Eric McCormack - Cloud

At home, in my bed each night, I used to imagine a thousand scenarios in which she lay in my arms — two lovers brought together by destiny. Under the damp stains of the ceiling, she was the focus of all my sensual fantasies.

ONE AFTERNOON near the end of that second year, I decided to say something to her. She’d come to the study hall, sat opposite me as usual, and had been reading and making notes for at least two hours.

I’d rehearsed over and over what I was going to say and was in the process of taking a few deep breaths before introducing myself. Just then the main doors at the end of the study hall swung open noisily and a man came in. He was a plump man of maybe thirty-five; he wore a formal dark suit and had a shiny face, his scalp showing through his thin, combed-back hair. He must have been a professor. He walked over to our table and put his hand on the shoulder of the girl opposite.

“Deirdre,” he said, “I’m sorry I’m late.” His voice was a bit loud for the study hall.

She smiled up at him and touched his hand with hers.

“I’ll just get my things together,” she said, barely above a whisper.

I kept my eyes on my book but heard her gathering her books and notes, putting them into her leather satchel. She stood up and he helped her on with her coat, which had been draped over a nearby chair.

I still kept my eyes on my book.

“Goodbye,” I heard her say.

I looked up and saw she was looking right at me, that it was me she was talking to.

“Good luck with your studies,” she said.

I mumbled a thank you.

She and the plump man then walked hand in hand to the main doors, which swung shut after them.

I WAS SO ELATED by her speaking to me that I didn’t at first realize what her goodbye might mean. In the weeks following, I went to the study hall every day as usual, looking for her — I thought of her now as “Deirdre”—but there was no sign of her. Then I began to worry.

In fact, the weeks became months, the months years — two whole years went by and she didn’t reappear. Even when I got to my fourth and final year, I still couldn’t quite accept the reality that I’d never see her again.

Over and over, I cursed myself for not having spoken to her during all the months she’d sat at my table.

Even though I’d only heard her voice on that one occasion, only heard her name once, barely knew her, I was sure I must be in love with her. I tried not to contaminate that love by wondering too much what her relationship to the plump man might be. For a long time, her exit from my life seemed to me the worst thing that could ever happen.

But something much worse did happen, at the end of March in my last year at university. It was on one of those early spring days when snow sometimes fell briefly on the city. It would even beautify the streets of the Tollgate for a short time before melting and laying bare their grim reality once more.

On the snowy morning in question, a Friday, my father had a day off work. As I was about to go out the door to catch the bus, he was standing at the window, smoking one of his morning quota of cigarettes and watching the snow fall.

“You’d better wear a cap,” he said. “It’s NOT NOT snowing outside.” He snorted this through a cloud of cigarette smoke— he’d adopted the double negative as one of his favourite jokes. “Right, Nora?” My mother was clearing up the remnants of breakfast. “Did you hear that? It’s NOT NOT snowing?”

My mother frowned, as ever, at these word games. Our latest cat, long-haired Milly, was clinging to Mother’s neck as she worked, loudly purring her love. She was a cat with so little faith in language she rarely responded even to her own name.

My mother came over to see me off.

“Do you have to go on such an awful day?” she said.

I nodded my head, though I wouldn’t have minded staying home. But today we’d have the last lectures of the term and there might be some hints of what would appear in the final exams.

I put on a wool cap to please them. When I got down the stairs into the chill wind and snow, I was tempted to climb back up into the warmth and comfort of home. But I didn’t.

AT THE UNIVERSITY, I attended final lectures. As usual, around one o’clock — by then, the snow had turned into a heavy, cold rain — I went to the study hall and prepared myself for an afternoon’s work.

I’d barely opened my book when the entire building trembled, ever so slightly, for three or four seconds. The students at other tables looked around, puzzled. The trembling stopped and we heard a rumble outside, perhaps a clap of thunder in the freakish winter weather. Everything became quiet again and we got on with our work.

At four o’clock, since it was the last day of term, I decided to take an earlier bus home. All traces of the snow had been washed away and the rain was now only a cold drizzle. The bus made good time, for the traffic was fairly light. I got off at my usual stop and began walking the last half mile home. My mind was so full of the upcoming exams that I wasn’t at all ready for what was in store for me when I went round the last corner into our street and saw a crowd of spectators gathered there.

They were looking at the tenement I lived in. The middle part of it — where our apartment as well as a dozen others ought to have been — was now only a ragged gap, as though a tooth had been ripped out of a huge jaw. All that was left was a deep crater and smouldering rubble. Fire trucks and soldiers and policemen were milling around. The crowd of spectators was watching the scene from behind a wooden barrier.

In a state of shock, I pushed my way through to the barrier and told a policeman standing there that this was where I lived. Did he know if my parents were all right?

All he knew was that a crew of city engineers had arrived in the morning to try and remove the unexploded bomb that had been buried behind our tenement since the war. Something had gone wrong and the bomb had exploded. The policeman took my arm and guided me to an emergency trailer parked along the street where I could inquire about survivors.

The soldier in charge of the trailer gave me the blunt facts: the crew of city engineers, along with all living persons in the affected apartments, had either been blown to pieces or incinerated in the resulting inferno. He was very sorry if my parents were in there. Soldiers and policemen were in the process, right now, of gathering whatever body parts they could find. They’d been at it since the explosion had occurred at one o’clock — the noise was so loud it had been heard all over the city.

That was just the time when I was settling down in the study hall, felt the trembling, and heard the rumble.

LONG INTO THAT EVENING I waited, hoping my mother or father might have gone for a long walk and were miraculously unscathed. Of course, I didn’t really believe it — they never went for long walks. They didn’t appear.

Near midnight, all work on the crater stopped. I was taken, along with the other remnants of families who for one reason or another weren’t at home when the explosion occurred, to a charity hostel where we were allocated rooms.

There, for two days, I spent most of my time sitting alone in the tiny room they gave me. My life seemed empty and pointless. At times, I could hardly breathe for sobbing. The two people whose love I’d taken for granted as the foundation of my existence had been obliterated. Yet I couldn’t quite grasp the absoluteness of their deaths. I particularly hoped my mother had managed to get to the end of the book she’d been reading. Nothing used to annoy her more than having to leave a book unfinished.

From time to time during those two days, I’d fall asleep from exhaustion in spite of my efforts to stay awake. I didn’t want to sleep because, in my dreams, my parents were still as alive as ever. Each time I’d wake I’d have to confront afresh the awful realization of their deaths. Like them, I was now an orphan.