Fiction by Robert Nisbet
Friday, July the twenty-first.
The journey from Gatwick was easy enough. Placid, six hours or so. But after an hour or two, I became aware of the couple across the way from me. They were mother and daughter, by the sound of it, and very English, genuine countryside types. You could almost picture them in tweeds, tramping along bridleways, accompanied by Basset hounds, the mother with a headscarf. (Whoa. Slow down now, Julia. That’s the feature writer in you taking over. You’re on holiday.)
It seemed that the girl might be disabled in some way, it wasn’t quite clear how. They were kind and cheerful people though and I’d quite liked having them across the way, even though we’d only exchanged a few words. But when we landed in Hamilton, our aisle had to file out very, very slowly in their wake. Clearly she had some problem.
The airport was hot, so hot, so humid, but Harry, meeting me, said, That’s Bermuda in July. We’ll get a thunderstorm tomorrow at three. Yeah, sure, I said, but he said, No, that’s our climate, babe. It’s so, so predictable. Honestly. It gets hotter and hotter, humidity building, for just three days or so, then …Whop … a cloudburst and it’s cool and settled again.
Saturday the twenty-second.
Harry was right enough, the heat this morning got desperate and at ten to three, we dived into a spacious café, everyone in sight did. We had a grandstand view, the wide street emptying, then, as he’d said … storm.
And it deluged, oh, it hammered, across the empty street. I think I was impressed as much as anything. Then I looked and saw, just across the street … Oh hell, where was Harry? … loo or somewhere … but look. Oh God. It was the mother and daughter from the plane. They can’t have been told, they were out in it. They were almost … well, not almost, they were … staggering in the weight of the water, the force of it. The girl’s disability was very clear now, her posture was wildly uneven, but the mother just stood by her girl, got her close to the wall, steadied her, trying somehow to fend off the storm.
Then, just as I’d started yelling for Harry and he’d wandered into view, three waiters ran out, into the sheet of rain … and dear God, even our eyes could barely penetrate it. They went racing across from the café, gathering in a bunch, a shield, and helped keep the daughter steady.
Five minutes and the storm had gone. Like that. Storm. Bang. Bermuda. And the waiters led them back, the mother, the daughter, back in to the café, gave them a chance to dry, then said, Let’s get you tea. Traditional English, with buttered toast.
Robert Nisbet is a Welsh writer who had many short stories published in his native land, before switching to poetry in the 2000s. Many of his poems have appeared in both Britain and the USA since then, and he is now switching back to shorter fiction.
