Emotionally Weird

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘A dragon?’ Chick queried mildly, as if I’d said something as unremarkable as ‘a door’ or ‘a Dandie Dinmont’.

  * * *

  To pass the time as we travelled the road and the miles to Dundee, Chick gave me a brief and reluctant rundown of his curriculum vitae: ‘Tulliallan Police College, three years as a village policeman in teuchter land because the cow had a hankering for it, the birth of the bairns, the move back to Dundee when the cow got bored of teuchter land, joined the CID, Lanzarote, blah, blah, blah, the rest is history.’

  ‘Blah, blah, blah?’

  Chick took a half-bottle of Bell’s from his pocket, took a large swig and then handed it to me. The whisky tasted sour and made me gag, but I kept it down.

  ‘Good girl,’ he said. We were silent for a long while and then Chick said reflectively, ‘I was a good policeman, you know.’

  ‘I believe you. Did you work on any famous cases?’ I asked him, thinking about The Hand of Fate, wondering if Chick could be some help with police procedure, modes of detection, and so on.

  He gave me a sideways look and after a while said, ‘I worked on the Glenkittrie case. Ever hear of that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Famous in its day,’ he said, draining the dregs of the whisky.

  ‘Tell me about it.’

  ‘Some other time,’ he said and peered into the empty bottle as if he was trying to conjure up more whisky.

  When I cast a glance at Nora I see she has grown pale as any corpse during the course of this innocuous tale.

  ∼ You’ve got a party to go to, she reminds me, very like someone who is trying to change the subject.

  I had completely forgotten about the McCue party and certainly had no intention of going.

  * * *

  I must have fallen asleep.

  ‘You fell asleep,’ Chick said when I woke up. I had been sitting uncomfortably with my head resting against the door of the car. I was numb with cold and the whisky had left a bad chemical taste in my mouth. Chick was reading the Evening Telegraph by the light of a torch. He lit a cigarette from the stub of the one in his mouth.

  There was a familiar look to the street we were parked in but it took me a few sleepy seconds before I registered that we were in Windsor Place, parked right outside the McCue house.

  The McCues were en fête – from where I was sitting I could see into the brightly lit living-room. I could just make out the faint vibrating thum-thum of rock music. Several people who looked as if they had last danced around the time of the Suez crisis were capering to the music – but in a constrained way, shuffling their feet and occasionally doing something daring with their elbows. Grant Watson was one of them, turning pink with exertion as he pushed his limbs around out of time to the music. I decided I would be in more jeopardy inside the McCue house than I had been in the hands (or whatever) of a rampant dragon.

  The party looked dire, although I’m not sure that there is such a thing as a good party. Perhaps there is a perfect form of merriment somewhere but what its constituents are I do not know and cannot imagine.

  ∼ Fireworks, Nora says dreamily, and Chinese lanterns strung in trees and the moon reflected in the water.

  I could see Philippa trying to encourage the Dean to dance. She was bouncing around in a tent-like dress, patterned in psychedelic swirls of purple and brown. The Dean was trying to pretend he was somewhere else – the Caird Hall perhaps, listening to the SNO in concert, or, preferably, lying in his bed fast asleep next to the flanneletted body of his wife, a large matronly woman called Gerda, currently in rayon and being propositioned by a swaying Archie.

  A different tableau-vivant could be observed in the adjacent window, which looked into the dining-room. I could see Professor Cousins daintily sipping sherry while talking to Martha Sewell, who was wearing sober black. In the background I could just make out Dr Dick having a furious fight with Maggie Mackenzie.

  ‘Why are we here?’ I asked Chick.

  He shrugged. ‘Who knows.’

  ‘No, I mean, why are we here?’

  ‘Why not?’ How annoying Chick was. How strangely Bobbish. When I informed him that I was supposed to be at the McCue party he tried to shoo me out of the car and into the house (to see if anything fishy was occurring, naturally). I steadfastly refused, even though I could see that there was much material for narrative there – the drunken faux pas, the misaligned relationships, the forbidden sex, even plot advancement – but none of that was enough to tempt me inside.

  A woman appeared at the dining-room window, a glass of red wine in her hand. She gazed into the street, an abstracted expression on her face. For a moment I couldn’t place her because she was so out of context and then I suddenly recognized her – it was the Hillman Imp woman, the woman we had been watching in Fife.

  ‘It’s the Hillman Imp woman,’ I hissed at Chick and he said, ‘I know,’ from behind his Evening Telegraph.

  ‘What’s she doing here?’ I said to him. ‘I don’t understand.’

  I watched her move away from the window. The next moment she reappeared in the neighbouring room and walked up to Watson Grant. He paused in his inept dancing and lurched drunkenly towards her, pulled her into his arms and started kissing her neck – an unattractive activity that she endured with rather a long-suffering expression on her face.

  ‘So she is having an affair,’ I said, ‘there’s your proof. She’s having an affair with Grant Watson. You should photograph them or something.’

  ‘Nah,’ Chick said, dragging hard on an Embassy, ‘that’s his wife.’

  Chez Bob

  Unbelievably, it was only eight o’clock when I got home. I ate Cornish Wafers and Philadelphia cream cheese; I watched the news, although I turned it off when it showed trees being napalmed. I read Me and Miss Mandible and listened to After the Gold Rush; I washed out a pair of tights and sewed on a button. I ate more Cornish Wafers, but I had run out of Philadelphia. I wrote a halfhearted sentence of Henry James (James’s implication is not only that the novel is episodic and fragmented but also that it is a vehicle for far too much analytic and philosophical intrusion on the part of the author herself –) until finally I went to bed only to be woken a couple of hours later by Shug and Bob rolling in with a couple of traffic cones and a clutch of warm rolls from Cuthbert’s all-night bakery. Of my mysterious promised visitor there had been no sign at all.

  ∼ Have you guessed who she is yet? I ask Nora, who is chewing on a Jacob’s cream cracker from a packet she’s found in a tin at the back of a cupboard. I can smell its staleness. Nora has coiled her hair up in a careless heap and I can see fiery little tendrils curling at her neck. Today our hair is very red on account of the rain that is threatening us. For we live in a rain-cloud. Nora says she can feel the rheumaticky weather in her bones. She says she is a human barometer.

  ‘Do you recognize her?’

  ∼ Do you think that’s a weevil? she asks, staring at the cream cracker.

  * * *

  Bob and Shug started playing a relentless, noisy game of Diplomacy until, overcome by an attack of the munchies, they went out into the darkness on a quest for Mars Bars. The clock by the bed said six o’clock. I wondered if it was morning or night. It didn’t make any difference, I was wide awake anyway. There seemed to be nothing for it but to write.

  * * *

  Madame Astarti took an early lunch, ambling out to buy fish and chips from a little place down a side street called ‘The Catch Of The Day’. It was off the tourist track and much frequented by the locals. It was a comfortable, old-fashioned kind of place with tiled pictures of fish and a back room with a coal fire. It took a minute or two for Madame Astarti to notice that it was no longer the chip shop it had been, but was now called ‘The Codfather’ and had been fitted out in stainless steel and pale blue plastic.

  ‘One of each, please, Sharon,’ she said, ‘and perhaps an extra portion of chips,’ she added as an afterthought.

  ‘Scraps?’ Sharon of
fered.

  ‘Oh yes, scraps,’ Madame Astarti agreed.

  ‘Mushy peas?’

  ‘Go on then,’ Madame Astarti said.

  ‘Pickled onion?’

  ‘All right.’ Madame Astarti drew the line at a pickled egg. You had to draw the line somewhere, after all.

  The fish supper came on a cardboard tray with a plastic fork. ‘What happened here?’ Madame Astarti asked.

  ‘Modern times,’ Sharon said, ‘that’s what happened.’ Shades of Lou Rigatoni, if Madame Astarti wasn’t mistaken. Clearly, he was a man who wasn’t going to be satisfied until he bought up everything on the coast.

  Madame Astarti ate her fish and chips out of the tray, sitting on a bench on the pier, watched, from a discreet distance, by a yellow dog. She could see part of the harbour festooned with blue-and-white crime-scene tape like bunting, but there were few onlookers as there was no longer anything to see. The tide was now out as far as it could go and the exposed beach littered with bodies in various stages of pinkness, like boiled shrimp. They looked dead, although Madame Astarti presumed they weren’t.

  Over by the donkeys she spotted Councillor Vic Leggat deep in conversation with one of Lou Rigatoni’s henchmen. What were they up to? she wondered. No good, probably. She tossed the yellow dog a chip.

  * * *

  ‘Captain’s log supplemental,’ Bob announced, rolling in around dawn, ‘subject has entered pon farr, the Vulcan mating cycle. You are the lovely T’Pring – fancy a shag?’ An offer which I rebuffed rather swiftly and Bob was soon sleeping the deep sleep of the innocent fool.

  Madame Astarti waddled back along the pier. My, my, she thought to herself (but who else do you think to?), that was some sea-fret that was rolling in. A great white wall of fog was moving inland, beyond it everything dark and obscure and yet in front of it the sun shone gloriously on the beach and the holidaymakers. Some of them had noticed the sea-fret by now and had jumped up in alarm. It looked like something out of a horror film, a malevolent presence swallowing everything before it. The fog horn started booming, a deep, thrilling vibration that Madame Astarti could feel resonate in her bones. They called it haar in Scotland, didn’t they? It was a funny word. She had been up there once with a Jock. A Jock called Jock. Haar Haar.

  ‘Wet fish!’ Bob shouted in his sleep and began to laugh uncontrollably until I smothered him with a pillow.

  The House of Fiction

  No woman is an island, except for my mother. Her legs are growing into the rock, her head is surrounded by clouds, her skin is covered in barnacles and her breath holds the weather in it. Or perhaps that’s just my imagination.

  She is wearing ugly black wellingtons that she has found in a cupboard somewhere. The wellingtons are too big for her but she doesn’t care. She has her face turned up towards the white fogged sky, she is smelling the weather, like an animal.

  Fog is rolling in from the sea, wave after wave of whiteness. A sea-fret. I watch it coming. We walk like blind women along the fog-bound cliff-top path.

  ∼ A fine haar, Nora says, as if it was something to admire. But it is obscuring the sound of her voice. She’s dissolving in the white fog, melting into it.

  ∼ I was thinking about the day you were born and how I killed –

  Her voice dwindles, taken by the fog. It presses against my face like a cold, wet shroud. When I look again I can’t tell what is Nora and what is haar. A strange keening noise rises above the muffled cushion of white.

  ∼ Whales, Nora says, lost at sea.

  ‘Do whales get lost at sea? What a strange idea.’

  ∼ We get lost on land. Why shouldn’t they get lost at sea?

  I try and catch up with her. ‘So,’ I shout to her through the brumy air, ‘everyone in your family died and then you were born?’

  ∼ More or less, she says, a distant, disembodied voice.

  ‘Go on.’ I want to hear her voice as much as I want to hear her story. I don’t know where the edge of the cliff is, don’t know where I am. I am afraid of the fog, it’s like something out of a horror story. Her voice is the thread that keeps me safe.

  ∼ Well, Nora says thoughtfully, this is how it was:

  Marjorie was a big raw-boned, red-haired woman from a Perthshire military family whose ancestors had fought everywhere, from the wrong side at Culloden to the right side at Corunna. She married Donald Stuart-Murray when she was thirty-five; no-one else wanted her and she couldn’t think of anything else to do even though Donald’s first wife was still warm in her coffin and his catalogue of personal disasters was long.

  The Princess of Wales herself had been at Donald’s first wedding to Evangeline, held in London way back in the previous century, but only a duke could be mustered the second time round for the rather less flamboyant nuptials at St Giles’ in Edinburgh. Marjorie wore Evangeline’s diamonds but, like the new bride, they failed to sparkle under a miserable Edinburgh sky.

  Donald set about replacing his lost children, first with a girl, Deirdre, who went to be Honoria’s playmate almost straight away, then a boy, Lachlan, followed swiftly by Effie and then, finally, fourteen long years later, the afterthought that was Eleanora—

  ‘You mean you? I think you should tell this in the first person.’

  ∼ Why?

  ‘To make it more real.’

  ∼ I would prefer it if it was less real.

  Silence.

  ‘That’s it?’ I call into the fog but receive no answer.

  * * *

  When I finally get back to the house Nora is boiling up a mish-mash of something unpalatable in an old cloth.

  ∼ Clootie dumpling,’ she says. Carry on, do.

  * * *

  Philippa was in the kitchen, stirring a vast vat of soup, a hotchpotch made from anything she’d been able to find, not all of it necessarily edible.

  ‘Everything but the kitchen sink,’ she laughed. The soup was thin and rancid-looking and smelt of rotten cabbage leaves, and something living seemed to be swimming around in it.

  ‘Taste?’ Philippa offered, holding up a ladle.

  Philippa was wearing a pair of Archie’s trousers and a fisherman’s smock in a thick brown moleskin material, and had tied an Indian silk scarf, Apache-style, around her hair. She trawled for something in the pocket of her smock and netted a new and very sleepy McFluffy. After trying in vain to rouse it, she stuffed it back in her pocket. Somewhere in the depths of the house I could hear the sound of energetic hoovering.

  I was sitting at one end of the McCues’ huge pine kitchen table sipping reluctantly at a cup of acrid coffee that Philippa had forced on me. Goneril, looking cross-eyed in the morning light, was slumped on an essay entitled, ‘How can I tell whether what seems to be a memory of mine is in fact a genuine one?’ She was washing herself indolently, every now and then dislodging little feathery dandelion tufts of feline fur that floated through the air. I watched one of them land delicately in the soup.

  ‘I think she’s got some kind of mange,’ Philippa said, chucking the cat under the chin.

  The salmon, a little the worse for wear – indeed, only half of it now remained – occupied the centre of the table. It had been poached for the party and in an effort to restore it to life its silver lamé skin had been replaced with cucumber slices and its dead eye with a stuffed olive. It wasn’t fully dressed; many of its cucumber scales had fallen off, revealing pink flesh underneath. Here and there a few flakes of skin still lingered like the scurf of stars. A row of cooked shrimp had been placed along its back, perhaps as a garnish, perhaps as a misguided attempt to recreate its spinal cord.

  ‘You didn’t come to our party,’ Philippa chided, throwing a huge handful of salt in the soup.

  ‘Sorry. I had to write an essay.’

  It was cold in the Windsor Place kitchen, that horrible damp cold that makes you feel suddenly melancholy. All the windows were misted up from the soup-making and from the rack of wet laundry that was hanging over the radiator. I cast a cu
rsory glance over the clothes, wondering if any of them belonged to Ferdinand, some intimate garment perhaps that had touched his skin, but all I caught a glimpse of was a pair of Archie’s huge, slightly grey Y-fronts and quickly looked away. No wonder all the McCues always smelt faintly of cooking. Except for Ferdinand, of course.

  ‘So, how’s Ferdinand?’ I asked Philippa, trying to sound off-hand.

  ‘Oh, you know Ferdinand?’ Philippa said. ‘How nice.’

  The sound of the vacuuming grew more insistent until finally Mrs McCue hoovered herself into the room on the end of a Goblin cylinder. She was followed by Mrs Macbeth, who had slung a net bag from her walking-frame to act as a container for cleaning materials – a tin of Mansion House polish, a box of Flash, a large bottle of Parazone, a pink bottle of Windolene – things that had probably never seen the inside of the McCue house before. Bringing up the rear, Duke shouldered his way into the kitchen. I almost expected to see a feather duster in his mouth.

  Mrs McCue hoovered noisily over the vinyl, picking up anything in her path – egg-shells and cabbage stalks, broken pencils, assorted grit, bushels of cat fur, the odd Brussels sprout. Finally, to my relief, she switched the machine off and said, ‘That’s enough for now.’

  Sensing the need for an explanation, Philippa said, ‘Good old Ma’s doing some cleaning for me. And her friend, too, of course,’ she added.

  ‘Just making ourselves useful,’ Mrs McCue said.

  ‘That bathroom,’ Mrs Macbeth said sotto voce to me, shaking her head in disbelief. She waved the bottle of Parazone like a Molotov cocktail.

  ‘They let you out again then?’ I asked.

  ‘They don’t keep them under lock and key,’ Philippa said irritably, ‘it’s not a prison. And anyway, they’re always out. They’re never in.’

  Mrs McCue muttered something under her breath as she sat down next to me. Goneril opened one evil eye and assessed her fearlessly.

  ‘Lunch,’ Philippa said. I made a move to escape; I couldn’t think of anything worse than eating Philippa’s soup, but Mrs McCue laid a heavy hand on my arm and said, ‘It is nice to see you.’