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.
SANDERLINGS 