‘And what did this mysterious woman say?’ I asked Bob.
He shrugged. ‘Nothing.’
‘Well, she must have said something. You can’t say nothing.’
‘She said,’ Bob said, with theatrical patience, ‘“is there someone called Euphemia there?”’
‘And you said?’
‘No, of course.’
Bob was amazed when I explained to him that ‘Effie’ was short for Euphemia (‘You know, Bob – Robert?’) and seemed rather put out that I hadn’t taken the time to clarify this before. Of course, this was the person who for the first few weeks of our relationship thought I was called ‘F.E.’ like some kind of college or an abbreviated swear word.
No-one ever called me Euphemia, no-one ever had. Who could know me by that name? Who other than someone calling from the obliterated past? Nora’s memory was like history itself – partial, fallible, inclined to oblivion – but surely there were other people somewhere who remembered – a best friend, a cousin, a schoolteacher.
The doorbell rang. It was Shug, who mooched into the flat and settled down on the sofa, burying himself in a Spiderman comic.
‘Can’t stay long,’ he said, ‘things to do, people to see.’
‘Yeah, well I have to go to the bog,’ Bob said as if this was a meaningful rejoinder.
Shug, unlike Bob, always had things to do and people to see. He spent his life disappearing off on mysterious trips and errands – off to Whitfield to see ‘the man’, out to the country to ‘get his head straight’ (which usually resulted in the exact opposite happening) or down south to some festival or other. Or at least that’s what he said – I had once spotted Shug in town, dressed (bizarrely) in a Territorial Army uniform, and on another occasion I had seen him pushing a toddler on the swings in Magdalen Yard Green. Perhaps he was leading a double life – perhaps I should warn Andrea before she found herself committing bigamy. On the other hand, it would give her something to write about.
‘I’ve got an essay to do,’ I said and took myself off to the bedroom because it was obvious I wasn’t going to get any peace if I stayed with Bob and Shug.
The bedroom was an icebox and I had to wear gloves, which made typing rather laborious. I worked on an ancient little Underwood that had a misaligned ‘t’ which made everything I wrote seem perpetually jaunty and surprised, which was rarely the way it was. I had a deadline, so to speak. Martha wanted the first draft of The Hand of Fate by the coming Friday, ‘or else’. I typed one-fingered and with difficulty.
* * *
Madame Astarti walked along the prom to her booth. The sea this morning was an expanse of blue, you couldn’t see the join between sea and sky. It was like standing on the edge of infinity.
‘Morning, Rita,’ Frank the fishman said as Madame Astarti unlocked her booth. Frank’s stall was a work of art – kippers in herringbone patterns and wheels of dead-eyed haddock. This morning’s centrepiece was a big silver salmon, a lemon stuck in its mouth and a wreath of parsley about its neck. ‘Rita’ was what most people called Madame Astarti, a fact she always found intriguing because it wasn’t actually her name.
Madame Astarti’s stall was in a prime position, between the fish stall and the bomb. The bomb was a Second World War torpedo set in concrete and bore a plaque remembering the men of Saltsea who died in the war. It was deactivated, of course, but just occasionally as Madame Astarti sat in her booth a few feet away from its hulking metal she did wonder – how did you know for sure if it was dead? If it had gone dead.
‘Hear about the body?’ Frank asked cheerfully.
* * *
The sound of the music coming from the other room was loud and indistinct. It sounded like Deep Purple but it could have been anything with a drummer really. I could hear Bob and Shug descending slowly into reefer madness; they were talking about their fantasy future in which they co-owned a vastly successful head shop and spent all day discussing the finer points of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. They were reciting some kind of dope mantra to each other – ‘Red Leb, blue dots, Paki black, Moroccan zero zero, THC.’ I put on a pair of ear-muffs made, sadly, from rabbit fur.
* * *
‘A penny for them, Madame Astarti,’ a silky voice said in her ear and Madame Astarti gave a little scream and jumped.
‘You frightened the life out of me,’ she said, patting her fluttering heart (or where Madame Astarti thought of her fluttering heart – which was actually her left lung). Lou Rigatoni laughed and doffed his hat, which Madame Astarti thought was a fedora but wasn’t sure.
Lou Rigatoni was the nearest thing Saltsea had to the Mafia, which wasn’t very near, it was true, but near enough for most people. The Rigatonis had begun the ice-cream empire (‘The Best Scoop in the North!’) which now dominated the north-east stretch of coastline (or ‘The Yorkshire Riviera’ as Vic Leggat, the leader of the local council, would have it known) and had now expanded to include amusement arcades and fish and chip shops and anything that could turn a profit.
‘Heard the news?’ Lou Rigatoni asked. ‘They’ve found a body in the sea, some woman.’ He was lingering in a way that was making Madame Astarti nervous.
‘Yes, well, must be getting on,’ she said, fiddling with the padlock on her booth; ‘things to do, people to see – you know how it is.’
‘Yes indeed,’ Lou Rigatoni laughed, ‘I myself have to see a man about a dog.’ And with that he doffed his hat again and was gone.
‘Poor dog,’ thought Madame Astarti.
I must have fallen asleep, for the next thing I knew I was woken by the ringing of the telephone. I seemed to be alone in the flat. I picked my way through the remains of the cat biryani strewed across the floor. When I picked up the receiver I found only silence on the line – a condensed absence of noise that seemed to contain unspoken words and unasked questions. Then I heard the click of the receiver being replaced at the other end and the line went dead.
I discovered a note written in Bob’s primary-school hand informing me that he and Shug had gone to see John Martin in New Dines. The phone rang again and I snatched at the receiver this time. Philippa McCue’s compelling tones echoed in my ear reminding me that I was supposed to be babysitting.
‘You hadn’t forgotten, had you?’ she said.
‘No,’ I sighed, ‘I hadn’t forgotten.’ Although I had, of course.
Something Fishy
The sea around the point is a curdled yellow brew, and the sun is an anaemic and watery thing that has struggled all day to crawl up its daily arc in a white squall of a sky.
I have borrowed dead Douglas’s binoculars and am keeping watch on the cliffs, although there is nothing to see except for the seals treading water in the Sound, their black heads bobbing on the water like rubber balls. Occasionally, far away on the cloudy blur of water and sky that passes for the horizon around here, the shape of a ship glides by, like a theatrical illusion – a cardboard silhouette being moved across a painted sea. Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all – a backdrop for the stories we must tell.
I feel as if I am waiting for something but I have no idea what that might be. I think I have been waiting all my life, waiting for someone to find me – a grandfather to claim me as his kin or the ghost of my father to appear and tell me his story. On the Oban birth certificate (a forgery, Nora confesses blithely) he is ‘unknown’, an anonymous person who seemed to have somehow slipped from Nora’s memory, a man who made so little impression on her that she couldn’t always be sure of his name and when I asked about him as a child she would say he was called Jimmy, sometimes Jack, occasionally even ‘Ernie’. Any Tom, Dick or Harry would do apparently.
∼ He could have been anyone, she says stoutly.
‘He must have been someone.’
The dead sometimes forget the living but the living rarely forget the dead. Not, however, in the case of my father. Half of what made me is completely missing – the forensics of my fa
ther a mystery. In their absence I am free to imagine him, but, unfortunately, even in my imagination he is leaving – on the deck of a ship, at the wheel of a car or leaning out of the window of a train carriage, his face obscured by clouds of steam from the engine.
From the occasional careless remark on Nora’s part during my childhood, I deduced that our moneyless, itinerant existence in the Sea Views and Sailor’s Rests of the English seaside was not the life that Nora had been born to. I wondered if perhaps Nora had got with child through a secret passion – impregnated by some black-hearted scoundrel, a passing vagabond perhaps, a groom in the stables or a gypsy in a wood – and that her angry father had thrown her out of the family home to find her own way in the world. I imagined her locked out in the cold and the driven snow, giving birth to me – her bastard daughter – in some freezing hovel.
‘Was it like that?’ I ask her, as I have asked her many times before. Nora looks at me thoughtfully.
∼ Not exactly, she says.
I dreamt that one day Nora’s father – chastened and forgiving – would find me and claim me as granddaughter and heir, and I would be restored to my rightful place in a world where people stay in one place and sleep in their own beds at night and avoid unnecessary journeys. Of course, life is composed almost entirely of journeys, necessary and unnecessary, but mostly unnecessary in my opinion.
I am waiting for Nora to give myself to me, to tell me about the time before my memory began, before I myself began.
‘Perhaps you could start with Douglas,’ I prompt her.
∼ Who?
‘Your brother.’
But she’s already gone, striding across the cliff-top towards the house.
* * *
My babysitting services were required because Philippa and Archie were going to a dinner party at the home of the Dean. When I arrived at their house in Windsor Place I found Archie standing at the kitchen sink, stoking up beforehand in case there might not be enough food and drink on offer at the Dean’s table – desperately quaffing the dregs of an old bottle of Bordeaux – a leftover from a French holiday en famille – between mouthfuls of a cold shepherd’s pie that he’d foraged from the depths of the fridge.
‘Politics,’ he said to me, ‘that’s the name of the game – Maggie Mackenzie hasn’t been invited, you’ll notice. Nor Dr Clever-Dick. And as for Grant Watson, or whatever his name is – what a no-hoper.’
‘What about the Professor?’
‘The who?’
Archie finished off the shepherd’s pie and started truffling around in the fridge again, finally retrieving a plate of leftover roast chicken and Brussels sprouts. I never ate anything from the McCues’ fridge when I was babysitting, there were things lurking in there that I recognized from two years ago – rancid dairy products and strange life forms blooming and reproducing in old Mason jars. Philippa, a Girton old girl and a part-time lecturer in the Philosophy department, was the slapdash sort and kept a remarkably filthy house.
Philippa had also recently become infected with the writing sickness and had embarked on her own novel – a doctor/nurse romance (The Wards of Love) in which the heroine bore the unlikely name of ‘Flick’ and which Philippa was intending to send to Mills & Boon. The large farmhouse table in the kitchen seemed to be acting as Philippa’s desk – it was littered with papers, unmarked essays and textbooks. Philippa’s surprisingly neat philosopher’s hand was much in evidence, particularly on a great sheaf of narrow-lined foolscap, the aguish aura of which suggested it must be her novel.
Words peeled off the page – hair the colour of a field of ripe wheat … eyes like drops from the bottomless depths of an azure ocean – and rained onto the Nairn cushion vinyl. The McCues’ dog, Duke, pattered into the kitchen. Duke was a burly, barrel-shaped Rottweiler made up of muscle and solid fat and built like a wrestler, a dog that looked like it was permanently on the verge of dying of boredom. He shook his weighty head as if he was being plagued by ear-mites and dislodged a scatter of small romantic words like a broken rope of pearls.
Duke sniffed around the floor looking for something to eat other than words; the kitchen floor usually rendered up any number of food deposits. Today there was a raw egg that someone had dropped and not bothered to clean up. Duke licked up the egg with one sweep of his tongue, skilfully avoiding the broken shell, and then sat down heavily as if his legs had given way and drooled at the chicken drumstick that Archie was gnawing on like a caveman.
Adding to the general air of disarray in the McCue household were a number of animals. In descending order of size after Duke these were: a hefty cat called Goneril; a Dutch rabbit (Dorothea); a guinea-pig (Bramwell); and, finally, a hamster called McFluffy who was replaced by a new McFluffy every few months whenever the old McFluffy was either eaten by Goneril, trodden on by Philippa or sat on by Duke (or vice versa). A considerable number of McFluffies had simply packed their pouches and escaped from prison, disappearing into the innards of the house, so that behind the wainscoting and under the floorboards there now lived a tribe of feral hamsters conducting guerrilla warfare against the McCue household.
The current McFluffy was sleeping in a nest of shredded Evening Telegraphs, in a cage in the corner of the kitchen. The cage was precariously balanced on top of a Christmas-sized tin of Quality Street, containing five years of unfiled household receipts, and a copy of Kierkegaard’s Fear and Loathing.
Goneril slunk into the kitchen and wound her body like a fat skein of wool around my feet. A piebald queen whose white patches had grown a urine-yellow, like the pelt of an old polar bear, Goneril was an unattractive cat with dead fish breath and slovenly habits that she’d probably caught off Philippa. She was a cat who liked no-one, especially not the eldest son Crispin, not after an unfortunate accident involving a tab of acid and a tin of Kit-E-Kat during his last long vacation.
Archie put his plate in the sink, already overloaded with dirty plates, burnt baking trays and Pyrex dishes that had acquired an unsavoury patina from years of McCue cooking. On the dull stainless-steel draining-board a huge raw salmon was laid out as if waiting for a post mortem.
‘We’re having a party,’ Archie said, indicating the salmon, rather morosely. It didn’t look like a party-going sort of fish; its silver-lamé scales may have gleamed under the kitchen lights but its dead eye was lustreless and fixed and it had leaked blood onto the draining-board. The cat made a great pretence of not seeing the fish.
‘Yes,’ Philippa shouted suddenly from the hallway, ‘Effie should come to the party.’ She appeared in person in the kitchen doorway a few seconds later, carrying a giant-sized tin of dog food. She smelt vaguely of lard. At the sight of the dog food, Duke changed his dribbling allegiance from one spouse to the other, worshipping at Philippa’s big feet like a slavering Sphinx.
‘A few students at the party would be a good idea,’ Philippa said to Archie.
‘Why?’ he asked doubtfully.
‘Because,’ Philippa said impatiently, ‘being popular with students looks good.’
‘Does it?’ Archie said, looking even more doubtful.
‘Bring a friend,’ Philippa said imperiously to me. She would have made a good wife for Macbeth; she certainly wouldn’t have fretted about a few blood spots.
Philippa’s physique was remarkably similar to Duke’s, although, unlike Duke, Philippa was wearing a kaftan. She hadn’t got round to buttoning up the front properly and her jaded, wrinkled bra was visible as well as quite a lot of jaded, wrinkled breast. The hem of the kaftan ended mid-calf, thus revealing Philippa’s unshaven legs, bare despite the inclement weather, growing stoutly out of a pair of red leather clogs that looked as if they were on the run from something Grimm. Philippa had dramatic badger hair – black with a swathe of white through it – which tonight she was wearing in a long squaw braid.
She was quite an embarrassing sort of person really, constantly referring to menstruation and sponge tampons and vaginal examinations so that she made women’s h
ealth sound like car maintenance. A stalwart of the university women’s liberation group, she was always urging us to examine our genitals in hand mirrors and stop shaving our body hair.
‘Right,’ Philippa said, making her way to the front door with Archie, myself and assorted animals tailing after her, ‘there’s food in the fridge if you get hungry, Effie, no sweets for Maisie, make her do homework, remember no television – except Tomorrow’s World because that’s educational, sort of, but she has to go to bed straight afterwards – the Dean’s phone number’s on the table if you have an emergency.’ Finally rattling to a stop, Philippa shrugged herself into an enormous Mexican-style poncho. She was still clutching the tin of dog food and I wondered if she was taking it with her to the party instead of a bottle of wine. Or just trying to drive Duke to the brink of insanity – a state of mind you had to judge, not from his expression of terminal canine ennui, but from the amount of dog slobber he was producing.
Archie, meanwhile, was admiring himself in the hall mirror, smoothing his hair and adjusting his tasteless kipper tie. Despite having a physical resemblance to a large sea-mammal, Archie was under the impression that he was attractive to women, which, for reasons beyond my comprehension, he was. (‘Maybe you’re not a woman?’ Andrea suggested.)
‘Of course,’ Archie said to me, via the medium of the mirror, ‘I don’t believe in bourgeois crap like dinner parties, it’s just a means to an end. Right,’ he said, finally satisfied with his appearance, ‘I’ll be off. Don’t take any nonsense from you know who.’
‘Who?’
‘You know,’ Philippa said. ‘The old mare.’ (Or at least, that was what it sounded like.) She was halfway down the path by now and she turned and shouted, ‘Catch!’ and bowled the tin of dog food underarm to me. Philippa had once been captain of Cheltenham Ladies’ College cricket team. And somehow she still was.
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