Emotionally Weird

by Kate Atkinson

  Thankfully, the room was not brightly lit. I hovered by the door, suddenly terrified by the idea of looking death in the face. My heart started to thud so loudly I felt it must have been audible even to the corpse. Chick gazed at the contents of the coffin as unperturbed as if he were viewing fish in an aquarium. Had Chick seen a lot of dead bodies?

  ‘I’ve seen my share,’ he said tersely as if there was a quota for each of us. ‘Miss Anderson,’ he said to me as though introducing me to the body. I advanced cautiously towards the coffin. ‘She won’t bite,’ Chick said. One would very much hope not. Chick took me by the elbow to encourage me to move closer.

  The coffin was lined with a kind of white ruff, like a soufflé dish, and the corpse of an old woman that nestled inside the ruff was, thankfully, unknown to me. The skin on the old woman’s face was like tallow candlewax and her thin lips were pursed in a way that suggested she had died with a complaint on her lips. Miss Anderson, I recalled, was a ‘crabbit wee wifie’ according to Mrs McCue.

  ‘So do you think someone killed her?’ I whispered to Chick.

  ‘Why would I think that?’ Chick said.

  ‘Well, why are you here then? And why were you at Senga’s funeral?’

  ‘She was my aunt,’ Chick said. ‘Aunt Senga.’

  ‘Aunt Senga?’ Maybe she was, but somehow nothing Chick said ever sounded as if it was true.

  I told him that, according to Mrs Macbeth, Miss Anderson had a terrible fear of premature burial and Chick said, ‘Is that so?’ and took out a penknife from his jacket pocket and without any preamble jabbed Miss Anderson in the back of one of her hard veiny hands. I screamed, but quietly, given the hushed atmosphere of the funeral parlour and the undoubtedly illegal nature of the deed.

  ‘She’s definitely dead,’ Chick said, as if he’d just done me a favour. But I had already left.

  Next we spiralled up the slopes of the Law, the extinct volcano on whose ashy skirts Dundee was built. We parked, like tourists or lovers (and we were definitely neither), got out and walked round in a circle to view the full three-hundred-and-sixty-degree panorama on offer. There was snow on the Sidlaws and the Tay was the colour of polished tin.

  ‘Aye, it’s a bonny place,’ Chick said, ‘from this distance anyway.’ He took another half-bottle of Bell’s from his pocket – I had a vague, rather queasy recollection of having finished the last one.

  ‘Go on,’ Chick said, ‘it’ll put hairs on your chest. Just like Sidney,’ he added and laughed – an odd phlegmy noise that ended in a hacking cough and an unpleasant choking that apparently could only be cured by lighting a cigarette.

  ‘So do you think someone’s killing the old people?’ I persisted.

  ‘Did I say that?’

  ‘Maybe it’s Watson Grant. Maybe he’s hoping to kill Mrs Macbeth before Aileen leaves him and he’s killing other old people to divert attention from his real victim – Mrs Macbeth.’

  ‘You read too many books.’

  It began to snow – cold wet stuff that melted as it fell. ‘That’s enough of the great outdoors,’ Chick said, climbing quickly back in the car.

  The snow grew thicker, whirling round in the eddies of wind at the top of the Law so that sitting in the car was like being inside a giant snowshaker. Dundee began to disappear behind a white veil while Chick drank his way steadily down the half-bottle. The odd thing about being with Chick – odd given the severe defects in his character – was that I felt safe with him, as if no harm could befall me in his presence. Maybe that was what it was like to have a father. But how could I know?

  I tried to encourage him to tell me more of his own story. This request elicited a barrage of bad feeling, Chick again cursing the cow and the loss adjuster, particularly the loss adjuster’s canary-yellow Capri.

  ∼ How do you adjust a loss? Nora asks, ladling out potato soup, viscous with starch.

  ‘Maybe you adjust to it,’ I suggest.

  ∼ I don’t think so.

  Nora is distinctly gloomy tonight – perhaps on account of the seaweed aperitif.

  * * *

  We set off back into town. ‘You’ve wasted enough of my time,’ Chick said. ‘I’ve got other fish to fry, even if you haven’t.’

  ‘It’s you that’s wasting my time,’ I said. ‘I have an essay—’

  ∼ Too much dialogue, Nora sighs. I prefer descriptive writing.

  As we drove back along the Nethergate we were accompanied by a great winter sunset painted across the western sky in livid colours – blood-orange and vascular violet – as if somewhere up-river a terrible fiery massacre was taking place. The rays of the dying sun, reflected in the water, made the Tay appear (just for once) to be a river of molten gold. A hard frost was already falling and the smell of snow was in the air.

  ‘Do you prefer that?’

  ∼ Yes.

  It must be a huge feat of celestial engineering to get the sun to come up and down every day. Of course, I do know it’s not quite as mechanical as that. But I like to think it is. Within seconds the sun slipped out of sight, gone to the antipodes or wherever it goes, and we were left with a darker kind of darkness.

  Nora frowns. Now you’re just being whimsical.

  ‘That was a braw sunset,’ Chick said. ‘Fancy a Chinky? We could go to the Gold Lucky.’

  ‘Well … OK,’ I said.

  * * *

  ‘Got any money on you?’ Chick asked, when we’d finished our meal – including a second order of banana fritters for him – ‘I seem to have left my wallet at home.’

  * * *

  The sea in the sound is grey and choppy this morning and as uninviting as old bathwater. Even the playful narratees have deserted it for warmer waters. The wind has blown too much lately, ruffled our minds, decomposed our thoughts. The air holds moisture like a cloth.

  We are in the kitchen, sitting by a fire made from damp driftwood and bits of abandoned bird’s nest. We are down to the last dustings at the bottom of the tea caddy. Perhaps we will die of starvation and thirst here.

  ∼ There’s plenty of water on the island, Nora says.

  There’s nothing but water, the rain has lashed the little rock for days now, the burns are overflowing, the little waterfalls have grown to cataracts, I expect that soon the sea-level will start to rise. My mother is a murderer. Or murderess. Did I mention that? Apparently we are caught up in some ghastly plot that we cannot escape.

  ∼ There’s a storm coming, Nora says, sniffing the air like a dog.

  But she’s always saying that.

  ‘Your turn,’ I tell her, throwing another inadequate log on the fire. ‘Go on.’

  ∼ Must I? Nora asks. Can’t I go to the toilet or make a cup of tea, answer a ringing phone or commit any other number of tedious distractions?

  ‘No. And we have no phone.’ Even the postman doesn’t knock here, not even once. ‘Tell me about your beautiful sister who died on the day that I was born.’

  Nora sighs a sigh so profound that it fathoms the bottom of the Sound.

  ∼ This is a very far-fetched tale, she warns, which you will find hard to believe. So … first there was Deirdre – who died – then Lachlan, then a year later came Effie, conceived in a thunderstorm, born during an earthquake.’

  ‘In Scotland?’

  ∼ A small one. It happens. Occasionally.

  ‘Very occasionally.’

  ∼ She was born on the winter solstice when there is no light in the world and everything has shrunk back into the earth. Born when the earth sleeps, yet Effie never seemed to rest and had soon worn out a rather fragile Marjorie. To look at Effie you might have thought that she was possessed of a salamander nature, that her elements were air and fire or some insubstantial matter, but in truth she came from some dark underground place. A spiteful sprite, a malevolent kelpie. Only Lachlan could put up with her and that was because he was made from the same flawed clay. They were never more their true selves than when they were together.

  The pai
r of them were wild, undisciplined creatures. Neither Marjorie nor Donald seemed to know what to do with them. Marjorie had never really recovered from having three children in as many years and soon resorted to the comfort of the gin bottle and Donald was, of course, quite old by then and he’d never been particularly interested in his children, so Lachlan and Effie’s upbringing was left to a succession of nursemaids and nannies. These were all eventually driven away, there was even a rumour that one nanny had been hospitalized – something to do with flypapers and cocoa – and one of the downstairs maids had certainly been paid off with her arm in a plaster. They were the sort of children who could always be found in the vicinity of an accident. Marjorie called it mischief and downed another gin.

  They were sent away to school eventually, Lachlan to Glenalmond to follow in the family tradition, Effie to St Leonard’s. Their behaviour improved a little once they were separated but nonetheless it was a wonder they were never expelled. And they still had the holidays to run wild together and torment every living thing.

  They roamed the woods and fields like gypsies, sticking pins in caterpillars, cutting worms in half with their pocket penknives, catching fish and smashing them on rocks. There was some incident with the gamekeeper’s cat, apparently – it was found hanging from a tree with its tail cut off—

  ‘Are you sure you’re not making this up?’

  ∼ Why would I do that?

  Their favourite place was the loch. No-one else ever went there any more. It was a gloomy place with its black water and its overhanging willows, surrounded on all sides by overgrown woodland. The man-made channels that had once fed and drained the loch had become clogged over the years so that it always had a rank, stagnant air about it. Occasionally, a long, dark pike-shaped shadow passed through the clouded water like a small enemy submarine.

  When he was seven, Lachlan threw his sister into the loch – that was the kind of boy he was. By the time she dragged herself out amongst the half-rotten bulrushes she had learnt to swim. That was the kind of girl she was.

  ‘That was when she became a water-baby?’

  ∼ Yes.

  ‘Then what?’ My mother (who’s not my mother) is not very good at this storytelling lark, is she? ‘And she was beautiful?’ I prompt, which gains a reluctant ‘Yes’ on Nora’s part. ‘In what way?’

  ∼ The usual – blue eyes, Titian hair, round limbs, high breasts. Personally I always thought her eyes were too far apart. Made her rather frog-featured. She bit her fingernails down to the quick.

  ‘What about her personality?’ Nora shrugs. This is like pulling teeth. ‘Incomplete sentences will do, single words if necessary,’ I urge. ‘Try adjectives, for example. Start with “A” if it helps.’

  Nora takes a deep breath—

  ∼ Abhorrent, blameworthy, catty, dreadful, empoverished (spiritually, obsolete usage), fearless (or fearsome), garrotted (should have been), histrionic, indolent, jadish, karmic (bad), left-handed, mean, negligent, oligarchic, psychopathic, quarrelsome, reckless, sly, tyrannical, ugly (inside), vain, xenoglossiac—

  ‘Really?’

  ∼ Might have been. (Quite a) yachtswoman, a zombie. The living dead.

  ‘No redeeming features, then?’

  ∼ No.

  ‘No saving graces at all?’

  ∼ No.

  A bad case of sibling rivalry, it seems. But then Effie was fourteen years old when Nora was born and away at school, wasn’t she? And how did a gin-sodden Marjorie and an ageing Donald manage to have another baby, even an ‘afterthought’?

  ‘Go on, carry on with your unlikely tale.’

  ∼ Effie grew up, eventually. Got married, got divorced (twice), died. End of story.

  ‘You can’t do that.’

  ∼ It’s the post-modern day and age. I can do what I want.

  * * *

  My mother is not my mother. Her sister is not her sister. Lo, we are as jumbled as a box of biscuits.

  Chez Bob

  ‘You’re back!’ Brian’s voice boomed out of the depths of The Crab and Bucket.

  ‘I haven’t been anywhere, you daft pillock,’ Madame Astarti said, fighting her way past the draped fishing nets and glass floats that made up the interior decor of The Crab and Bucket – or The Crab as it was known affectionately by the locals. It was the kind of pub that holidaymakers went into thinking it looked authentic and interesting (it smelt of raw fish) and hurried out of again without even having put glass to lip. This was not so much on account of the gloomy green underwater lighting or the dead stuffed fish in glass cases around the wall, as the unwelcoming hostility of the natives. If Custer had had The Crab and Bucket’s regulars on his side he would have lived to stand another day.

  Madame Astarti did not even have to glance in the barman’s direction – a melancholic man called Les (or Les Miserables, as the locals called him behind his back) – for him to put out a glass and start filling it with a large measure of gin and a token splash of tonic.

  ‘I,’ Brian said cheerfully, ‘have been to hell and back.’

  ‘Don’t exaggerate, you’ve been shopping in Scarborough with Sandra,’ Madame Astarti said, heaving herself onto a bar stool next to Brian. ‘Where is she anyway?’

  ‘On her way,’ Brian said, plunging his face as far as he could into his glass and inhaling beer fumes. A little spasm of pain crossed his face and he said, ‘Left my ruddy arch supports out.’ Madame Astarti commiserated with him. ‘Ah, Rita,’ Brian said, ‘why didn’t I marry you instead?’

  ‘Because I wouldn’t have you,’ Madame Astarti said and gave him a sharp rap on his knuckles with her–

  —what? Her fan-shaped wafer-biscuit? Her crystal ball? Oh dear God, this was so tiring. I was developing some kind of fever, one of those hot and cold things. I took two paracetamol and went to bed with Bob’s blue teddy-bear hot-water bottle and read The Indian Uprising. Then I must have dozed off because the next thing I knew Bob was lying in bed beside me, claiming to have spent the night in The Tavern – a particularly debauched student watering-hole – which was strange because Shug had telephoned from there an hour earlier asking if I knew where Bob was.

  ‘If Alice comes,’ Bob said earnestly to me, ‘and either Bernard or Charles comes, Dotty will show up. Bernard and Edward will either both come, or both stay away, and Alice will put in an appearance if and only if Charles and Edward are both going to be there. So Dotty won’t be there if Alice isn’t.’

  ‘Bob, what are you talking about?’

  ‘Don’t ask me,’ he said, ‘given the premises of the above –

  a) Could all five people come? Could only four come, and if so which four? Could three, and if so which three? Could two, and if so which two? Could one, and if so which one? Could none of them come?

  b) In what circumstance will Alice come?

  c) Whose absence will be sufficient to ensure the absence of Bernard?

  d) Is it possible for Bernard to come without either Alice or Edward coming?’

  I was asleep by then, of course.

  * * *

  Madame Astarti’s head was throbbing. She peered into the dregs of her glass suspiciously. She had a hangover already and she hadn’t even finished drinking. There was a man once, long ago, who had tried to spike her drink in an effort to sell her into the white slave trade and since then she had felt you should be as alert as possible when getting drunk. Not that it was likely that anyone was after her for the white slave trade any more.

  ‘I’ve never really understood what that was,’ Sandra said. It seemed to Madame Astarti that Sandra’s thin red lips mouthed the words a second or two behind the sound and she leant forward to tell Sandra that she was out of synch with herself but lurched and nearly toppled from the stool.

  ‘What is it exactly you don’t understand, my darling?’ Brian asked Sandra, ‘the word “white”, the word “slave” or the word “trade”?’

  Sandra’s neck and cleavage had grown scrawny over the years so that part
s of her now resembled a chicken. She crossed one artificially tanned leg over the other and waved a gold strappy-sandalled foot around. ‘Coming to see the show this season, Rita?’

  ‘As if I would miss it,’ Madame Astarti replied. Brian and Sandra weren’t just Brian and Sandra, they were also ‘The Great Pandini and his Lovely Assistant, Sabrina’ – staple fodder for summer shows and holiday-camp seasons across the land. Every evening, Brian abandoned his British Home Stores pullover and polyester slacks and was transformed into a vampirish figure courtesy of a top-hat and a swirling black cape lined with scarlet satin ‘from Remnant Kings at seventy-five pence a metre – that’s fifteen shillings a yard to you and me,’ Sandra said to Madame Astarti. Sandra herself donned fishnets and black satin and prepared herself for being sawn in half and vanished.

  ‘Dickie Henderson,’ Sandra said, ‘now there was a great performer.’

  ‘Is he dead?’ Brian asked.

  ‘Could be,’ Madame Astarti said gloomily. The heat and the noise in The Crab and Bucket were beginning to make her feel quite ill.

  ‘Another one?’ Brian asked cheerfully, more to himself than anyone else.

  ‘You’ve had too much already,’ Sandra said. ‘I’ll have a port and lemon, you’ll have a half, no more. Rita?’

  ‘Don’t mind if I do.’

  ‘Fag?’

  ‘Go on, then.’

  ‘Did you hear about that woman?’ Sandra asked, her face looming in and out of focus, ‘the one in the sea. Dreadful thing.’

  ‘Do they know who she is yet?’ Brian asked, downing his half and then staring hopefully into the bottom of the glass as if he was expecting it to come back.

  ‘Was, Brian, was,‘ Sandra corrected him. ‘She is no more. Her name, I believe, was Anne-Marie Devine.’

  ‘Was what?’ Madame Astarti said, spilling her drink all over herself.

  ‘Anne-Marie Devine,’ Sandra repeated, ‘a lady of the night. Rita, are you all right?’

  ‘A lady of the night?’ Brian said.

  Sandra took another cigarette out of the packet. ‘Give us a light,’ she said to Brian.