Emotionally Weird

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘But accidents will happen by land and by sea.

  Therefore, to save ourselves from accidents, we needn’t try to flee,

  For whatsoever God has ordained will come to pass;

  For instance, you may be killed by a stone or a piece of glass.’

  Poor Dundee, surely not doomed for ever to be the town of McGonagall and the Sunday Post?

  Professor Cousins’ creaking bones took some time negotiating their way up to the top floor but they triumphed eventually. ‘The air’s quite thin up here,’ he wheezed, leaning on the door-jamb to recover. I could only guess at what state I would find the flat in when I opened the front door.

  * * *

  I think it’s time for some more of the story of my miscreant mother (who is not my mother), don’t you? We are huddled inside, in the kitchen, riding out the storm that Nora has stirred up. A fire burns weakly in the grate of the Eagle range. Nora, for reasons best known to her eccentric self, is wearing diamonds around her neck and in her ears.

  ‘Real?’ I query.

  ∼ Real, she affirms.

  ‘Stolen?’

  ∼ Sort of.

  ‘Evangeline’s?’

  ∼ Maybe.

  I sigh with frustration. This is like getting blood out of a stone, drawing teeth from a tiger, wrenching dummies from babies. Has she been in possession of this treasure all through the years of our seaside poverty? Can she explain how she came by them? What a mystery my mother (but not my mother) is.

  I decide on the patient approach of the concerned psychiatrist to pull her tale from her. These are deep waters we are fishing in. ‘Tell me your first memory?’ I say encouragingly to her. Surely we will find something innocent here, an insight into the childish building-blocks of character. My own first memory, of drowning, is not so innocent, of course. Perhaps it was a kind of afterbirth memory of swimming in amniotic fluid (for we are fish), and yet even as I write I can feel the icy water, filling my nostrils, my ears, my lungs, dragging me down into the depths of forgetfulness.

  My second memory isn’t much better. We were catching a bus – one in an endless series in my fugitive childhood. A distracted Nora, preoccupied with the amount of baggage she was trying to get on board the bus, forgot all about me and left me sitting on a bench in the bus station and was two miles down the road before she realized that something was missing. The driver had to slam his brakes on when Nora stood up suddenly at the back of the bus and started screaming dramatically, ‘My baby! My baby!’ so that for one dreadful moment the driver thought he must have crushed Nora’s baby under his wheels. By the time he understood what she was shouting, Nora had precipitated hysteria in half the passengers and an asthmatic attack in a sensitive young librarian who gave up his calling not long afterwards and set off to travel the world in search of an excitement that could equal that of the wild, red-haired woman at the back of the bus. I’m imagining the librarian obviously.

  ‘And yet I wasn’t your baby,’ I muse to her, ‘was I?’ But whose baby am I, for heaven’s sake?

  ∼ I thought you wanted my earliest memory?

  ‘Please.’

  ∼ I am very small and they are very tall.

  ‘They?’

  ∼ Lachlan and Effie. They must be … sixteen and eighteen, maybe a little older. Maybe younger.

  ‘I get the idea.’

  ∼ It’s summer and they have taken me down to the loch for a picnic. I’ve always been their ‘pet’, their ‘plaything’. The trouble is, they treat their pets and playthings very badly. The sun is very hot and the black water is shining in the sun. Insects are dancing and skating on the surface of the water. I can smell rotting weed and heat and hard-boiled eggs –

  (If only I had tried the hypnotic recall approach on her years ago.)

  ∼ We’re sitting on the little jetty and they’re dipping their feet in the water, but my feet won’t reach. I’ve got a splinter in my finger from the rotten planks of wood and I’ve been stung by a nettle but when I cry Effie says that the giant fish-witch who lives in the loch will come and eat me if I don’t stop snivelling.

  ‘Fish-witch?’

  ∼ Fish-witch. Lachlan says he can’t eat an egg without salt and hurls it overarm into the water where it splashes like a pebble. He’s red in the face from the heat. He says he’s bored. She says she’s bored. They smoke cigarettes. They make faces at each other.

  They begin chasing each other, running around the woods, shrieking with laughter – they are always very childish when they’re together. Eventually they grow tired of this and decide to take the little wooden rowing boat out onto the lake. They put me in first, I can feel Effie’s arm round me, slick with sweat. Her hair’s damp on her neck and the cotton print dress she’s wearing is sticking to her body.

  Lachlan rows the boat to the middle of the loch and then he jumps in the water and starts pretending to drown. Effie dives in, like a knife in the water, and they start racing each other to the shore. Lachlan does a butterfly stroke, splashing like a water-wheel, but he can’t catch Effie, who swims as sleekly as an otter and reaches the bank several lengths ahead of him. They clamber out and shake themselves like dogs. Then they start chasing each other again, screaming and laughing and they run off into the woods.

  Then everything falls silent. After a long time of waiting for them to return and an even longer time of realizing they’re not going to, I fall asleep in the heat. When I wake up my skin is sore from the heat. The sun has started to sink behind the trees now and it’s growing cold. I’m terrified the fish-witch is going to rise out of the water like a leaping black salmon and eat me.

  I fall asleep again. When I wake it’s dawn – the loch is covered in mist but by the time anyone comes to look for me, the mist has dissolved and the sun is high again. I am the only person ever admitted to the local cottage hospital who is suffering from sunburn and hypothermia at the same time. Afterwards, they said I had run away from them, but really I think they were trying to get rid of me.

  ‘Why?’

  ∼ Because they were wicked, of course.

  ‘But you learned about boats and swimming from your sister, didn’t you?’ I puzzle to her. ‘Did that come later?’

  ∼ Not from her, she never taught me anything. I learned in case she tried to drown me.

  Chez Bob

  I was expecting Bob to be asleep but he was sitting on the sofa watching Playschool, eating Heinz stewed apples from the jar and speaking conversationally to an invisible person sitting next to him. ‘And thus I recognize that the certainty and truth of all knowledge depends on the sole knowledge of a true God, so that before I knew him, I could not know any other thing perfectly. Is Descartes entitled to this conclusion?’ He looked up and said, ‘Hey,’ when he saw us.

  ‘Hey,’ Professor Cousins replied amiably.

  Bob nodded in the direction of Proteus, companionably sharing the sofa with him and said, rather guiltily, ‘I’m only finishing what he didn’t want.’ Proteus was propped up and bumpered with pillows and cushions. He was covered in food from head to toe, not just the stewed apples but a variety of suspect stains which Bob helpfully mapped – ‘Marmite, Ambrosia Creamed Rice, Ready Brek – this thing’s a gannet.’ Well, it takes one to know one.

  Professor Cousins perched himself gingerly on the edge of the only other available seating – a chair on which a pair of Bob’s Dr Who underpants were unbecomingly draped.

  ‘Why is Proteus here?’ I asked Bob, who gave the baby a speculative look and said, ‘Is that its name?’

  ‘It’s a he. It’s Kara’s baby, you’ve seen him lots of times before.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Professor Cousins said, ‘of course, that big girl who always smells of the barnyard. He’s a nice little chap, isn’t he?’

  ‘But why is he here?’ I persisted patiently to Bob.

  With a long-suffering sigh, Bob tore his eyes away from Big Ted, Little Ted and friends. ‘Because that girl left him here.’

  �
�And out of the millions, if not billions, of girls in the world which one would that be?’

  ‘She said she was your friend.’

  ‘Terri?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Andrea?’

  ‘The lovely one,’ Bob said, his features softening as if he was a devout Catholic referring to the Virgin Mary.

  ‘Olivia?’

  ‘She said she had something she had to do and would you look after him.’

  Perhaps Proteus has taken on the role of the parcel in Pass the Parcel, or a chain letter that had to be handed on. Perhaps – after bringing good luck and wealth to everyone who dutifully passed him on (and unfortunate consequences to those who didn’t) – he would eventually get back to Kara. If the odds were against him he could pass through the hands of the entire population of the world before returning to his mother. How old would he be then? And how long would it take for a baby to be handed round the world? (That would be an interesting experiment.)

  ‘Wouldn’t it be easier just to find his mother and hand him back?’ Professor Cousins suggested, unwrapping his head from the red scarf, like a boiled pudding, or even a clootie dumpling.

  ‘What’s-her-name said something about Karen being at a women’s thingy meeting in Windsor Place,’ Bob said.

  ‘You mean Kara?’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘At a women’s liberation group meeting?’

  ‘The round window!’ Bob shouted suddenly at the television and Proteus squirmed in terror.

  Was Olivia all right? And was an abortion the ‘thing’ she’d had to do? If I was her friend I wasn’t a very good one.

  I offered Professor Cousins a cup of tea but at that moment the power went off, much to Bob’s distress as he was destined never to know now what was through the round window.

  Bob finally recognized Professor Cousins and started enthusiastically explaining to him his idea for his dissertation: ‘On Jekyll and Hyde, ’cos it deals with like one of the universal myths of western society,’ Bob said enthusiastically, waving his arms around like an uncoordinated beetle. ‘There’s all these ur-stories, ur-plots, urmyths, right?’

  Professor Cousins looked concerned and asked Bob if he always had a stammer.

  ‘The Enemy Within,’ Bob said, ignoring the question.

  ‘Stevenson?’ Professor Cousins, furrowing his brow in an effort to follow Bob.

  ‘No, Star Trek,’ Bob said patiently. ‘Captain Kirk gets split into two people by a transporter malfunction – the good Kirk and the evil Kirk.’

  ‘Ah, dualistic theories of good and evil,’ Professor Cousins said, ‘Manicheism, Zoroastrianism.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Bob said, ‘the interesting thing is that the good Kirk can’t live without the evil Kirk – now what does that tell you?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘Then there’s this other episode called “Mirror, Mirror” where all the crew of the Enterprise have doubles—’

  ‘And the doubles are all evil?’ Professor Cousins guessed.

  ‘Exactly!’ Bob said. ‘And then Kirk has to use this thing called the Tantalus Field—’

  I was distracted from this critical analysis by the sight of Proteus trying to eat the top hat piece from the Monopoly board. I supposed it was lucky that he had chosen that rather than the large lump of Moroccan that had been sitting next to it, nonetheless this was no place for a baby.

  ‘I’ll come with you,’ Professor Cousins said when I started gathering up Proteus’s things, none of which he’d had yesterday.

  ‘Yeah,’ Bob said, ‘she said she’d had to buy him stuff.’

  Olivia had spent a fortune on Proteus. She’d bought nappies and Mothercare babygros as white as newborn lambs, Tommee-Tippee cups, a Peter Rabbit cereal bowl, a bone china egg coddler, a baby-blue rabbit, Osh-Kosh dungarees in a blue-and-white butcher’s apron stripe, a pair of corduroy bootees and enough cleansing, wiping, moisturizing ‘stuff’ to stock a small branch of Boots.

  ‘His holdall’s over there,’ Bob said. ‘It should have everything you need. His jacket’s in the hall. His nappy’s been changed and he’s due a sleep but if he’s hungry there’s food in his bag.’

  ‘I’m sorry?’ I stared at Bob in amazement.

  ‘What?’ He started rolling a joint and in the absence of television opened a 1968 Blue Peter Annual.

  ‘Nothing, just for a minute there you sounded like a grown-up person.’

  ‘Not me,’ Bob said cheerfully.

  I found Professor Cousins in the hall, trying to fold up Proteus’s buggy, like someone in a comic film trying to work out a deckchair.

  ‘Where are we going?’ he asked as we commenced the tortuous journey down the stairs.

  ‘A women’s liberation meeting.’

  ‘Well, that will be a first for me,’ he said. ‘I do hope I fit in.’

  ‘Wait!’ Bob shouted after me, retrieving something from down the side of the sofa. He handed me a well-worn and quite filthy dummy. ‘You’ll need this,’ Bob said. ‘It works better than Elastoplast, believe me, I’ve tried everything.’

  What Maisie Didn’t Know

  ‘Like the feeding of the five thousand,’ Philippa said cheerfully, making sandwiches from slices of Sunblest and the remains of the salmon, which had now acquired a faint tarnish of iridescent green. Even Goneril had lost interest in it.

  In fact there were only eight people at the women’s liberation meeting in Windsor Place and four of those – Andrea, Professor Cousins, Mrs McCue and Mrs Macbeth – were not members of the group, as Heather took it upon herself to point out vociferously and at some length.

  ‘He’s a man,’ she said indignantly when Professor Cousins made himself busy slaking Mrs McCue and Mrs Macbeth’s endless need for tea. Professor Cousins tottered around the kitchen table with the teapot, enquiring about milk and sugar preferences, proffering teaspoons and murmuring sotto voce apologies for the use of teabags. Professor Cousins bought his Darjeeling fresh by the leafy quarter from Braithwaite’s every week and seemed particularly perturbed by Philippa’s oak-coloured Typhoo.

  Mrs McCue sniffed her tea suspiciously as if it might be laced with arsenic.

  ‘She thinks someone’s trying to kill her as well,’ I explained to Professor Cousins.

  ‘Well, you know what they say, don’t you?’ he said in a confidential voice to Mrs McCue.

  ‘Just because you’re paranoid they’re not out to get you?’ she said.

  ‘Exactly!’ he grinned.

  Sheila Lake, smeared with oatmeal and masticated Farley’s rusks – and presumably with a baby hidden about her person somewhere – seemed rather charmed by Professor Cousins’ geisha qualities, complaining that Roger wouldn’t recognize the kettle if it hit him on the head (an attractive idea). She seemed blissfully ignorant of the fact that her husband was planning to move his pregnant (or perhaps no longer pregnant) girlfriend into her sandstone villa in Barnhill.

  ‘No Kara?’ I asked. ‘No Olivia?’ No-one, in fact, who might take Proteus off my hands – Proteus who was currently asleep on the bed in the spare room, the erstwhile place of repose of Ferdinand and Janet. Janet herself was sleeping peacefully under the kitchen table downstairs, but what of Ferdinand, where was he?

  ‘He’s taken the dog for a walk,’ Philippa said. Duke gave her a questioning look. She frowned at him. ‘Not that dog, obviously,’ she said, ‘because that dog is here and we can’t ignore the evidence of our senses because then we would enter the territory of casuistry and unnatural doubt, which is all very well in its place. Of course, some people would argue that the truth of factual statements can only be established inductively from particular experiences. Can perceptions yield knowledge of a mind-independent world? Is such a world ever knowable? Does “being” consist in “being perceived”? Is a dog merely a collection of sense data – the smell of a dog, the sound of a dog, the feel of a dog, the taste of a dog, et cetera?’ Philippa paused and, returning Duke’s scrutinizing gaze, said rat
her lamely, ‘Another dog, Ferdinand’s taken another dog for a walk.’

  ‘The taste of a dog?’ Mrs Macbeth puzzled.

  * * *

  The McCue kitchen contained two of the things Andrea feared most in life – food and old people – a fact that was making her rather pale and fidgety. She reported being dragooned by Heather to attend this meeting after being lectured on the ethics of eating an egg from the shared fridge, which she claimed she hadn’t even touched – an egg which was marked ‘H’ in black felt-tip pen, ‘Like Humpty-Dumpty,’ Andrea said moodily. She was wearing a smocked and ruffled pinafore that would not have looked out of place on a Victorian child.

  ‘I thought property was theft?’ I said to Heather.

  ‘Property’s property,’ she retorted crossly.

  ‘What does that mean?’ I said, irritated by this tautologous wisdom, ‘like “I’m me”, or “a door is a door”, “a cat’s a cat”?’

  ‘A man’s a man for a’ that,’ Mrs Macbeth said.

  ‘Is this a game?’ Professor Cousins asked hopefully.

  Mrs McCue was buttering Selkirk bannock. Mrs McCue and Mrs Macbeth had been busy baking in Philippa’s kitchen all morning although, as Mrs McCue confided rather loudly in my ear, not before they had scrubbed everything clean of the McCues’ resident germs.

  ‘Bannock, anyone?’ Mrs McCue offered, handing round a plate.

  ‘I thought that was a battle,’ Andrea said, frowning at the huge slab of calories being thrust under her nose.

  ‘I’m awfie fond of a wee bittie bannock myself,’ Mrs Macbeth said conversationally to no-one in particular. She was wearing a wrap-over overall and was lightly dusted with a talcum of flour.

  ‘Oh, me too,’ Professor Cousins said enthusiastically. ‘I can’t think of anything better than tucking into a spread prepared by the deft hands of the fairer sex.’

  ‘Come again?’ Heather said waspishly, her face distorting unattractively with disbelief.

  ‘I said,’ Professor Cousins began again pleasantly—