Ordinary Thunderstorms

11

ADAM WAS FLYING ABOVE a dense cloudfield of supercooled cumulus, high over Arizona, the grey packed clouds stretching to the horizon. A cloud desert. Somehow he was both piloting the plane and at the same time supervising the dry-ice dispenser in the rear. Running beneath the wings of the plane were plastic tubes with small, lipped vents set in them at regular intervals. The plane dipped to one side and descended close to the cobbled surface of the cloudfield, flying a few feet above its gently shifting mass. What time of day was it? In the rear of the plane Adam flipped the switch on the high-pressure pump and tiny granules of frozen silver iodide, like fine sand, began to stream from the plastic vents on to the clouds below. The plane flew a course of a long oval, ten miles long and two miles wide, like a giant racecourse, the trajectory of its passage and the dusting of silver iodide revealed by a wide deepening trench appearing almost immediately in the cloud surface as the frozen ice crystals coalesced into water droplets. Down below the clouds, standing in a dry arroyo in the Arizona desert, Adam lifted his face to the sky as the first fat drops of the rain that he had made hit his brow and cheeks.

♦

Adam woke. He felt cold, although the sun was shining, and he had horrible nausea. He eased himself out of his sleeping bag, crawled a few feet away and vomited. Concussion, he thought, wiping his mouth and spitting: I must be still, be quiet, drink lots of water.

He hauled himself back into his sleeping bag and lay there, shivering, now growing conscious of aches beginning to make themselves felt about his body. Curiously, his head wasn’t sore but his balls hurt and so did his back and, worst of the lot, his left thigh and left shoulder were competing for first place in the throbbing-pain stakes. He remembered the dream, vividly, it was one of his recurring ones, but one he hadn’t had in months. Why was he dreaming about his old life when his new one was so immediately and dolorously present? He shed his sleeping bag again and checked out his body. He had a long thin bruise on his thigh — a lurid purple-blue — the skin only slightly broken, and on his left shoulder was a clear gash: his dirty, greasy shirt was slightly ripped at the shoulder and the rip was fringed with dried blood. He remembered — both injuries caused by that Mhouse-woman wielding his entrenching tool. He touched his forehead gently, feeling the gridiron of scabs, crusty under his exploring fingertips. He wondered what he looked like — a terrorist bomb casualty? A survivor from a car crash? Or a destitute, homeless person, victim of a brutal mugging?…

Back under his bush, he found himself recalling the dream. He had never seeded clouds from a plane — that was why they had built the cloud chamber. Plane trials and tests were too erratic, too easily disproved — that was why Marshall McVay himself had funded the building of the Yuma Cloud Chamber. They made their clouds, cooled them to the required temperature, then seeded them with dry ice or frozen silver iodide or salt or water droplets and measured the precipitation down below. All very straightforward and controlled.

He forced his thoughts to change — he had to stop thinking about his past, his old job, it was making him even more depressed — concentrating instead on the events of the previous night. He remembered the Mhouse-person bringing him clothes. He was still wearing her beige-grey, camouflage, mid-shin cargo pants and he could see the flip-flops a couple of yards away where he had kicked them off. And then the journey from the Shaftesbury Estate to Chelsea became patchy, something of a vague, troubled dream: buildings passing, car headlights and tail lights glaring, talking to Mhouse, her small cat face staring back at him, her body twisted round over the front passenger seat…Who was driving? He remembered her showing him her name, tattooed on the inside of her right forearm: ‘MHOUSE LY-ON’. What kind of name was that? ‘Mhouse’ pronounced ‘Mouse’, clearly. And then he had helped her over the fence of the triangle — a skinny little thing, with a pretty, snub-nosed, thin-eyed face. Yes…And then she had attacked him.

Why had she attacked him with such sudden violence? She had punched him and then kneed him in the balls — he winced at the pain-memory — then she laid about him with the entrenching tool. Why, for Christ’s sake? Christ — John Christ, of course, the unlikely answer came to him. Go to the Church of John Christ in Southwark, she had said, his fiendish Samaritan, they’ll help you.

Somehow he managed a laugh — it sounded cracked and strange to his ears — and he slipped out of his sleeping bag for the third time that morning to see what he had left in his campsite. The inventory did not take him long: she had stolen his raincoat and briefcase. The muggers had taken everything else, leaving him with worldly goods of three tins of baked beans, a gas stove, a saucepan, a knife-fork-and-spoon set, an entrenching tool and half a bottle of mineral water — non-sparkling. He sensed self-pity invade him and his eyes warm with tears. Yes, he felt sorry for himself — this was no sin, surely, under the circumstances? He had a dirty, torn shirt, underwear, a pair of socks, some tight, cropped camouflage cargo pants and flip-flops for his feet. Meagre assets. He thought of his new three-bedroom house in Phoenix, Arizona (now the property of his ex-wife, of course) — he could see its watered green lawns, the neat laurel hedge, the twin-car garage…It seemed like a parallel universe, or something that had existed aeons ago. Moreover, he had money in bank accounts in Arizona and in London — thousands upon thousands of dollars and pounds — and yet here he was crouched, hiding, battered, stinking, a fugitive hiding amongst the bushes and trees of a patch of waste ground by London’s river.

Thinking of Arizona and his Arizonan life brought the cloud chamber back into his mind. Only days ago he had been showing the interview panel at Imperial College the abstract for his half-completed monograph: ‘Hail suppression in multi-cell thunderstorms’. One of the panel (the woman) had been at the glaciation conference in Austin, Texas, and had heard him read his paper on ‘Silver iodide seeding and the production of biogenic secondary ice nuclei’. He had described to them his last experiment in the Yuma cloud chamber (before he resigned his post) that had been a highly successful reduction of hail swath from a beautifully formed cumulonimbus cloud, its anvil head just brushing the plexiglass roof of the chamber, nine storeys high. He had stood there on the viewing gantry watching the icy dust of the seeding crystals disperse and witnessed the near magical generation of a billowing warm updraft. Hardly any hail had fallen into the vast collecting trays below. His colleagues had broken into spontaneous applause.

Adam could taste the bitterness of frustration and disappointment in his mouth as he lit his camping-gas stove to heat a tin of baked beans. The smell of the gas and the odour rising from the cold beans as he tipped them into the saucepan made his gorge rise — but he knew he had to eat something.

Stop! he told himself abruptly, as he felt a scream of rage and anger building in him. Those days were gone, the cloud chamber was no more. All that was history, now. Adam Kindred, cloud-seeder, hail-suppressor, rain-maker was as real and tangible as a strip-cartoon superhero. He crouched on his haunches and concentrated on the here-and-now, spooning warm baked beans into his mouth and trying not to think about the life he had once led.

Two days later, Adam wondered if he was actually beginning to starve: he felt light-headed and, when he stood up, dizzy and unsure on his feet. It was twenty-four hours since he had finished his last tin of beans and he was now filling his plastic bottle with water from the Thames itself — brownish water with some sediment but the taste was acceptable and he needed to put something in his empty stomach. He felt oddly fearful since his attack — since he’d been jumped — frightened about venturing out from the security of the triangle — his small, known realm — into the pitiless, vast world of the city beyond. He had no money, for a start, not a brass penny, and unkempt hair and beard and his clothes — his torn shirt, stupid trousers and flip-flops — would draw curious glances, he was sure, and the last thing he wanted was people staring at him. He felt safe in the triangle: the near-constant traffic noise reassured him; the tide on the river rose and fell; boats and barges passed. No one came to the triangle and at night the strings of glowing bulbs on Chelsea Bridge seemed festive, almost Christmassy, and cheered him up.

The next morning, at the first glimmerings of dawn, he climbed down to the small beach to fill his water bottle. There ‘was another rubber tyre half buried in the mud, numerous broken plastic bottles, some driftwood and a tangled coil of blue nylon string. He picked up the string — thinking vaguely that this was the sort of useful jetsam that a castaway might use — and estimated that it must be at least twenty foot long. What a waste and what irresponsible bargee or seaman had tossed this over the side? — sea birds could become tangled up in it, propellers snagged. He looked around him; the light was beautiful, peachy-grey, and the air was cool. Already the river birds were flying and soaring about: gulls, crows, ducks, cormorants. He saw a heron flap inelegantly by, heading for Battersea Park and its tall trees. There were Canada geese on the river as well, he knew, and, all of a sudden, the phrase ‘cooked his goose’ came into his head. He looked at the beach — the tide was on the turn — maybe he had half an hour before it would be too light and he’d be spotted. He clambered back up the chains to the triangle.

It didn’t take him long — scouring his abandoned tins produced half a handful of cold beans. Grabbing his wooden box, he was down on the beach again in seconds. The trap he constructed was rudimentary in the extreme but he had faith that it would work: one end of the box was propped up on a driftwood stick to which his new acquisition of blue nylon string had been attached. He shaped a small cone of cold baked beans on a flat pebble and placed it under the propped-up box. Then he climbed back up the chains, holding the end of the string between his teeth and settled down out of sight behind a bush to wait. He wasn’t seriously expecting a goose to take his bait but he was hoping for a duck — a small, plump duck would do nicely — though he’d happily settle for a mangy London pigeon. He waited, telling himself to be patient, to muster a hunter’s calm and steadfast patience, if he could. He waited, and waited. Cormorants drifted downstream with the ebb tide, then dived under the water. A couple of crows flapped on to the beach and pecked around the pebbles at the water’s edge showing no interest in his beans at all. Then he heard a dry whirr of wings, like an angel overhead, and a big white-and-grey gull swished past above him, banked steeply, stalled, and touched down, immaculately, delicately, with almost ostentatious care. The crows ignored it, methodically turning over their pebbles, pecking at bits of weed. The gull made straight for the baked beans, stooping under the propped end of the box…Adam tugged his string, the prop clattered away and the box fell.

“Easier said than done,” Adam remarked to himself, out loud, as he contemplated his box, now shifting about agitatedly on the mud beach as the panicked gull flapped and skittered inside. Easier planned than executed. But he was hungry: he had caught his prey, he had fuel, a knife and roast flesh was what he craved. There was nothing for it — he reached quickly under the box and grabbed the gull by a leg. Its hard yellow beak stabbed viciously at his forearm, drawing blood, until Adam battered the bird senseless with the driftwood prop. He rinsed his forearm in the river — more wounds, who cared? — and went back to pick up his limp and lifeless gull, its broad white wings thrown wide. As he did so a big laden barge appeared under Chelsea Bridge heading upstream. There was a man standing on its prow staring over at him. Adam moved the gull behind his back and waved, casually. The man did not wave back.

Adam plucked the gull and somehow, with the knife from his knife-fork-and-spoon set, managed to gut it, throwing the intestines in the river. Then he cut slivers of greasy flesh from its surprisingly raw-boned body and, pronging them with the fork, held them in the blue flame of the gas jet until they blackened. The taste of the hot meat was gamey but inoffensive, though the flesh was sinewy and required much chewing, washed down with draughts of Thames water. He ate as much as he could and flung the carcass into the river, the tide now beginning to surge upstream. Then he sat down on his seat of three rubber tyres and wept.

♦

It had been good to cry, he told himself, later: it was a salutary release of emotions, very necessary after everything he had been through — the mugging, the trauma of that first surprise attack, the relief of rescue, then the trauma of the second attack. At the darkest hour of the night he left the triangle for the first time in days and went into Chelsea to scavenge. He felt better, calmer and more determined, as he rummaged in dustbins and scampered cautiously down empty streets, peering in basement wells. It was amazing what people left out in their rubbish. By dawn he had managed to acquire a newish, white denim jacket (one breast pocket disfigured by a stain of black ink, as if from a leaking biro), a pair of golfing shoes that had been left on a back step — a little tight but more tolerable footwear than the flip-flops. He had also eaten from the rubbish bins of fast-food franchises — cold chips, the end of a kebab, half-inches of cola and other fizzy drinks remaining in the bottom of tin cans. He returned to the triangle belchingly replete and newly attired — he almost looked normal, he thought. But what was uplifting him was the realisation that he could survive, now. It was as if the roasted gull-meat had strengthened and emboldened him in some way, had given him new resolve and heart. He had some of the squawking cheek and strutting arrogance of a big white seagull. Once the scab on his forehead had healed and disappeared he would venture forth with more confidence and range more widely. Perhaps, he thought, and this was a measure of his new frame of mind, he might even take Mhouse’s advice and go to Southwark and see what help the Church of John Christ might offer him.