I began to shiver. I stood up and the room tilted. The fog was everywhere, I pushed my way through it.
‘Wait!’ Archie shouted after me, but I really couldn’t. I ran past Watson Grant’s room and saw him struggling to open his window. To let the fog out, I supposed.
I hurried on and, as the lift was out of order, thanks to the Culture and Anarchy boy, I barged past Joan and stumbled down the stairs.
As I ran outside into the chilly air I nearly collided with Maggie Mackenzie – in the middle of berating a rather cowed-looking Professor Cousins over some perceived administrative oversight.
‘I’ve been looking for you,’ I said weakly to her. ‘I’ve got the essay for you.’
‘What essay?’ she said, looking at me as if I had grown even more stupid than usual. I raked through my bag for the essay, finally retrieving the tattered pages of my George Eliot.
‘What is this?’ Maggie Mackenzie asked, holding up the proffered essay between the tips of two fingers as if it was contaminated. I regarded it with horror – the pages were torn and ragged, the front cover almost shredded. There were filthy marks all over the paper as well as stains and blotches, as though someone had cried all over it. I peered at it more closely – the filthy marks seemed to be paw prints and the stains produced by dog slobber.
‘I’m sorry,’ I mumbled to Maggie Mackenzie. ‘I think a dog ate my essay.’
An alarm bell sounded shrilly. At first I thought it was in my head, so odd was I feeling, but then people began to stream out of the building.
‘Oh, my lord,’ Professor Cousins said, ‘I do believe the place is on fire.’ I could see the fog escaping from the windows of the extension and suddenly realized that it wasn’t fog at all – it was thick smoke that was pouring out of the building.
Above our heads the sound of muffled shouting and banging grew more insistent. I looked up and saw Grant Watson hammering on the window of his room, pushing and pulling at the handle as if he was trapped inside. Then the window flew open suddenly and in doing so it sent flying all the books that had been piled up on the sill. Watson Grant shouted a warning but it was too late – the books rained down slowly like books in a dream and I looked on with paralysed interest as first one volume of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary (A to Markworthy) and then the second (Marl to Z) fell like slabs of Old Testament stone onto Maggie Mackenzie’s head. A strange Splat! sound that could have belonged in a cartoon speech bubble was made by her body as it hit the ground.
* * *
Things weren’t quite as bad as they seemed. Everyone escaped the building and the fire brigade doused the flames (feeding on the university’s abundant supply of flammable grey plastic) before they could do any real harm.
Professor Cousins and I rode (reluctantly) with Maggie Mackenzie in the ambulance. The ambulanceman who had ferried Dr Dick to hospital smiled at me and said, ‘You again.’ Unfortunately, Maggie Mackenzie wasn’t unconscious and, if anything, rather garrulous, as if being hit on the head by so many words had stimulated the vocabulary department of her brain.
When we got to the DRI we had to wait while she was seen and Professor Cousins suggested we go and visit Christopher Pike, former front-runner for head of department, ‘and perhaps Dr Dick’s still here?’ he mused to himself. I assured him that he wasn’t.
After some detective work, we eventually located Christopher Pike in a two-bed side bay of the men’s surgical ward. He was still trapped in his web of ropes and pulleys although now only recognizable by a name pinned up above his bed. The rest of him was swaddled in bandages from head to foot, like the Invisible Man, so that it could have been anyone pupating inside the crêpe-bandage chrysalis. Tubes came in and out of the bandages, all of them carrying liquids of a yellowish hue.
‘Poor old Pike,’ Professor Cousins said quietly to me. ‘I’m afraid he had another accident while he was in here.’
On Christopher Pike’s bedside locker there was a glass of sticky-looking orange squash and a bunch of yellow Muscat grapes, proving that somewhere else in the world there must be heat and light.
‘I don’t know,’ Professor Cousins said, making a great performance of chewing on a grape. ‘I may as well transfer the English department to the DRI.’ Christopher Pike gurgled something incomprehensible from inside his mummy suit.
‘You’ll soon be back on your feet, dear chap!’ Professor Cousins shouted at him.
‘He’s not deaf,’ the patient in the neighbouring bed remarked, without taking his eyes off the Courier he was reading. Christopher Pike made some more incomprehensible noises and his neighbour put down his newspaper and inclined his head towards him like a rather poor ventriloquist to translate the gurgling but then frowned and shrugged and said, ‘Poor bastard.’
The ward sister swept in ahead of a consultant who in turn was followed by a group of medical students like a gaggle of goslings. I recognized a couple of them from the Union bar.
‘Out,’ the sister said peremptorily to us.
* * *
We found Maggie Mackenzie restrained by the tight tourniquet of starched white sheet and baby-blue coverlet. Her hair was a knotted mass of grips and snakes and plaits on the pillow. Her face bore a vague resemblance to corned beef and a deep blue bruise had bloomed on her forehead. I touched my own bruise to see if it was still there. It was.
Professor Cousins offered Maggie Mackenzie a Nuttall’s Minto. She ignored him and said, in an even more crotchety way than usual, ‘I’m lucky I’m not dead. They’re keeping me in for a day or two, I’m concussed apparently.’
‘I was concussed once,’ Professor Cousins said, but before he could embark on this familiar tale, a bell rang to signal the end of visiting-time – although for a moment Professor Cousins was under the impression that the hospital was on fire.
‘Well, goodbye,’ I said awkwardly to Maggie Mackenzie and, uncertain what was appropriate in the circumstances, I patted one of her washerwoman’s hands that lay atop the coverlet. Her skin felt like an amphibian’s.
* * *
As we made our way out through the overheated corridors of the DRI, Professor Cousins cast a nervous glance over his shoulder. ‘They’re trying to kill me, you know,’ he said conversationally.
‘Who?’ I asked, rather impatiently. ‘Who is it exactly that’s trying to kill you?’
‘The forces of darkness,’ he said conspiratorially.
‘The…?’
‘Forces of darkness,’ he repeated. ‘They’re all around us and they’re trying to destroy us. We should get out of here,’ he added, ‘before they spot us.’
∼ No-one’s trying to kill him at all. He’s just paranoid, isn’t he? Nora says irritably. He’s just a red herring. And the old people – I bet they’re just paranoid as well.
‘Ah, yes, but that doesn’t mean that someone’s not out to get them.’
∼ You’ll never make a crime writer.
‘This isn’t a crime story. This is a comic novel.’
I abandoned Professor Cousins to the forces of darkness and made my way home, taking a mazy route through the back streets of Blackness until finally pitching up on the Perth Road. There was an ambulance on the street, blue lights flashing, and with a sense of alarm I realized it was parked outside Olivia’s flat. Olivia herself appeared – pale and unconscious and strapped on a stretcher, rather like Dr Dick before her. The same ambulanceman was there, as if there was only one crew in the whole city. When he caught sight of me this time he gave me a suspicious scowl of recognition. I suppose I did seem to be in attendance at rather a lot of mishaps.
A distraught Kevin appeared as if out of nowhere, along with all three of Olivia’s flatmates. ‘An overdose,’ one of them whispered to me.
‘I found her,’ Kevin said when he saw me. He was sweating uncomfortably and a wheeze like that of Mrs Macbeth’s old dog was coming from his chest. ‘I came to ask her if I could borrow her George Eliot essay,’ he said.
‘She did Charlotte Bro
ntë,’ I said flatly.
‘She had an abortion yesterday,’ one of her flatmates said to me as we watched Olivia being loaded into the back of the ambulance. ‘It’s a shame, she loved babies.’
‘Loved?’ It was only then that I realized that Olivia wasn’t unconscious – Olivia was dead.
∼ No, no, no, no, no, Nora says, very agitated, you said this was a comic novel – you can’t kill people.
‘People are already dead.’
∼ Who?
‘Miss Anderson, poor Senga.’ (Not to mention most of Nora’s family, but I suppose it’s tactless to mention that.)
∼ They don’t count, we didn’t know them. Don’t kill Olivia. I shall stop listening to you, I shall leave, I shall …
She searches for the biggest threat she can think of. And finds it –
∼ I shall erase.
‘Oh, all right, calm down.’
* * *
Maggie Mackenzie was diagnosed with concussion and Professor Cousins went reluctantly with her in the ambulance. The ambulanceman who had ferried Dr Dick to hospital smiled at me and said, ‘You again.’
I elected not to go to the hospital, making the excuse that I had to redo my essay, and set off, taking a mazy route through the back streets of Blackness until finally pitching up on the Perth Road, where I bumped into Miranda, substantially the worse for wear but a medic nonetheless, and I grabbed hold of her limp form and hung onto it while I repeatedly rang the bell on Olivia’s front door.
After an agony of waiting the heavy door swung open and I dashed – as well as one can dash when hampered by a raging fever and a recalcitrant girl – up the stairs to her flat. One of Olivia’s flatmates was in the process of letting Kevin in. He was stammering on about George Eliot as I barged into him, sending him flying into the flat.
‘Olivia!’ I gasped to one of her flatmates.
‘She’s in her room, what’s the—’
Olivia’s door was locked. I told Kevin this was a matter of life and death, Olivia’s to be more precise, and he responded as heroically as Thar-Vint might have done by throwing his soft body repeatedly against the solid door until it gave in to his chivalrous bulk and opened with a splitting of wood.
Olivia was lying on her bed. An empty bottle of tablets and the remains of a glass of whisky were tumbled on the carpet. Her eyes were half open and she whispered to me, ‘Is Proteus OK?’ – which proved, if proof were necessary, what a charitable and altruistic person Olivia was. He was in good hands, I reported, and quite well – a sentence which contained one truth and one lie, which is a good balance in my opinion.
I pushed Miranda forward and said sternly, ‘Right – do something.’
‘Like ring for an ambulance?’ she said vaguely.
‘I’ve done that,’ Kevin said, dropping to his knees by Olivia’s bedside. Olivia’s lovely lip started to tremble and she began to weep – because beautiful girls weep where ordinary ones merely cry and grow blotchy (although Terri had a tendency to howl) – and I put my arms around her and stroked her hair and then burst into tears myself (because that was more the kind of girl I was).
‘For God’s sake,’ Miranda said crankily, ‘get some black coffee and start walking her round the room.’
* * *
I didn’t go in this ambulance either. The ambulancemen, different ones thank goodness, said Olivia was going to have to have her stomach pumped but would be fine.
‘Can I go now?’ Miranda said, once we’d watched the ambulance drive away.
‘Please do,’ I said faintly. My throat was swollen and my skin felt as hot and dry as desert sand, even though I had cold gooseflesh. I walked off quickly although I was having terrible difficulty co-ordinating my arms and legs. My legs felt weightless, as if I was on the moon, and I was worried that they might just float away. Other parts of me – my hands and my head most noticeably – felt as if they were being subjected to tremendous G-forces. Perhaps I should have consulted Miranda after all and explained to her that I was in the grip of the fading, falling disease.
I walked through town, not going anywhere in particular as long as it wasn’t home. I walked down Seagate, thought about going to the cinema but didn’t. The sickly smell of whisky drifted from a bonded warehouse and made me feel sick to my stomach. I carried on, down Candle Lane to Marketgait, across Marketgait to the Victoria Dock, where the ancient frigate Unicorn had found her final berth. Further off, a huge Scandinavian freighter was unloading wood and the smell of pine was carried through the foggy air. The water in the dock was brown and filmy and did not smell good, but I threw in a silver coin and wished for happiness and stepped back from the edge because the pull of water is a powerful thing and I expect many people have accidentally drowned on account of it.
Someone was standing next to me, a shadow on my vision, and laid a claw of a hand on my arm. I recoiled from the touch. It was the water-baby. The bad girl. The woman who is not the sister of the woman who is not my mother. (Not surprisingly) I didn’t have a full understanding of these tangled family ties and I asked her, rather tentatively in case the answer was in the affirmative, ‘You’re not my mother, are you?’
She made a face as if the idea was distasteful, though I think it was probably caused by some kind of alcoholic palsy. Her bony hand was still gripping my arm. When she spoke it was a sibilant, ‘Listen.’
∼ No, don’t, Nora says, looking uncomfortable. Don’t listen to anything she says. She was born a liar, she’ll die a liar.
‘I was always misunderstood,’ Effie said. ‘Just because I liked to have a good time. If it was nowadays I’d be called “liberated”. I didn’t do anything wrong.’
∼ Oh, but she did, she did, Nora says. She did nothing but wrong.
Effie lit a cigarette and stared into the fog.
‘Eleanora,’ she said and sucked through her teeth as if she was smoking a joint, ‘or Nora, as she calls herself, is a murderer.’
‘Murderess,’ I corrected her weakly.
‘She killed my father, she poisoned her stepmother, she tried to drown me, and very nearly succeeded I might tell you. It was sheer chance I didn’t die.’
‘Killed her father?’ I echoed vaguely.
‘Not her father,’ Effie said, her harsh accent making her sound impatient, ‘my father, not her father. Her father was a wonderful man. The world never appreciated Lachlan for what he was.’
I was very confused. Perhaps the fever was making me delirious. ‘Lachlan was Nora’s father? I don’t understand, I thought Donald was her father?’
∼ I’ve changed my mind, Nora interrupts, I think exposition is a bad thing in a story, some things should not be revealed.
Effie turned to look at me. Her dull eyes glittered for a moment and then clouded. Her voice continued but I could no longer really make out the words. Waves of nausea were washing over me and I couldn’t focus on anything; the Unicorn looked like a ghost ship appearing out of the mists of time. The fog was everywhere, inside my head and out.
‘Are you OK?’ a voice asked in my ear. The voice sounded tiny, as if it belonged to a gnat or someone far away, but it had Effie’s accent. I tried to say something but my tongue was too big in my mouth. My ears were filling up with fog. I felt my legs going from under me and held out my hands to ward off the ground when I fell – but there was no ground to fall onto, only space and air and then, finally, foul-smelling freezing-cold dock water.
I was plunged down to the bottom as if liquid lead ran in my veins, as if I was the bob on the end of a fathom-line, sent to measure the watery Murk. There was a taste of oil and sewage, there was darkness and there was bemusement too, for it seemed I had forgotten how to swim, despite having been carefully taught by Nora when I was small in a variety of municipal swimming baths up and down the coast.
But suddenly, without any effort on my part, I was shooting up to the surface, choking and coughing and fighting desperately to get a breath. I could see the Unicorn’s wooden hull loom
ing out of the fog and caught a glimpse of Effie’s impassive features as she stood on the dock, but before I could shout to her for help I found myself being pulled back down to the bottom. The water was colder and darker this time and I was surprised when I popped back up to the surface again like a stopper out of a bottle of elderflower champagne. I had barely got a breath when the waters closed over my head a third time – which we all know must be the last.
The water no longer felt so cold, nor, strangely, so dark, and I was able to look around me a little and see that it was teeming with fish. They were not the kind of fish one might have expected to find in the sludgy waters of the Dundee docks – there were blue carp and shining golden orfs and the king of the fish, the great silver salmon. And then the most unexpected thing yet occurred – a mermaid pushed her way through a curtain of weedy fronds and swam into view. She had a huge fishscaled tail and her long hair trailed behind her like ribbons of seaweed. She lifted me in her strong arms and held me to her woman’s breast as we swam up through the water, through a trail of silver bubbles, up, up and up until we were finally once more in our natural element, which is to say, air, and I caught a glimpse of the mermaid’s face and it was Effie. The water-baby.
I was landed on the dock by invisible hands, but was not weighed and measured as a record catch. Instead I felt my chest being pummelled by one of the dockers who had been unloading the timber freighter, so that the first breath I took was scented with the pine of northern forests. When I finally opened my eyes, it was to the friendly face of the yellow dog. It thumped its tail on the pavement in recognition and grinned at me. Then I passed out.
* * *
We are braving the great outdoors. We shall most likely be blown away. The grey seas are mountainous, the white horses wild and the clouds are whipped across the sky by an invisible hand.
‘Go on.’
* * *
∼ The summer holidays before my final year at school. I spent most of my time studying, I was hoping to go to Edinburgh University to read science.
Emotionally Weird Page 29