Tag: clouds

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.

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

Edinburgh. February 2020.

Janet sat down heavily on the bench in Princes Street gardens and pulled her scarf tighter around her neck. That went well, Jeremy had said, as he’d buttoned up his thick woollen coat and ushered her out into the street. A consummate professional as expected. We’ll go for a coffee and  debrief. There’s a little place round the corner that does excellent cheese scones.  He’d put his hand on her arm and moved her in the direction of the cafe. Janet had muttered some excuse that she didn’t feel so well and had hurried away from him in the opposite direction before he could insist. She’d ignored the splutter of his surprised calls at her back. She wasn’t sure how she’d ended up in the gardens by this particular bench. I’ll call you later, she’d said, or something to that effect. There’s a lot to take in.

There was indeed a lot to take in. In front of her on the weak winter grass, two crows were squabbling with a large herring gull over an empty crisp packet. The birds hopped, skipped and jibed as the packet was torn from one beak to another. It’s empty, you idiots, Janet wanted to say. And its two against one. The gull, however, showed no sign of giving up, even as the larger of the crows hopped onto its back and threw a jab at the back of its skull. Distracted, the gull swiveled its head around, and the crow on the ground grabbed the packet, winked at Janet, and flew up into the weeping ash tree with its worthless prize. The other crow took one last jab and flapped up to join its mate in the bare branches. The gull looked at Janet, blinked, and lifted off towards a discarded cardboard coffee cup further along the path. The crisp bag floated down from the tree a minute or two later.

It would rain soon, Arthur had remarked cheerlessly in the detective’s office.  Janet looked up at the sky. A habit now, searching for Cyril. A pointless one of course. It wasn’t a day for cirrus clouds. There were no celestial brush strokes or fallstreaks. Instead the sky was plugged with drab and unremarkable nimbostratus. The thick featureless grey hung across the city like an old mosquito net. The damp of the cloud crept into Janet’s scalp, stole along the bare skin on her ankles, and sidled into the harrying pain of her wrist joints.

Lisa Connolly-Smythe. What a mouthful that must have been for a little girl. Had the Inspector been carrying on with her when he had a baby at home? Or did baby Lisa come later? After the Inquiry.? Maybe years later? Janet was hopeless at estimating people’s ages. But the Inspector had never taken Janet to his house and Janet had never asked why. Or at least she didn’t remember asking. Had he been hiding a family all along? Or maybe she had been to his house and she couldn’t remember? It was all such a long time ago.

Perhaps this wasn’t a coincidence? Jeremy was setting her up? Bessie knew and she’d told Jeremy and they were in it together and they’d chosen this private detective to out her once and for all. They’d bring her down out of some warped sense of justice or jealousy or just bloody vindictiveness. She should quit now, just leave Cyril. Maybe those criminal kids were right that he shouldn’t be caged up. That he’d better off in the sky. She was just a stupid lonely old woman who’d attached herself to a cloud instead of people. And now her past was finally chapping at her door.

Her phone buzzed in her handbag. She pulled it out. Bessie. Bessie calling her to ask how the meeting went? Bessie calling to ask why she’d run away from Jeremy? Or Bessie calling to dig for information on how both of Janet’s brothers had died young in such tragic circumstances. She let the phone ring out.

She got up and walked along the path towards her bus stop. A discarded Metro paper flapped across her feet. She stooped and picked it up. She couldn’t understand why people felt the need to litter. She continued on until she got to a bin. She glanced at the headlines as she threw the paper in. The first British persona had died of corona virus. A man on a cruise ship in Japan. Janet shivered. The rain started. Heavy and insistent. Janet didn’t have her umbrella. She put her head down and quickened her step.

To be continued.