Emotionally Weird

by Kate Atkinson

  * * *

  I found Maisie in the living-room watching a Monty Python re-run. I retrieved a bar of Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut from my bag and broke it into two and shared it with her. It covered several of the major food groups and hadn’t been contaminated by the McCues’ kitchen.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, cramming most of the chocolate into her mouth at once. Nine-year-old Maisie was the most normal of the McCues (in some ways anyway). She was a plain girl, with straight hair and thin limbs and a mathematical turn of mind. Photographs of a newlaid Maisie in the overheated maternity ward of the DRI, showed her lying in a plastic cot like lidless Tupperware, looking like a small, skinned mammal, apart from a little thatch of mouse hair on her head. Even at six hours old, she seemed unaccountably old.

  Maisie’s full name was Maisie Ophelia. I can’t help but think that it’s an unfortunate custom to name children after people who come to sticky ends. Even if they are fictional characters, it doesn’t bode well for the poor things. There are too many Judes and Tesses and Clarissas and Cordelias around. If we must name our children after literary figures then we should search out happy ones, although it’s true they are much harder to find. (‘Ratty’ and ‘Mole’ are Maisie’s suggestions.)

  ‘Do you have homework?’ I asked her.

  ‘Not really,’ she said, without taking her eyes off the television.

  ‘I do,’ I said gloomily, taking George Eliot out of my bag. I commenced to write very slowly – James’s judgement that Middlemarch is an ‘indifferent whole’ is refuted by even a superficial reading of the novel, when we cannot help but be struck by the highly wrought nature of the writing, the function of character, the careful thematic structuring and the balancing and illusion of autogenesis, something for which the paralleling of action and moral consequence – but then I must have fallen asleep again because the next thing I knew I was being rudely awoken by a scream and it was a little while before I understood that the scream had come from the television set, rather than one of the various inhabitants of the house.

  Maisie was deeply engrossed in a black-and-white horror film of some kind. The woman who was screaming – tall and blond with her hair in a perfect French pleat and apparently called Irma – seemed to have realized (rather late in the day) that she had stopped for the night at a bed and breakfast run by a vampire, even though you would have thought, as B and B names go, ‘Castle Vlad’ wasn’t exactly ‘Sea View’ or The Pines’.

  ‘She’s really thick,’ Maisie said admiringly.

  I tried to shift position; I was incredibly uncomfortable – Duke was slumped heavily on my feet while curled up in my lap, like a large evil netsuke, was Goneril. Not only that, but Maisie’s bony body was sticking into me on one side, while on my other side, an old woman I had never seen before was fast asleep, her head lolling uncomfortably on my shoulder.

  The old woman had skin that was the texture and colour of white marshmallows and in a poor light (which was always) you might have mistaken her hair for a cloud of slightly rotten candyfloss. Although fast asleep, she was still clutching a pair of knitting needles on which hung a strange shapeless thing, like a web woven by a spider on drugs. She looked so peaceful it seemed a shame to wake her up.

  ‘Maisie?’ I said quietly.

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘There’s an old woman on the sofa with us.’

  Maisie tore her eyes away from the television to lean over and look and said, ‘It’s just Granny.’

  ‘Granny?’

  ‘My dad’s mum.’ (How strangely complicated that sounded.)

  Surely she was supposed to be in The Anchorage in Newport-on-Tay, looking at the water?

  ‘She escaped,’ Maisie said.

  Now that I looked at her I could see that Mrs McCue looked vaguely familiar. Despite Andrea’s belief that ‘all old people look alike’ I thought I recognized her from the shoal of mourners at ‘Senga’s’ funeral that afternoon. Mrs McCue woke up and automatically began to knit. After a while she stopped and sighed and, looking at me with yellowing rheumy eyes, said wistfully, ‘I’m dying for a cup of tea.’ She seemed to be altogether from the jaundiced end of the spectrum – the whites of her eyes were the colour of Milky Bars and her horsy teeth resembled blank Scrabble tiles.

  It seemed churlish not to comply with her heartfelt request and so I levered Duke off my feet – no easy task – shoogled Goneril off my knee as gently as I could to avoid being bitten, and finally struggled free of the bookending bodies of Maisie and the dowager Mrs McCue, who both immediately shifted to fill the space I’d vacated.

  While the kettle was coming to the boil I went to the toilet—

  ∼ In the same sentence? Nora objects, it’s been nothing but ringing phones and boiling kettles, doorbells and toilets, since you began.

  Ignore her, she is in a bad mood today. She is avoiding telling her story.

  —a journey that took me past the open door of the spare bedroom that Archie used as a study. A strange noise wafted out of the room, a faint little purp-purp noise like a kitten snoring, and I peered in the room, curious to find the source.

  It turned out to be a boy – more a man really – who was lying on the bed, as still as a corpse. He was a very fine specimen of his sex – just the right shape and size, with no strange features or disturbing blemishes, only a rather fetching scar on his left cheekbone as if he had been raked delicately by a tiger’s talon. If it hadn’t been for the snoring you would have thought him dead.

  I wondered who he was (how helpful it would be if people were labelled). His hair was dark, his skin pale, his lashes long, and you might have thought that his lips – carved into a curving pout by Cupid himself and slightly damp from sleep – were waiting to be kissed. But I didn’t do that, because that would have been like asking for trouble instead of simply waiting for it to arrive in its own good time.

  He was lying on top of the covers and although his feet were naked, the rest of him was fully clothed in a pair of Levi’s, an old sweater and a battered leather biker’s jacket that indicated a darker and more interesting personality than Bob’s army greatcoat or Shug’s Afghan ever could. I sniffed the lanolin of his rough wool sweater and the slaughtered smell of his jacket. I inspected his ears (clean, shell-like), his fingernails (dirty, bitten), the faint tide-mark of grime on his neck, the ingrained oil on his mechanic’s hands, inhaled the faint aroma of marijuana on his breath.

  He smelt like a Platonic ideal of a man would smell. Compared to the slugs and snails and puppy dogs’ tails that composed Bob’s biodynamic, he seemed to be made up of entirely testosterone-based ingredients – leather car seats, cut-throat razors, ropes and knots and binding cords, salt, mud and blood. He was all … other.

  I wondered what colour his eyes were beneath those gorgeous sleepy lids. Of course, for all I knew he was squint and cross-eyed, or worse – a blue-eyed man. I thought about prising open one of his semi-comatose eyelids but decided against it. Was it possible to tell his character from his appearance? He looked sublime but he might have been any one of a hundred undesirable things. A university lecturer, for example. Perhaps he was a thief who had come in through the window and had grown tired in the middle of his thieving and lain down for a rest. More unlikely things happen every day, after all.

  The window was wide open and the temperature in the room must have been near freezing. The unknown man’s feet were turning blue and felt icy to the touch, more like cold corpse flesh than the appendages of a warm and breathing man. Hastily, I pulled a blanket over his motionless form. He was sleeping on his back with his arms and legs flung out like a dead starfish – although with fewer legs. (Or arms, or whatever it is that starfish have.) He didn’t look as if he was on a harmless date with the Sandman, but more as if he was stranded in the Land of Nod for ever with no map and compass of return and I wondered if I shouldn’t keep watch over him for a while, but, sadly, there is only so much pleasure to be got from observing a sleeping man – even a handsome
one – and I was soon distracted by the sight of a very fat manuscript poking out from under the bed.

  The edges of many of the pages appeared to have been nibbled by small animals – clan McFluffy, I presumed – and the title page announced it to be Archie’s great novel, The Expanding Prism of J.

  ‘Well,’ I said to the sleeping man, ‘I don’t see what harm there can be in just taking a look.’ Words which, as we know, everyone lives to regret (Pandora, curious cats, Lot’s wife, all of Bluebeard’s wives, and so many, many others).

  The Expanding Prism of J appeared to be a novel with neither plot nor character (and certainly no pictures). Even the simplest details were cloaked in a claggy syntax, and reading Archie’s prose was like trying to make sense of glue. As far as I could gather, the eponymous J was a university lecturer employed in an institution more tortuous than a Borgesian labyrinth. J himself had no fixed or true character but was a man made up of layer upon layer of impenetrable metaphor and alienated asides. Struggling through the dense language of the first few pages, it took me some time to realize that J was not riding through a Mitteleuropean city on a tram but was indulging in something quite perverse with his mistress’s lapdog. I began to feel slightly nauseous and wondered if Archie’s words might be having a toxic effect. Perhaps if I looked further under the bed I would find small dead animals.

  Despite the number of words, nothing really seemed to happen, although after a while J’s paranoia began to produce a kind of mirage of a plot, as if something was about to happen at every moment and yet never did. A typical paragraph (for there was little to chose between them) read like this –

  J felt a tenuous uncertainty as to which of the several tenebrous passages his presumed tormentor had chosen to disappear into. He permitted his imagination a brief glance down into that darkness to find what it would, but recoiled from the sudden vista of – not despair and madness as he had expected, but rather the torpor and enervation to be found there. He was made fully aware now of the kind of horror that his mental games had led him to and speculated as to the –

  And so on and so on. No wonder the sleeper on the bed was in such a sopor, breathing in Archie’s somnificiant words all the time. A sudden gust of wind lifted the curtains and sent an icy blast into the room, ruffling the pages of Archie’s novel and sending several of them flying through the air like autumn leaves. I jumped up and chased around the room after them and managed to retrieve all but one, which floated serenely out of the window like a birdless wing.

  I tried to get the manuscript back into some semblance of order but the pages, for some annoying reason, were not numbered so that it was impossible to tell what sequence they should be in and the sense of the text gave me no clue whatsoever. At a loss, I skimmed the page in my hand and discovered J in the process of meeting a nasty death. He was at the top of a flight of stairs when a banister he was leaning against gave way and sent him plunging down into the dark depths of a stairwell –

  Falling, falling, into the dark depths of the unknown and unknowable chasm, the abyss of his own imagination rushing to greet him, to enfold, to smother him, the darkness circumscribing him, obfuscating his senses and finally stilling even the faintest glimmerings of cognizance and speculation –

  Which I think meant he was dead. There was no knowing where this particular page belonged as Archie was obviously the kind of writer who thought nothing of killing off his main protagonist within the first fifty pages. In the end I just put all the pages back together at random and stuck them as far under the bed as they would go.

  Another gust of wind sent a sudden chill shudder through the sleeping body on the bed. I pulled the blanket up further and closed the window—

  ∼ How much more sensible if you’d done that to begin with.

  I don’t think Nora should talk about sensible, not when she herself is standing on a rock that is being lapped by an incoming tide as if she is trying to command the sea.

  —I could just see the bridge from the window – a train was crossing, one bright headlamp marking its passage from the black unlit banks of Fife across the even blacker water, like a messenger from somewhere else. I drew the curtains.

  The water in the kettle had almost boiled away by the time I got back to the kitchen and I had to start the tea-making process all over again—

  Nora makes a great display of boredom.

  —closely observed by the current McFluffy, which was standing up on its hindlegs, holding the bars of its cage in its tiny pink hands. Its cheeks were bulging with food and it looked unusually alert, as if it was about to embark on the great escape. I noticed that the salmon, previously whole and unsullied by anything except death, now had a large bite taken out of its side. It really should be in the fridge, especially as it had another day to go before its party appearance. I could almost see the microbes congregating festively around its silvery corpse. When I turned away from the salmon I found another old woman sitting at the table. Were they breeding?

  When this one saw me, she gave a little scream and clutched her breast. ‘Wha’ a fleg you gave me,’ she said. She was as small as a dormouse and almost entirely spherical, you could probably have rolled her from one side of the kitchen to the other. She heaved herself up from the chair, with the help of a walking-aid, and introduced herself as ‘Mrs Macbeth’. I gathered she was Mrs McCue’s friend and a fellow escapee from The Anchorage.

  Mrs Macbeth was being followed around by an old fat Westie which seemed almost as lame as its owner. Its fur was a Chinese yellow and it seemed to have gone rusty around the mouth. Its teeth were as yellow as Mrs McCue’s and in some strange way it reminded me a little of her. Its aged eyes – one brown, one slightly wall-eyed – looked at me in a resigned kind of way when I addressed it.

  ‘She’s cried Janet,’ Mrs Macbeth said. ‘We’re no allowed pets at The Anchorage, but I couldna get rid of her, she’s been my wee pal all these years.’ She sighed and Janet seemed to sigh too, her lungs wheezing like a tiny pair of accordions.

  ‘So you hide her?’ I asked, trying to imagine the complexities of keeping a small dog hidden.

  ‘Aye, it’s a rare carry-on,’ Mrs Macbeth agreed. ‘The keech’s the worst thing, of course.’

  The pair of them followed me back into the living-room, Mrs Macbeth insisting on carrying a box of Tunnock’s Teacakes, despite being hampered by the walking-frame. The old dog hobbled after her and when Duke caught sight of her he struggled up from the dead dog position he’d adopted on the floor and sniffed poor Janet’s rear end with bizarre enthusiasm.

  ‘Who is the man in the spare bedroom?’ I asked Maisie.

  ‘Ferdinand.’

  ‘Ferdinand? Your brother Ferdinand? I thought he was in prison?’

  ‘Early release for good behaviour,’ Maisie said, not taking her eyes off the television, which was now showing some kind of curling championship.

  ‘Irma escaped from Castle Vlad and went home,’ Mrs McCue said helpfully to me. ‘Ferdinand’s a good boy really,’ she added, nodding her old sweetie-selling head at me. Mrs Macbeth’s old dog flopped down heavily on its side and fell asleep immediately, making a strange creaking noise when it breathed.

  Mrs McCue inspected the inside of her teacup and frowned. At her feet she had a large sack-like bag, made from some kind of chintzy material. The bag looked as if it contained a dead animal – a middle-sized one, a hyena perhaps – but when she turned it out, proved to contain everything imaginable except a hyena. Eventually she found what she was looking for – a handkerchief, a little lacy thing with bluebells embroidered all over it, and cleaned the cup, rubbing it vigorously with the handkerchief.

  ‘That woman keeps a clarty house, there’s stour everywhere,’ she said to Mrs Macbeth, who gave a little shiver and said, rather enigmatically, ‘The flair.’

  ‘I’m an affie tea-jenny,’ Mrs McCue said, pouring the tea in an unsteady stream from the heavy brown pot.

  ‘Me as well,’ Mrs Macbeth agreed.
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  ‘Why was Ferdinand in prison if he was such a good boy?’ I persisted.

  Mrs McCue shrugged. ‘Who knows? That’s a rare cuppie,’ she said to Mrs Macbeth. Mrs McCue was managing to drink her tea, knit and read the Sunday Post all at the same time.

  ‘Mistaken identity,’ Maisie said through a mouthful of teacake.

  Mrs McCue reached into her chintz sack again, and produced a large bag of Iced Gems which turned out to be soft but we ate them anyway. Then she produced a packet of Player’s No.6 and offered them round. ‘I only smoke for the coupons,’ she told me, shaking a cigarette out of the packet for Mrs Macbeth.

  ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ Mrs Macbeth said and they both lit up. Maisie coughed theatrically and Mrs McCue delved into the bag again and came up with a packet of Tyrozets for Maisie.

  ‘A’thing but the kitchen sink,’ Mrs Macbeth said, nodding approvingly at the bag.

  As soon as I sat down Goneril leapt back onto me, kneading my chest with her claws. She was an extraordinarily heavy cat – if the Tara-Zanthians got hold of her they’d probably keep her in a safe deposit box. As soon as we were all nicely settled the doorbell rang suddenly (how else?), a simple enough event but one which set in motion an alarming amount of chaos – Duke barked his way to the door, a clumsy process which involved treading on Janet, knocking over the milk jug and sending Goneril in a death-defying leap from my lap to that of Archie’s mother who gave a little scream of horror and dropped an entire needleful of stitches from her erratically woven web. Thank goodness there was no baby to wake up – the usual conclusion to this kind of chain of events.

  After all that commotion it was irritating to discover that there was no-one there when I opened the front door. The entire street was hushed and deserted, not even The Boy With No Name, just howling winds and freezing rain.

  As soon as I sat down the doorbell rang again. How boring this was.