Isabel Clemente 

‘The Fault is on the Gales’

She gazes at the ceiling. The metal sounds of pipes bumping into structures annoy her. Strong gusts of wind sweep the roof violently. The blinds of the skylights shake as if someone were trying to open them. She wonders if it will. A howling noise tells her that the storm is already inside the building.

Shut at home, with no windows or television overlooking the world, she is trapped in ignorance. She considers calling the landlady but gives up as she realises how late it is and how hard it would be to talk to her over the phone. The lines were cut anyway, but she didn’t know that either. She also weighs up resorting to using the emergency line but what would she report? We don’t have a TV. We are lonely strangers in an unknown place

They would have known about the weather if they had listened to the news, but what kind of busy parents tune in to the news during a long-awaited first time away to Scotland? On the fourth floor, the cosy rooftop flat is split into two large lofts, one with the en-suite and the other with a small kitchen, a bathroom and an oversized comfortable couch where the boys are fast asleep now. It does not have windows overlooking the city. Instead, it offers a much better view, according to Dad: the sky through the skylights, to which the boys replied with a ‘hurrayyy’ when told.

They had decided to travel during Christmas on the spur of the moment, thanks to cheap seats in a low-cost carrier. They had visited castles and haunted houses, tried on actual armours and brandished swords, as Dad had promised the hurrayyying-five-year-old twins. The flat is within a fair walking distance from the main attractions so that the kids spend all their energy – or part of it – strolling around. A perfect plan, except the boys never get tired. They go down and up the old Victorian building staircase, climbing it and jumping steps, racing each other, amused by the muffled thud of their feet on the carpeted floor and the echo of their giggles in the open-plan space. When they arrived, one of the kids had asked the landlady what language she spoke – an enquiry his parents would also have made if they did not know the answer.

‘Mah accent puzzles ye?’ the landlady said, in good spirits.

‘I am sorry, we’ve just arrived in the UK,’ the mother said.

***

It was a harsh winter. They noticed something was wrong when the streets became empty. The temperatures were already low in the bloody cold castle, in the bloody cold church, in the bloody cold streets.

‘Stop saying bloody all the time, will you? The boys are copying you,’ she had told the husband a few hours before when they were hiding from the wind in the not-that-bloody cold gallery.

‘A freezing temperature hit my body and bones, causing involuntary shivers, and decreasing the blood supply to my extremities,’ he had said, acting funny for the boys’ amusement. Not hers.

           ‘It was YOUR idea to come to Edinburgh. You should have known.’

           ‘I’m an astronomer, not a meteorologist.’

           ‘You’re always looking at the sky.’

           ‘For different purposes.’

           ‘The weather is miserable.’

           ‘Now it’s my fault? I didn’t plan to stargaze here. You accuse me of ignoring what is happening down here, on the ground, don’t you? I’m trying to do it.’

           ‘You brought a portable telescope!’ she said.

           ‘What’s the matter? Just in case.’

           ‘Let’s walk home.’    

***

Now they are already indoors, safe and sound, unaware of the weather details, apart from the noise it produces. She can’t help looking at the ceiling, wondering. She does not feel safe. They do not grasp what ‘gale’ means, which left her believing a hurricane was coming, a catastrophe was imminent, and they should be shielded in the basement, as she’d seen in movies, not on the rooftop. She does not share her deepest fears with him. First because of the boys, secondly because there is a sort of shame restraining her from doing so, while her mind keeps replaying Dorothy flying with the house and the dog and all to Oz. She dreads the old and hollow Victorian building may collapse. The wooden stairs seem fragile, worn out. Everything in the city seems to be a thousand years old. She fears nature and power cuts. There were no candles in the bloody flat.     

‘Did you say bloody flat?’ he says.

            ‘What if the lights went off?’

           ‘We’ve got the kids lighting firearms.’

           ‘Forgot the annoying sound they make?’

           ‘Should buy them silent guns next time.’

           ‘You should stop buying them guns.’

           ‘They’re boys. They fight. Anyway, in case we desperately need lights…’

           ‘It took me two hours to make them sleep. That toy will wake the entire building up,’ she says, rolling her eyes.

           He examines her face, resumes reading, but then changes his mind.

‘You’re not pleased, are you.’

           ‘You’re kidding me.’

           ‘Weather changes!’

           ‘And it turns into a hurricane.’

           ‘It is not a hurricane.’

           ‘How do you know? You don’t have the faintest idea what a gale is.’

           ‘But if it was a hurricane, the neighbour would have used the word “hurricane”.’

           ‘You don’t know the local synonyms for hurricane. Gale can be hurricane in Scottish,’ she says in a peevish tone. ‘And tomorrow, and the day after tomorrow, and the day after that, we will be here without food and TV, because of your stunning idea to offer the kids a TV-free diet for a whole week.’

           ‘You agreed.’

           ‘True, I did. With the whole thing, by the way. I agreed I would be the one looking after them while you look for new stars. What’s wrong with my doing the cleaning, the cooking, the playing, the coming and going, the fetching, the daily boring things you’re not aware of while you gaze at stars. Why should I consider TV important during our Christmas break if the sky is what matters? A break for whom, tell me, for whom?’

           ‘The storm will clear away, eventually,’ he says, in a lower voice.

           ‘Eventually! God knows when.’

           ‘Do you regret coming to London?’

           ‘I’m not going to talk about it.’

           ‘But I am because we still have three and a half years of my PhD ahead.’

           ‘And perhaps it means that we’ll have three and a half years more to ignore my dreams, my aims, my desires. What’s wrong with my doing the boring stuff alone?’

           ‘You seemed excited with the move,’ he said, his voice disappearing.

           ‘Seemed. You’re more accurate with your research. You never take “seem” for granted while mapping the Milky Way. Everybody else seemed excited but me. Thank you for asking now, I was scared! Moving abroad with two small kids? It will be good for you, and I agreed. You’re so young, you can resume your career when you return, and I agreed. I’m not young anymore. I’m thirty-five! And I didn’t read the footnotes.’

           ‘What footnotes?’

           ‘About maternity, all those side effects that people don’t talk about openly. Everybody will be fluent in English, and I agreed, and now we can’t even figure out what a gale is.’

           ‘Oh please, darling, we are in Scotland…you’re not supposed…’

           ‘I am not supposed many things, many, like, like leaving behind so much, oh gosh,’ she says, storming out into the bathroom where she bursts into tears.

The noise of the rain pouring down against the glass muffles her sobs. She tries to shut the blind, but the cord is stuck. She draws it upwards, then down, then upwards again, to release the lock. With the last tug, the cord releases and goes loose. She cries more. She had a good life back home: help with the kids, her parents living next door, a cleaning lady twice a week, a job. Now she’s got nothing. She did not miss knowing English. Fuckoff. She is a dentist. She fills the bath with water and anger. She hates this weather. She sits in the tub, wondering why he never comes after her. He has seen this before. He knows that if they quarrel, let’s say, for five minutes, he’d better allow six times more for her to wind down. It is typical of him to think mathematically, one of his irritating peculiarities.

The door remains closed for more than thirty minutes while she soaks in hot water, pouring the bath bubbles she bought for the boys till the last drop. She fills the bottle with water, shakes it and pours it again, Simone de Beauvoir’s words echoing in her mind about women finding themselves imprisoned in family life, using it as an excuse for their fallacies, perhaps not as much, but it does not matter. She rests her head on a folded towel at the edge of the bath, blowing the bubbles in her hand and staring at the mesmerising rain tapping on the window till they turn into snowflakes. The boys would be thrilled.

***     

Already in her nightgown, she walks out of the bathroom. He’s lying on the bed reading a book under the lamp twilight and raises his eyes.

‘It is snowing,’ she says.

           ‘Really? We’ll have a white Christmas then. The boys will be thrilled.’

           ‘It took me ages to get them to sleep,’ she said, tucking herself under the cover.

           ‘I was in charge, and you sacked me.’

           ‘You said boats were flying while peering through the skylights and wanted them to stay quiet?’

           ‘I meant to amuse them, and ward off their fears.’

           ‘Sometimes, you amuse them too much at the wrong time.’

***

The Met Office had issued red weather warnings for a severe snowstorm, along with fierce gales, across Scotland and North Ireland. The winds were expected to be strong enough to uproot trees and upturn vehicles, posing risks for life and imposing travel disruption. They will learn about it the next day when he buys a newspaper. With the likelihood of floods, the conditions would remain until Sunday, their last day in the Highlands.

***

           ‘All this noise and the distant sirens…What’s happening?’

           ‘The rooftop makes it sound worse, but it is not that bad.’

           ‘It sounds horrible. Why do we always end up on the rooftop?’

           He raises his eyebrows, cracking a smile.

           ‘Because it’s the closest place to the sky. Have I told you that the constellations look upside down in the Northern Hemisphere?’

           ‘A thousand times.’

           ‘And that the North Star can only be observed from here?’

           ‘A hundred times…’

           ‘Hmmm… and the moon. In the Southern Hemisphere, we used to see the first quarter moon as a C, remember?’

           ‘True.’

           ‘Here it’s more like a D, the opposite.’

           ‘Okay, this one is new.’

           ‘There is a meteor shower expected in the first days of 2000. We’ll have a privileged view of it from London. It shall be very active during the night and close to the horizon.’

           ‘I wonder how these things can be predicted so far in advance.’

           ‘Because, besides being an astronomer, I’m a fortune teller.’

He stands up, dragging the duvet and his pillow to the floor, beneath one of the skylights and opens its blind.

           ‘Come. Let’s watch the snow.’

           Lying on the floor, they still hear the gales and strange thuds on the roof while white explosions hit the invisible shield above them.  

           ‘The guy in the pub tried to warn us,’ he says.

           ‘We should have paid attention...’

           ‘But you changed the order to take away.’

           ‘Of course. He would have thrown us out the door.’

           ‘If it were not for the neighbour.’

           ‘I felt less stupid following his talk, but why didn’t you ask him the meaning of gale? I trusted you knew it.’

           ‘Well…perhaps I did.’

           ‘What if it is a hurricane?’

           ‘It’s not.’

           ‘How do you know?’

           ‘We are not spinning up into the void.’

She grins and silently promises herself never to skip a word in conversation anymore, to keep a small dictionary in her bag… when her thoughts are interrupted by him talking unintelligibly.

‘Dinnae ye ken aboot th' rid waither warnings, ma’am.’

‘What…’

‘Fluent in Scottish since childhood,’ he says.

They explode with laughter together at what would become one of their running jokes for many years to come.

                 ‘I didn’t get a thing from what the waiter said.’

                 ‘I tried to guess what a ‘boot’ had to do with water.’

                 ‘Perhaps get rid of your boot before drinking water.’

                 ‘I thought it was something about dining with a boot, a boot being a measure for food. Care for a boot of chips? They weigh people in stones here…’

                 ‘…what’s a ‘rid waither warning’…?’

                 ‘Perhaps a warning to get rid of the waiter.’

This comment kicks off gales of laughs.

                 ‘He warned us about him.’

                 ‘And we didn’t get it.’

The more they remember, the funnier it gets, now in unstoppable fits of laughter. Perhaps it is not that funny, but they know what they have been through, the awkward circumstances, the challenges, the mischiefs, the misunderstandings, the ignorance, and no place offers more opportunities for these outsiders to get lost in translation than Scotland. She walks in rounds, her eyes brimming, the comedy of the situation growing within them. She loses her voice.

                 ‘Don’t do it! It is scary,’ he begs, crying. 

She tries to recover her breath, but spasms keep coming back.

                ‘…rid..of..the…WAITER!’

                ‘…with a dine boot.’

                ‘I’ll die…’

                ‘We’ll wake the kids up…’

He coughs, trying to stop. She lets her body collapse on the bed, face against the pillow to muffle the sound. He throws himself beside her. She closes her eyes, inhales and sighs.

                 ‘Now we know why the waiter was so impatient.’                             ‘Poor man, a snowstorm was coming and the dumb tourists…’

                 ‘He could have been clearer.’

                 ‘Subtitles would have saved us.’

                ‘I feel like going there again to have a second chance, or we’ll never guess what he said.’

                ‘Shall we?’

                ‘Count me in.’

He fixes his eyes on her face, still smiling, joyful. Then, he gently pushes her hair back from over her eye, letting his hand slip across her back to the top of her bottom.

                 ‘You smell good…’

                 ‘It’s the kid’s bubble bath…’

                 ‘I see, perhaps…too sweet?’

‘Perhaps I took an overdose,’ she says, grinning, while he traces the contours of her lips with his fingers. ‘I love the way you laugh, squeezing your eyes and lifting the chin as if something were suffocating you, and I also love your neck, its proportion, size and curves,’ he says, using maths the way she adores, getting near, letting her feel his breath close to her ear, and his hands under her nightgown, and his urgency in overcoming obstacles between them.

                 ‘You’re adorable.’

                 ‘I am not. You only desire my body,’ she whispers.

                 Then the storm stops, the whining sounds wane. He gets rid of her underwear, and their panting breaths fill up the room.

***

‘Night, beautiful,’ he says, turning his back to her.

‘I found candles,’ he adds, a moment before falling asleep. Laid down, eyes half open, she remembers that tomorrow they must buy new hats, for both the boys have lost theirs in the castle; and if the storm comes back, they’d better order food and eat in. And since the kids will need some entertainment, she will ask the landlady for a TV. Also, tomorrow, she will buy another bottle of bubble bath. Can’t forget that. They’re so funny, those impossible boys she loves more than anything. At least they sleep the whole night through already. No more calling, no more crying, no more breastfeeding. Two at once was kind of crazy. One would be easy. Even knowing that she carries the twin gene, for both her parents have a family history, she wasn’t prepared to see two hearts beating on the black and white screen, or better said, inside herself. It was a scary and yet overwhelming feeling to find her body as a temporary refuge of three souls, a miracle within her, a superpower she didn’t know she had.

                 She is so tired, but she still hears something strange outside as if debris were collapsing against faraway obstacles. Her sleep became so light after motherhood while he – look at him – is so easy to fall asleep. He’s like a child. Is he dreaming about new galaxies? Has he drifted away amongst constellations? Designing roads to cross the universe he offered her as a gift at their wedding, six years ago? She planned the perfect dress. He planned the perfect site and night, away from the light-polluted city. He even planned the power cut to say his vows in the dark, when he promised to find a new wonder up there: to name it after you, because the universe wants us to be together, now and forever. She memorised every word. My love will keep expanding because the universe is doing the same. And when she believed her imagination or her tears were making the sky gleam, a child shouted shooting stars and the guests looked up and went oh, observing all those shiny and glittering dots above them, unaware of the lump in her throat, her trembling lips and a shaken body, of her efforts to say some words. He knew it, the fortune-teller, she recalls, amused.

                 And here she is with him, under the weather, on sunny and stormy days. She smiles again. They always end up laughing together. She knows how hard he tries to be a better father for his kids than his own father – a man unable to praise or hug or love anyone – was to him. In this sense, it was so reassuring to know how he loves being a dad. Now, if it doesn’t come before Sunday, she will tell him that her period is two months late – if she is not mistaken.