Emotionally Weird

by Kate Atkinson

  Oh no, Madame Astarti thought, they were beginning to—

  ‘Poor cow,’ Brian said. ‘I wonder what she looked like?’

  ‘About my height,’ Sandra said, ‘not very bright.’

  ‘I bet she’s a sight.’

  ‘Give you a fright.’

  Madame Astarti moaned, the room was beginning to spin, she must get out of this nightmare.

  * * *

  The wind roars, the seas howl. Nora is standing on the headland like the figurehead on the prow of a ship. I think she is trying to conjure up a storm. It is a diversionary tactic – she will do anything rather than finish her tale.

  My mother is not my mother. My father is not my father. Nora’s father is not her father. Lo we are as jumbled as a box of biscuits.

  The World Is Hollow

  The ground floor of the tower was in turmoil – a rowdy crowd of people milling about, uncertain as to what they were supposed to be doing. Many of them, naturally, were there simply on the off chance that something exciting might happen.

  ∼ Excitement is very over-rated.

  A few of them were heckling Roger Lake, who was in declamatory mode, standing on the stairs that led up to the library. Roger was preaching to an attentive group of militant students, most of them apparatchiks of the Socialist Society. A lot of them were sitting cross-legged on the floor so that Roger looked as if he was taking a primary school assembly. This inner sanctum looked as though they should all be waving little red books and were very vociferous. I was beginning to get a headache again.

  I caught sight of Olivia, standing aside from the crowd. She looked oddly disengaged as if she had been hypnotized. Someone waved a placard behind Roger Lake’s head that declared firmly INSURRECTION IS AN ART AND LIKE ALL ARTS IT HAS LAWS which I thought had probably been dreamt up by Heather, but Olivia said, ‘No, Trotsky, actually.’

  ‘What’s going on?’ I asked her.

  ‘I think Roger’s advocating overthrowing the establishment,’ she said, looking rather weary, ‘and setting up a “University of the Street” or something in its place.’

  ‘The street? I thought we were protesting about the war? Or is it the government?’

  Olivia shrugged indifferently and then – in an exemplary non sequitur – said, ‘I’m pregnant.’ Her skin was like milk.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I hesitated. ‘Or congratulations? Whichever.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said ambivalently.

  Roger shouted something that seemed to agitate his cohorts and Olivia said, ‘I was wondering if I could talk to you?’

  ‘Me?’ But at that moment Robin bounded up, wearing red corduroy dungarees and a blue and white striped long-sleeved T-shirt, as if he was about to present Playschool. He had pinned a small shield-shaped badge onto one of his dungaree straps. The badge said ‘School Prefect’.

  ‘It’s an ironic comment on the nature of power,’ he said when I asked him if he actually had been a school prefect.

  ‘Catch you later,’ Olivia said to me and disappeared into the throng.

  ‘This is real,’ Robin exclaimed heatedly; ‘this is important stuff.’

  ‘I didn’t know Buddhists were into politics,’ I said.

  ‘Buddhists?’

  ‘You were a Buddhist yesterday,’ I pointed out to him.

  ‘Yeah, well maybe I’m a Maoist today. You know nothing,’ he added. Which was true.

  I spotted Shug and Bob strolling through the mêlée of bodies.

  ‘Anarchy rules,’ Shug said laconically. Bob had a brown paper poke in his hand from which he was eating magic mushrooms as if they were lemon drops. He offered one to Robin.

  ‘Your sort doesn’t have any kind of commitment to anything, do you?’ Robin said, cramming a handful of psilocybin into his mouth. ‘You’re just lazy hedonists, all you care about is your own little lives.’

  ‘He’s been politicized,’ I explained to Bob and Shug.

  ‘Wow,’ Bob said, ‘did it hurt?’

  Heather appeared at Robin’s side. ‘Direct action,’ she said, nipples joggling feverishly, ‘it’s the only way we can make anything change.’

  ‘Too right,’ Robin said.

  ‘You’re so full of shite,’ Shug said, rather concisely, I thought.

  ‘Come the revolution,’ Heather spat, ‘you and your kind will be first against the wall.’ Robespierre, Stalin, Heather – the line of descent was clear. She embarked on a polemical rant about how students were going to run the world and something I didn’t quite grasp about the local Timex and Sunblest workers taking over the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (which might be a good thing).

  ‘I thought this was about Vietnam? Or the miners?’ I puzzled.

  Robin sighed at my lack of enlightenment. ‘It’s about everything.’

  ‘Everything? That’s a lot of stuff.’

  ‘You sound like your boyfriend,’ Robin said petulantly.

  Bob gave me a perplexed look.

  ‘That’s you,’ I explained.

  ‘We’re having an uprising,’ Robin said. ‘We don’t need frivolous people like you lot.’

  ‘Nor fifth columnists,’ Heather added, looking at me menacingly.

  None of this was doing my headache any good. Added to which, my limbs had begun to ache and my tonsils felt as if someone had sandpapered them.

  Bob and Shug declared they were going to ‘hang out’ and see what happened, but I fought my way through the flux and spill and out into the corridor, hoping that I wouldn’t encounter Maggie Mackenzie.

  As if the very thought of her very name had conjured her up, I suddenly heard her strident tones and dodged into the female toilets.

  Where I found Terri. She was sitting on the ledge in front of the mirrors in the company of a surprise new dog. Silky-sleek and very elegant, it was clearly a pedigree of some kind and was an infinitely more sophisticated representative of dogdom than the elusive yellow dog Chick had run over. The new dog was sharing a packet of dog chocolate drops with Terri – one for the dog, one for Terri, and so on. The dog took the chocolate drops from Terri’s upturned palm like a fastidious horse.

  ‘Meet Hank,’ Terri said proudly, as if she’d just given birth. ‘I found him,’ she said, rubbing the dog’s wet nose with her own slightly dryer one. ‘Isn’t he gorgeous?’ The dog regarded me, rather mournfully, with a pair of beautiful sea-green eyes. A horrible thought occurred to me. ‘What breed do you call that?’ I asked her.

  ‘Jesus, you’re ignorant – it’s a Weimaraner, of course.’

  ‘I had a feeling it might be.’ Somehow I couldn’t quite bring myself to spoil her new-found happiness by telling her about Hank’s suspect provenance, for who else could this be if not Buddy? Terri had tied a piece of clothes-line around the dog’s neck and now stood up and gave it a gentle tug. ‘We’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘We need to get stuff.’

  ‘Stuff?’

  ‘Yeah – dog stuff.’

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’

  ‘No, it’s OK.’ Terri jumped down from the ledge, the dog following her like a shadow, and set off purposefully, an adverb I had never seen her utilize before. She’d even removed her Ray-Bans. Perhaps there was still an all-American girl lurking under that Lamian carapace, a cheerful, resourceful college kid (a babysitting, prom-queen type). One who didn’t seem to need me any more.

  Could I really be replaced so easily, I wondered as I left the toilets and wandered out into the corridor. And by a dog at that? Perhaps that was the answer to my problem with Bob – I could get him a dog as a substitute for me. And a dog would surely treat him better than I did. It might not cook, but it wouldn’t judge.

  I was so caught up in this idea – I’d got as far as picturing Bob in the company of a cheerful Border terrier that could do simple household tasks – that I failed to notice Maggie Mackenzie barrelling along through the Murk again and collided with her full on. I was winded but she appeared unmoved.

  ‘Miss Andrews,’
she said stiffly, ‘I will extend my deadline for you as you are so incompetent. You have until ten o’clock on the day after tomorrow.’

  My brain felt so addled that I could barely work out what that meant.

  ‘If your George Eliot essay doesn’t appear at the allotted time I shall have to inform the Dean that you are no longer eligible to sit your degree.’

  * * *

  The Students’ Union was full of excited people talking about occupation and subversion and storming the library. Not Andrea and Kevin, however, who were sullenly enduring each other’s company and having a protracted argument about some arcane Edrakonian law. Andrea was wearing a cheesecloth smock and agonizing over whether to eat a salt and vinegar crisp.

  A scuffle broke out in the bar between a bunch of rugby players and some Revolutionary Communist Group cadres and Kevin said angrily, ‘They’re all so pathetic. Slogans and jargon, that’s all it is. In Edrakonia when people believe in things they’re willing to sacrifice their lives. They have real weapons – the rapier, the poniard, the Toledo. Weapons forged from finest steel, decorated with bronze and chased with gold and silver. The stiletto, the glaive, the falchion, the bombard, the falconet –’

  I made my excuses. I finally found Olivia in the cafeteria queue, trying to juggle a tray of food with the unwieldy body of Proteus and a newfangled McLaren buggy, striped in blue and white and folded up like an umbrella. I offered to take the tray and she said, ‘Thanks,’ and handed me Proteus instead. He had an angry red teething rash on his cheeks and one small boxer’s fist jammed in his mouth as if he was trying to eat himself.

  ‘You haven’t seen Kara, have you?’ Olivia asked. ‘Only she asked me to hold him for a minute and that was ages ago.’

  ‘No, sorry.’

  She was loading up her tray with cartons of milk and assorted Kellogg’s Variety Packs. ‘Do you think he can eat these?’ she asked me. ‘They don’t have any baby food in the Union.’

  We found a space at the corner of a table. Olivia sat Proteus on her knee and we tried pushing spoonfuls of cereal in his mouth, an idea which he seemed to find alarming and exciting at the same time. Every time the spoon approached him he opened his mouth like a giant baby bird and then went into a kind of delirious spasm, throwing his arms and legs out and squawking at the novelty of it all. Occasionally he spat out Ricicles or Coco Pops like grapeshot. ‘I’m sure it’s time he was weaned anyway,’ Olivia said, rather sheepishly.

  ‘Is that what we’re doing?’ I really did know nothing.

  ‘Roger wants me to have the baby,’ Olivia said.

  ‘The baby?’ I repeated, confused. I had forgotten she was pregnant and for a moment thought she was talking about Proteus.

  ‘He says I can move in with him and Sheila.’ She shook her head in amazement. ‘Can you imagine?’

  I couldn’t. ‘Does Sheila know?’

  ‘No. It doesn’t matter anyway,’ she said flatly. ‘I’m going to have an abortion.’

  ‘Are you sure? I mean, you’re really good with babies.’

  ‘I think it’s wrong to bring babies into this awful world,’ she said sadly. ‘I mean, all you would want would be for them to be happy and that’s the one thing that people aren’t, isn’t it? I couldn’t bear the idea of knowing that my child was unhappy. Or that when they’re old – a helpless old man, or a little old lady – you wouldn’t be there to look after them because you’d be dead by then.’ I wished I could think of something cheerful to say in response to this rather tragic outburst but at that moment Proteus gave a fractious cry and we both stared at him as if he might hold a key to some mystery, but he had jammed his fist back in his mouth and looked on the verge of tears.

  ‘He’s burning up, poor lamb,’ Olivia said, putting one of her cool, pale hands on his forehead. ‘I’d better take him out of here.’ The Union was full of noise and smoke which probably wasn’t good for a baby and certainly wasn’t good for me so I followed her out.

  ‘Thanks, anyway,’ Olivia said, ‘you’re a real friend,’ which made me feel suddenly guilty because I didn’t really think of us as friends.

  ‘See you,’ she said.

  * * *

  Maisie was hanging around outside the main door of the Union in full school rig. ‘There you are,’ she said in the exasperated tone of a much older female.

  ‘Why – had we arranged to meet? And shouldn’t you be at school?’ I asked as I followed her down the road.

  ‘Yes to both questions. Come on, we’ll be late.’

  A feeble shout directed us to the slight figure of Professor Cousins, trotting towards us along the pavement as fast as he could. ‘Hello there,’ he gasped. I sat him down on a bench at Seabraes to recover and we contemplated the view of the railway goods yards and the Tay (which today was dull pewter) until he got his breath back.

  ‘We have to go,’ Maisie said.

  ‘It’s Dr Lake’s daughter, isn’t it?’ Professor Cousins said to her. He started clicking his fingers. ‘No, don’t tell me, the name will come to me in a minute.’ He twisted his whole body in an outlandish effort to remember.

  ‘You mean Lucy,’ Maisie said.

  ‘That’s it!’ he exclaimed.

  ‘We’re going to be late,’ Maisie said, growing more impatient.

  ‘Are we going somewhere nice?’ Professor Cousins asked hopefully.

  ‘No.’

  * * *

  Chick gave me a cursory nod of acquaintance over Miss Anderson’s open grave. He was in Balgay cemetery with his funeral face on – somewhere between a bloodhound and Vincent Price – solemnly witnessing Miss Anderson’s interment. The grave was amongst the new ones at the foot of the hill and a bitterly chill wind was blowing so that the minister’s garments billowed around him and I feared he would take off like a dandelion head if he wasn’t careful. It began to spit with rain and the Tay dulled to a leaden colour.

  ‘Wouldn’t it be horrible if she wasn’t dead?’ Maisie whispered to me in a thrilled voice, after peering into Miss Anderson’s new, rather muddy, home. ‘Imagine waking up and finding yourself in a coffin. Buried alive,’ she added with some relish, and made clawing motions with her hands, presumably in imitation of a corpse trying to escape although she looked like she was miming a demented cat. Several of the assembled mourners cast anxious glances in her direction.

  ‘She is dead, trust me,’ I hissed, remembering Chick’s macabre penknife test.

  ‘Dear Lucy,’ Professor Cousins said affectionately, ‘she’s quite the little ghoul, isn’t she?’

  Mrs McCue, at whose invitation Maisie was present, although heaven knows why – some kind of initiation rite into womanhood, probably – put a restraining hand on the bony shoulder of her granddaughter who, in her enthusiasm, looked to be in danger of falling into the open grave. Mrs McCue was wearing her funeral hat – black felt with a brim – that she had tied onto her head with a Rainmate.

  Professor Cousins gave Chick a cheery wave. He seemed to be enjoying himself. There were quite a few other mourners, considering that Miss Anderson was supposedly a crabbit wee wifie. Mrs Macbeth, naturally, had accompanied Mrs McCue along with a minibus of Anchorage residents.

  ‘Like a day-trip in a charabanc,’ Mrs McCue said disapprovingly. ‘It’s not as if any of them liked her.’

  ‘Neither did you,’ Mrs Macbeth reminded her.

  There was a small knot of relatives of the deceased who, unlike the residents of The Anchorage – all of whom were clearly veteran funeral-goers – did not possess mourning outfits and were selfconsciously attired in plums and greys and navy blues. Some of them dabbed their eyes with handkerchiefs, others stared very seriously at the coffin lid. They all had the awkward look of over-rehearsed actors.

  ‘Close family,’ Mrs McCue scoffed, ‘close not being the word I would choose. They weren’t bothered about her when she was alive, I don’t know why they’re concerned now she’s dead.’ Mrs McCue seemed to have taken it on herself to recite the usual obse
quial platitudes.

  The rain was beginning to take itself seriously now and Professor Cousins opened up his duck-head handled umbrella (try saying that quickly) and gathered Maisie and myself beneath it.

  Janice Rand had also remembered an old person, but only just, as she arrived rather late and breathless, but nonetheless had a spiritually superior air about her as if she was personally dispatching Miss Anderson to her maker.

  A sudden gust of wind lifted Professor Cousins off his feet so that I had to reach out and grab his arm to stop him being blown away. That was when I felt the eyes on my back (‘Surely not?’ Professor Cousins said, looking alarmed). My watcher had returned, it seemed. She was standing amongst the old graves of the cemetery, up on the hill, solemnly watching the funeral, like an outcast mourner or an unnoticed ghost. She was partially obscured by the umbrella she was holding but the red coat flared like a signal. This, surely, must be the person whom I felt dogging my footsteps at every turn – or did her life take her to the same unlikely places as mine did? Or perhaps I was being followed by two people – one I could see and one I couldn’t.

  My attention was diverted when Mrs McCue threw a handful of claggy soil onto the coffin lid, where it hit with a thud that made Professor Cousins wince (Maisie executed the clawing gesture again for my benefit), and when I looked again the woman had gone.

  ‘Well, I dinnae ken about you,’ Mrs Macbeth said as everyone started turning their backs on Miss Anderson, ‘but I could do with a nice cuppie.’ Mrs McCue rested on the ground a raffia shopping-basket that she was carrying. On the side of it the words ‘A Present From Majorca’ were worked in different-coloured raffia. It looked as though it weighed a ton and seemed to quiver every so often. An off-white ear poked out of one corner.

  ‘Janet,’ Mrs Macbeth whispered, ‘aff her legs again.’

  ‘Achtung,’ Mrs McCue whispered as a tall, slim woman approached, ‘mein Führer’s here.’

  Mrs Macbeth parked her Zimmer in front of the shopping-bag while Mrs McCue translated for me. ‘The matron – Mrs Dalzell.’

  Mrs Dalzell had an encouraging, Mary Poppins kind of demeanour and indeed she had the same hairstyle as Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music (or indeed most of her films) and was progressing rather regally around the graveside, checking on everyone’s happiness or lack of it and inviting the relatives back to The Anchorage for ‘a small tea’.