Emotionally Weird

by Kate Atkinson

  ‘They’re airing,’ Kara said, appearing in the doorway, her body sagging with the weight of Proteus on her hip.

  ‘Well, I didn’t think they were cooking,’ he murmured, but not so that she could hear. Gilbert’s childhood nanny had inculcated a dreadful fear of women into him, a fear that Harrow had refined into an art.

  Kara sat down at the kitchen table and started breastfeeding Proteus, currently encased in a grubby babygro. She was followed into the kitchen by another of Balniddrie’s residents, a woman called—

  ∼ For heaven’s sake, Nora objects grumpily, not another character. There are far too many already, and all these minor ones, what’s the point? You introduce them, give them a trace of character and then abandon them.

  ‘Who? Who have I done that to?’ I can see she’s having to rack her brain to come up with one but finally she says,

  ∼ Davina.

  ‘Who?’

  ∼ In the creative writing class. I bet she doesn’t appear again.

  ‘How much?’

  ∼ A pound.

  ‘Anyway, life’s full of minor characters – milkmen, newsagents, taxi drivers. Can I go on?’

  ∼ And what about the boy with no name?

  ‘No,’ I correct her, ‘it’s The Boy With No Name.’

  ∼ Whatever, I don’t even see the point of introducing him – someone who doesn’t even exist any more. You would be as best not giving any of them names, they last for such a short time.

  ‘Be quiet.’

  —a woman called Jill, who had a three-year-old daughter called by a Gaelic name that no-one was ever quite sure how to pronounce once they had seen it written down. Jill sat down next to Kara who had stopped breastfeeding in order to start rolling an enormous loose joint of home-grown grass.

  ‘You don’t have a George Eliot essay by any chance?’ I asked Jill. She gave me a rather disparaging look and took out a tin of Golden Virginia, which she opened to reveal a layer of tiny neat joints packed in like sardines. ‘I’m a Law student actually,’ she said, prising one of the tiny joints out of the tin.

  Gilbert had set about – with much banging and clattering of pans – to cook some kind of meal. This might have been lunch, it might have been dinner, I couldn’t really say – it was so very dark outside that it was impossible to tell what time of day it was and I had lost all track of time by now.

  Kara inhaled on her joint as if her life depended on it. Every so often a seed exploded like a tiny pistol-shot and sent a glowing red spark skittering across the table or onto an inflammable piece of child’s clothing (which is also how accidents happen). Jill and Kara exchanged their joints. They had embarked on a heated discussion about the age at which you should stop breastfeeding. Jill favoured two years old while Kara thought you ‘should let them decide for themselves’. A decision she might live to regret when Proteus was a thirty-year-old civil servant commuting daily from Tring.

  At that moment a small child lunged into the room and gave a bloodcurdling scream. I jumped up in alarm – the cry was so ghastly that for a moment I thought it must be on fire and was searching for something to throw over it. No-one else in the kitchen seemed moved by the noise, all except for Terri who stuck a surreptitious foot out and tripped the child up. It ceased the noise abruptly and I recognized it as Jill’s daughter.

  ‘If you’re hungry you’ll have to wait,’ Jill said to her. The child unearthed a plastic potty from under the table and threw it across the kitchen.

  ‘Don’t forget we’ve got to kill the goat,’ Gilbert said, casting a doubtful look over a wrecked Kara. In the hierarchy of Balniddrie – although pecking-order might be a more accurate term – Kara was the unacknowledged leader. The goat to be killed, it transpired, was a little billy-kid because, Jill explained, ‘Billy-kids are no use for anything.’

  ‘I didn’t know we got executed if we weren’t of any use,’ Terri said. ‘I didn’t realize usefulness was the criterion by which we lived or died.’ (Quite a long sentence for Terri.)

  ‘We’re not talking about people, we’re talking about goats,’ Kara said.

  ‘Goats, people – what’s the difference?’ Terri said, looking as if she was about to stab Kara with her parasol.

  ‘It’ll be a humane killing,’ Jill said in an attempt to mollify Terri. ‘Miranda’s going to do it, she’s the—’

  ∼ Excuse me, Nora says, but where is Kevin? Have you forgotten he’s in the kitchen?

  Kevin, who had been remarkably silent until now (unlike Nora), was helping Gilbert to peel potatoes and carrots in a slow, ham-fisted way. He popped the top of a can of McEwan’s and said, ‘That’s what animals are for, they exist so we can eat them. In the great kitchens of the Palace of Calysveron there’s always an animal roasting on a spit – hares and rabbits, capons, a fine hart, a wild boar, a great ox for the feasts.’

  ‘That would be a real place, would it?’ Jill scoffed. ‘The Palace of Callyshite?’

  ‘Calysveron,’ Kevin corrected her. ‘Real as anything else.’

  ‘Real as this table?’ Jill quizzed. Kevin scrutinized the table as if he was thinking of buying it and finally said, ‘Yes, as real as this table.’ This dialogue would have gone on longer and grown more tedious (although the premise was interesting) if the child hadn’t set off round the kitchen again, at the same hectic pace as before and yet again screaming for dear life. This time it made a beeline for the Aga and was saved at the last minute from immolating itself by a modified rugby tackle from Gilbert. Perhaps they could substitute the girl for the goat in whatever Satanic ritual they were planning for later. A kid for a kid.

  * * *

  Before the Murk got any Murkier, and before we had to face whatever nightmarish repast Gilbert was preparing to serve to us, Terri and I decided to take a tour of the outside. Terri was still holding onto a lingering hope that the dog might be somewhere about. We visited the garden but there was little to see; the combination of endless winter and poor husbandry meant that nothing was growing in it apart from a large crop of dandelions, the few valiant remains of Jerusalem artichoke stems and some poisonous water hemlock that had colonized the burn at the bottom of the garden.

  The chickens were free to roam this winter garden, although the sensible ones had gone to roost by now. Kara had said that some kind of fowl pest had been laying claim to the hens and the few stragglers that remained in the gloaming certainly looked rather lacklustre, their feathers dishevelled and their eyes dull. Terri cluck-clucked and chick-chick-chicked at them but they were indifferent to conversation.

  Adjacent to the garden was a bumpy field full of some kind of mutant thistle that hadn’t died down in the winter cold. This was where the goats lived when they weren’t shut up for the night in a pig-pen. They were Anglo-Nubians, with floppy rabbit ears and devil-eyes – two nannies and two kids, a big one and a little one, this latter presumably the subject of tonight’s sacrifice.

  ‘Poor baby,’ Terri said, attempting to kiss it.

  Although a little downcast, the goats were quite friendly, certainly friendlier than the chickens, and so we spent some time petting and commiserating until a genuine kind of darkness fell and it grew too cold to be standing around in a field so we made our way back to the kitchen from which was emanating an unappetizing aroma.

  * * *

  Jill was setting the table, trying to make a space amongst the candles and candle-making equipment that were strewn everywhere.

  ‘That’s my pièce de résistance,’ Gilbert said, pointing proudly to a particularly ugly candle – a pyramid of brown studded with lumps of mauve wax. ‘We could light some of these candles,’ he suggested to Kara; ‘that would be nice.’

  ‘They’re to sell,’ she snapped, ‘and besides, we’ve got electricity, for heaven’s sake.’

  Robin emerged from ‘the wine cellar’, which was actually another pig-pen, carrying several bottles of home-made wine – rose-hip, elderberry and a rather lethal-looking parsnip.

&nbs
p; ‘I’ll just uncork the reds,’ he said, ‘so that they can breathe for a moment.’ I had a sudden rather unnerving glimpse of the polite schoolboy lurking within the hairy chrysalis – of Robin helping out at parental cocktail parties, handing round salted nuts and topping up the tonic in large, middle-class gins.

  ‘Yeah,’ Robin admitted, shamefaced, ‘Surrey. Dad owns a firm of estate agents.’

  ‘Lucky you.’

  Andrea and Shug had reappeared by now, their pupils dilated from either drugs or a bout of sexual activity or – more likely – both. Bob also turned up, although where he had been was less clear – another transporter malfunction, I suppose.

  ‘I am not a number,’ he whispered defiantly to me, casting about warily for a giant bubble that had apparently been chasing him.

  Several people I’d never seen before made an appearance for the meal, all of them Balniddrians, presumably.

  ‘Balniddrians,’ Kevin said, writing the word down in a tiny little notebook. ‘Good name.’

  The meal was a strange primeval slop of semi-identifiable ingredients – brown rice, potatoes, carrots, something that might or might not have been a vegetable, all of it vaguely goat-smelling even though not a morsel of goat was in it, according to a vow on his mother’s life that Terri made Gilbert swear on his knees.

  ‘What did you do with that pan of wax that was on the stove?’ Jill asked Gilbert, who pretended not to hear.

  Proteus was ‘asleep somewhere’ according to a rather vague Kara but Jill’s unpronounceable child was up long past her bedtime and had to be force-fed her rice-carrot-wax sludge before falling asleep with her head on the table, by which time she had acquired an almost feverish complexion.

  ‘You should try Heinz toddler jars,’ Bob said earnestly to Jill, who said, equally earnestly, ‘Never.’

  ‘Babies should eat what we eat,’ Kara said.

  ‘I think we should eat what babies eat,’ Bob said.

  ‘I think we should just eat babies,’ Terri murmured, a remark which, luckily for her, went unheard.

  Before long Bob found himself unwittingly taking part in the ‘what age should you stop breastfeeding’ argument, even at one point arguing vehemently against feeding on demand because it would lead to a generation of layabouts and slackers.

  ‘Watch it, Bob,’ Shug said, laying a reasonable hand on his arm, ‘you’re turning into a Klingon.’ Perhaps there was another Bob inside Bob – a conventional person who would grow up to be a teacher and vote Liberal and worry about his pension. A Bob who would one day rip off the rubbery facemask of the false Bob and take his place in the world of alarm clocks, Burton suits and lunchtime bank queues.

  ‘Is there a pudding?’ Kevin asked, trying to ignore the whole unpalatable topic of conversation of infant nutrition.

  ‘Absolutely,’ Gilbert said. ‘In fact here’s one I made earlier, ha, ha.’ He produced a plate of brownies which turned out to be surprisingly good.

  ‘They’re lovely,’ I said to him.

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ he said, clasping my hand. ‘It’s so nice of you to say that.’

  Miranda reappeared, more lethargic than ever but not so comatose that she couldn’t eat Andrea’s share of brownies.

  ‘Well?’ Kara said to her, and she made a face and took a long thin box out of her pocket and opened it to reveal a shiny surgical-steel scalpel.

  ‘Whoa – phasers on stun, Mr Spock,’ Bob said in alarm.

  ‘I don’t think Captain Kirk would say “Whoa”!’ Shug said.

  ‘It’s not logical, Captain,’ Bob agreed. (Bob, you will have noticed, tended to cast himself in his mind as the entire crew of the Enterprise rather than any one particular member.)

  * * *

  I don’t know why, but I had presumed that we would be going home after we had eaten. No such luck, it seemed, as everyone was now extraordinarily mellow and laid back, especially for people so intent on goat-slaughtering.

  ‘That woman’s phoned again, this morning,’ Bob said to me suddenly, ‘while you were at the…’

  ‘University?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘And?’ I asked him patiently.

  ‘And … she said she was going to come round tonight. To see you.’

  ‘And you’ve just thought to tell me now?’

  ‘There’s a bus,’ Robin said indifferently. ‘The road’s just over the hill.’

  No-one, it seemed, was coming with me. Robin had begun a game of Go with Kevin – possibly the most boring board game ever devised – and Terri was intent on staying to save the condemned goat by kidnapping it (naturally) although I couldn’t imagine what she planned to do with a billy-goat in her fourth-floor Cleghorn Street flat. Andrea uncharacteristically offered to show me the way to the bus-stop but only, as I discovered to my cost, so she could talk endlessly about Shug.

  Our route, apparently, took us past the standing stones which were ‘Over there somewhere,’ Andrea said, pointing vaguely into the darkness and tramping off before I could question her orienteering skills.

  We tripped over brambles, fell into burns, slid on the thickly frosted grass and bumped into badly parked cows before finally encountering a steep hill that we had to haul each other up like funicular trains until we were sweating and freezing at the same time, all the time the air full of Andrea’s Shug catechism – Do you think he likes me? Do you think he really likes me? Do you think he loves me? Do you think he really loves me? And so on.

  By the time we reached the seven sisters, Balniddrie was no more than a couple of pinpricks of light in the distance. For a moment, I thought I heard a strange pagan chant of ‘Kill the goat! Kill the goat!’ followed by a scream but Andrea said I’d imagined it and I hoped she was right.

  Careless of any bad-tempered wizardry that might be lurking, Andrea began dancing around the stones in an abandoned one-woman eightsome reel. ‘Sky magic,’ she said breathlessly.

  The standing stones, although only four of them were still actually standing, were about the same height as Andrea, roughly hewn and pointed like the teeth of a gigantic cat. Andrea flung her arms around an upright one in a dramatic fashion and, hugging it, said, ‘Feel the earth magic.’ I gave the nearest stone a tentative embrace but experienced no thaumaturgy – the stone felt like a stone, clammy and napped with lichen. What was I doing cavorting with boulders in the middle of nowhere? I should have a pair of warm arms embracing me instead of the cold clasp of a megalith.

  ‘Are you sure this is the way to the bus-stop?’ I asked her, but before she could answer I noticed something astonishing. I was developing astronomical skin! The back of my hand was like a reseau, a perfect grid of lace waiting to be mapped by stars. Andrea was searching on the ground for agates and still wittering on about the mystical properties of rocks, but I was hypnotized by my hand – even as I watched it the skin was expanding and magnifying into a huge stretch of parchment. My pores were like tiny, distant stars and the lines on the surface of the skin were the ghostly paths of the heavenly bodies. My cosmic self was about to have a glimpse of immanence.

  ‘Wow,’ I whispered (I couldn’t help myself). ‘This is amazing, Andrea.’

  ‘You ate the brownies, didn’t you?’ she said, rather wearily.

  I don’t know how much time passed while I was contemplating my celestial body but when I tore myself away there was no sign of Andrea. I called her name, but received no answer, only an echo ringing in the gelid air. I looked behind the stones, I looked at the stones – perhaps they really were accursed maidens. They gave no indication, however, of harbouring lapidified girls. I touched one cautiously but did not go so far as to whisper ‘Andrea?’ in its mossy ear.

  The power must have gone off because there were no comforting lights from the farms and cottages spread around the hillside, no visible topography of any kind. It was so quiet I could have heard a mouse rustling through the stiff grass, or an owl’s wing swooping, but no mouse rustled and no owl swooped.

  Then
the silence rumbled into unwelcome life with the sound of heavy breathing – a slack snorting that belonged to something teratoid and beastly. From behind the crest of the hill steam clouds of ogreish breath bellowed into the cold air and a phosphorescence rose like a nightmarish sunrise, fringing the stone sisters with an unearthly arc light. I didn’t wait to find out the source of this strange incandescence but took off, stumbling down the hill as fast as I could.

  The stertorous breathing, like a labouring steam engine, was following me, but I didn’t look behind. It was accompanied now by a dreadful reek of foul-smelling stinkhorn and hard-boiled egg sandwiches. I tripped over a root and fell into something cold and plashy which I hoped was nothing worse than a burn, although I could feel oozing icy mud. For a second I thought I caught a glimpse of something gleaming in the dark – a flash of silver and bronze, something fishy and scaly and then in an instant it had gone and everything was quiet.

  ∼ So is that magic realism? Nora asks.

  ‘No, it’s fiction.’

  Or more like a kind of madness. When I got my breath back I noticed a bus shelter further up the road and hurried towards it. There was a timetable stuck up inside but it was too dark to make out the tiny print. I sat on the narrow, plank-like bench and waited, although the idea that a bus might come along any time soon seemed highly unlikely somehow.

  A light appeared in the distance, less alien and monstrous than before but nonetheless bobbing across the darkened landscape like a will-o’-the-wisp. As the light got closer it started to resolve itself into not, as I’d hoped, a bus, but a car. The car slowed to a halt beside the bus-stop and the driver leant over and opened the passenger door.

  ‘You’ve missed the bus,’ a familiar voice said. ‘Get in.’

  I got into the car and slammed the door. ‘You are following me, aren’t you?’

  ‘In your dreams,’ Chick said.

  Until very recently, time had been a slow slurry of nothingness for me; now the days were suddenly packed to overflowing, a turn of events that I found surprisingly unwelcome.