Emotionally Weird

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘Really?’

  I’ve never thought of Nora as having a scientific kind of mind, never think of her having any left-brain at all.

  ∼ Yes, really, she says. I remember that it did nothing but rain that summer. That was nothing unusual, of course, but it was so warm as well and often the air had a heavy, tropical feel to it as if we were in the middle of some great climatic change. It was the strangest weather – purple, stormladen skies, air humming with static. I saw hornets for the first time, droning through the air as if they could hardly lift their own weight. And we were plagued all summer by wasps, one bike after another turning up, under the eaves, in the attics, in the lilacs overhanging the lawn. Mabel bought cyanide to poison them but apparently she’d bought the wrong kind – powder instead of gas – and we didn’t get rid of the wasps until the first frost of winter.

  Then Effie came to stay, trying to avoid the sordid details of the divorce courts and the relentless pursuit of a Daily Express reporter intent on a photograph to reveal the face of the notorious co-respondent to the public. Apparently, the divorce courts had been shown photographs of every part of her anatomy except her face.

  Effie was continually loathsome the whole time, hanging about the house, listless and bored, muttering vile things about Mabel – her size, the common food she cooked, her dubious morals. Mabel smiled at Effie and told her God loved her.

  ‘No he fucking doesn’t,’ she spat back. Effie was convinced Mabel was nothing more than a gold-digger and was terrified that she was going to lose whatever inheritance was left (which was very little and mostly composed of Evangeline’s diamonds, which Mabel had never worn), and although she hated sick-rooms she spent a lot of time sitting by Donald’s bed trying to find out details of his will.

  She considered her father to be completely ‘ga-ga’ and had consulted her solicitor – Effie spent half her time with solicitors now – about getting the marriage declared null and void. I kept out of her way, she never had a good word for me. ‘Every time I look at you,’ she said, ‘I see myself getting older.’

  Effie spent a lot of time on the telephone to Lachlan, who was still living in Edinburgh, trying to persuade him to visit, which he did eventually, in August. He brought his neurasthenic wife, the judge’s barren daughter—

  ‘Oh, give her a name, for heaven’s sake.’

  ∼ Sure?

  ‘Yes.’

  ∼ Pamela.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ∼ His neurasthenic wife, Pamela, city born and bred and highly averse to the country. Pamela took to her bed almost immediately, complaining of headaches and humidity. Mabel spent her time ferrying iced tea and aspirin and arrowroot biscuits up the stairs and reassuring Pamela that despite all signs to the contrary, God loved her very much. An ungrateful Pamela complained that Mabel smelt of bacon fat, which wasn’t true – she smelt of Yardley’s freesia talcum powder and jam, for it was jam-making season and Mabel spent hours at a time stirring the boiling fruit and sugar in Woodhaven’s old copper jeely-pans that she had burnished up again with lemon juice and elbow grease. Jam-making was a dangerous activity because of the plague of wasps, so that before she began her task Mabel had to seal up the kitchen windows and warn no-one to trespass over the threshold of the kitchen.

  She must have been making the jam for herself, for no more than two pots a year were consumed in that house. Effie was too bitter to have a sweet tooth and Donald certainly didn’t eat any jam, he was now living off sops and milk soup. He had recently begun to suffer dreadful pains in his stomach. The local doctor, who was surprised Donald was still alive anyway – a fact that was probably due to Mabel’s careful nursing – guessed at ulcers and prescribed Milk of Magnesia.

  Lachlan and Effie spent all their time together, usually out of the house, driving or walking in the hills, sometimes swimming in the loch, in the rain, always plotting how to get rid of Mabel. Mabel herself was serenely indifferent to them, humming happily to herself as she went about her lowly tasks. She seemed like a woman keeping a secret to herself, and I was surprised that Effie – who had so many secrets of her own – didn’t try to prise it out of her.

  The whole week that Effie and Lachlan were visiting, the short summer nights were rent by Donald’s roars of pain, nights already disturbed by the beastly moans of the cattle, newly deprived of their little calves, and the bleating of the sheep torn from their lambs.

  ‘So much for pastoral innocence.’

  ∼ There’s no such thing as innocence, unless it is in the beating heart of a tiny bird—

  —but then Nora is dive-bombed by an angry seagull, which serves her right for being so fanciful.

  ‘Go on.’ (How tiring all this encouragement is.)

  ∼ No.

  * * *

  When I came round I found myself dry and tucked neatly into the spare bed in the McCue house. Mrs McCue and Mrs Macbeth were sitting either side of me, both of them knitting like enthusiastic tricoteuses.

  ‘Flu,’ Mrs McCue said, nodding and smiling at me.

  ‘Very bad flu,’ Mrs Macbeth added.

  ‘Is that all?’ I asked.

  ‘You want something worse?’ Mrs McCue puzzled. ‘You nearly drowned, you know,’ she added. ‘Ferdinand saved your life. He’s a good boy,’ she added defensively; ‘they should have given him bail.’

  ‘He’s back in jail?’

  No, this mustn’t happen, we mustn’t start to rhyme. I tried again, ‘How did Ferdinand save my life?’

  ‘He’d just got a job working down at the docks,’ Mrs McCue explained proudly. ‘He did a lifesaving course while he was in jail, so he knew what to do.’

  ‘But who pulled me out of the water?’

  ‘Don’t know,’ Mrs McCue said. ‘Some woman.’

  * * *

  It is the dead of darkness, and the world outside our window is in confusion and uproar. Waves pound the rocks, the heavens roar and quarrel with the sea. The dark skies are torn by lightning so that if we were to look out of the storm-proofed windows of the big house we might see the hapless victims of this night’s havoc – the tempest-tossed seabirds, the shipwrecked sailors, the exhausted mermaids and disorientated narratees and the poor fish hiding in the watery chasms of the deep.

  * * *

  ∼ The night that Mabel’s baby was born—

  ‘Baby? What baby?’

  ∼ It was a secret that only I shared. Donald had another stroke – one that robbed him of the power of speech – so he had no way of expressing his astonishment when his wife became miraculously pregnant. Not that I think for a minute that she told him, for she had told no-one else. Donald’s sick-bed had never been a marriage-bed and Mabel remained a virgin, untouched by first Dudley and then Donald. Yet somehow an immaculate conception seemed more likely than Mabel succumbing to the temptations of the flesh. Not that for a moment I thought God – in whom I did not believe – had chosen Mabel as His vehicle for the second coming.

  Nor, clearly, did Mabel, for God was now punishing her in the most malign way he could – He no longer spoke to her. Mabel could sit all afternoon in her ladder-back chair in the kitchen after any number of pleasant lunches of cold chops, pork pies and home-pressed tongue sandwiches and not a word would fall from His lips.

  No-one noticed that Mabel was pregnant. A few extra pounds of baby seemed to make no difference to her size. She never spoke about the father of her child and I didn’t understand what she planned to do once the baby, was born. You can hardly keep a baby hidden.

  ‘Although you can keep its origins hidden.’

  ∼ Not for ever. Mabel told me about the baby when I was home for the Christmas holidays. She was looking after it well already – dosing herself with cod liver oil, avoiding bad thoughts and spiders and drinking gallons of milk. ‘I’ll turn into milk,’ she laughed, but sadly. And knitting like a demon, of course, the drawers were full of little white lacy garments.

  Effie had been in London, trying to rescue some money from
the divorce. Unfortunately, she returned after Hogmanay and discovered a set of tiny woollen mittens, the purpose of which even a fool could have guessed at. Effie was like a cat in a box, I thought she was going to rip the baby out of Mabel’s stomach right then and there, and Mabel didn’t make things any better by telling Effie that God loved her when it was clear to everyone that not even God could have loved Effie.

  So. The night that Mabel’s baby was born I had been at a ceilidh in the village hall in Kirkton of Craigie. It was Easter and my final school exams were in a few weeks’ time, I hadn’t done anything but study for months. Effie was away for the weekend with some man, I expect.

  I’d had such a fine evening at the ceilidh, hurling and birling and falling in love with a strapping farmer’s son. We’d known each other for years, we’d been at the primary school together, but that was the first time he’d ever noticed I was female. I was wearing one of Effie’s cast-offs – a green taffeta dress with a huge skirt – New Look, certainly a new look for me.

  I got a lift home on the back of the farmer’s son’s tractor and walked the last few hundred yards home. I was still hot from the dancing and the falling in love and so on, and didn’t feel the cold at all. It was past one in the morning but there was a full moon – a fat, cheesy moon, more suited to a harvest than a cold spring night. The cattle in the fields were all due to calve and I could hear their restless shuffling and puffing, but other than that it was so quiet. I felt as though I was standing on the edge of something high and glorious, flexing my wings and getting ready to fly.

  (A girl in love is a frightening sight.)

  The house was quiet too, more than usual, for Donald had recently subsided into a ghastly kind of darkness where pain was the only thing that seemed to get through to his mind. His doctor, making a more sophisticated diagnosis this time, declared it to be cancer of the stomach and prescribed morphine. I think he was hoping that Mabel would quietly overdose her husband and hasten his inevitable end, but Mabel didn’t believe in taking life – unless it was to end up on the kitchen table and be eaten – and thought that God should be left to do His business in His own good time. For she still believed in God, even though He no longer believed in her.

  There was a kettle still hot on the range when I came into the kitchen and I made tea with it and sat at the kitchen table to drink it and plan my future with the farmer’s son. Would he wait four years while I did my degree? What would our children look like? What would it be like to be kissed by him?

  ‘You hadn’t kissed him?’ (How hard it seems to be to get a kiss off the man of one’s dreams. Has Nora ever been kissed?)

  ∼ No, she says regretfully – as you would if you were thirty-eight and had never been kissed, but then I am nearly twenty-one and have been kissed many times and all of them put together aren’t worth an imaginary kiss with Ferdinand.

  * * *

  The weather is getting worse if that is possible. The welkin rings with the wind, the sky is cleft by fissures of lightning, the wind threatens to set the little island to sail on the wild waters. Outside, the Siamese cats are slinking along the walls of the house for shelter. We’re afraid that if we let them in they might eat us but eventually we cannot bear their noise any more and relent. They prowl around the house suspiciously as if we might have set traps for them.

  ‘Go on.’

  ∼ Then, finally, I went upstairs. First I looked in on Donald – usually if you couldn’t hear him moaning with pain you could hear him snoring but tonight he was very quiet. It struck me that despite her objections Mabel might have put him out of his misery. The moon was shining through a high windowpane, illuminating Donald – as still as any corpse – in his bed. The covers didn’t rise and fall with a breath and his arms were crossed over his chest as if he had gone to sleep expecting never to wake. I called out, ‘Father,’ and pinched his hand; his flesh was still warm but he was gone. I picked up the bottle that contained his morphine tablets from the bedside table and could feel its emptiness without looking inside. I felt nothing for the passing of Donald, except perhaps relief.

  I hurried to Mabel’s room and as I neared I heard a fretful mewling sound. I thought it was a cat – I’d never heard a newborn baby cry before. I knocked on her door and opened it.

  (Our own cats – although we hardly own them – are wandering around our feet, crying like banshees, not babies.)

  Mabel was propped up in bed, a bed on which the sheets were in mangled and bloody disorder. She looked so dreadful that for a moment I thought she must have had some terrible accident – she had black shadows under her eyes, her hair was plastered to her head with sweat and the terrible look on her face suggested she had stared into the maw of hell. She was holding a baby in her arms – a red, prune-skinned infant. The baby was dressed in a great assortment of the clothes that she had been knitting all winter – leggings and a little coat, bootees, mittens and a beribboned hat. It looked like a baby that was ready to go on a long journey.

  Mabel held the baby out to me without a word. It was sleeping and bore no resemblance to anyone. The question of its paternity wasn’t answered by its looks. It half opened its eyes and I took it over to the window and showed it the moon and, not knowing what else to do in these strange circumstances, I began speaking the kind of nonsense to it that you speak to babies.

  Then the quiet night was disturbed by the noise of an approaching car engine. I heard the car turn into the drive and recognized Effie’s brutal driving. I looked to Mabel to warn her of Effie’s imminent arrival and saw her stirring a white powder into a glass of milk on her bedside table. I thought it must be a Beecham’s Powder – although that seemed a strange antidote to childbirth – but then I smelled the faint almond-smell of it and recognized the little paper packet that had held the poison for the wasps last summer.

  I cried out and put the baby down on a chair and rushed over to Mabel and grabbed the paper packet off her, but it was too late, she had already swallowed the cyanide-flavoured milk. She wore a surprised expression on her face as if she couldn’t believe what was happening and then—

  Nora pauses, not for effect, for she is taking no delight in her storytelling.

  ∼ Have you ever seen anyone dying from poison?

  ‘Obviously not.’

  ∼ Well, I don’t want to describe it, thank you. I think we should leave a space and imagine it, if we have the stomach—

  * * *

  ‘That’s called cheating. And then?’

  ∼ And then she was dead – what else? She’d had to wait until she’d delivered the baby before she could kill herself; it would have gone against everything she believed in to have killed the child inside her. She must have planned to do it all along. And I suppose she thought that, as she was going to hell anyway, she might as well release Donald from his suffering. She did speak before she died. She said, ‘God will talk to me again.’ She was in despair, which is a forsaken place to be, and I wish I had realized, for then I might have prevented what happened.

  I was feeling for a pulse, thinking something might still be done to save her, when Effie came in. Naturally, she was stopped in her tracks at the sight of Mabel. Effie stank of alcohol and she had a bite-mark on her neck. She seemed quite deranged. Then she noticed the baby lying on the chair and pounced on it, saying it wasn’t going to end up with what was hers. I’ve never seen such hate on anyone’s face, not even Effie’s. I would have tried to wrest the baby off her but I knew she wouldn’t care if she hurt it. She was screaming, all kinds of filth and obscenities about Mabel and the baby, about money, about solicitors. I thought someone would hear and come and help me but there was no-one there to come.

  Effie darted out of the room and ran downstairs with the baby. I chased after her, across the lawn, through the gate in the fence and down to the river. The river was swollen and icy with the snow that had melted on the hills, but Effie waded into it as far as she could go. For a moment I thought perhaps she was going to kill hersel
f too – my head was still so full of Mabel – and it was only when she shouted to me, ‘What do they do with kittens on the farm, Eleanora?’ that I realized she meant to drown the baby. She was quite mad, of course.

  I waded in after her. The water was unimaginably cold and the current much stronger than I’d thought. The stones on the riverbed were slippery so that I had difficulty keeping my footing. The green dress, heavy with water, was dragging me down. I tried to snatch the baby out of Effie’s arms, but as I lunged for it I slipped and fell towards her. I caught her off balance and we both fell into the water. I caught a glimpse of the baby being carried away by the river, like a basketless Moses.

  Effie and I clung on to each other as we were swept downstream. We fetched up close to the river bank, entangled in the branches of a tree that had fallen in the water. And then suddenly, without even thinking about it, I clutched a handful of her long hair in my hand and pushed her head under the water. I wanted her to die. I wanted her dead. She fought her way back up, clawing at me like a cat from hell. I had the advantage, though, for she’d been drinking and I had been toughened by years on the playing fields of St Leonard’s, which is a better training than a marine gets. She could hardly speak from the cold but she managed to plead with me, stuttering out the words that I’d been waiting for her to say for a long time.

  Silence.

  ‘The words, what words?’

  ∼ ‘Don’t kill me,’ she begged, ‘I’m your mother.’ And then I pushed her head under the water and held it there. When I let her go, she didn’t come back up.

  ∼ On the whole, Nora says thoughtfully, I think I prefer your story.

  * * *

  ‘Let me get this straight – Effie and Lachlan were your parents?’

  ∼ Of course. Surely you’d guessed? Effie had me when she was fourteen. She didn’t tell anyone until it was too late to do anything about it, I suppose she hoped it would just go away. That I would just go away. She was still running up and down St Leonard’s lacrosse field when she was eight months pregnant, probably keeping it hidden by willpower, knowing her.