"ANGEL RUNES"
copyright 2006 by BARBARA JACKSHA
The Predictability of Clouds and Other Ordinary Things
Daniel Tanner remembered his father's hands better than he remembered his face. If he thought hard, even when his memory was muddied by age, he remembered the sky as it was that day, because of what his father had said.
He remembered running, cold as wet granite, out of the Cornish surf, running towards his father's warm body, then his father's strong arms round him like live steel hawsers. Big hands rubbing his back up down up down like they were rubbing flints together. He remembered the smell of his father's chest, the sharp tang of salt and sweat. The heat spreading slowly over his back until small fast-tongued fires licked under his father's fingers. Then when Daniel was almost drugged by the solidity of the man, his father relaxed his hold and turned him round to face the sea. Hugging Daniel into himself, he curved his shoulders round him. He rested his chin on Daniel's head. He exhaled, his lips close to Daniel's scalp; live warmth from inside his body flowing out into Daniels' hair, round his head. They were so close, so much one that Daniel thought he could taste the salt from his own hair as it tasted in his father's mouth.
He leaned into his father, making the sea, the waves, the people, blur between his lashes. His small hands gathered the towel under his chin, his chilled fingers moving like sea anemones. His father gathered Daniel's hands in his own, covering them, cupping them; the child's small fingers, smooth and pale; the father's hands, work-roughened, brown, and wrinkled from the salt water. Then he lifted all four hands to his lips over Daniel's head, and he blew warm air gently between his thumbs, filling the cup of his hands, bringing Daniel back to life.
His father spoke into his hair. "Look at the clouds," he said. The clouds were high, windblown wisps like smoke from a candle in an airless room. Bigger clouds massed on the horizon.
"People used to read clouds."
Daniel wriggled, bunching his hands under his chin, not wanting to open his mouth to let the cold in. Not wanting the wind to find where his heart was and chill it.
His father carried on. "They used to sit for hours in their cave entrances, huddled round their fires, watching clouds. The ones who could read the shapes, tell the future, they were the powerful ones. They read the shapes the clouds made, they read the way the wind played with them and let them drop. We've forgotten the language."
"I can speak clouds," Daniel said. "I can see shapes. Look there's a king with a bare chest and a long beard."
"It's Neptune," his father said. "Sitting on a dolphin." It was. The wisps of cloud eddied and eddied round Neptune, so much seaweed disturbed in a rock pool, as the wind found the cracks and crevices between the boy and his father and made its way down Daniel's throat.
Could Daniel really read the clouds? Later, he revisited this moment a thousand times, recapturing for an instant the warmth of his father's arms. Could he have seen what was coming? Less than three short weeks after their holiday finished, his father did not come home from the factory where he worked. Instead a policeman and a policewoman, their hats in their hands, took his mother into the living room and closed the door.
Maybe if Daniel had known cloud language he'd have known, and made those weeks precious. As it was they had drifted by in a haze of normality, and Daniel could not remember them at all. A friend from the factory brought back his father's things. They looked very insignificant on the floor in the hallway. A pair of steel-capped boots, a metal toolbox, a file of papers from a course, some overalls. The milky plastic container his father used as a lunchbox.
The clouds might have told Daniel, might have predicted that he would become his father. That he would try to take his place at home and wonder what made his mother still cry into her pillow at night when he was there to be the man. That he would be as proud as his father had been and stand back from other people. That he would be as lonely as his father had been and need people very much. That one day he would walk through the factory gates in his father's overalls, carrying a small metal toolbox. That he would marry a woman who reminded him of his mother.
They might have predicted that this marriage would not last. That small arguments about toothpaste, television, loose tealeaves versus teabags, her need to go out versus his need to be in his home, would turn into reasons for her to leave.
Daniel stood in the hallway of his council house, listening to the sound of his car being driven angrily, low-geared but fast, out of the estate. He tried to hear his son crying from his baby seat, but couldn't. He sat on the bottom stair in his overalls and eased off one steel-capped boot, then the other, wriggling his freed toes.
The tap was still running in the kitchen. Daniel stood by the sink, watching the water swirling round, down the plughole. He ran his fingers round the edge of the sink, lifting the sealant with his thumbnail, peeling it back, a grey plastic snake. He turned off the tap. The kitchen was filled with an oppressive silence that weighed on the surfaces and pushed between canisters of tea, coffee, sugar, small glass jars of baby food, packets of special cereal. The silence was too heavy and made too much space for echoes. He turned the tap back on so not to hear the echo of a shrill voice saying she'd had enough, the echo of his baby's cry, the scrape of chairs, the banging of wardrobe doors, of cupboard doors, the thud thud thud of a heavy bag pulled behind her down the stairs, echoes that sounded like fists hammering at his heart.
His work bag was where he had left it on the kitchen table. He took out his plastic lunchbox, thermos, and mug, and carried them to the sink. He rinsed out the thermos, watching the vestiges of milky tea clouding the clear water swirling round against stainless steel. He watched the black specks of tealeaves marching round in circles like demented ants in the water. Then he smashed his hand flat into the sink, splashing his overalls, stirring up the water, flailing at the ants, pushing them towards the plughole. Did he cry? He couldn't remember. All he could remember was the sound of the tap running into the sink, and his hand pushing the ants away, then reaching for his mug to rinse that too, and finding it speckled with tealeaves on the base, black flecks in a wet white dune of undissolved sugar, running up the side of the mug in a trail that had earlier invaded his mouth, leaving him gagging, picking pieces of black off his tongue with oily fingers.
Might the tealeaves have predicted the move of his first wife to another man who lived four counties away? Might they have said you will only see your son sporadically? Told him to give up any dreams of holding a small boy in a rough towel against his own body, warming him, chilled from the sea, holding his own flesh so close that their bodies would not allow the wind any quarter?
Might they have shown Daniel at least fifteen years of solitude, losing his house, moving to a small damp flat over a launderette, endless comings home to no home, endless rinsing of lunch things, endless careful putting together of his boots in the hall ready for tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow with no one to care for? Small, weekly, handmade cards after a while fading out to the odd one-page letter, then the odd postcard, then nothing.
Then, when he thought all was lost, another baby, with a brown eyed-clerk from the factory office. No marriage, not then, but a move to live with her, and a quiet promise to himself that this time it would last. And a holiday when the baby, a girl, was three, to a rented barn near the sea, near the beach where his father had shown him the clouds.
It rained. They scrambled with buckets and nets on the black rock promontories that finger the surf, looking into rock pools. They found pools so deep they would hold a man, standing. They found crabs and small fishes that made the girl squeal with delight. Their barn was damp, and they collected driftwood from long lonely beaches to make fires. Found coal in an outhouse. Lay at night together in front of the fire, the child asleep in their bed. They drank wine warm, made slow love, watched by the yellow green of salt flame, the red glow of the coal, watching between their lashes, making shapes out of the embers, the running sparks, smoke eddying and tipping like a cloudbank over a ridge when the wind blew down the old chimney, making their eyes water.
They did not see the child climb from their bed, tug on her dressing gown, and find her fishing net. They did not hear her bare feet on the old stones of the hallway, or hear the door open and close. Might the coals have shown them, said, "Hold her, watch her?"
"Hold her." Might the sparks have said this is the last time you will make love?
It was dark when they missed her, missed the net. Daniel ran to the beach, found their own footsteps where they had collected driftwood, flashed his torch over the rocks, catching the white shapes of roosting gulls on damp grey masses. He shouted for his child over and over. The wind entered his open mouth and found its way down his throat to his heart.
Men came with flashlights and found small footprints in the sand, making for the pools. They found the sand puddled and piled where the child had struggled to climb onto the rocks. They found the net, showed Daniel strands of damp seaweed caught in the threads. They found the child, her hair lifting in still-moving water, her small hands like pale starfish against the black-barnacled rocks, the light from the torches fading into the black depths beneath her feet, and her nightclothes lifting like clouds round her body.
Would the running smoke have shown Daniel his woman running from him into the darkness, her howls swallowed by the pounding of the waves? Would it have shown his neighbours shunning a man who could not keep his women, his children, who let the wind blow what mattered away?
Would the scurrying sand have shown him breaking like a tall tree will break before the gale? A time when his words would no longer come, when his eyes would fill at the sight of the sky, when he would rail at the clouds, and when they would shut him away for years?
He would lie at night in a hospital room with bars at the window, listening to the wind in the trees, knowing that the wind was eddying round Neptune's pools, reaching out its fleshless fingers to send cold shivers down his throat. He would lie and listen to the cries and howls of the truly mad, the sound running like smoke down the corridors, seeping under his door and filling the room until he could not breathe and cried out for air.
Would the cries in the night, their patterns and eddies, or the movement of tree branches outside his window, have shown Daniel his small recovery? Would they have told of his recovering enough to be discharged, enough to allow a move, a retirement far too early on medical grounds, the rental of a tiny house on the very edge of the village near the sea where he knew his child still floated?
Daniel's house was in the corner of a field, behind high hedges. In the garden there were huge standing stones, menhirs, and a vast stone altar raised on two massive blocks, its face to the stars. The village women said the angels came down and sat on the stones at night.
The local farm sold him milk, eggs, potatoes, and chickens for broiling. He would stand in his kitchen looking out at the stones, plucking and drawing the chickens for the farmer's wife to sell. The feathers he would push into bags, catching them as they rose in the currents of air that played through the windows and doors, never quite sealed. The bright innards he would spread on the work surface, moving them with his palms, pushing and turning them, the hearts, the livers, the entrails, snaking…sometimes he imagined them still pulsating under his fingers.
One evening in winter a chicken was brought to him still warm. Daniel plucked it, and in the cold air the down from the chicken's breast rose round his head like a halo. He saw his face reflected in the window, wavering, as though he was a ghost. He drew the entrails, and they steamed, wraiths filling the air like moving seaweed. A smell of iron filled his nostrils. The heart was cold as ice.
And this time, Daniel listened.
He went out into the cold night and walked barefoot down to the beach in his shirtsleeves, walking the sand where his child's footsteps had been. He opened his mouth and let the wind whip round his head, funneling down into his chest. He climbed the path back to his house, his heart sounding in his ears, pushing at his ribs as though they were the bars of a cage. Back in his garden he climbed up to the flat stone altar in the dark and lay down, the cold granite at his back, listening to the distant sound of the sea and the cries of a few disturbed gulls. For a while he watched the clouds scurrying across the moon. Then he shut his eyes and waited for the angels to come.
"The Predictability of Clouds and Other Ordinary Things" has also appeared in Artistry of Life.
Copyright 2006 by Vanessa Gebbie
