Emotionally Weird

by Kate Atkinson

  She gave birth in her own bed at home during the summer holidays and the easiest way to conceal the truth was to say the baby was Marjorie’s, although God knows by that time Marjorie wasn’t fit to look after an infant. Effie wasn’t even late returning to school, leaving Marjorie and a completely disreputable nanny to bring me up. They thought I would be defective, being in-bred. They always treated me as if I was, even when I proved not to be. Lachlan was given a thrashing the next time he was home from Glenalmond and told not to do it again. That’s the ruling classes for you.

  (This is all a little melodramatic, is it not? Grand Guignol with a pinch of Greek tragedy.)

  ∼ I warned you, I told you right at the beginning that it would be a tale so strange and tragic that you would think it wrought from a lurid and overactive imagination rather than a real life.

  ‘And what of the baby? Is it dead?’ I ask.

  ∼ You are so slow, Nora laughs fondly.

  * * *

  I am that red, prune-skinned infant. I am that baby in the water. My mother is not my mother, her mother is not her mother, her father is not her father, her sister is not her sister, her brother is not her brother. Lo, we are as jumbled as the most jumbled box of biscuits that ever graced a grocer’s shelf.

  * * *

  ‘Buggery rats!’ Madame Astarti exclaimed as the torpedo on the prom exploded.

  Blood and Bone

  Against all the odds, daylight has come again and we have survived the tempestuous night. We are lucky we haven’t woken up and found ourselves over the rainbow. Although there is no rainbow to be seen and the skies are ashen and Nora’s eyes are the colour of dead doves. The cats, offended at our lack of milk and fish and meat, have returned to their weather-beaten abodes.

  We breakfast in the dining-room of the house, a room we are never usually in. The furniture – table, chairs, a huge dresser – is all dark and heavy in some mock-Elizabethan style that depresses the spirit. We might be in a hotel, the way the table is placed in the window to give us a sea view while we eat, although one would hope that a hotel would provide better fare than our meagre repast of oatmeal and milkless tea. When we finish we remain at the table. We seem to be waiting for something.

  ‘Are we waiting for something?’

  Nora doesn’t answer. She is paying even more attention than usual to the sea. I hand her dead Douglas’s binoculars that have been sitting on the sideboard.

  ∼ Thank you.

  There is a dot on the horizon – a little black speck of nothing on the edge of infinity. We wait. The dot grows bigger. And bigger. And eventually the dot declares itself to be the fishing-boat that first dropped me off here. It lurches up and down with the waves and it makes me feel sick just to look at it. The boat is ferrying a passenger to us, though his figure is indistinct and not yet known to us. My heart tips like the waves – perhaps Ferdinand has broken out of prison and come to find me.

  ∼ Unlikely, says my unromantic unmother.

  We grab our outdoor clothes and scramble eagerly down the cliff-path to the shore to welcome our anonymous visitor. The fisherman waves to Nora and she waves back. This is probably as close as she gets to a social life. The fisherman helps his cargo – a rather shabby middle-aged man, bundled up in clothing that would do for a trip to the Arctic – into a little boat, as frail as a nutshell, and rows him as close to the shore as he can.

  The man staggers through the waves and onto the clattering pebbles of the beach.

  Nora puts out a hand in greeting and says,

  ∼ Hello, Mr Petrie. I’ve waited such a long time to meet you again.

  And Chick – for it is indeed he – says, ‘Watch it, I’m away to boak again,’ and is true to his word.

  * * *

  We sit in the kitchen with a poor fire in the grate. The fishing-boat dropped off provisions and we are enjoying a feast worthy of Joppa, comprising tinned soup, oatcakes and cheese, Abernethy biscuits and a Lyons’ Battenberg.

  ∼ I’ve been telling her, Nora says to Chick.

  ‘Everything?’ he asks warily, lighting up a cigarette. He offers one to Nora, which she takes and then, squinting through the cigarette smoke at him, she says –

  ∼ Not everything. I’ve left room for your story.

  There is much to be explained – why is Chick here? How do Chick and Nora know each other? How infuriatingly enigmatic this pair are.

  ∼ Constable Charles Petrie, Nora says. You had that nippit wife, Moira, wasn’t it? I bet she ended up leaving you.

  Of course, now I remember – when Chick gave me a lift home on the road from Balniddrie to Dundee that night, he had mentioned working on the ‘Glenkittrie case’ when he was a village policeman in ‘heuchter-teuchter land’.

  ‘It was me that found the bodies,’ Chick explains to me. ‘The old guy was dead with a huge morphine overdose. His wife poisoned. She’d obviously given birth. Elder daughter was never found but her dress turned up in the river – identified by a man that she’d had it off with the day before the murder, so presumed drowned. The younger daughter…’ Chick pauses and looks at Nora ‘… was missing, along with the bairn, the car, the diamonds. The only thing that wasn’t missing were your fingerprints on the poison and the morphine. Heid-yins were called in from Dundee,’ Chick says glumly. ‘Soon every police force in the country was looking for one Eleanora Stuart-Murray. Big case,’ Chick says, ‘big case, famous in its day.’

  ‘I never thought you did it,’ Chick says to Nora. ‘You seemed like a nice lassie. I’d seen you at that ceilidh, dancing with that big farmer’s laddie, what was his name?’

  ‘He doesn’t have one,’ I tell Chick.

  ∼ Robert, Nora says sadly, he was called Robert.

  ‘The evidence was against you,’ Chick says to her. ‘I’d have done the same in your shoes, I’d have legged it. Any more tea in that pot?’

  ∼ I ran to save the child, Nora says.

  ‘From what?’ the ‘child’ asks.

  ∼ From Lachlan, from your self, from the past you didn’t know about yet.

  * * *

  I have no mother, no brother, no sister, no father. I do not want to be a person who opened their eyes on the world for the first time and saw their mother dead. I don’t want to be a person who set foot on earth only to be tossed back into water, like a fallen leaf, an abandoned sweet wrapper.

  ∼ The first thing you saw was the moon, Nora corrects me.

  ‘And that makes it all right?’

  I would like my self to be given back to me. I would like a mother, father, brother, sister, aunt. I would like a family dog and a family car. I would like to live in a traditional thirties semi with a swing in the garden and I would like to eat lamb chops for my tea, with potatoes and peas and afterwards a Victoria sandwich cake made by the hand of a genuine mother.

  ‘Jam and buttercream?’ Chick says, wiping his nose with the back of his hand.

  ∼ Well, I can’t give you that, Nora says, but I can tell you what happened afterwards and of how you came to dry land. For I was not the only thing to snag on the fallen tree in the river. As I was trying to drag myself out of the water I noticed something caught by a branch. I heard its cry –

  ‘Its?’

  ∼ Yours. I heard your cry even above the noise of the rushing water. The lacy matinee coat had hooked itself onto a branch and you were bobbing around like a baby made of cork rather than flesh.

  I managed to get both of us out of the water and back to the house where I warmed you up as well as possible. I was sure you were going to die. There were plenty of clothes for you. Mabel had knitted a layette that would have done for quadruplets. When I took off your soaking things I found her little crucifix around your neck, it was a wonder it hadn’t strangled you.

  ‘And I suppose you are going to hand it to me now,’ I say to her, ‘as one does in all good stories, so that I will have a treasured memento of the mother I never knew.’

  ∼ Well I lost it actually, she
says carelessly. On a train. Or a bus. Who knows? Pass me an Abernethy.

  ∼ So. Then I took what money I could find in the house, took the diamonds, sitting carelessly in the sideboard drawer – I was very calm – I was thinking that I could sell them when we ran out of money. Of course, I never did for fear I would be discovered. I packed baby clothes and made sandwiches, I even took a Thermos of tea. It was almost as if we were setting off on a great adventure. Then I drove away in Effie’s car – I had a vague idea how to drive it, I’d sat next to her a few times and there was no traffic around. I stopped in a passing-place to feed the baby, put her to my breast and milk came. It seemed like a miracle, a sign, but I’ve read of such things since.

  ‘So, you were a seventeen-year-old schoolgirl who’d just killed her sister who was really her mother and you were breastfeeding a baby who wasn’t yours on a deserted Highland road in the middle of the night.’ I wonder if there are any words that can adequately cover this situation. The ones that spring to mind – absurd, surreal, grotesque – don’t really do, somehow.

  ∼ Then I drove to a station and waited on the platform with the milk churns and caught an early train over the border. We went to London where we were anonymous and then to Brighton. I saw the name ‘Andrews’ above a butcher’s shop and thought it ordinary enough and – well, you know the rest.

  I kept track of things in the newspapers – I could hardly go to a police station and protest my innocence over two murders when I was guilty of the third – they still hanged people then. So I went on the run.

  And now, Nora says, Effie turns up alive after all these years. It makes no difference, of course – for I meant to murder my mother and intention is everything. Another slice of Battenberg, Mr Petrie? she asks, as regal as a duchess.

  ‘Call me Chick,’ Chick says, ‘and yes it was Moira, and yes, she did leave me.’

  ∼ What a cow, Nora says cheerfully and Chick says, ‘How did you know?’

  * * *

  I know what happened to Effie because she told me, just before I fell off the quay of the Victoria Dock. I didn’t understand then what she was saying, but I do now.

  Further down the bank a man had spotted her being swept down river. He had parked his car next to the water in preparation for running a length of hose pipe from his exhaust to the inside of the car and removing himself from the planet for good. He was a rep from Peterborough – ladies’ shoes – and was married to a woman he hated but felt he couldn’t get divorced from because they had three small children and a huge overdraft. He was a coward and thought it was just easier to die than cope with his wife’s wrath, although he didn’t feel very cowardly, having his last cigarette and contemplating the Highland scenery by night, he felt downright brave when he thought of what he was about to do. At that moment, as if to call on the hero hiding inside him, he saw something drifting down the river and with some difficulty, and not without getting his trousers soaked, he managed to haul in his salvaged naiad – Effie. Still alive (and enticingly naked), she was a water-baby, after all, and once she was on the bank she coughed up a great deal of river water, some pond weed and a couple of small fishes –

  ∼ Really?

  ‘No. And so she came back to life. And he drove off with her – blah, blah, blah.’

  ∼ Blah, blah, blah?

  ‘It was like a sign for both of them. A fresh start. A re-birth. They went to Rhodesia together, set up a business which was very successful, he died a year ago and she came back to lay things to rest. Atonement, maybe. And she saved me from drowning so perhaps in the grand cosmic design of things that cancels out trying to drown me in the beginning.’

  ∼ I doubt it.

  ‘And she was looking for you. So perhaps she wanted to make amends.’

  ∼ So where is she now?

  ‘Wouldn’t she have gone to see Lachlan?’ I ask. ‘And what happened to him anyway?’

  ‘Dead,’ Chick says, ‘a few weeks ago.’

  ∼ I hope it was a prolonged and painful death, Nora says, taking another of Chick’s cigarettes.

  ‘Aye, I believe it was,’ Chick says. ‘I was working for him,’ he explains to me –

  ‘Is everything to be tidied up and explained in this part of the story?’

  ∼ Yes.

  ‘He employed me,’ Chick continues, ‘to find his daughter. You,’ he adds to Nora in case she’s forgotten, which is highly unlikely. ‘And the bairn,’ he says, looking at me in an odd way. ‘Maybe his conscience got to him, but I think he wanted to make sure his money was kept in the family. No other heirs,’ he says to Nora, ‘just you and the bairn. It was coincidence that he picked my name out of the Yellow Pages.’

  ∼ There’s no such thing as coincidence, says my airy-fairy non-mother, draining her cup and glancing at her leftover tea-leaves.

  ‘So you were following me?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he says with just a hint of contrition in his voice.

  * * *

  This has been as strange a maze as ever man trod but thankfully we are approaching the promised end. We are done with Effie and Lachlan; they belong in a whole book of their own and there is no more room for them here.

  ‘Well,’ Chick says, ‘there’s one wee thing.’ He takes a cutting from the Courier out of his pocket. He has circled a small article with a sub-headline that said ‘Mystery Woman’, which he proceeds to read in his own fashion ‘… a certain William Scrymegour … no direct relation to the famous prohibitionist, Neddie Scrymegour nor to the great Alexander Scrymegour wha’ bled wi’ Wallace, blah, blah, blah … an elderly gentleman who fought with the famous Fourth Battalion Black Watch … Battle of Loos … wiped out, blah, blah, blah … rented a flat … Magdalen Yard Green … poor sleeper … amused himself … early morning hours … Tay through his binoculars … the weather this particular morning … damp and foggy, blah, blah, blah … morning train from Edinburgh due over the bridge in seven minutes … knew the timetables off by heart … raised his binoculars … struck by extraordinary and unexpected sight of a woman walking out along the rail bridge … wearing a red coat of some kind … well on her way to Fife … reached the high girders … climbed up onto the edge of the parapet … perched like a bird … stood up … on the edge … executed a magnificent dive into the water, blah, blah, blah, didn’t re-emerge. The Edinburgh train whistled and appeared out of the mist … on time, Mr Scrymegour noticed … extensive search of the Tay … no body found … no-one had reported a friend or loved one missing and the case had been closed, blandy, blandy, blah. End of story.

  ‘Of course, the interesting thing,’ he says when we have all digested his strangely cooked story, ‘is that the day the “mystery woman” dived off the bridge was the day before you fell in the dock.’

  ∼ Oh, no ghost stories, Nora says with a shiver, I really can’t abide them.

  * * *

  ∼ We still have another loose end, Nora says, and who better to tie it up than our detective.

  ‘Me?’ Chick says.

  ∼ Yes, Chick, Nora says, and to do that you must tell us your story.

  ‘How?’ Chick asks, looking suddenly worried. ‘I’ve told mine, remember – I found the bodies. The old guy was dead – and so on.’

  ∼ I know everything, Chick, Nora says softly, and I mean everything.

  Chick sighs, like a man who knows he’s up a blind alley with his back against the wall and a knife at his throat.

  ‘Well. I’m not used to this kind of thing,’ he says, staring at his feet.

  ‘Begin at the beginning,’ I tell him, remembering Mrs Macbeth’s dictum (which she may well have stolen off someone), ‘and carry on until you’ve finished.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ∼ Start with the weather, I always like to do that.

  ‘It was weird weather,’ Chick says. ‘Warm but rainy, like a monsoon or something. Thunderstorms. And animals appearing that didn’t belong. A puma was found wandering the hills in the glen. I had to get a bloody zoo keeper up
from Edinburgh.’

  ∼ Oh, I’d forgotten that, Nora says. The hunters were all stalking it, they said there was no closed season on cats.

  ‘And fish,’ Chick said, ‘there was an angler claimed to have caught an angelfish. Another one said he netted a mermaid. People were aff their heid with the weather. And those bloody wasps, they were everywhere, in people’s hair, in their beds, in their baffles, their biscuit tins. Mind that woman over at Kembie,’ he says, turning to Nora, ‘got stung when she was hanging out her washing and dropped down deid. And it was jam-making time so the women were aff their held, the wasps were aff their heid. Everyone was aff their heid.’

  ‘Raspberry,’ he says, suddenly, unexpectedly wistful, ‘raspberry was the sweetest.’

  Who would have thought Chick a jam-connoisseur?

  ‘She made such a lot of it,’ he continues, ‘forever stirring that jeely-pan. I dropped in one morning to warn her about a Geordie gang that were raiding over the border – stealing stuff out of folk’s houses. No-one kept their doors locked thereabouts.

  ‘It was like a Turkish bath in that kitchen. She gave me a bit of mutton pie and some green beans, leftover rice pudding, a cup of tea.’

  (The way to Chick’s heart is clearly the traditional route.)

  ‘It just went on from there.’ Chick shrugs. ‘She was lonely, I was lonely. She’d never had a man, never had her furrow ploughed –’

  ∼ Charming.

  ‘She was married to that dried-up old crippled stick. She was such a nice woman, she started off telling me that God loved me, but I think she’d changed her mind by the end. We’d knocked over a few jam pots in the heat of things. The stuff was everywhere. Wasps were throwing themselves against the window –’

  Realization has been dawning slowly, very slowly, on me.

  ‘Oh my God,’ I say to Chick. ‘You’re my father?’

  * * *

  So I have gained my inheritance, which is to say, my blood. My mother was my mother, my father is my father.