News from the Clouds

by Robert Llewellyn

  ‘Yeah, sorry about that. I knew I couldn’t land conventionally, you know, like we did when you flew with me. I wasn’t sure where I’d end up landing like that though. Sorry about the mess.’

  ‘With this rain we can’t really make more mess, we can merely shift it around and you certainly did that,’ said William, wiping some of the mud off his cheek. ‘We all ran for our lives as the mud started flying.’

  ‘Yeah, sorry about that, must have looked a bit alarming.’

  The soaked crowd around me were smiling but all of them looked genuinely surprised to see me. Unlike in London or more especially the land of clouds, they clearly didn’t expect to see me in Gardenia.

  The rain was pelting down so heavily it was hard to actually hear anything.

  ‘Let’s get back inside and dry out,’ said William. ‘I’m quite exhausted from all the excitement.’

  I closed the pilot’s door on the Yuneec and sheltered under the wing, looking out at the sheets of torrential rain falling all around. My flight suit suddenly felt woefully inadequate; it was not only pouring with rain, it was also quite cold.

  Someone stepped forward from the group and handed me a cape. I slung it around my shoulders and without a word we all set off back to the hall.

  I glanced around at the Yuneec as we trudged through the sticky mud. It looked undamaged resting in the corner of the field and it was only as I could see the position I landed in that I realised I was frighteningly near some very large trees. It was pure fluke that I hadn’t landed on them and once again ripped the Yuneec to shreds.

  As we approached the front door of Goldacre Hall I could see a crowd of people had gathered in the entrance lobby and under the porch roof to greet me.

  They were waving and cheering as we walked up the sodden path and the welcome I received when entering the Hall was nothing short of tumultuous. Well, as tumultuous as one multi-occupational household can muster.

  After taking off the sopping cloak and removing my cloud boots I stood up, a big grin on my face. I was genuinely happy to be back in the least insane place I’d visited.

  Along with William I entered the large dining area to yet another almost deafening cheer and round of applause. I know I was grinning like a fool but I also felt so welcome, so happy to be back in this charming place. I was shaking my head in disbelief at every face I recognised, but of course I was looking out for one particular person rather keenly.

  William pulled back a seat for me and gestured for me to sit. ‘If I remember correctly you will fall asleep in about an hour, so I’d better make sure you get something to eat.’

  ‘How long have I been away?’ I asked him as he sat opposite me on one of the long tables. A big crowd gathered around us immediately and it was obvious that everyone wanted to hear of my adventures. The noise of the crowd subsided, men holding children up to see stood at the back, older and more frail members of the Hall stood near the front.

  ‘Well, you left in early July, it’s now late November, so about four months I suppose.’

  I shook my head. I hadn’t kept any record of time since I’d left Gardenia but four months felt about right.

  ‘Okay,’ I nodded and noticed that someone had put a bowl of Gardenian food in front of me. ‘Oh wow, proper food.’

  ‘So where have you been?’ asked William.

  ‘And what was the food like?’ asked someone in the gathering around us.

  ‘And the weather?’ said someone else.

  ‘Were the people kind?’

  ‘Did you go into space?’

  ‘Did you go to Mars?’

  The questions tumbled out, so many and so fast I couldn’t hear them. I laughed.

  ‘Let the poor man have something to eat!’ said William. ‘You look ravenous, I think you’ve lost weight.’

  I started eating and of course, just as I expected, it was wonderful. The paste stuff on Cloud Eleven was close in flavour and texture, but at least this food looked the same in the bowl as it tasted in your mouth.’

  ‘Cloud paste,’ I said eventually, ‘is truly amazing. It’s like a cream-coloured paste but it changes into whatever you want when it’s in your mouth. It’s the weirdest experience I’ve ever had, but it does taste almost as good as this.’

  That caused a great deal of discussion and lots of incredulous repeats of the term ‘cloud paste’.

  ‘I’ve been to two alternate dimensions, both of them really bloody difficult to deal with.’

  ‘You’ve been through two folds!’ said William. ‘That is extraordinary.’

  ‘Yes, the first was a big city, I mean so huge it took up the whole of Gardenia. It’s right here where we are, don’t even begin to ask me how any of this works but I’ve been there, seen it with my own eyes. I lived there and I didn’t quite go mad.’ I took another mouthful and after chewing for a moment I said, ‘I got close on a couple of occasions though.’

  I swallowed and saw a crowd of faces staring at me, all of them dumbfounded.

  ‘Then today, I was living on a cloud.’

  ‘A cloud!’ came a chorus of disbelief.

  ‘Yes, well, a huge lighter-than-air structure that looks like a cloud.’

  ‘Heavens above,’ said William.

  I spent the rest of the evening in the dining area of Goldacre Hall answering questions about the Squares of London and the clouds of everywhere.

  ‘You cannot begin to imagine how big those clouds were,’ I explained. ‘Bigger than anything I’ve ever seen made by people, they literally were the size of a storm, a floating city with millions of people living on them.’

  ‘A floating city, how lovely,’ said a very old woman standing beside me.

  Everyone listened very intently, they didn’t sneer or tell me I must be off my rocker, they took everything I said very seriously.

  The main thing that stayed with me as my energy rapidly faded was the lack of surprise exhibited by everyone there. They clearly knew that my ridiculously fantastical tales were utterly plausible. They had no problem accepting the existence of alternate dimensions but they clearly didn’t have the desire or the technical ability to cross through the anomaly or fold to get there.

  As my eyelids began to get heavier and my speech started to slur, William suggested I rest. By this stage I was so flummoxed I’d have done anything; however, even in my advanced state of exhaustion I was disappointed to hear that someone else had taken over my room in the old barn. I was given a small attic room on the third floor of Goldacre Hall.

  Once I’d followed William up the stairs and registered the wonderfully familiar smells of the old house I felt almost deliriously happy.

  As soon as he showed me my room I turned and embraced him, thanked him and said that I may sleep for some time.

  31

  I can’t honestly even remember crossing the small room at the top of Goldacre Hall and collapsing on the delightfully cosy-looking built-in bed, but that’s where I woke up.

  My bleary eyes opened to see bright sunlight coming through the heavy curtains and covering the small dormer window. It was very quiet. Another thing I’d forgotten about Goldacre Hall was the incredible silence.

  The clouds hadn’t been noisy but there was a constant background hissing sound, a kind of aural awareness that I was in a pressurised vessel floating high in the atmosphere.

  The noise in the culverts was constant and fairly frightening, like the thunder of a distant battle.

  Although the Squares of London weren’t as noisy as a twenty-first-century city, it was still a city full of buildings and people so there was background noise all the time.

  Goldacre Hall was ridiculously peaceful and quiet. It was a few moments before my ears became accustomed to the low noise level and then I could just hear a song thrush outside the w
indow somewhere.

  I glanced over at something sitting in the middle of the floor. My bag, the one Kirubel had given me just before I left Cloud Nine and next to it a wooden box which looked a bit like a fruit box or something people ship tea in. Not polished and posh, just a rough timber box.

  I was pretty sure it hadn’t been there as I stumbled into bed the night before, but then again I had just cloud-jumped and I had been a waste of space soon after. Jet lag is nothing, it’s cloud lag that really does your head in.

  I got up and opened the box. It was full of my old stuff. My chinos, my shoes, socks, pants, my polo shirt, iPad, iPhone and wallet.

  I wondered for a moment if Grace had brought them to me. Had she come into the room while I was sleeping, placed the box down carefully on the floor and discreetly withdrawn?

  I could picture her doing that and I started to powerfully recall our time together. Then I sat up and decided that was probably a bad idea. I’d gone away in the middle of a storm, left her standing looking at me as I flew into the cloud. I had no right to be part of her life.

  The items of clothing were neatly folded and placed inside the box. Placed on top of them in a very orderly fashion were my personal electronics.

  I picked up the phone, still at 100 per cent charge but with no signal. I sat on the bed and looked at it. It still worked even though it was hundreds of years old.

  I opened the camera app and took a picture of myself. Yes, I took a selfie.

  I then started looking through pictures. I had a couple of thousand on the phone and even more in various albums on the iPad.

  The ones on the phone were mainly of large earth-moving machinery, me standing in vast open caste coal pits and quarries in various parts of the world. Me standing next to massive bulldozers or by the 20-foot high wheel of a giant earth-moving truck in Australia.

  My thumb flipped through the pictures without hesitation, muscle memory intact.

  Suddenly there was one of Beth in our kitchen, with her friend Maeve from Ireland and Maeve’s ridiculous Irish wolfhound that came to stay the weekend before I left. I could remember taking the picture, I had taken it something like seven months earlier, and yet it felt like years, decades ago. In fact it had been over two centuries.

  Beth looked wonderful, smiling at the camera, and the light coming through the side window in the kitchen lit her face beautifully.

  I looked at that picture for a long time. Getting back to Kingham in 2011 seemed like the most ridiculous notion I could have. It was painfully obvious I was only able to hop sideways through the various dimensions in 2211. Surely I was never going to be able to get back.

  I opened the bag and extracted my body suit from London and my favourite boots that Noshi had given me. I showered in the tiny smooth grey cubicle built into the small room and got dressed.

  I walked down the stairs and it was only then I noticed a distinct change in the weather. The sun was bright and the sky was clear, although I could tell the temperature outside was a great deal colder than when I’d left Gardenia back in the summer.

  An old lady ran up the stairs past me. She had to be in her nineties but she bounded up the stairs without a second thought.

  ‘Welcome back, Gavin,’ she said as she whooshed past me.

  ‘Thank you,’ I shouted behind me but she’d already disappeared.

  At the foot of the stairs a young boy was waiting. I didn’t recognise him at first.

  ‘Grace says if you want some nice tea she’s at Oak House,’ he said.

  ‘Henry?’ I said.

  ‘Yes, that’s me.’

  It was Grace’s son. In all the head-spinning pandemonium I’d been through I’d completely forgotten about Henry.

  ‘How are you, Henry?’

  ‘I’m very well thank you, Gavin, are you coming for tea and breakfast?’

  I smiled. ‘Yes, I would love to.’

  So I followed Henry out of the front door and into the cold air of an English, or I suppose Gardenian, November morning. This experience was bizarre on so many multiples of layers. For a start I knew where to go. I knew Oak House and of course I knew Grace. I felt bad that I’d forgotten about Henry and I also felt a little bit uncomfortable about the fact that I really hadn’t forgotten about Grace.

  The hedges either side of the path to Oak House were covered in brown leaves, some of the trees were already bare and the narrow path was covered in fallen leaves.

  We walked along in silence. Henry didn’t want to talk, that much I could register.

  I was, of course, full of questions about his mum but I contained them and we walked along in peace.

  As we approached the familiar structure of Oak House I started to feel tense. Here I was about to meet the mother of my first child. Even with my confused relationship with time I knew she wouldn’t have given birth to our child yet, but I had no idea what to expect.

  Henry approached the beautiful door that looked like wood but wasn’t and walked straight inside.

  I paused in the porch, bent down and pressed the release button on the back of my boots. They flopped out around my foot and I stepped inside.

  The sweet little kitchen was the first interior I’d seen when I arrived in Gardenia. It looked the same but the smell was delightful: roasted nuts, freshly baked bread and delightful warmth.

  Grace was standing by the kitchen counter wearing a floor-length red dress. The material was tight around her stomach that revealed, without question or mystery, the fact that she was very pregnant.

  ‘Hello, Gavin,’ she said with a kind smile. ‘I didn’t expect you to come back.’

  I smiled at her. She looked utterly stunning, there was something about the bloom of colour in her face that made her almost impossibly radiant.

  ‘Hello, Grace,’ I said. ‘I never expected to be back. But here I am.’

  ‘And for how long will you stay?’ she asked, the faintest smile playing on her beautiful lips.

  ‘Until the next anomaly, I am now equipped with a greater understanding and better technology to navigate through time,’ I said, trying to sound calm and all-knowing. In truth I had barely grasped any of the concepts Theda and Brad had spent so many hours trying to explain.

  ‘Do you know when the next anomaly is?’ asked Grace.

  ‘I’m not sure right now, I’d have to check my instruments but it should be quite soon.’

  ‘And where will you go?’

  ‘Back home,’ I said, ‘back to 2011, where I belong.’

  ‘Back to your wife,’ she stated and turned away from me.

  ‘Well, yes, that’s where I belong. I’m a bit of a fish out of water here,’ I said, hoping she would look back at me.

  ‘And are you well?’ she asked without looking.

  ‘Yeah, fine, pretty good actually. I’ve only just woken.’

  ‘I know,’ she said and then walked toward me and gave me a soft kiss on the cheek. ‘It’s nice to see you.’

  She returned to the kitchen counter, picked up a large steel pot and put it on the table along with some steel mugs.

  ‘I have just made some breakfast baps and Henry has made the most delicious strawberry jam, would you care to join us?’

  ‘I grew the strawberries myself,’ said Henry, putting a large steel container on the table. ‘I collected 26 kilos of them so I produced really a lot of jam. Everyone loves my jam.’

  ‘Sounds excellent,’ I said and sat down at the table. I stood up again immediately and said, ‘Can I do anything to help?’

  I think I must have done this because an inner alarm went off; I had sat down in the expectation of being waited on by a pregnant woman. As soon as I stood up I realised that however potentially thoughtful and empathetic this original thought might have been, the result could easily be
misinterpreted.

  I then became aware of just how tense and uncomfortable I felt being in the same dimension, geographical zone, indeed the same kitchen, as a woman I had made pregnant but who didn’t seem the least bit concerned about my role in her condition.

  ‘Please sit,’ said Grace kindly. ‘It’s no trouble, we have had a late start today and we’re having breakfast anyway. Hallam and Mitchell will be joining us soon.’

  I nodded and sat down. The awkwardness of being in Oak House came back to me at that moment. The fact that I never truly understood what was going on or who was related to whom made me feel tense.

  Grace sat opposite me, next to Henry. They were both looking at me the whole time. There was a period when I would have found that extremely uncomfortable, but by the time I arrived back in Gardenia I realised how much I’d changed. I was intrigued by their rather peculiar manners but I wasn’t upset or uncomfortable. I stared back.

  I took a sip of the sweet black tea Grace had given me and I was transported back to the first moment I realised I had flown through time. I could almost sense the very frightened and confused man I was back then, battling to make sense of a world gone insane. Now I felt a lot older and wiser, and more importantly, calmer inside.

  ‘So, how are you, Grace?’ I asked after a long silence.

  ‘I’m very well,’ she said.

  ‘And when is your baby due?’

  I had gone over this question in my mind a few times to make sure I structured it in the right way. Not ‘our baby’ or even ‘the baby’ but very specifically ‘your baby’.

  ‘In February next year,’ she said. ‘Henry is very excited about having a baby sister.’

  ‘I am,’ said Henry flatly.

  I was a little confused by his response. At first I couldn’t judge the tone. Was he genuinely happy about it or was he saying what was expected of him and actually he was dreading it? I watched him spread strawberry jam on a warm lump of bread. He was happy about it, I could sense it from the relaxed movements of his hands.

  ‘That’s great,’ I said.