Emotionally Weird

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘… the autonomous work of art brings into question—’

  ‘But don’t you think, Archie,’ Professor Cousins said mildly, ‘that really all literature is about the search for identity?’ He made an expansive gesture, ‘From Oedipus Rex onwards it’s about the search of man –’ he reached out and patted my hand ‘– and the fairer sex, of course, for the true understanding of himself – or herself – and his – or her – place in the universe, in the whole scheme of things. The meaning of life. And God,’ he added, ‘does He – or She – exist and if so why does He – or She – leave us bereft in a cold and lonely world, spinning endlessly through the black infinity of space, whipped by the icy interstellar winds? And what happens when we reach the end of infinity? And what colour is it? That’s the question. What do we see when we stand on the terrace of infinity?’

  Everyone sat in silence, staring at Professor Cousins. He smiled and shrugged and said, ‘Just a thought, do carry on, dear boy.’

  Archie ignored him. ‘Not only the role of the creator of the fiction but also his relationship to the work itself—’

  ‘Excuse me,’ Kevin said to Professor Cousins, ‘did you mean “What is the colour of infinity”? Or did you mean “What is the colour of the end of infinity”?’

  ‘Is there a difference, do you think?’ Professor Cousins said eagerly. ‘How intriguing.’

  ‘End of infinity?’ Andrea puzzled.

  ‘Oh, everything has an end,’ Professor Cousins said reassuringly, ‘even infinity.’

  Infinity, I happen to know, is the colour of sludge and dead seals, of sunken battleships and their crews, the dregs of Monday mornings and the lees of Saturday nights and of small harbours on the north-east coast in January. But I kept that knowledge to myself.

  ‘… represents the distance between the world and phenomena, not to mention the—’

  Archie was interrupted again, this time by a neat rapping at the door and Martha Sewell walked in without waiting for an answer. Martha was the recently appointed tutor in creative writing. After one year, Archie had declared the creative writing paper such a success that he had persuaded the department, for the sake of prestige, to appoint ‘a real writer’ to the post of tutor. Bostonian Martha, an Amherst type, was a poet in her forties whom no-one in the department had ever heard of. She wrote poetry with impenetrable syntax about a life where nothing ever happened. Her poems had titles like ‘Abstraction Or [#3]’ (and your hair, blurred with/rain makes me think/of the obliquity of existence) and had just published a new collection called Cherry-Picking in Vermont, which she carried around with her everywhere like a passport, as if she might be asked to prove who she was.

  Martha was still in culture shock, having come to Dundee thinking that it was part of a Scotland that was built out of lochs and mountains and decorated with moorland and waterfalls, and every so often you could see a pained look cross her face when she had to negotiate a piece of shoddy modern architecture, a gas-lit close, or a hollow-eyed and abandoned jute mill. She was not convinced when Dundee’s many good points were pointed out to her – the glorious parks; the municipal observatory; the view from the Law; the beautiful bridges; the Tay; a radical and seditious history; the almost unnatural friendliness of Dundonians, their concomitant violence; the curiously Dundeecentric press; the inhabitants’ benign indifference to idiosyncratic behaviour (the way, for example, that you could walk down the street in nothing but a pair of baffies with a budgerigar on your head and no-one would think twice of it).

  Tall and thin and as sensual as a cod, Martha had large beloafered feet that were designed for pounding the paths and trails of New England. She gave the impression of being extraordinarily clean and groomed, as though she curried herself thoroughly every morning. Her smooth hair, somewhere between blond and grey, a colourless colour, was worn in a tidy bob, kept in order by a black velvet Alice band.

  Martha had been accompanied to Scotland by her husband, Jay – a professor at Ann Arbor and a Whitman specialist – who had taken a sabbatical to accompany his wife. The Sewells spent a lot of time – certainly more than the average Dundonian – visiting Edinburgh, where they purchased cashmere tartan travel rugs, Caithness crystal, and rare malt whiskies and daydreamed about renting a house in Ramsey Gardens.

  Martha and Jay belonged to the class of people who run economies and design legislation, who arrive alive in the polar regions and survive in the equatorial, who invent chronometers and barometers, and mend clothes and darn stockings and never run out of milk or clean underwear. They led the kind of life I could never hope to, especially if I stayed with Bob.

  Today Martha was wearing black courts, a grey flannel skirt and a rat-coloured woollen wrap that came down almost to her feet and was carrying a heavy, serious-minded, leather briefcase. Although not directly involved in the war of the departmental succession, Martha seemed to have become a trophy figure and the various candidates vied to have her on their side.

  ‘You’re busy,’ she said to Archie. Archie denied this self-evident fact, waving his hand dismissively at his students as if we were a figment of Martha’s imagination. Andrea made a gagging gesture as if she was about to throw up.

  ‘Are you looking for the toilet?’ I asked Martha kindly, but she had caught sight of Professor Cousins in the corner and a shadow of confusion passed across her granite-smooth forehead.

  ‘He’s sitting in,’ Archie said, making Professor Cousins sound like a student protester. Professor Cousins leant so far towards me that he nearly toppled over in the chair. He jabbed a finger in Martha’s direction. ‘Remind me who she is again,’ he said, in a loud whisper.

  I shrugged. ‘Some woman.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said as if that made everything clear. He folded his hands over his old man’s soft belly and nodded benignly at Martha and said, ‘Sit down, sit down,’ gesturing towards a chair next to Terri. ‘You might learn something,’ he laughed. ‘I know I have.’ Martha looked to Archie for guidance but he just raised his eyebrows as if to say it was nothing to do with him and so Martha reluctantly folded up her awkward grasshopper limbs into the chair, all the while keeping a wary eye on Terri.

  Seeing Martha was a blow, I was hoping to avoid her for some time. The creative writing assignment I owed her was another degree paper I was probably going to fail, and to make matters worse my assignment, The Hand of Fate, was a crime novel, the least reputable genre there was, according to Martha (‘Why? Why? Why?’) and I had to pretend to her that crimewriting was a postmodernist kind of thing these days, but I could tell that she wasn’t convinced. Things would have been going better with Martha if I’d had more words on the page, rather than in my head. (How much easier life would be for the poor writers if they didn’t actually have to write their books.) So far I’d got little further than a rudimentary character introduction and a hint of plot –

  ‘Well, time and tide wait for no woman,’ Madame Astarti said out loud as she heaved her portly shape off the bed. Madame Astarti’s torso would have fitted quite snugly inside a barrel. The only thing she could find to eat in the kitchen was half a packet of stale chocolate digestives. She wondered if there would be any point in going on a diet. She had lost her figure sometime in the sixties and had been unable to find it ever since. She lost it before she arrived in Saltsea. She’d never intended to come here; it was one of those haphazard kinds of decisions (which means no decision at all, merely circumstance). She’d arrived in 1964 with her then husband Gordon McKinnon on a cheap-day return from Cleveland when they’d both been in a rather tired and emotional state. They’d had a long-running argument which had cumulated in a nasty moment on top of the Ferris Wheel with Gordon telling her about his personal interpretation of reincarnation – a theory which centred on Madame Astarti’s imminent return as a seagull – but which eventually resolved itself with Gordon returning to Cleveland and Madame Astarti staying in Saltsea. The last she had heard of Gordon McKinnon was in 1968 when he was on the run from the RSPC
A. He could be dead for all she knew – an ambivalent state occupied by many people Madame Astarti had once been acquainted with. The could-be-deads, as she thought of them.

  After several more cigarettes, and a rather prolonged toilette which included Madame Astarti’s constant struggle with one of the world’s eternal dilemmas – how to apply mascara when she couldn’t even see her face without her spectacles on – she was finally ready.

  The telephone rang but when Madame Astarti answered it the line went dead with a purposeful click. ‘Went dead’ – that was a curious phrase, wasn’t it? she mused thoughtfully. Things that go dead, in their various tenses. Electricity, telephones, not people, they didn’t go dead they just were dead. Things that go dead in the night – no, that wasn’t right, was it? Sometimes she wondered if she wasn’t in the early stages of dementia. But how do you tell?

  She locked up carefully behind her, reasoning it was better to be safe than sorry, even though Madame Astarti had lived most of her life according to the opposite philosophy. ‘Time to go,’ she said to no-one, although—

  Professor Cousins startled me by leaning over towards me again and producing a Nuttall’s Minto from his pocket which he pressed into my hand, saying, ‘You’re a good girl,’ as if he had been told otherwise by someone.

  I wondered if Professor Cousins was as old as he looked. I was a kind of magnet to old people – at bus-stops and in shop queues they flocked around me, desperate to chat about bus timetables and weather. Andrea, who was frightened of old people (in case she became one, one day, I suppose), said that every time she looked at a baby she thought that one day that baby would be an old person. Personally, I prefer to look at an old person and remember they were once someone’s baby. Perhaps there are two personality types (a half-full, half-empty kind of thing), on the one hand the people who can discern traces of the baby in the senescent and, on the other hand, the depressives that look at the fresh baby and see the demented old crone.

  ∼ Wise, Nora amends, wise old crone.

  Archie was beginning to get a slightly mad look in his eye. The overheated room and the number of people in it were making him increasingly dishevelled – he had loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar and the damp patches of sweat were spreading further and further across his chest like two oceans determined on confluence.

  ‘… or as the transition from one existent to another, from a signifier to a signified…’

  ‘Excuse me, Archie,’ Professor Cousins was waving his hand around in the air to catch Archie’s eye.

  ‘Yes?’ Archie said stoically.

  ‘Could you just go back a bit,’ Professor Cousins said genially. ‘I seem to be losing the thread of all this. I’m afraid –’ he turned to Archie’s students with a conspiratorial smile ‘– I’m afraid I don’t have Dr McCue’s brilliant mind.’

  Archie trundled his chair across the carpet, a mode of locomotion that made him resemble a particularly inept Dalek, but then stopped abruptly in front of the Professor and started doing strange breathing exercises, presumably to calm himself down, although he gave the impression of someone who was trying to inflate himself.

  ‘Realism,’ Martha intervened patiently on Archie’s behalf, speaking very loudly and slowly to Professor Cousins, ‘Dr McCue’s talking about realism.’

  ‘Ah,’ Professor Cousins smiled at Martha, ‘Trollope!’

  Archie retreated back across the brown contract carpeting and snapped, ‘The mimetic form can no longer convince us of its validity in the post-industrial age, true or false? Someone? Anyone? Kevin?’

  Kevin shook his head miserably at the wall.

  ‘Effie?’

  ‘Well, I suppose these days,’ I said, wriggling uncomfortably in my chair, ‘there’s an epistemological shift in fiction-writing, whereby second-order verisimilitude won’t suffice any more when trying to form a transcendentally coherent view of the world.’ I had absolutely no idea what I was talking about, but Archie seemed to.

  ‘That seems to imply that achieving a transcendentally coherent view of the world might still be a good thing, doesn’t it? Anybody?’ There was another knock on the door.

  ‘It’s like Waterloo Station in here,’ Professor Cousins said cheerfully. ‘I don’t know when you get any teaching done, Archie.’ Archie gave him a doubtful look. Professor Cousins may be on his way out but he hadn’t gone yet and still had hiring and firing power. The knock on the door was repeated.

  ‘Come in,’ Archie said querulously. The candle wavered and flickered wildly.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said to—

  ∼ No, no, enough, Nora says wearily, that’s far too many people already.

  * * *

  I sleep in a back room, a servant’s room, that smells of mildew and wet soot. The thin paisley eiderdown feels damp to the touch. I have settled on this room because the larger bedrooms all have water coming in the roof, collecting drip-drip-drip into buckets like Scottish water torture. I have tried to build a fire in the tiny cast-iron corner grate but the chimney is blocked, most likely by a dead bird.

  On the bedside table there still sits a pocket Bible covered in cheap black leather that has blistered with the damp. The pages are freckled with age, the paper as thin as old skin. It is not a family Bible but is inscribed on the flyleaf in the utility hand of a servant. I imagine some poor put-upon maid of the holidaying Stuart-Murrays waking in the morning here to the sound of the thrumming rain and looking out across the dreich wet view from her little window and wishing she belonged to a sensible family that spent their summers in Deauville or Capri.

  I can hardly sleep because of the unearthly yawling and yowling of the feral cats, like feline banshees. They have startled me awake most nights since I arrived – dropped off by a passing friendly fishing-boat, the owner of which regretted that he could not return for me because the island was full of strange noises that made him ‘feart’. He was not to be persuaded that they were merely Siamese cats gone horribly wrong.

  I am convalescing. I have been sick with a virus, a strange influenza that has left me as weak as a kindle of kittens. I have come here to recuperate although, sadly, my atavistic mother’s island does not provide the usual invalid comforts – warm bedrooms, soft blankets, coddled eggs, tinned soup, and so on – but I must make do, for Nora is all I have.

  Nora herself washed up here a couple of years ago, in her little boat, the Sea-Adventure. She lives like a castaway in the ‘big house’, which is indeed bigger than all the other ruined crofts and roofless cottages that litter the island, themselves slowly eroding into landscape like the ruins of a Minoan palace. Nora says that her great-grandfather had the house built in the last century, imagining that generations of Stuart-Murrays, stretching out to the crack of doom, would wish to vacation here.

  The house gives the impression of having been abandoned suddenly, in anticipation of some great disaster. Set up on the hill overlooking the Sound, and beyond that to the wide Atlantic, the winter winds are so fierce here that they cast up pebbles from the beach to rattle and knock against the windows, as if the ghosts of homesick mariners are asking to be let in.

  The house is falling down around our ears. A house that was once grand and orderly is now reduced to little more than a stone shell. The roof leaks dreadfully so you cannot move for falling over old galvanized buckets of rainwater. The sandstone of the sills has been worn away by the sea air, the floorboards are rotten and the main staircase so eaten by worm and fly that you must walk at the edge of the stair for fear of falling right through to the mosaic-tiled floor of the hall below.

  The house still has its heavy, moth-eaten drapes and cold, fireless grates, the big Belfast sinks, the monstrous Eagle cast-iron range, the Glass Queen washboards and a full set of bells for summoning servants who have long since ceased to respond. The walls are hung with gloomy oil-paintings, so in need of cleaning that you can barely make out the stags and liver-spotted spaniels and heathery vistas that form their subjects. There
is even a plant that has survived, a dry old palm with papery brown leaves, struggling on from another era without benefit of water or warmth.

  The house is full of the mouldering relics of a more complex, more opulent life – the huge silk umbrellas like marquees that rot in the outsized yellow dragon Chinese vases in the vestibule, the complicated deckchairs with canopies and footrests whose green canvas is worn so pale and thin that they can barely take the weight of a field mouse. In cupboards and trunks and outhouses there lurk decaying galoshes, sou’westers and rubberized macs, ancient shotguns and fishing-rods and nets. On disintegrating dressing-tables the bristles of enamel-backed brushes have caught the hair of people who are all now dead.

  The cellar appears to have been used as a storehouse for the whole island and contains cargoes of mysterious objects – lengths of net and twine, old fish boxes and lobster pots, racing-pigeon hampers, shrivelled seed potatoes and, perhaps strangest of all, the figurehead from the prow of an old sailing-ship – a seafaring sailor’s fantasy of a mermaid, with yellow hair and naked torso, she must have once flown beneath the bowsprit of some brave ship, her breasts jutting into the winds and her mad blue eyes looking on the wonders of the world – the Baltic ice and London fog, the tempests of the Capes, the soft yellow sands of the Pacific and the strange savages of Bermuda.

  Everything is turning to dust before our eyes. Nothing escapes the hand of time, neither the cities of the Sumerian plain nor the holiday home of our ancestors.