Emotionally Weird

by Kate Atkinson

  When I came home I found that Marjorie had died in the local cottage hospital and without a single living soul to see her off, the nurse by her bedside having slipped outside for a cigarette.

  * * *

  Lachlan, who had turned out in adulthood to be as vain, weak and selfish as his childhood character predicted, decided it was time he acquired a wife and got engaged to the highly strung daughter of a judge. Effie was furious, jealous as a cat, and immediately got married again herself to a man she met on a train. It was to spite Lachlan, I suppose. This new husband of Effie’s – let’s call him Edmund – was rich – he owned a business – war-profiteering of some kind, although Lachlan always referred to him as a car salesman because he’d offered to sell him his old Bentley ‘at a good price’.

  Lachlan’s own wife, Gertrude, proved a disappointment. Chosen to be a brood mare for the Stuart-Murray blood, she turned out to be incapable of bearing children.

  Donald had another stroke and became bedridden. Whenever I came home from school it was to the smell of the sick-room. The house was full of nurses coming and going, mainly going – Donald was a terrible patient, most of his nurses only stayed a few weeks; one only lasted a night after Donald threw a full urinal at her head.

  Then Mabel Orchard came.

  ‘And?’

  ∼ And everything.

  * * *

  Brian twirled his cane and his false moustache for Madame Astarti’s benefit.

  ‘Can you get my fags from the dressing-room?’ Sandra asked her. They were waiting in the wings (a place Madame Astarti felt she’d spent her whole life), waiting for their cue to go on stage and start sawing and vanishing.

  There was something melancholic about an empty dressingroom, Madame Astarti thought, even threatening in a funny way. It reminded her of Stage Fright or clowns. Madame Astarti had always found clowns frightening. They were so … unfunny.

  There was no sign of a packet of cigarettes anywhere, but there were clothes hanging on a rail and a coat on a hanger on the back of a door and Madame Astarti went through the pockets of all of them, gingerly, because you never knew what you would find in a strange pocket, but she found nothing. She tried the cupboard. The door handle was stiff and she had to pull hard on it. She nearly fell over backwards when it suddenly responded–

  Chez Bob

  I could hear Bob talking in the bedroom as I came into the flat. At first I thought it must be his usual sleep gibberish, but gradually it resolved itself into (a kind of) Logic –

  ‘Symbolize the following propositions in the symbolism of Predicate Logic:

  a) The miners have a special case.

  b) University teachers don’t have a special case.

  c) The miners work harder than the university teachers.

  d) The miners will get a bigger rise than the university teachers.

  e) No group will get a bigger rise than the miners.

  f) If one group works harder than another group, it will get a bigger rise.

  g) A group will get a bigger rise than another group only if it has a special case and the other group doesn’t. And that,’ Bob said in an exasperated voice, ‘isn’t even the difficult bit – right?’

  ‘Right,’ another voice said, sounding rather tired, as if it might have been listening to Bob for some time. Interestingly, the voice was female. I crept as silently as a dog-burglar across the carpet towards the bedroom door.

  ‘“M”,’ Bob continued ‘is “the miners”, “u” is “the university teachers”, “sx” is “x has a special case”, “hxy” is “x works harder than y”, “bxy” is “x will get a bigger rise than y”, Universe of Discourse is groups of workers. Show by constructing a formal derivation that (c), (f) and (g) together imply (b). You don’t know how to do this stuff by any chance, do you?’ he asked this anonymous female hopefully. ‘My girlfriend thinks I have no brain.’

  ‘And is she right?’

  ‘Ha, ha,’ Bob said. ‘You’re quite witty, aren’t you?’

  The door to the bedroom was ajar and I gave it a nudge so that it opened just wide enough for me to catch a glimpse of Bob lazing naked amongst a tumble of empurpled sheets.

  ‘Brain and brain, what is brain?’ Bob said in a ridiculous voice. I nudged the door a little further until I could see the Finnegans Wake girl lying with the sheet pulled decorously up over her torso but nonetheless presumably naked also.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ she said in an exasperated tone.

  I pushed the door wide open.

  ‘Arse,’ Bob said eloquently when he saw me. The Finnegans Wake girl screamed realistically.

  ‘It’s Star Trek,’ I said helpfully to her, ‘an episode called “Spock’s Brain”, from the third series.’ I shut the bedroom door. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

  I was about to leave when the phone rang. I picked it up and listened in silence to the voice at the other end. Finally, I said, ‘Right, I’ll tell him then.’

  * * *

  When I opened the door to the bedroom Bob put his hands up as if he was expecting to be shot.

  ‘Bob,’ I said with a heavy heart, ‘Bob, I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news for you.’

  ‘The power’s off?’ he guessed. ‘We’re out of tea? You’re leaving me?’ he added rather dejectedly.

  I sighed. ‘No, none of those things. Your father’s dead.’

  Poor Bob Senior, a man I hardly knew really apart from the odd conversation over the tea-table about the state of the garden or the politics of state. Nonetheless, it was I who had the tears running down my face, while Bob stared helplessly at the Finnegans Wake girl, already pulling her clothes on and heading for the door.

  What a particularly bad twenty-four hours it had been.

  * * *

  ‘Buggery rats,’ Madame Astarti exclaimed as the body fell out of the cupboard on top of her.

  Great Excitement

  Madame Astarti had opened up early and was sitting in her booth, drinking tea and idly shuffling her Tarot pack whilst wondering whether to eat all of her Kit-Kat now or save two fingers for later, when she heard a strange ticking noise. She left the booth and went and scrutinized the war memorial suspiciously. The deactivated torpedo was definitely ticking like an alarm clock ready to go off. Madame Astarti looked around; no-one else seemed to have noticed it. Frank the fishman was unlocking his stall, fiddling with an awkward padlock.

  At that moment Madame Astarti became aware of another noise, this one like the droning of a large, angry insect. ‘Look!’ she shouted to Frank, pointing in amazement to the blue sky where a small light aircraft was circling lower and lower, smoke trailing from one of its engines.

  Frank finally managed to yank open the shutters of his stall just as the little aircraft plunged into the sea with a kind of plopping noise. A few minutes later a woman struggled out of the water and waded ashore. Not often you saw that, Madame Astarti thought.

  Frank was indifferent to the woman walking out of the water, instead he was screaming at what he had found inside his stall. Where his plaice and haddock and tubs of whelks were usually displayed was an altogether more sinister cold water fish – the body of a dead woman lay on the slab, with a lemon stuck in her mouth and a few sprigs of parsley for garnish.

  * * *

  ∼ Mabel Orchard was thirty-four years old when she arrived in the glen to nurse Donald and was as passive as a piece of furniture and as placid as a bowling-green.

  (How fanciful are my mother-not-my-mother’s figures of speech.)

  Mabel was very religious; she claimed she’d had visions as a child, something which hadn’t gone down very well with the strict and obscure Christian sect that her parents were members of, who branded her a fanciful and heretical child, one teetering dangerously on the brink of papism and idolatry. Now Mabel no longer bothered with the edifices and ritual of the Church but claimed, like Joan of Arc before her, that God spoke to her in person all the time, although sometimes he sent his
Son to have a word and very occasionally she was blessed with a tête-à-tête with the Holy Ghost Himself. Like Joan of Arc, she was also engaged in a one-woman battle with the enemy, but in the case of Mabel it was the forces of Satan rather than the English (which is not the same thing, despite what some may say).

  Mabel was herself English, born in Bristol to a family that, despite its earthbound name, had been seafaring for centuries, manning men-o’-wars, submersing in submarines and ferrying cargoes of slaves across the great wide ocean. The last male in the Orchard line – Mabel’s brother – had been torpedoed on the China Seas and there was a general sense of disappointment in the family that the nautical genes were going to die out with Mabel, who had decided to remain as chaste as a nun.

  Although she had spent her whole childhood wishing for children of her own, Mabel had forsaken personal happiness and all thought of marriage and married love after her fiancé – Dudley – was shot through the heart at Tobruk, this in spite of the little Bible Mabel had given him as a parting gift and which had nestled snugly in the pocket of his uniform waiting to catch bullets and save his life – in the manner of a story she had read in a magazine. After it fatally failed to fulfil this function, Mabel was uncertain as to whether she should stop believing in God or in fiction. She chose the latter and never opened a magazine – or even a newspaper – from that day forward. After Dudley died Mabel trained as a nurse. If he had lived she had planned to fill her arms with so many babies that when they grew up there would be enough Orchards to crew the entire British naval fleet if necessary.

  Mabel wore a plain gold crucifix around her neck, given to her by Dudley on his last leave, and the chain was so thin that it was beginning to disappear into the folds and rolls of flesh around her chin. For Mabel was fat. There was no politer word for it. Her personal God put no restrictions on appetite or intake, indeed, Mabel had a feeling that he actively encouraged her to eat. And her body, she reasoned, was made by Him, so what better way to praise His works than to develop more of it. It was God, after all, who had put all this bounty on earth – even lardy cakes and black bun – who was she to shun it? Lachlan, when he first met her, called her ‘the cow’ and she did possess a strange passing resemblance to a Jersey in the colour of her hair, the length of her lashes, the flesh on her ample fallow flank. Yet she was stately, almost majestic, in her bulk – more like a great tribal queen than a milch-cow and when she ate – which was often – she was as delicate as a cat.

  ‘Well-upholstered,’ mumbled Donald – who still had the power of speech, if little else, and had taken an uncharacteristic ‘shine’ to his new caretaker. Mabel was so relentlessly nice to him with her ‘God bless you’s and ‘Jesus loves you’s that he began to believe this propaganda and the idea that God might still love him, despite his flaws, wrought a strange change in his character and made him almost bearable. And, although now in his seventies, Donald was still capable of appreciating a female bosom and took considerable, albeit heathen, pleasure in trying to catch sight of Mabel’s butterfat breasts through her cheap blouses, as she bent over him to attend to some intimate bodily function or other of his.

  Unfortunately for Donald, he was now paralysed down his left side and could not really put his thoughts into action.

  * * *

  Such servants as there were had now all departed. They had either been driven away by Donald (before he was blessed by God) or they had got tired of not receiving any wages (the Stuart-Murrays had always had a tendency to resent the idea that servants were supposed to be paid), and Mabel cheerfully took on all the work of the house. Her big dumpling-fleshed arms washed and wrung out any number of soiled bedsheets and stained clothes; she swept and scrubbed and shined and even found time to cook the kind of hearty food that her mother had cooked for her when she lived at home – suet puddings, boiled brisket and shin-beef stews, rissoles and scrag-end hot-pots, jam roly-poly and bread-and-butter pudding. Donald discovered that he rather liked this food and wished he’d met Mabel when he was younger; she would have surely have produced more wholesome and longer-lived heirs than either Evangeline or Marjorie had managed (although Evangeline could hardly be blamed for the First World War).

  God’s favoured time for a little chat with Mabel was in the afternoons, so once lunch was done with and the pots cleared, Mabel would sit in the ladder-back chair in the corner of the kitchen, hands folded quietly in her lap as if in a private church and wait for God to find her. Naturally, God could, if necessary, communicate at any time, even, Mabel once shyly revealed to me, when she was ‘on the WC’, which was a natural act created by God Himself. But the afternoons were the best as far as both Mabel and God were concerned, after a nice lunch – boiled bacon and salad and new potatoes and a slice of apple pie with cheese was a favourite mid-day repast (of Mabel, not God).

  Listening out for God was the only time her hands were idle; the rest of the time they were the busiest hands He ever fashioned. Mabel was particularly fond of knitting; sometimes she unravelled things on purpose just so that she would have something to knit back up again.

  When I first met her, in the school summer holidays when I was nearly sixteen, Mabel had already been ensconced in the house for three months. The atmosphere in Woodhaven was quite changed. Everything was clean and orderly and, possibly for the first time ever in that household, everything was peaceful – but then Effie wasn’t there and peace and Effie never lived in the same room together.

  Mabel was so kind to me, always asking, Was I all right? Was I warm enough? Did I need anything knitted? Would I like something to eat? To drink? Did I want to walk? Talk? Listen to the radio? It made me realize what a cold childhood I had had, how mean-spirited my mother had been, how distant my father, and last, but not least, how peculiar and perverse my siblings.

  * * *

  Effie had been living in London with Edmund, the businessman, all this while and had hardly ever visited the glen or taken an interest in its goings on, so it was quite a surprise for her when she came home, wild-eyed and teetering on the brink of an unsavoury divorce, to be greeted on the doorstep of Woodhaven by Mabel Orchard proudly (yet humbly) displaying a wedding-ring and introducing herself to Effie as ‘Mrs Donald Stuart-Murray’.

  Silence.

  ‘And?’

  ∼And I’m going to bed. Goodnight.

  * * *

  I saw Bob onto the train. It seemed the least I could do, in the circumstances. I walked down to Riverside to watch the London-bound train passing over the Tay but the fog was so thick that I could hardly make out the bridge, let alone the train. The river, what I could see of it, was a cold gunmetal colour. I could have sat down by the banks of the Tay and wept (although for myself rather than Bob), but I didn’t because I had a deadline to meet.

  * * *

  I had to fight my way into the English department. The Tower extension was under siege from protesters, a motley crew now as it seemed anyone with any kind of grievance had begun to attach themselves to the uprising to demand a new world order – students wanting free condoms or the tied-book loan period extending, anti-vivisectionists, diggers and levellers, even a sprinkling of Christians – I spotted Janice Rand and her balding friend holding a hand-made sign that said ‘Overthrow sin – let Jesus into your life’. I doubted that there would be enough room.

  The lift to the extension was out of order, jammed open with a mop and guarded by a boy reading Culture and Anarchy who took the time to ask me if I’d done an Emily Brontë essay and if so could he borrow it? I ignored him and hurried up the stairs where I found the English department being stoutly defended by the redoubtable Joan, standing like a guard dog at the top of the stairs and murmuring something about boiling oil. ‘I think they’ve got Professor Cousins,’ she said, looking rather pleased at the idea.

  There was no sign of Maggie Mackenzie in her room and Joan seemed unsure of her whereabouts. This was very disappointing. I had gone to great lengths to hand in George Eliot on time and now M
aggie Mackenzie wasn’t even there to receive her.

  The door to Dr Dick’s room was closed, of course. I knew only too well why he wasn’t behind it. (Had I had sex with him? And wouldn’t I be able to tell if I had?)

  Watson Grant’s door, on the other hand, was open to reveal a group of bored students to whom he was dictating like an old-fashioned dominie. He was sitting on the wide windowsill surrounded on all sides by books, and frowned when he saw me.

  The door to Archie’s room was also open and I could hear his voice drifting out into the corridor –

  ‘Kierkegaardian dread … The identity of essence and phenomenon “demanded” by truth is put into effect…’

  I tried to tiptoe past unnoticed but Archie caught sight of me and shouted, ‘What are you doing skulking about out there? Come and sit down!’ My protestations went unheeded and he almost dragged me into his room and pushed me into one of the uncomfortable plastic chairs.

  ‘What Heidegger might call “an empty squabble over words”…’

  I could see why he needed me, the only other person present was Kevin – looking distressed, like an animal tracked and hunted down by Archie’s relentless verbosity. No Shug, no Andrea, no Olivia, no Terri (well on her way now, presumably, to Fresno or Sorrento).

  ‘The use of the fragmentary and contingent to express the dissonant … as Pierre Machery says … the line of the text can be traversed in more than one direction…’

  Was it really a week since I had last endured this? Archie bored on:

  ‘… the line of its discourse is multiple … the beginning and the end are inextricably mingled…’

  I felt hot and cold at the same time, there were bees (or maybe Bs) in my head and my brain seemed to be in spasm. Was it my imagination or had the fog outside started to creep inside the room?