider. Gives the worm space to sprawl. She smiles down at it. On the other side of the fence, a neighbour’s window rattles. She starts, and covers the worm with her hand.
They’d said we shouldn’t plant anything anymore. Not within a two hundred mile radius. Nothing edible. No vegetables or herbs or anything that might attract an insect. An insect! No one had reported seeing an insect in months. Keep it barren they write in headline banners and capital letters. Usually with an exclamation mark. KEEP IT BARREN! Planting flowers is akin to drinking and driving. Cross pollination is illegal. PLANTING COULD KILL US ALL! Black letters on a red background. Pink skulls and crossbones on yellow cotton flags. Yellow as the sun.
And now this. This lone worm. Still alive. Still slithering. Such a small thing. Blind and deaf to the State’s blistering instructions. Rhona gets up and walks across the astroturf, the worm a jewel on the cushion of her hands. Hope, she whispers to the worm, I’m going to call you Hope.
In the kitchen, she lays Hope down on a cracked white saucer. She watches him bulge this way and that until he stops, supine, resigned. A worm on a saucer. Not in the soil. How do you keep a lone worm alive, in secret? Away from the Authorities?
All vegetables are imported now. From Africa. North Africa to be more precise although the country of origin is never labelled. Beans and peas and courgettes from the west. Lettuce and chard and spinach from the east. That’s what people say. Although no one knows for certain. Rhona hasn’t seen a cauliflower for at least two years. Mr Wilson down the road had grown an illicit stash of broccoli in his greenhouse and got ten years of hard labour for his efforts. Salt mines in the north of Scotland they said. Everyone knows what salt mine means. And it has nothing to do with salt. Rhona shreds some African lettuce for the worm. Piles it up around the edge of the saucer in a pretty green ring. She grates a small slice of carrot and lines the ring of lettuce with it. Lucky worm. A carrot costs the same as a pineapple these days. But is much harder to find.
She glances at the clock. Nearly four. Richard will be home soon. Richard with his red and white armband. Richard with his evening strolls around the neighbourhood. Richard with his sharp eyes and remote sensors. She takes the saucer out into the shed. Examines each cupboard and shelf. All those garden implements in neat orderly lines. Oiled and sharpened but never soiled. She takes an empty cake tin down from the top shelf. There’s a royal baby on the lid. With a Prince and Princess long since gone to healthier climes. The baby didn’t survive. Rhona punches discrete holes through the three crowns with a fine nail and a claw hammer. She fills one half of the tin with scrunched up brown paper, adds the lettuce and carrot to the other half, and pours the worm in off the saucer. She wonders whether Hope might need water. She can’t take the risk of checking on-line. Anyway, she’s sure there’s plenty of water in lettuce. It should do him fine. At least for tonight. She strokes the worm with a finger, whispers ‘goodnight’ then pushes the lid down hard on the tin. She lifts the tin back up onto the top shelf, careful to ensure it’s in exactly the same place as before. She leaves the shed, locks the door, and squats down on the fake lawn by her pile of dry soil. She’ll squat there, sieving and sieving the dead brown matter, until Richard comes home.
2019. Portobello, Edinburgh
A few days after the storm, Janet was standing in the queue in the fishmongers. The young woman in front of her was studying a poster on the wall, asking questions of the man behind the till, and taking forever to decide. She was going on about climate change and fish stocks and microbeads. The queue behind her sighed and stomped and sighed again. The shop was small and narrow, the queue tight, and Janet jostled the woman deliberately to try and hurry her up. The man behind Janet shouted something about leave and come back when you’ve made up your bloody mind. Janet thought that was a bit rude. The queue nodded and fidgeted. Eventually the young woman made her selection, paid, squeezed past them all and left the shop. Janet bought her regular two smoked haddock, walked out into the sunlight and looked up and down the street. Maybe she’d go to the library. Or should she have a walk in the park first? Or should she take the fish home? As she pondered, there was a tug on her arm. It was the young woman from the fishmongers.
‘Excuse me,’ she said, smiling at Janet, ‘aren’t you the woman with the pet cloud?’ Janet blushed, and put a hand up to her face. ‘I saw you in the library,’ she continued, ‘you were asking for books on meteorology.’ She waved a gloved hand at the sky. ‘And my friend Dan said he was sure, he was sure that it was you.’
‘News travels fast,’ Janet said. She didn’t know why she’d said that. It was just the first thing that came to mind.
‘Anyway, we were wondering…’ the young woman paused. ‘Sorry, I should have said, my name’s Amy, Amy Maddox.’ She held her gloved hand out to Janet. ‘And you are?’ Janet took her hand. Amy’s gloved hand gave hers a good firm shake.
‘Janet,’ she said. ‘My name’s Janet.’
‘It’s lovely to meet you,’ Amy said. ‘The thing is, we’re got this group and we wondered whether you’d come and talk to us. We usually meet on Wednesdays after work.’ Janet looked at the woman. The soft chestnut hair tucked under a yellow woolly hat. The red tights. The black patent leather boots. The green donkey jacket. Janet felt old, dowdy, ridiculous.
‘What about?’ Janet said.
‘Sorry, of course. About the cloud. Keeping the cloud. What that’s all about?’ Janet wished the young woman would stop apologising. It was her generation that had to apologise. Not theirs.
‘I don’t know,’ Janet said. ‘There isn’t much to say.’
‘Of course there is,’ Amy replied. ‘There are only six in captivity in the city.’ Janet flinched. What did she mean by captivity? Cyril couldn’t possibly survive out there in the wild.
‘Sorry,’ Amy said again, ‘Dan says I’m always too dramatic.’ She put her hand on Janet’s shoulder. ‘We’d love you to come and speak about your experience. How it’s going.’ The young woman pulled a purse out of her bag, and took out a pale green business card. ‘Look, here’s my email. And number. Use whatever and I’ll get straight back to you.’ Janet took the card and put it into her coat pocket without looking at it.
‘Thank you,’ she said, ‘I’ll have a think. I’m not very good with crowds.’
‘Oh, it’s only the six of us. Sometimes seven. We’d love you to come.’ Janet nodded. ‘One more thing,’ Amy said, ‘you couldn’t…’ she paused, ‘…bring the cloud with you? So that we could see it?’ Janet shook her head. Treating Cyril like a circus animal. In this day and age.
‘I need to get going,’ she said. ‘I’ve got things to do.’ She put her hand in her pocket. Put her fingers around the business card. Felt the matt smoothness of it. It was tempting. But what if they made a fool of her? Or it was some sort of trick?
To be continued
1965. Edinburgh
‘It’s up to you,’ her father said. He was looking at Janet’s left ear. Janet pushed her fork back and forward across her plate, scooping the mashed potato into a small mountain. She used her knife to top it off with a dab of pale orange neaps.
‘Stop that, will you?’ Her mother’s cheeks were pink, the tip of her nose bright red. Her mother took another sip of sherry. Janet carried on with the fork. Green peas encircled the muddy white mountain. An invasion of pond weed.
‘You’re old enough to make up your own mind,’ Janet’s father continued. ‘But we can’t leave you on your own. You’d have to stay with your Pop George.’
‘I’m seventeen, Dad. I can’t stay with my grandfather. I’d be the laughing stock.’
‘What does it matter what other folk think?’ Janet’s mother was clearing the table, crashing the crockery into the plastic dish-washing bowl. ‘Your Pop George has looked after you for years. Time you gave a bit back.’ Janet knew how it would go. More crashing, a dropped fork or spoon, a glass broken on the draining board, some tears, and eventually her mother would get her way.
‘You want me to look after him so you lot can swan off to Australia. The four of you. You want free care for Grandad and Dad doesn’t want to pay for my cabin. That’s the truth of it.’ Janet’s voice was as thin and green as a reed.
‘You’re being ridiculous. We’ve told you you’re welcome to come.’ Her father stood up and took a bottle of beer from the fridge. There was a stain on his slacks, just behind his right hip. Chocolate or brown sauce or Fowlers Wee Heavy. Janet scooped some peas onto her fork and loaded them into her mouth.
‘But my friends are here. I’m supposed to be going to university.’
‘You can do that in Sydney,’ her mother paused, ‘although the Scottish universities are better off course.’ A wet fork clattered to the floor. Her father leant down and picked it up, smacked it playfully against her mother’s backside, and put it on the table.
‘It’s emotional blackmail,’ Janet said. Her father got up, took a dish towel and wiped down the steamed-up windows.
‘That’s better’, he said, ‘we can see out now. There’ll be no steamy windows in Sydney, that’s for sure.’ Janet felt the draught cold around her bare ankles. She put down her knife and fork and pulled the sleeves of her sweater down over her fingers. It wasn’t fair, making her choose. The boys were just told they were going. They weren’t asked if they wanted to live with an old man. Not that he was incontinent or anything like that. Or confused. But living in that village? She’d be the youngest person for twenty miles. She stood up and put her glass on the draining board.
‘I’m going out,’ she said to them, ‘once the rain stops.’ She didn’t tell them she wanted to go to look at the clouds. That the clouds would tell her what to do. What to decide.
To be continued
Your death sat between us
Dead centre on the table
Flanked by the Pinot Grigio and a tossed salad
Spoken of like a coffee morning or a game of whist
..
You were wearing shorts
I’d laughed and you laughed with me
You wanted the sun on your skin
No one could deny you that
..
You fluttered away in early summer
An autumn leaf blown off course
A bird lifting off from the wire
A rare moth swallowed by the dawn
..
There was a celebration of your life
Your plan, your day
My words the frantic swarm of sanderlings
Jostled by waves on the incoming tide
2019. Portobello, Edinburgh
After the thunderbolt, Cyril seemed to change. He cowered above the shower head, refusing to come out of the bathroom, his wispy trails curling tight into the cracks between the rough taupe marble tiles. His tinkles were less frequent. He no longer dropped down onto Janet’s head in the mornings to soothe her scalp or separate her wrinkles. Noise seemed to disturb him. He’d shoot out a long contrail if a plane roared overhead. He condensed and shrank when the bin lorries rumbled down the street. He spat mini hailstones if the flat buzzer rang.
Janet was at a loss. She searched the Internet for clues. Tips. There was nothing. No results for identifying the emotional problems of a pet cloud. No results for how to pep up a pet cloud that might be depressed. She wondered whether to call the Met Office. Or the coast guard. Or the vet. Or, god forbid, to swallow her pride and speak to the little moustached man in the Ice Tower.
She tried talking. Telling Cyril stories. Tit bits about the weather or the neighbours or the latest book display in the library. But Cyril remained inert. She tried a different distilled water in his spray. Tried keeping the blinds open. Tried keeping the blinds closed. She even had a bath, covering her bare pink breasts with handfuls of soft seaweed-scented foam while he sat tight three or four feet above her. Unmoved. Unyielding.
Finally, sitting on the bathroom chair one evening, she tried singing to him. She cleared her throat before she started. Pushed her glasses firmly up her nose. Smoothed down an errant grey eyebrow. She never sang in public. Not in church. Not even in the choir she’d once joined after her doctor had told her she really needed to socialise more. But she knew plenty of songs. She started with her favorite. Caledonia. She sang softly at first, the words almost inaudible. Then she built up, surprised at the confidence of her voice. How pleasant she sounded. How kind.
I don’t know if you can see the changes
That have come over me
In these last few days I’ve been afraid
That I might drift away
She lost the words at the fifth line. Shot away with other memories. She filled in the gaps by humming the tune, tapping the bath with her fingers, looking up at Cyril. The cloud expanded, softened somehow. And then, from somewhere close to his core, came the sound of hand bells. Pure, pitch-perfect. Angelic even. The sound of heaven. Janet’s voice rose and fell with those bells. Voice and bells in perfect time. In perfect harmony. They finished the song together:
But I’m steady thinking, my way is clear
And I know what I will do tomorrow
When the hands have shaken and the kisses flowed
Then I will disappear
Janet allowed a full minute of silence at the end of the song before she spoke.
‘Don’t you disappear,’ she whispered to Cyril. ‘Don’t you dare disappear.’
To be continued.
Lyrics excerpts from ‘Caledonia’ by Dougie MacLean.
1960. Edinburgh.
It was her mother that had said it first. That girl’s never going to achieve anything. Too busy with her head in the clouds, she’d said to the neighbour during a chat over the hedge about their errant offspring. I blame her grandfather. Wee Janet’s vision had blurred. Her mother repeated it like a mantra. To the bent-over woman who took away their laundry. To the boy who delivered the papers. To the fish man who came at two on the dot on Tuesdays in his dripping white van and blue striped apron. Maybe she was right. Wee Janet was forever in the apple tree, or on the shed roof, or teetering on the metal dustbin, her head tilted back as far as it would go, staring up to the sky, singing to the soft grey swirls that wandered across the city. Her brothers would egg her on. What’s that fog called, Wee Jan, they’d ask, pointing to the thick plane of mist that stole the tops of cranes and steeples and flattened people’s smiles into frowns. Stratus she’d reply in a chirrupy voice, and spread her arms wide. I told you that yesterday! And the boys would kick off down the road shouting Straight Arse Straight Arse Wee Janet’s got a Straight Arse and Wee Janet would wish that the Straight Arse would pick up her two snotty brothers and drop them into the Forth.
She had wished a similar fate on her mother. Bernadette, a long-legged angular woman made up largely from triangles who dressed like a magpie, had spent more time talking about Wee Janet or over Wee Janet than to Wee Janet herself. She just stares at the sky, her mother would say to her teachers, or she follows a bee around the garden for hours, and the teachers would interrupt and frown and say that’s not very kind, Mrs Waters. They’d mention her pretty musical voice or her way with words or the fact that she could identify every tree or every bird. Her mother would tut and scold and say what good’s that to set a girl up for her future and it wasn’t a question it was an assertion. Wee Janet liked to use the word assertion and even knew how to spell it.
To be continued
2019. Portobello, Edinburgh
Cyril had been living with Janet for around three weeks before he discovered the view of the sea and the sky. She’d come home earlier than usual, and instead of finding him hanging tousled and moist above the shower, he was pressed hard up against one of the kitchen windows. She must have forgotten to close the door. Janet stood in the doorway and studied him. The thickest part of him, towards his upper edge, was misting the inside of the window. Patterns rippled out across the glass in the shape of lips or boats or a child’s drawing of birds.
The cloud seemed anxious, on edge somehow. His tendrils lifted and fell and lifted and slid over the kitchen workbench. Ice crystals scattered across the linoleum floor. Janet picked her way through them and stood beside him, looking out. Above the milky grey of the flat sea were storm clouds. Cumulonimbus. There were three distinct clouds, with dark glutinous bases and towering granite walls that shimmered up to the troposphere. A sudden squall rattled the window.s She started, swinging her arms up across her face. The sea thickened and darkened into an oily charcoal paste. The crack and flash of the first thunderbolt threw Cyril across the kitchen and out into the hall. She thought she heard him shout. Yell out something. The kitchen lights flickered and went out. Another squall of wind hit the windows. The tenement sighed and shuddered. Downstairs a baby cried. Janet heard the bathroom door slam shut. Cyril, she presumed, rushing for cover. There was nothing in the manual to help her with this.
To be continued.
2019. Edinburgh
She named the cloud Cyril. Not for any profound reason. It was just the first name that came to mind when she’d thought of names beginning with ‘C’. She and Cyril soon worked out a pattern although it was the cloud that dictated the rules. He’d stay in the shower at night and in the morning she’d scoop him out with the cloud catcher and arrange his trusses over her head. He’d settle down slowly, weightless and frosty, and ooze calm over her forehead. He’d soothe her prickly scalp, and she’d drop her shoulders, and breathe out slowly through her nose. Fifteen minutes on weekdays. More at the weekends. Sometimes he’d drop tiny crystals into her hair and they’d shimmer there like diamonds before melting. Then she’d send him up a few inches with a couple of waves of the bamboo fan that the man in the Ice Tower had slipped her for free.
‘Going for a song’ the little moustached man had said, as he poured the cloud into the Perspex cooler box and handed her the care instructions. Although song was the wrong word. It should have been symphony or concerto or at the very least a sonata. The cloud had tinkled and whispered and shimmered and oozed until its feathery wisps stacked neat and square, filling the box.
‘It’s the last one’, he’d said as he clicked the white lid into place. ‘You’re a lucky lady, doing so well in the test. Most folk failed, a couple even tried to give me, you know, a bit extra. Imagine that, bribery in this day and age. Reported them of course. You sure you can manage him?’
Janet had wanted to say woman, it’s woman, not lady, and of course I can but instead she had muttered yes, yes she’d be able to manage, she’d passed the test hadn’t she, every one of the thirty questions correct. She had flicked the pages of the manual but kept her eyes on the box.
‘They’re not for everyone. Cirrus. High maintenance.’ He’d been leaning over the counter, closing in on her, his neat orange moustache rising and falling with the tide of his words. ‘You will take care of him, won’t you?’ She had leant back from the trespass of his breath. Did he henna that moustache? But his fingers were pale and clean. His nails smooth and short. You must need clean fingers to handle a cloud.
‘I call him Chronos,’ she thought she heard him say but his words were swallowed by the shrieks of a toddler on the other side of the showroom. She picked up the box. Precious.
‘I’ll get going then.’
‘Don’t forget to register him.’
‘No. I’ll do it first thing.‘ She paused. ‘You can trust me you know. I’m not stupid.’ His eyebrows twisted.
‘No need for that tone,’ he’d said, ‘I was just, well, you know, he’s delicate.’
‘I passed the test.’ Janet’s voice had seemed to come from someone else. Someone more confident. ‘Bye.’
‘Bye, then.’ He’d waved a small hand at the box then rubbed at his eyes. She wondered whether he might cry. ‘Call if you’ve any questions.’ She mouthed a thank you and walked awkwardly through the showroom both wanting and not wanting the other shoppers to look at her. See her. She felt taller, slimmer, significant, younger. Someone with something rare. Someone that people might want to know. Someone that people would talk about to their friends. You know that old woman who wanders round here but never speaks they’d say over a coffee and an over-buttered scone? You mean the stocky one with the short grey hair and weird glasses? Yep, the very one. Turns out she owns a cloud. Really? What’s her name? Not sure. Jan or Mary or something. But we should find out. See if she’ll come for a coffee. Imagine. A pet cloud.
To be continued
SANDERLINGS 