Clouded Yellow
By Caroline Dormer
In November 1936, there weren’t yet telephones on the island, so his grandparents left their dog at the cottage when his mother went into labour.
He had always loved hearing the story of his birth. How the rain had come horizontally off the coast in steely sheets, how his grandfather had sat at the window watching the track turn to sludge, how he had just shrugged on his wax coat to head over to the cottage himself when he saw the black blur of fur bolting across the field. But his favourite part of story was the small vial his grandfather had untied from the dog’s collar to read the scribbled note inside. Come tomorrow to meet your grandson, Albert.
He’d always been proud of his name. A good strong name. Albert stares at it now, written in neat cursive on the christening invitation from his daughter.
‘How lovely,’ he says, as he slips it under the gaudy pasty magnet she bought him in Cornwall. ‘I’ll have a think about it.’
‘We’ve got to get you off the island sometime, Dad.’
His daughters joke about how he never leaves, but he likes life on this comma of land that hangs off the coast.
After tea, she hovers in the drive, looking around the cul-de-sac of identical one-bedroom bungalows.
‘We’d love to have you at the christening,’ she says, flattening her lips into a smile and widening her eyes.
‘We hate to think of you out here all alone.’
Albert didn’t like to think of himself that way either. He has always been solitary and there was a virtue in keeping your head down and yourself to yourself, or so he’d been taught. His childhood was spent up on the grassy clifftops, out from under his mother’s feet, with the dog that had announced his birth – though Albert never remembered her bolting across the fields. She picked her way along the path behind him and would lie on the grass, eyes closed, grey nose to the sky, panting as he watched the waves break on the beach below and poked at the quivering wildflowers.
By the time his daughters were born, a new estate was spreading across the clifftops and by the time they were teenagers most people went to the mainland for work and school. When he came home from the workshop at noon on a Saturday, the girls only ever wanted a lift along the straight strip of asphalt, too taken with friends, the cinema, the shopping centres and the New Romantics to fawn over the wildflowers of Dorset and their improbable names.
Lily-of-the-valley and pellitory-of-the-wall,
Bulbous buttercups and delicate fairy-flax,
The lesser and the greater water parsnip,
Pignut and hogweed, cow-wheat and cowslip,
Pheasant’s eye and mouse-ear,
Colt’s foot and sheep’s bit,
Wound-wort and stitch-wort.
That night, he goes to sleep under the slow blink of lighthouse. He dreams of the wildflowers and the drone of insects in dry grass.
He is weary when he wakes. The heat and hum of his dream has settled over the bungalow and he stirs it up like pollen as he shuffles along the hallway. The kitchen is thick with it. It swirls around him, spiralling in eddies as he reaches for his mug, as he shakes bran flakes into a bowl. He jumps when the pint of milk he buys once a week rattles in the fridge door and realises he is clinging to the countertop.
He knows the colour of this haze, a sickly yellow that clings to everything and sucks at his limbs. It is an accusing colour that floods his kitchen, pulling him into the whirl of it.
***
He’s eight, on the clifftops in springtime, looking out at the sea where a yellow cloud is spreading across the horizon, rolling towards him. His hands flutter at his hip, but he has left his gas mask at home because he doesn’t like the way the box bumps at his body. He can hear the siren at the lighthouse and the far-off wooden whack of a gas rattle. The dog, deaf, pants by his side. After all those drills at school, still he sits and watches the yellow cloud crawl over the sea.
It creeps towards the fishing boats coming in from their morning’s catch. The other boys at school are always talking about what the gas does to you. He gags at the thought of the fisherman’s pustulating skin, their tears and vomiting as they gasp like the fish they’ve caught in a tangle of nets at the bottom of their boat.
He thinks of his mother, curved over the washboard, hauling a bedsheet up and down its ridges, her fingertips puckering in the soapy water. He thinks of the way she had lifted a hand and waved as he ran down the garden path. Is she running now, hands dripping, to the shelter? Or is she out on the clifftop calling for him and his grandparents’ deaf dog?
The siren stops and he looks across the coast path to the lighthouse. He can hear the tinny sound of the tannoy. People begin to gather around the lighthouse like ants clustering around a dropped strawberry at a picnic. On the beach below there is whooping and laughter.
He looks back to the sea and watches the yellow cloud shimmer and crumble before him. His shorts are wet. He buries his face in the grass at the thought of being found like this. In the cocoon he makes of his body, the smell of his own piss mixes with the smell of soil. The huge swarm of butterflies rushes up the cliff-face and crashes over him like a wave breaking at the shoreline.
When he uncurls, a butterfly is flexing its wings on a stalk of grass in front of him. A pale clouded yellow. The wings flick between pale yellow and marigold, like a magician turning a card between his fingers.
***
His tea has gone cold. He throws it down the sink and turns to look at the invitation, the only item pinned in the centre of the white expanse of fridge. His stomach lurches when he wonders why she didn’t write Dad. Or Grandad.
He tries to busy himself for the rest of the morning. He agonises over the cryptic crossword, writes half a shopping list, fiddles with a few pieces of twine on the tomato plants in his greenhouse. In the afternoon, he walks to the lighthouse where seagulls, fat from tourists’ fish and chips, gather around the café tables and picnic benches. In the fresh air, the yellow cloud thins. Dispersed by the clifftop breeze, the island only shimmers with it. He sits on a bench and looks out across the sea. It is a very different sea now, ploughed with the regular froth of passenger ferries and chequered with the shadows of cargo ships.
From a distance of some eighty years, he stares at the horizon, trying to rationalize it. He knows now that on the other side of it, wildflowers had sprung from the wounded earth, that the clouded yellows had gathered and gathered around them until they spilled across the sea.
Still, the yellow cloud colours his dream that night. It creeps over the sea and under the door of his greenhouse. His tomatoes blacken and shrivel into rotten chrysalises from which the clouded yellows explode until the whole greenhouse is full of their fluttering.
Caroline Dormor is a writer, translator, proofreader and teacher living near Venice, Italy. She has a research background in medieval Italian literature and is currently working on a novel set in thirteenth-century Siena as well as a screenplay with her writing partner.
She is particularly interested in human relationships with the environment and the importance of non-human entities in the stories we tell about ourselves and our society.
She began writing short stories and flash fiction around two years ago. This is her first award.
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