Tag: clouds

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fiction serial

The Cloud. Episode 38

2020, Portobello Edinburgh

‘I can’t believe it’s you,’ Bessie’s voice has been de-husked since they last spoke. Had she given up smoking? Janet tapped up the volume on her phone.  

‘Well, it is.’

‘Happy new year! A new decade. So exciting!’

‘Happy new year to you, too.’

‘After all this time. I can’t believe it!’ Bessie paused. ‘Has something happened?’ She tailed off, coughed and waited. Janet waited too.

She was sitting on the small chair in the bathroom, her feet solid on the floor in her green slippers. The chair wasn’t really a chair at all. A curious person would wonder at the depth of the seat, tap the top, hear the hollow, and prise open the lid. Inside the chamber, not a treasure but an old white ceramic commode bowl.

Janet had never used the commode, not in that way, but she found it comforting to sit on, a chair with an inner secret, a chair privy to our most elemental needs, a chair that just might have started its life in a forest on the other side of the world, and, picking up woodworm on the way, had somehow ended up in a charity shop in some antique shop on the wrong side of the Edinburgh bypass.

‘Are you there, Janet?’

‘Yes, sorry. Was thinking about the commode.’

‘The commode?’ Bessie sounded baffled.

‘Yes, you know, where the wood came from, who cut down the tree…’ She stopped, and looked up to the corner above the shower where Cyril used to live. There was nothing to show he’d ever been there. No misting on the shower screen. No odd feeling of cool dampness. No heavenly tinkling. What was she doing on the phone to Bessie? She didn’t understand why she’d called. And now she wished she hadn’t. She had nothing to say.

‘Are you alright, Janet?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s been, what, fifteen years? I can’t believe it’s been that long. Time is amazing isn’t it. So fast. Especially at our age!’

‘More, maybe.’ Janet crossed her legs. Her slipper dangled from her shaking foot.

‘I heard your mother had died. I’m so sorry.’

‘Did you?’ Janet couldn’t think how Bessie would know that, not with her living in Kent or wherever she was now.

 ‘Jeremy saw it in the paper. Cut it out and sent it to me.’ Jeremy was Bessie’s only child. Janet hadn’t seen him since he was around ten. He’d been an intense curious little boy with big glasses and big questions and a perplexing attention to detail. He must be in his forties now. Probably working for GCHQ.

‘Yes, the undertakers did that.’

‘I didn’t think you’d written it. You always had such pretty writing. The piece about your mother, it seemed a bit perfunctory.’

‘What would I have written? I regret to inform you that Bernadette Waters, mother of three, and wife of dearly departed Eric Waters, died without speaking to her daughter for decades?’

Bessie’s reply took a long time to come. She said ‘she’d lost both of her sons, Janet. Both of them. And her husband. No one could have borne that. The grief. Imagine losing two sons. God, if I lost Jeremy…’

‘I was still alive.’

‘Yes, you were but…’

‘But she thought I killed them? Is that what you were going to say?’

‘What is this, Janet? You called me, remember? We should get together. It would be lovely to see you properly. Celebrate old times!’

‘She always blamed me.’

‘Well, I guess she can’t anymore. She lived to quite an age though. And fit as a fiddle until the end?’

‘You’re right.’ Janet pulled her slipper back on. Felt the floor again solid under her feet. ‘New Year. Just rattles me you know.’

‘It’s okay. Jeremy’s the same. Always a bit tetchy at this time. Worries about all the resolutions he needs to make. I just say let’s see what happens.’ Janet stood up and looked at herself in the mirror. A long black hair had sprouted from a mole on her left cheek. She hooked the phone between her shoulder and her ear and tried to pinch the hair out.

‘Are you still there, Janet?’

‘Yes. What’s Jeremy doing these days?’ Janet abandoned the errant hair, went through to the living room and sat down heavily on the couch. She listened to Bessie talking about Jeremy. His fancy job that he wasn’t allowed to talk about in the military. But a mother knows! Her cottage in Dorset with its walled garden. Her collection of dinosaur bones. Best in the county! The death of Martin in a car crash six weeks after he’d left her for an older woman. Karma! The new lover she’d found on the Internet. Colin. An absolute sweetie! Amazing cook and green fingered too. He’d made a set of shelves for the bones out of drift wood. So handy! How she’d given up smoking. Colin had helped. So caring!

Janet put her feet up on the couch and lay back. A tiny beige clothes moth was making its way down the wall beside her. She reached for it, hovered a finger until it stilled, then pressed it firmly into the wall. She’d forgotten the way Bessie punctuated everything good about her life with a gleeful exclamation mark. Janet had no use for exclamation marks but perhaps, secretly, she wished she had. Exclamation marks were ebullient. Joyful. Energetic. Over the top. Exclamation marks didn’t shuffle around in green slippers and pine on woodworm-ridden commodes.

‘Enough from me Janet – you know how I go on!’ Bessie laughed. ‘Tell me everything.’

‘Well, the thing is, Cyril’s been kidnapped.’ The words were out before Janet could retract them. Think of a way to explain. Bessie’s intake of breath was sharp and voluble.

‘What? Who’s Cyril? How awful! How did it happen? The police?’

‘He’s my cloud. My pet cloud.’ Janet started to cry. Thick fat tears rolled down her cheeks. She tried to gasp them back. Clenched her eyes shut. Gritted her teeth. The harder she tried the more they came. Her chest shook. And then the sobs came. Anguished waves that rolled up from her belly, heaved through her chest, and blurted out through her mouth. Bessie was saying something but Janet wasn’t listening. She put the phone down and let herself weep.  

Sometime later, she couldn’t have said how long, she sat up and checked her phone. Bessie had hung up but she’d sent her a message.

SEND ADDRESS AND I’LL COME. CAN HELP WITH CLOUD. JEREMY HAS CONTACTS. YOU NEED A FRIEND NOW! BXX

Janet managed a smile. She tapped in a reply. It would be good to see Bessie. And perhaps Jeremy wasn’t so awful after all.

To be continued.

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fiction serial

The Cloud. Episode 35

1966, Sydney

Janet sat in the back of the taxi squeezed between her mother and her brother. Bernadette had her knees tight together under her thin pale green cotton dress, presumably, Janet thought, to avoid having to touch her daughter. Bernadette dabbed at the bruised puff around her eyes with her white hanky. Would her mother never stop crying?

Edward had his head out of the open car window and was naming the make and model of each car that passed in the opposite direction. When he got it wrong, Eric, stretched out in the front passenger seat, corrected him. It wasn’t a friendly correction. Her father’s fingers were still drumming, now on the shiny wood-veneer of the dashboard. His nails clicked like the crickets that had sprung under Janet’s feet as she’d walked out of the police station to the waiting taxi. The naming the car thing had been Philip’s game. How stupid of Edward to play it. Janet tried elbowing him, a sharp bony jab jab under his ribs. He turned briefly, stared at her, curled his lip, and continued on with the game.

The taxi driver, recently arrived from Greece and what a journey that was, sick the whole way not like his wife and three daughters and even the baby okay and couldn’t eat a thing for three weeks and had lost weight and never felt better since, had already learnt nearly all of the street names in the city. Or so he said to them as he accelerated through a red light. He regaled them with the name of each street just before he drove into it to prove his point.

Janet wanted the driver brother car street naming duet to shut up. She was hot, tired, and angry. How dare they all blame her. The Inspector had clearly known she wasn’t guilty. The way he’d looked at her. Drawn her apart from the others. Why didn’t they believe him? A proper policeman. She fingered the card in her pocket. The Inspector’s phone number. Just in case she remembered something else. She was to phone anytime. He was here to help. Such a terrible tragedy to happen to a lovely new Australian family. He hadn’t had time to say anything else nice to her. Her father had pushed them all outside. He had wanted, he said, to get home. Janet wasn’t sure which home he’d meant.

Eventually the taxi slowed and the driver leant out of his window. We’re near, he said. Forty-eight, forty-six, forty-four, and then Edward was shouting, and her father was pointing and the taxi slid to a halt outside No.36. Number 36, Macaulay Road. Their home for the next six months. Or longer if Eric couldn’t find their own house to buy at the right price. Janet leant back on the sticky plastic car seat and stretched her neck. Four large flies was crawling across the ceiling of the taxi towards her father. A brown spider, as big as her finger nail, stood upside down in the corner above her head. Its tiny feet tap tapped on the cream plastic. She’d read somewhere there would be insects here. But she hadn’t realised how many.

Edward was already out of the car, pulling open the black metal gate which scraped across the concrete with an unwelcoming scour, and jumping up the steps to the house. He lifted up a pot with a cactus type plant, felt around underneath, then held up a key in triumph. Her father was fumbling in his wallet, checking the unfamiliar currency. Bernadette was murmuring something about a tip and poor Philip, poor Philip not even seeing the house. The tree in the garden next to theirs was swaying and squawking. As the taxi driver opened the boot to get their cases out, it exploded into a swirling mass of flashing blue and green. ‘Budgies,’ said Janet,  to no one, ‘those are budgies.’   

Janet was last into the house. It took a few seconds for her eyes to adjust to the gloom. The house smelt of wood polish, lavender and something that was probably fly spray. She was confused at first by the lay-out. The house defied normal logic. It was long and thin, with the hall running down one side and all the rooms, apart from the kitchen at the end,  off to the left. The floors were all wooden, apart from the kitchen with its smart black and white linoleum tiles. Each time someone spoke, the house spoke it back to them.

She followed her mother through the hall and into the kitchen. The same yellow spirals from the police station twirled from the ceiling in the light breeze from the screened off windows. Janet opened the kitchen door and stepped out into the garden. It was small and boxy with a large tree that she didn’t recognise, a brick barbecue with a blackened wire grill, a small square of lawn, neat borders with pretty flowering shrubs that smelt tropical sweet, and a wooden deck with four metal fold-up chairs leant up against the wall of the house. The timber fences on each side of the garden were just high enough to hide them from the neighbours.

A pale cotton net hammock was tied from two of the branches. She sat down on it and it dropped, almost to the ground. She pushed herself back and forward on it. It was quiet in the garden, just the rustle of leaves and the sharp calls of a few early birds gathering in preparation for the late afternoon chorus. Something nipped at her foot under the leather of her sandal. Then again and again. And then the other foot. She bent over to have a look. Her feet were covered in tiny golden ants. She tried brushing them off, but the more she brushed, the more they came. She stamped her feet. Smacked at the pain.

‘Janet, in here now.’ Her father had come outside and was standing on the decking. ‘Your mother needs help to unpack.’ Janet stood up and nodded. She didn’t look her father in the eye. ‘And your room’s the small one at the back.’ The smallest room. The dreariest room. Her punishment presumably. She sighed and, stamping her feet again, followed her father into the house.

Categories
fiction serial

The Cloud. Episode 34

2020, Portobello, Edinburgh.

Janet sat in the dark on the tall stool at her kitchen window and stared out into the night. With the window wide open she could smell the smoke from the dancing line of bonfires that leapt skywards all the way along the coast to Musselburgh. Drummers drummed although where they came from nobody knew and nobody cared. Someone banged a tambourine and someone else rang a pair of hand bells.

Drunken renditions of Auld Lang Syne spilled along the Promenade as each raggedy taggle group threw their arms around the next. Barking dogs competed with the tears of weary children. A pale cat appeared on the garden wall in front of the sailing club, arched its back, bushed its tail, and disappeared. The neighbours projected a grainy black and white film onto the wall of the white flats. Charlie Chaplin danced over the brown stain of a leaking gutter. Someone, somewhere, was playing a piano in accompaniment although not quite in the right tempo or time.

Fireworks turned the pitch of the dark into momentary brilliance: kaleidoscopes of red and gold, green and silver, shot upwards, and, when rewarded with laughing screams, sideways. The ferret, standing on Janet’s lap with its front paws on the window ledge, cocked its head and shivered with each frantic explosion. Janet stroked its head. It was an absent-minded stroke, unconscious, perhaps driven by being alone when everyone else out there bringing in the new year had someone to wrap their arms around.

Auld Lang Syne. She’d always liked the tune. Even in Australia locals that had never set foot out of the state had sung it every year. Arm in arm in checked shirts and bright cotton skirts and flapping sandals, they’d charged forward and back, forward and back, until someone had stumbled and they’d all collapsed in on each other, a rubble pile of arms and legs and hands and heads all askew.

Janet murmured the words of the third verse. Or was it the fourth?

We too have paddled in the stream
From morning sun to night
But the seas between us broad have roared
From auld lang syne

Where was Cyril? Where was her cloud? Out beyond the Forth? On the other side of the sea? She pushed the ferret off her lap onto the floor and leant out the window. The sudden cold scraped at her cheeks and scrawled around her open collar.

The drummers had worked their magic. The sky was sharp black, the sort of black that fought off clouds for the sake of clarity, limpidity. Cyril would have been afraid of the fireworks. Perhaps that’s why was the sky was so clear. The clouds had scuttled off elsewhere. Sheltering in another time zone until the revelers had run out of booze and the stubs of smouldering pyrotechnics had fizzled their last.

She pondered Katherine’s plan. Infiltrating the group, the kidnappers, seemed reckless. Dangerous even. Amy and Dan wouldn’t be taken in by glossy words or a blond wig or emerald green nail varnish. But there was also something oddly exhilarating about it. Arousing even. Reminded her of the weird mix of fear and thrill she’d had in her gut through the whole Philip saga. Perhaps this was just what she needed to jolt her out of her aging reverie. A bit of subterfuge. She closed the window and swung around on her stool. The ferret was on the kitchen workbench, licking crumbs off the toaster. She laughed.

She’d ring Katherine the following afternoon. Tell her she wanted a bigger role in Cyril’s retrieval. She wasn’t quite sure what yet. She needed to think. But it would be big. And it would definitely be audacious.

Categories
fiction serial

The Cloud. Episode 33

1966, Sydney.

The police station was hot, dim, and riven with dead insects. Yellow papery coils, dotted with dead black, spun from the ceilings. Fly screens clung to the open windows keeping the hot air in and the hotter air out. Cockroaches scattered through the reception area, twice on the end of a passing policeman’s boot.

We don’t want to take up too much of your time, Inspector Connolly said to Janet’s father as he led the family through a series of beige corridors to a room with a fan and a dusty Venetian blind. The Inspector motioned to her parents to sit down opposite him at the wooden table in the centre of the room. Edward ignored the Inspector and leant against the wall by the window, cracking his knuckles and crushing something dark and crunchy between his fingers. Janet joined her parents at the table. She was on the Inspector’s right, so close that she could smell his sweat and the faint smell of carbolic soap.

The Inspector took a small notebook from a drawer in the desk, opened it up and laid it out on the table in front of him. Just a few details, he said. And then you can be on your way. You’ll be needing time to settle in. He took a pen from the pocket on his chest. Janet’s mother blew her nose into a small white cotton handkerchief. She hadn’t stopped snuffling since Philip had disappeared into the Indian Ocean. Janet’s father put his arm around her mother’s shoulders. She slumped into him. Her father’s eyes were rimmed red. His chin stubbed grey. He hadn’t shaved in days.

Janet watched the Inspector write down her parent’s words. He had round, child-like writing that wasn’t joined up. The blue ink smudged on the page from the Inspector’s sweating hand. He didn’t always get her parent’s words exactly right. She wondered if she ought to tell him. Correct him. Point out his errors. It might matter later. If this went further.

‘And you, Janet?’

‘Sorry?’ Janet said, suddenly flustered. She hadn’t understood that the Inspector had turned his attention to her.

‘Did you want to add anything?’

‘What?’

‘To your parent’s account. You were the last person to see your brother alive?’ Janet was sure Edward was looking at her. Staring as he crunched and crackled whatever was dead between his fingers.

She said, ‘I’ve said it so many times.’ The Inspector put his pen down and touched Janet’s arm.

‘I know, lass,’ he said. ‘It’s not easy. A tragedy like this. I need to go through the formalities, though. To help you,’ he paused, ‘your parents, you know…’ He stopped mid-sentence. Janet shook her feet out of her sandals and pressed her bare soles into the cool of the linoleum. She wanted to lie down. To rest her face on a cool white linen sheet. For Inspector Colin Connolly to stroke her back. For Colin Connolly to drape a damp towel over the back of her neck.

‘Janet,’ the Inspector is talking to you.’ Her father was irritated. He looked at Janet and frowned. ‘For Christ’s sake, Janet, stop bloody dreaming and just tell him so we can get out of here. Your mother’s exhausted.’ He took his arm from her mother’s shoulder and shook a finger in Janet’s face. ‘We’re all bloody exhausted. And you…’ His finger was trembling. blurring in front of Janet’s nose. Her mother interrupted.

‘No, Eric, we said we wouldn’t.’

‘Look at her, will you? Look at her!’ Her father, his cheeks red, stood up.

‘Not now, love. Please.’ Bernadette tried to pull her husband back into his chair. He shook her free. The Inspector frowned. Stretched his arms out, his palms up, in peace.

‘You’re all upset. Please, folks. Please sit down. We can finish this another time.’ Janet’s father sat down heavily on the chair. The legs scraped hard across the floor. Janet looked down to see whether they had left a mark. His hands, flat down on the table, were dancing. Fingers playing some wretched tune on a long-abandoned piano.

‘You speak to her again, Inspector. She knows more than she’s letting on.’

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fiction serial

The Cloud. Episode 32

2019. Portobello, Edinburgh.

‘So,’ said Katherine, unwrapping two small gold packets of butter and spreading them both onto her white bread roll, ‘how have you been, Janet?’  Janet didn’t eat butter. At least, not like that. Not in full view of everyone else. Those poor wailing cows at Pop George’s cottage. Bawling night after night so that folk could spread fat on bread that didn’t even need it.

‘You know, doing away.’ Janet wasn’t good at small talk. She didn’t have anything of value to say. She couldn’t confess the ferret. And she wasn’t sure why Katherine was bothering to help her. Katherine seemed to be one of the busy young women that excelled at everything. They go to work, they go on fancy holidays with packs of friends, they swim in the sea on their own, they have their own mortgages. They probably even have sex toys. Although what they did with them she couldn’t be certain. She stirred her tomato soup with the spoon. It splashed up the bowl and onto the table. She didn’t like tomato soup, but she’d panicked when the waiter came to take their order. Katherine had known what she wanted straight away, so Janet needed to too. ‘You said something about news?’

Katherine put her knife and fork down on her plate and pushed it to one side. She took the salt and pepper shakers, one in each hand, and moved them across the table towards Janet. ‘See these?’ Janet nodded. Of course she could see them. ‘See how ordinary they are? How you only notice them when they’re not there and you want to add salt. Or pepper?’ Janet nodded again. What was she on about it?  ‘Well, I’m going to be the pepper.’ Janet raised her eyebrows. Was her mind getting away from her? It wasn’t the first time she’d been confused by something that Katherine had said.

Katherine looked at Janet. Janet sensed by the tightness of the lips that she was exasperated, frustrated that Janet wasn’t as clever as she was. ‘Could you just explain it to me,’ she replied. ‘I’m not following.’ She wiped her mouth with the paper napkin. It came away streaked rusty orange. How long had her mouth been stained by that soup? She put her hand to her face and blushed. She should have worn the lipstick. Eaten more carefully. Ordered something without colour.

Katherine said ‘I’m going to infiltrate the group.’ She leant back in her chair and put a finger to her lips. ‘And when they realise they can’t do without me,’ she paused, ‘I’ll strike.’

Janet opened her mouth to reply just as the waiter returned to the table. Katherine waved him away. ‘What do you think, Janet?’

‘Isn’t it dangerous?’

‘Do you want the cloud back?’

‘Yes, of course. But…’ Katherine interrupted her. ‘It’s either this or the police. And you said you didn’t want the police.’

‘Yes. No.’

‘Although I wish you’d tell me why the police are a problem.’

‘Infiltration. Yes. You’ll be great at that.’

‘That’s what I thought.’ Janet looked at Katherine’s fingernails. Neat, just the right length, polished in emerald green. Her thumbnails flashed. Two little silver stars on each one.

‘Will you need to be disguised?’ Katherine turned to look at the other customers. She was conspiratorial. Something out of a movie.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Were they disguised when they came to your flat?’ Janet blushed again. Of course they weren’t. Or were they? How would she know?

‘But I can wear a wig if you’d like,’ Katherine went on. I’ve got three at home. I’ll send you the pics and you can choose.’

‘For me?’ Janet asked, scrunching the napkin into a tight fist.

‘No, you idiot. For me.’ Janet managed a smile. How stupid she was. She hadn’t always been stupid, though. She’d got away with murder. Not everybody could say that.

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fiction serial

The Cloud. Episode 31

1966. Sydney.

Janet had never spoken to a police officer before. There’d never been any need. And now, with these two in front of her, their foreheads sweat sticky under the tight grip of their black hats, she wasn’t sure whether she should.

The tall one had taken her father to one side and was speaking to him. Her father was nodding his head, then shaking it, then nodding again. The policeman’s expression hovered somewhere between pity and irritation. Janet suspected he didn’t like dealing with death. Especially when there was no body. Especially when the no body might be in another country. At the bottom of the ocean.

Her father’s shoulders started to shake. His back convulsed. Long, deep lowing sounds came out of him. The sounds the cattle made by Pop George’s house when the farmer took the calves away. Janet couldn’t bear the sounds of the anguished cows. She’d bury her head under her pillow night after night begging Pop George to get the calves back to their mothers. And now she couldn’t bear her father’s sounds either.

The tall policeman touched her father’s elbow. Took a pace back. Turned to stare at the ship’s white hull until her father’s sounds shrank and tapered into the shimmer of the clammy heat. Stood in silence while her father scrabbled around for his dignity. Maybe she’d got that wrong about the policeman. Maybe he didn’t mind dealing with death at all.

Janet had read two P.D. James novels on the ship. She’d rather liked Inspector Dalgliesh. He was clever. Wrote poetry. Was unobtrusively handsome. This policeman wasn’t handsome. He didn’t look like a poet. His fingers were too stubby. His feet were too wide. And his nose reminded Janet of the platypus in the Welcome to Australia leaflet.

Perhaps his irritation signalled his suspicion. That something wasn’t right. That there’d been no accident at all but a premeditated murder. Or perhaps it wasn’t irritation but excitement. The policeman was hungry for promotion. Eager for something different. Something to make him famous.

Already hot, Janet’s armpits wept damp unpleasant wafts from under her t-shirt. She held her arms tight against her body. Kept the smell in. The shame hidden. She needed to hear what the policeman would say next. She took a step towards the two men but her mother pulled her back, frowned, and shook her head.

The shorter policeman, off to her right, and talking to Edward, seemed to have a problem with his face. Every minute or so he’d wipe his brow with a blue-checked cotton handkerchief. Edward’s ears were pink and his fists, clenched tight in front of him, were trembling. The short policeman looked over Edward’s shoulder to Janet and winked. Or did he? Janet couldn’t be sure. And then the policeman smiled. Rubbed his face again with the handkerchief. Janet tried to smile back but her lips were stuck shut. The policeman put his hand on Edward’s shoulder, said something to the boy, then turned to speak to her and her mother.

‘I’m sorry for your loss,’ he said, addressing her mother. ‘I’m Inspector Connolly. And that,’ he said, pointing to the taller man, ‘is Senior Sergeant Maxwell.’  Inspector. Just like Adam Dalgliesh in the books. ‘He’s just getting a few facts from Mr Waters about…’ He paused. ‘About your son.’ He wiped his face again.

Janet stared at his shoes. So black. So shiny. His feet must be terribly hot. The family were all in sandals. Even her father. Janet had never seen her father in sandals until this trip. The Inspector was speaking again. Saying something to her mother about immigration. About luggage. About how they, the policemen, would take them to their hotel to settle in. Then speak to them once they’d slept and showered.

‘You must be Janet,’ he said. He put his hand out as if to shake hers then drew it back again. Janet caught his eye and looked away. She was embarrassed for him. How short he was. How could a sergeant be taller than an inspector? That couldn’t be right? But he seemed nice. He had a smiley face.

The next day he’d tell her, out of ear-shot from the rest of the family, as they walked into the police station, that his mates called him Sniper. Short for Sniper’s Dream. He’d grin as he said it, and Janet’s skin would prickle and the prickle would feel nice and Janet would blink and look away and wonder whether she’d just found her first friend in this hot and clingy land.

To be continued.

Categories
fiction serial

The Cloud. Episode 30

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
fiction serial

The Cloud. Episode 29

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
fiction serial

The Cloud. Episode 28

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.

Categories
fiction serial

The Cloud. Episode 27

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.

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