Cloudfall: Chapter 10
Resentment to Rest
Contents | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 | Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11
It happened again. Shay had exploded. Craig McLaren walked down Queen Margaret Drive, heading into the morning sun. This anger was stacked on top of his previous annoyances: not enough time to read his script, too many interruptions while reading it and an almost total lack of sleep.
Coming here was supposed to be better.
It hadn’t quite cashed out that way yet, though. Shay’s “explosion” (Ben’s terminology for tantrum) eclipsed anything Craig had seen back home. It was a week until Shay would go for her procedure. Craig still didn’t understand what was involved, but at this stage, he didn’t care. Things had to change, one way or another
Squinting into the insistent Scottish sun, he audibly lamented having no sunglasses. It drew a dirty look from an old woman perusing a Saturday morning’s bounty outside the greengrocers.
Then there were the hurtful words. He cursed himself, again, for shouting, for what he said. His dad deserved it, but not Shay. She was a victim. He knew that. But that temper, the short fuse and the high explosive yield were a gift from their mother. He had tried to stop the ignition and prevent the explosion but to no avail. The detonation was huge, the words incendiary. He tried, too, to stop pouting on the flight here and during the move into the new place. He had tried so hard to suck it up, keep everything bottled up and hidden behind a stoic facade. In the end he had failed at it all. There was simply too great a volume for such a small vessel.
Should he be punished for telling his father what he thought? He didn’t think so. Ben had two children; both had needs and sure, Shay needed this operation, the procedure, but did that mean that everything he wanted was to take a back seat? He was enrolled in a nice school, wasn’t hungry and wanted only for what he could not have; the upper decks of Maslow’s pyramid.
Knowing this, though, offered little solace.
This knowledge hadn’t prevented him from shouting at Ben, saying hateful, hurtful things - un-retractable things. As soon as he raised his voice, he realised his mistake. Too late, though. Shay was inconsolable, and Ben was defeated, broken behind the slammed front door. It became harder to tell what he was angrier about, what he said, or where he was. He tried to calm his mind, focusing on the script, this small role the school had recommended him for. The audition might just be a path to something, a chance in this shitty little country.
His phone buzzed, and Craig took it from his pocket. Andrea.
“Hey, what’s up?”
She began to complain down the phone to him as he walked. Trivial details about her brother, things her father asked her to do that were “soooo unreasonable like you just don’t know.”
Taking out the bins and doing your homework seemed perfectly reasonable to Craig. He couldn’t imagine Andrea getting up at sunrise, making Shay her breakfast, coaxing her from her bedroom, and playing the same game they played every morning to ensure she ate without an episode. He had only known Andrea for a few weeks, and they had hung about and made out. This short time was enough for him to gauge that her life was a million miles from his own: Privileged, pampers and unbothered by siblings with special needs. Her troubles were petty inconveniences. Her red lines were just part and parcel of being grown up. As she complained, he waited patiently to tell her of his woes, how Shay had “exploded”, how he hadn’t had enough time to rehearse, to learn his lines to his satisfaction. The gap didn’t arrive. Eventually, he attempted to bring it on himself.
“Hey, you remember I have that audition today?”
Andrea did not. Nor did she wish him luck. Instead, she continued, her mode set to transmit only, “I mean, like, he just is always on my case, Craig…”
He chose to end the call and switch his phone off. He could claim that it ran out of power, despite phones rarely doing that nowadays. His stock of patience was gone. So he pushed silently down the sun-split street, past the cafes and shops of the pedestrianised Byres Road, the mock antiquity of Glasgow University, down through Chinatown and the community gardens to the bridges, the Clyde and the BBC. His mind was hung, drawn and quartered, his thoughts scattered to the four winds. He was to be Bully No.4 in a teen drama.
The reading was off, though. His mind was filled with real life, and he brought a distracted and frantic air to his performance. He knew he had wasted his time as the stage door slapped shut behind him, and the darkened BBC studios became bright Glaswegian streets.
This fucking city.
There was no rest or respite for him here. No solace in the sandstone tenements or under august trees. He longed for deli ham on rye, hand tossed slices and the frenetic thrum of his home town. He wished to be native again. He ached to flow against the refugees and exiles pouring from America’s bleeding heart, to return to that imperfect beauty, the tarnished grandeur and the sheer scale of his own city. The air was different here; it didn’t vibrate and ring as it was channelled through the artificial canyons of Manhattan. Glasgow pavements were everything Manhattan’s sidewalks weren’t. The public transport was sterile here, whilst New York’s subway was rickety, old and groaning with life.
“I’m old enough to go back. You won’t let me, you’re fucking selfish!”
Ben hadn’t liked that. Craig supposed that’s why he said it. Walking now, alone, the breeze stirring around his feet seemed to gather his thoughts like autumn leaves, loose and free, forever depositing them back in this inescapable moment with Ben. Why had he said what he had? Was it just because he was pissed off? His father had dismissed his requests to go home.
“And we won’t talk about it again,” said Ben.
But I ain’t done talking.
“Well, maybe I’m a patriot, not ready to turn my back on our country like you, traitor!”
Were those his own words? Why had they come out like that? He longed to be back, to once again be where everything was familiar. He had sought familiar voices with news of home, alone at night in his bedroom. He took comfort in the voices of his people if somewhat jarred by what they said, at least at first. But it made sense, if you just gave it a chance. He searched for the comings and goings of home, and something had found him in his search: a voice, a sentinel of reason in a chaos of data. He listened passively at first, the facts collapsing to a soliloquy delivered like a lullaby. Reid Ralston, that voice, taking what was confusing and contradictory, making it conciliatory, reducing it to beguiling simplicity. It was comfortable, the words, the ideas, the notions. They rang true, the themes, the tone and the anger. He had grown up around so much background anger, and now, here in Scotland, the lack of it was deafening. Ralston’s holo projected face spoke to him, finding him when he was alone and isolated and giving him guidance and certainty. His smooth voice never cracked, always delivering the news, tailored just for him. He spoke of home and the struggles there and even dared to name the enemies, the sources of the struggle. Ralston’s honied words undergirded his facts and never ran diametrically to his emotions. There was no conflict, at least internally. There was a rightness to things, a veracity in his voice.
What did Ben not get?
Had ever asked himself what was it to be American? Had he ever considered the unpayable debt he owed the land and his ancestors? Had he ever felt so humble before such a mountain of obligations whilst no one demanded payment? This was freedom; the only obligations that required recompense were those he entered into freely, like a contract or a promise. He had signed nothing, vowed nothing and now here he was with these old-world goons clinging to their stupid little rock.
He walked on with his head bowed against everything but traffic, earphones in, Reid Ralston’s calming words spinning his mind back to where he wanted to be—the people he wanted to be with.
My kind.
He stood at a busy junction in the city centre, removing his earphones. This was Sauchiehall Street. He had embarrassed himself the first time he tried to say it aloud. Andrea had laughed, but not in a malicious way. Now, he stood on the same spot they had when she had laughed and watched as the trams and trolley buses emerged from their tunnels, spilling briefly overground. The older buildings in their large yawning windows looked down at him, alone beside the thin trees and silently gliding trams.
What am I doing here?
There was something smug about these people, these Europeans. What were they up their own asses about anyway?
They didn’t feel patriotic, and if they did, then where were the symbols? Barely any flags flew. Their pride was smug, sub-surface, lurking like an attack sub. His pride wasn’t afraid to be noticed - it wasn’t embarrassed; it sailed defiantly like an aircraft carrier. His love of home was real, tangible and available for the whole world to see. These people? Their European smugness and over what? They hadn’t built what Americans had. They had not carved an entire continent in their own image. Instead, they played in the shadows of old ruins built by once-great empires. Their pride was a sham, that of a child presenting a drawing to an adult, one they had stolen for someone older and better at art. He was a proud beacon in a sea of modest mediocrity. The only benefit he could feel from being here was how much it recharged his fervour for his home. The foreignness of Scotland and the different speed of life in Europe, in general, made him more American, proud, and patriotic.
He walked the streets of Glasgow, seeing only what was there to avoid it. Eventually, he stopped, turned his phone on, and decided to be present in the here and now. The phone silently rang, and the messages piled high: Ben wanted him to watch his sister, Andrea wanted him to listen to her pish, and a producer wanted him to know he didn’t get the part.
What about what I want?
What did he want? He wanted out, away, to be home. He wanted to jump on that insanely fast jet and skim across the pond, back to Lady Liberty and the smells and sounds he loved. By the River Kelvin, he watched the fast-moving water turn Archimedes screws on its way to the Clyde. He thought of the machines and their duty to help power the city. He was like them, lying there, all duty, no reward. Soon, his sister would enter the university hospital to be operated on. He found a mosaic of emotions within him, each tile different but part of a cohesive whole. He found he could not resolve the entire image. There was structure alright, but he couldn’t discern it or parse the meaning. It was just a fractured mess.
Back at the flat, Craig was welcomed with chaos and madness. Shay was screaming, bucking, and thrashing, and Ben was trying to keep a cool lid on the hot box he held. Instinctively, Shay reached for Craig, and he took his sister, struggling with her weight and soothing her cries. She was getting too big for paroxysms to be managed easily.
“Hey, hey, c’mon now,” he said, bouncing and rocking her.
They sat by the big bay window, and Craig pointed out the trees and the birds. She relented, happy to be in a safe space, her energies spent. When Craig was finally able to put his sister down on the couch, enough time had elapsed for Ben to dry his eyes and restore his happy-go-lucky demeanour.
“I didn’t get the part, Dad,” said Craig, head hung low.
His father hugged him, and Craig could feel his facial muscles tightening, clenching in pain. Both of them were at breaking point now. But neither could say it because the saying would be an admission of failure, a concession to defeat. And they had come so far, halfway across the world.
At dinner, Craig asked his father again if he could return home, even if it were just for a week. But Ben shook his head, “You might not get back out of the country right now, son. Things are getting crazy over there. I honestly think we left at the right time.”
Rage boiled within Craig, but he was too tired to let it out. He remembered his regret at losing his temper earlier, opting to go to bed instead. Was this what being grown up was? To effectively register tiredness and not fight it? Or was this just defeat? Perhaps just the realisation that no amount of angry words had brought Craig any measure of tranquillity.
He lay in bed, the foreign moon bright in the strange sky piercing his weak blinds. So much compromise and time spent on things that were just not home. Eventually, he slipped into a tepid sleep, longing for his mother, cold and alone, as he woke in the wee hours, not far from where he had first drifted off. Eventually deep sleep came for him, carrying him beyond care and concern, helping him to block his worries and woes for the time being. Each sleep until Shay’s procedure would follow the same arc.
Then the day came, and Craig found he could not face Ben. He helped dress Shay and prepare her for going under the knife but said nothing to his father. Perhaps he read the anxiety on Ben’s face, and maybe somewhere inside him, he knew that he was like his father, bottling up what he could, unable to share and explain for fear that saying something -anything - aloud was to make it happen. A baked-in, genetic-level superstition. A passive gift from his father to counteract the active one from his mother.
He left for school, knowing he was getting dumped by Andrea. But he didn’t care. All his thoughts were on Shay.
Andrea chose to make a meme diary, denouncing her “stupid ex-boyfriend” and his “fucking atrocious kissing”. The memes were holo-sprayed around the school, and rather than take them down and use his phone to remove and absorb the digital graffiti, Craig just left content to be truant at lunchtime.
Fuck that bitch.
Some encouragement was sent to his phone. His friends, who had warned him that she was selfish, ‘a bit mental, pal’, had spoken to other classmates and informed them of what he was going through and what was happening to his sister. Some of it landed, some of it eliciting a patina of teenage pity.
Craig didn’t care.
He went to the library, the cinema, and then home. All with Ben’s blessing.
“Don’t worry,” his father texted, “just take the time off. I’ll deal with the school.”
On the ward, the first chance Craig got, he was with Shay by her bed, looking at her bandages and the tubes going in and out of her. She slept whilst machines beep-beeped reassurance. He held her hand, careful not to disturb the tubes entering it. In the doorway, Ben chatted with Selina.
Her.
She made vaguely reassuring noises, though Craig was deaf to the words. They were technical but hopeful. All he did catch was Ben repeating, “So in two weeks, we’ll get her home.”
It was a day short of the full fortnight when Shay returned home. Ben carried her into the house, her form small and quiet, her eyes hooded but busy. She slept a lot, both McLarens standing vigil, neither able to rest. Ben reminisced about how it was like having his newborn son home for the first time, each sneeze or wheeze from Craig’s cot a Def Con two event. Eventually, Craig slept after a thirty-hour watch. He fell into deep dreamlessness and awoke to a small blank face that watched him and a small hand holding his own. Unbidden, tears washed his face, and he felt something positive for the first time in a long time.
“You ok?” asked Craig.
The little head nodded, got under his blankets, and clung to him tightly. There were no words, rage, or yelling, just the mellow satisfaction he felt when he rocked her to sleep—his baby sister. She was here, and maybe, just maybe, all this pain had been worth it.