‘Dead?’ I queried, in the rather off-hand manner of the semi-orphan (for my father, you will have noticed, is absent from my own story), and Olivia said, yes, dead and by her own hand, inconveniently gassing herself on Olivia’s tenth birthday.
Andrea suddenly ducked under the table to avoid Heather. Heather – the priggish, rather frightening girl who had hijacked the women’s liberation group – shared a flat with Andrea, one of those university places where no-one knows each other at the beginning of the year and no-one likes each other by the end. It was also one of those flats where everyone had their own provisions so that their rather small Hotpoint fridge contained, for example, five pints of individually labelled milk and there were constant arguments over purloined butter and pilfered cornflakes. Heather went so far as to mark the levels of her tomato sauce bottles and weigh her blocks of margarine.
Heather, making a beeline for the hapless Andrea, was wearing a skinny-rib, polo-necked sweater that made a feature of her small unrestrained breasts and surprisingly prominent nipples which bounced hypnotically as she walked.
‘She thinks I ate one of her Dairylea,’ Andrea sniffed, ‘as if. One triangle has a million calories.’ Luckily for Andrea, Heather was distracted by a drunken rugby player committing unspeakable practices and unnatural acts.
I noticed Olivia staring at Proteus, very intently, as if she was trying to work out a particularly knotty Logic problem. Like Bob, Olivia was doing a joint degree in English and Philosophy. Unlike Bob, she was set to get a first. Her preoccupation with Proteus allowed Kevin’s tormented gaze to creep up as far as her knees. He was clutching a bit of The Chronicles of Edrakonia, now entering its fourth volume, which was very much the same as the previous three volumes.
‘The Lady Agaruitha,’ he said in a low voice to me, because for some reason I had been singled out a long time ago as his audience, ‘has been imprisoned in a tower by—’
‘The lady who?’ Kara interrupted, looking up from a piece of dun-coloured fabric she had taken out and begun to smock, despite the hindrance of a suckling baby.
‘A-g-a-r-u-i-t-h-a,’ Kevin spelled out crossly, blushing because Agaruitha was based on Olivia, although I don’t suppose Olivia was the goddaughter of a dragon queen, but she did sometimes have the look of someone imprisoned in a tower by ‘the evil Lord Lebaron, known as Dragonscourge—’
Proteus unplugged himself from Kara’s breast with a popping noise and looked abstractedly at the ceiling as if he was trying to remember something. Kara took the opportunity to root once more in her rucksack and this time produce some mis-shapen candles in dull plasticine colours. Some of them had been set with what were supposed to be decorations – beans and lentils, little pebbles and the odd leaf. Most of them looked as if they had been moulded in empty cat food tins. The candles were Balniddrie’s response to the current state of emergency.
‘We’ve had to put the price up,’ Kara said, ‘because of demand.’
‘Capitalist profiteer,’ Shug said.
I bought a candle out of necessity. It was very heavy, you could easily have bashed someone’s skull in with it.
‘And then burnt the evidence,’ Kevin said, ‘that’s brilliant.’
Olivia hadn’t noticed Roger Lake lurking in the doorway trying to make surreptitious gestures to attract her attention without attracting any to himself.
There was a sudden surge of renewed raucousness from the rugby players at the bar, one of whom was standing on a table doing a slow, unattractive striptease. Then the power came back on causing a lot of people to flinch and cower like nocturnal animals suddenly caught in the beam of a headlight. The engineers rushed to the jukebox to put on ‘Maggie May’ and the noise level in the basement was cranked up a further notch.
When Olivia finally noticed Roger a little frown disturbed her perfection. But then she smiled at him and slipped away quickly, following him at a discreet distance.
The rugby players had used up most of the oxygen by now and I thought it was probably a good time to leave before people started dying.
‘I’m going,’ I said to Terri.
She followed me out, saying she was going to the Howff for a while. The Howff was Terri’s favourite graveyard, although any cemetery would do when she was in the right mood, which was always. Where other students might knit or read or hillwalk, Terri’s hobby was studying graveyards, exploring the topography of the cities of the dead – the Howff, Balgay, the Eastern Necropolis. Death was never going to have to worry about Terri not stopping for him.
At the entrance to the Union we passed a short, bland girl called Janice Rand. Janice was in Martha’s creative writing class and wrote short, bland poetry that resembled vapid Anglican hymns. Janice had set up a table containing a handful of blue, badly printed leaflets and on which a hand-made banner was tacked, proclaiming quietly, ‘Don’t forget old people’.
Janice smelt of piety and coal tar soap. She had recently become a Christian, a neophyte of a student Christian fellowship whose members roamed the corridors of Airlie, Belmont and Chalmers Halls looking for likely converts (the afraid, the alone, the abandoned) and those who needed to use the Bible to fill in the spaces where their personalities should have been.
The student Christians ran some kind of volunteer service, visiting the elderly and the housebound. Janice was trying to sign up more volunteers.
‘Don’t forget old people what?’ I asked, drawn by curiosity. ‘That they fought in the war, that they know more than you do? That they feel afraid and alone and abandoned?’
Janice made a face. ‘Not what,’ she replied scornfully, ‘just don’t forget them. In general.’
We turned to go and Janice shouted after us, ‘Jesus can save you!’ She looked rather doubtful as if he might draw the line at us. ‘Jesus is the Son of God,’ she added, in case we didn’t know. ‘He came once to save us,’ she said, rather stroppily, ‘and He’ll come again. He might even be here now.’
A blast of cold air swung the front door open with a loud crash and we all jumped, but especially Janice who looked as if – just for a fraction of a second – she believed that Jesus had walked into Dundee University’s Student Union. She should warn him about the lack of hot food. It wasn’t Jesus, unless he had chosen to return as a scruffy student from the Socialist Society, carrying a box of newly printed leaflets – small pink ones as opposed to Janice’s small blue ones.
‘Because blue is the colour of heaven?’ I asked her but she just scowled at me. The boy from the Socialist Society pushed one of his leaflets into my hand. It said, ‘Stop the War Now’. He tried to give one to Janice but she wouldn’t take it unless he in turn took one of her leaflets and when we hurried out of the door they were still having a stand-off, thrusting leaflets aggressively at each other.
* * *
Nora, who has been snoring gently by the cold ashes of the kitchen grate, wakes up and yawns.
∼ Did I miss anything? she asks.
‘A certain amount of fear and loathing, a little paranoia, acres of boredom, the Lady Agaruitha in a tower. A lot of new characters that you’ll just have to catch up with as best as you can.’
∼ No dragons?
‘Not yet.’
* * *
Nora has sea-change eyes. Today they are a murky rock-pool brown because the gulls are being chased inland by a determined south-westerly. The wind on the cliffs is so strong that sometimes we find ourselves walking backwards.
I am strangely at home in this salty air, I am in my element.
∼ The sea’s in your blood, Nora says, the call of the sea.
Did the Stuart-Murrays – luckless landlubbers who farmed the rolled and folded landscape of Perthshire – have the salty, sea-going blood of sailors?
∼ Quite the opposite, says Nora.
For it seems that the Stuart-Murrays, whilst mysteriously drawn to the water – witness our ancestral holiday home, or Nora’s peregrinations – are nonetheless incapable of keeping afloat
on it. There was a Stuart-Murray sank at Trafalgar, according to Nora, and one aboard the Mary Rose, one outward bound on the Titanic, one homeward bound on the Lusitania, and one long forgotten Stuart-Murray who is said to have lost the king’s treasure in the Forth, although which king and which treasure seems unclear.
I am surprised that Nora ever ventures out in her little Sea-Adventure. But it seems the Stuart-Murrays do not even have to be in boats to be drowned at sea, one of Nora’s uncles was believed lost in the great and horrible Tay Bridge disaster, sneaking onto the train at Wormit, the last stop before the bridge, in a fit of youthful high spirits and alcohol. Ticketless, he remained unaccounted for in the lists of the dead.
∼ Not your blood in particular, she says, it’s in everyone’s blood, where else does the salt come from?
Nora is watching the sea, through a huge pair of First World War binoculars that she is toting. She says they once belonged to her eldest brother. A brother? She has never mentioned a brother.
∼ Oh yes, Nora says nonchalantly, she had a lot of brothers and sisters.
‘Imaginary ones perhaps?’
∼ Real, she says, and counts on her fingers, Douglas, Torquil, Murdo, Honoria, Elspeth … and those are just the ones who died before she was born. What an unlucky family the Stuart-Murrays seem to be.
∼ Oh, that’s nothing, Nora says glumly, not compared with what happened later.
There Are Places Between Edinburgh and Dundee
I have a stone hot-water bottle, wrapped in an old sweater, that I hug to my body in a vain effort to keep warm at nights. It is difficult to sleep when the darkness is so absolute, the only illumination provided by the occasional chink of starlight or a faint moonbeam.
I remember the countless nights of my childhood during which Nora left me alone while she went to her work in some pub or hotel that had taken her on for the season. I can conjure her up now, smell her cheap lily-of-the-valley cologne as she bent to kiss me goodnight, her extravagant hair piled on top of her head like a sea-front ice-cream and her figure sculpted by her barmaid’s dress or baffled by a severe waitress habit. I can still hear her whispering in my ear, entreating me to be a good girl – not to get out of bed, not to play with matches, not to choke on sweets, to scream if I was attacked by a stranger or a strangler or a rapist climbing in through the bedroom window. Nora always feared the worst.
∼ From experience, she says darkly.
We drifted on, in and out with the tide, like flotsam, spending our time departing and arriving (or arriving and departing, depending on how you look at it). I grew up a connoisseur of pavilions and winter gardens and miniature golf courses. I may have been mystified by the conjugation of foreign verbs and the complex lives of fractions but I always knew my tide-tables. Nora’s talents (piano, French, Scottish country dancing) qualified her for nothing useful, but she never had trouble finding work in some Sailor’s Rest pub or Crow’s Nest café.
Nora usually lived in wherever she was working so that ‘home’ was some cold hotel attic or a ramshackle room over a public bar where the two of us slept in rooms where the smell of mass catering and stale beer seeped up through the floorboards to join the aroma of wet hand-washed laundry drying dangerously on an Ascot water heater. We lived off other people’s leftovers – salted nuts and olives and maraschino cherries from gin palaces and lounge bars, or restaurant scrapings – wedding trifle from the bottom of catering bowls and stale canapés from dinner-dances. And endless fish and chips, eaten in vinegary haste straight from the newspaper before Nora rushed to work.
No wonder, therefore, that wherever we went I sought out friends with families of a larger and more conventional composition – girls who lived in ordinary houses (thirties semi-detached, good-sized garden), had a stay-at-home, homespun mother, a known father (an accountant, a grocer), at least one sibling, a grandmother, a dog, an aunt or two. Families who spent their lives boiling kettles, flushing toilets, answering phones (ad infinitum, ad nauseam).
Always, just when I had established myself as a cheerful, eager-to-please fixture in the homes of these families, Nora would uproot us again and we would be on a bus to the next small seaside town that looked very like the one we had just left. You would almost have thought that we were on the run from something. And we were, of course.
* * *
I wake up in the dead of night and find that I can’t remember who I am. Is that normal? Almost certainly not. The feral Siamese have been holding a cats’ concert in the night, a maniacal caterwauling that sends a shiver down the spine of every vertebrate on the island, whether quick or dead. Perhaps they’re engendering more of their own consanguineous kind.
∼ Spawn of the devil, Nora says cheerfully next morning, stirring watery breakfast oatmeal with an ancient wooden spurtle. Go on then, she says, dolloping out this gruel in a bowl in front of me. What happened next?
* * *
A faint, defiant cry of ‘Jesus Saves’ followed us as we set off listlessly down the Nethergate. A harsh wind was whipping litter and grit off the street and the occasional pink or blue leaflet. A fine Highland rain, like the spray from a plant mister, was falling in the wrong meteorological zone.
Terri wanted to go to the Morgan Tower pharmacy for a bottle of Collis Brown to boil down messily and opiate herself further with, while I was planning to buy a copy of Coles’ Notes on Middlemarch from Frank Russell’s University Bookshop.
At that moment a dog appeared from nowhere (as they do) on the pavement opposite. Catching our eye, it assumed a sociable expression and lolloped towards us as if it was crossing a field rather than a road. At that same moment, a 1963 Ford Cortina hurtled into view (in as much as a 1963 Cortina can hurtle), heading inexorably towards the same spot on the road as the dog. Seeing this, Terri darted into the road to save the dog from the Cortina.
Narrative destiny (a powerful force) took charge at that point. The car-dog-girl scenario – lolloping dog, hurtling car, foolish girl – could only end in tears and although the Cortina swerved at the last minute and avoided Terri, it couldn’t help but find the dog. I closed my eyes—
—when I opened them again the car was up on the pavement and Terri was sitting on the kerb with the dog’s head in her lap. Although generally unattached to the human race, Terri was surprisingly fond of animals, particularly dogs – she was more or less brought up by the family pet (a large Dobermann called Max).
The dog which now lay limply in her arms was a big yellow mongrel with fur the colour of an old teddy-bear or a half-dead camel. The man who would sooner run over a dog than a woman got out of the car and lumbered over to this canine pietà, giving his front bumper a cursory inspection on the way. He had the stocky build of a cheap discotheque bouncer and hair that carpeted the backs of his hands so that you might have thought he was wearing a chimpanzee outfit beneath his crumpled suit. He bent down stiffly to observe the dog, revealing a dreadfully hairy shin. The cheap material of his suit, the colour of Maltesers, stretched tightly over his beefy thighs when he bent down.
‘I haven’t got time for this,’ he said, ‘bloody dog, why didn’t it look where it was going? I’m late,’ he added in a very agitated voice, ‘very late.’
The dog, meanwhile, wasn’t agitated at all, indeed so still and lifeless that it could have been demonstrating the taxidermist’s art to the crowd that had begun to gather. Terri started to give the dog the kiss of life, breathing into its big Alsatian-derived muzzle with unusual determination.
‘Oh dear,’ a rather feeble voice said behind me, ‘is there anything I can do to help?’ The voice turned out to belong to Professor Cousins, waving a large duck-handled umbrella about, like a man in danger of becoming a caricature of himself.
With much creaking and straining he bent down next to the dog and tried to encourage its recovery by scratching the coarse hair on its sugar-pink belly while the onlookers susurrated in the background, earnestly discussing the best method of resuscitating a dead dog – recommend
ations varying from ‘gie it a sweetie’ to ‘gie it a skelping’.
However, having Terri’s vampire breath in its lungs seemed to be doing wonders for the yellow dog. It began to come slowly back to life, starting at the far end with its big tail – like a giant rat’s – which started to thump heavily on the tarmac. Next it stretched its back legs, flexing the abnormally long toes that ended in big lizard-like nails. Finally, with a little sigh, it opened its eyes, lifted its head and looked around. It seemed agreeably surprised by the number of interested bystanders it had attracted and whacked its tail more vigorously so that its audience broke into a spontaneous round of applause at this Lazarus-like recovery. The dog got to its feet unsteadily, like a newborn wildebeest. I wondered if it might take a bow, but it didn’t.
Terri regarded this recovery with a certain suspicion. ‘He’s probably in shock,’ she said, her little white face pinched with worry. ‘We still need to get him to a vet.’
‘You’re joking,’ the Cortina driver said. ‘I had to be somewhere else half an hour ago.’ Terri began to hiss like a malevolent kettle, showing her little pointy teeth. Looking more surprised than shocked, the dog waited expectantly for its fate to be decided between the two warring parties. It was the Cortina driver who eventually backed down. ‘Oh all right then,’ he relented, ‘but quickly then, I’m very late,’ and started ushering us all urgently into the car.
The car – which didn’t look as if it had ever seen better days – was a rusted white, more rust than white. I got in the back, followed by Terri and the dog which scrambled in awkwardly and insisted on sitting between us. Professor Cousins climbed gingerly into the front, behaving as if motor cars were a new and untested invention.
‘A jaunt. This is fun,’ he remarked and held out his hand towards the driver. ‘Professor Cousins,’ he said, ‘lovely to meet you. And you are?’
Emotionally Weird Page 6
