Category: serial

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

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.

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

1958. Her mother had been running from the car before Wee Janet had even realised they had stopped. Sprinting towards a brown heap in the long grass outside Pop George’s cottage.  A heap that had Pop George’s muddy wellington boots on the end, pointing straight up to heaven. Her mother was making long shrill noises that caught at Wee Janet’s throat and seared her eyes. Then her mother was by the heap, down on her hands and knees, feeling about the pile. Wee Janet’s chest was all tight. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. Her mother’s sounds wouldn’t leave her alone. And then the pile was sitting up and it was Pop George  and he was roaring and her mother was shouting and Wee Janet was climbing down from the car and creeping towards them, one an older, squarer, more wrinkled version of the other. One watery-eyed and bemused, the other red faced and tearful.

‘I was just shifting clouds’ he was saying. ‘Best way to do it is to lie on your back and think them gone.’ Her mother, back on her feet, rubbing hard at the grass stains on the knees of her silvery grey slacks, had seemed close to spitting.

‘Is that true, Pop George? A human can move a cloud?’ Wee Janet’s eyes were huge.

‘For God’s sake, Dad. You know how impressionable she is.’ Her mother’s voice still seemed full of spit.

‘She’s ten, Bernie. Give her a break.’ He beckoned to Wee Janet. ‘Come here, love.’ He patted the ground beside him.  ‘Now lie down beside me and look straight up’.  Janet looked at her mother and then her Pop George. Her mother turned, and started to walk towards the cottage. The old man tugged on one of her pigtails. ‘Come on, Wee Janet, it’s only grass.’ The temptation was too much. She wriggled down onto the sweet prickle of the meadow flowers. Her grandfather lay down beside her. ‘See that goluptious cloud above the hill behind the village?’

‘The puffy one like a sheep?’

‘That’s it.  It’s even got a lamb. Two if you look hard enough.’ He pointed up to the right of the cloud and his finger shook in the breeze.

‘I see it I see it!’ Wee Janet forgot about her mother and the spit.

‘Well that’s a Cumulus. It’s our fair-weather friend.’

‘‘Cumulus,’ Janet had said, testing the word in her mouth. ‘Isn’t it weird, Pop George, how your teeth have to grab your tongue to say it.’

To be continued.

The cloud came with instructions in diagrammatic form. There were no words in the four page leaflet; just child-like pictures.  She understood from them that she should spray a fine mist at the cloud twice a day. Once when the sun came up. And once when the moon came up. She wasn’t sure whether to take this literally. Should she lengthen and shorten her days with the seasons? She’d forgotten to ask in the shop. She bought distilled Scottish water. Ordered it in bulk. She worried about all that plastic. But not as much as she worried about spraying treated tap water at her chaste, unadulterated cloud. The cloud quivered under the mist. The quiver of new butterfly wings testing their first flutter.

She bought the cloud in the Black Friday sale in an uninspiring warehouse on the edge of the city. She brought it home on the bus in a large white watertight box. People stared. Once in her flat, she shut all the windows. Taped over the letter box hole. Filled the cracks around the door. She opened the box in the empty bath. The cloud oozed out and up. Fluffed itself up like a diva. It was moist, pearly dove grey, cold as sleet. The shower head was a silver spoon in its mouth.

The cloud had special needs. Adaptations were called for. She stopped using the shower. Washed herself in the sink. She hated the shower anyway. Gathering her stiff limbs over the edge of the bath was awkward and ill-advised. Sometimes she sang to the cloud. The cloud tinkled back. The same tinkle of the wind chimes from that hot fly-blown verandah in Queensland the year missiles in Cuba opened their jaws and purred.

To be continued.