Emotionally Weird

by Kate Atkinson

  * * *

  On the last day of winter, which is the very next day, we go down to the shore and Nora takes the – rather gratuitous – diamonds from her overcoat pocket and flings them into the grey ocean where they disappear into the waters with a steaming hiss.

  ‘Aft her heid,’ Chick says to me and I can only agree.

  ∼ There, Nora says, that’s the end of that.

  ‘You promised madwomen in the attics.’

  ∼ One madwoman, I only promised one madwoman and there wasn’t enough room for her.

  I suppose Effie will do well enough for our story’s madwoman.

  ‘Aye,’ Chick says. ‘Aff her held, that one.’

  ∼ I could put an attic in if you really wanted, Nora offers, in an agreeable mood now she is rid of her tale.

  But I think we will leave it at that.

  ∼ No attic?

  ‘No attic.’

  1999

  The Meaning of Life

  It is all endings now.

  Lachlan left nothing but debts after all, and the diamonds that were at the bottom of the sea were all that was left of the Stuart-Murrays’ wealth. No body was ever found in the Tay but nor was there any more word from Effie.

  I never took my degree. Instead my new, unlooked-for father took me back to Dundee to collect my belongings – Bob was sitting the last paper of his finals at the time (he got a third-class degree, but didn’t understand how), but I didn’t hang around to see him.

  I stayed with Chick for a while – he had a sort of hovel in Peddie Street, we had to climb out of the downstairs window to get to the outside toilet – and he made a great effort to be paternal, which mostly meant buying me fish and chips and offering me cigarettes every time he lit up. It wasn’t long before I left Dundee – leaving the north for ever to find my fortune elsewhere – but I kept in close touch with Chick as well as ‘the mingin’ little bastards’, who were my half-siblings, of course (much to Moira’s fury). Chick died a few years ago but I think of him fondly.

  It was Chick who persuaded Nora that it was safe for her to return to the land of the living and she took things up much where she had left off, becoming a mature student and taking a degree in marine biology. She married a diver – a handsome one, you will be pleased to know – and he knows the story of her life as a murderess and a fugitive. They have a little boat called Sea-Adventure II that they more or less live on and they wander around the warmer parts of the world like a pair of sea-gypsies. So, there’s a happy ending. I don’t see Nora often but that’s all right. She will always be my mother, as far as I’m concerned.

  I have been back to Dundee very recently, crossing over the rail bridge under a sky of saltire blue. I saw the stumps of Thomas Bouch’s disastrous bridge, the seals – as freckled and speckled as mistle thrushes – sunning themselves on the sandbanks in the middle of a Tay that was the colour of the sea on the Neapolitan Riviera. Dundee had changed and yet hadn’t changed. There were new buildings – a contemporary arts centre, a big blue medical research building – and old ones had disappeared – the Overgate, the Wellgate Steps and the flat in Paton’s Lane where I had once lived with Bob. The headline on the newspaper stand was ‘Dundee reptile saved’, proving that the local press remained as Dundee-centric as ever.

  I had lunch in the new arts centre, overlooking the Tay. I visited the Howff graveyard and I bought tea in Braithwaites’ and fern cakes from Goodfellow and Steven. I wandered round the university. Watson Grant was no longer there, of course. Aileen left him in 1973 to live with her lover – a dashing pilot stationed at RAF Leuchars. Grant Watson declared personal bankruptcy a year later, lost his tenure, got taken into Liff for a while. Now he lives quietly in Devon and works as a bookbinder.

  Dr Dick was no longer there either – he moved to Lancaster University – and Maggie Mackenzie died of a blood clot on the brain a few minutes after I patted her hand and said goodbye to her in the DRI. Professor Cousins died years ago after handing over the reins of the English department to Christopher Pike, who had undergone a miraculous recovery.

  * * *

  To my astonishment, I saw Bob again. The reason I was in Dundee was because I was on a book tour, of sorts. To everyone’s surprise, but mostly mine, I had eventually become a writer of detective fiction – the genteel kind for nervous people who like their crime free of anything to do with urban decay, computers or sex, and for foreigners who like their English detectives to be quaint and colourful.

  I was giving a reading, to a modest audience, in James Thin’s bookshop in the High Street. Halfway through, I looked up and saw a figure staring in through the plate glass of the window like a curious fish in a tank.

  I thought he was another madman and returned to reading. A few minutes later the madman came into the shop and hovered annoyingly behind the rest of the audience. Only after the usual questions were done with did the madman – overweight, balding, a rather sleazy air – speak.

  ‘Is it really you?’ he said, his natural nasal Essex returned.

  It really was me but could it really be him? Yes, it seemed.

  We went for coffee the next day in a little café on the Perth Road. Bob was now a Modern Studies teacher at the Morgan Academy. Two children, divorced, a new girlfriend – this latter said shyly. Middle-aged, middling happy, a droop to the shoulders. ‘What more is there to say?’ Bob shrugged. ‘Drink too much, smoke too much, try not to think too much,’ he laughed.

  We chatted about Kevin – for Kevin Riley is now, of course, the second most famous writer of fantasy in Britain. His latest book, The Balniddrian Conspiracy – the most recent in the seemingly endless Chronicles of Edrakonia – was at the top of the paperback bestseller list.

  I told Bob how once, browsing in a second-hand bookshop in Suffolk, I discovered a long out of print book entitled The Invasion of the Tara-Zanthians which was indeed about a group of alien invaders who introduce a currency based on the domestic cat and dog. It had not been written by ‘The Boy With No Name’ but by someone called ‘Colin Hardy’. So that was one mystery cleared up.

  We talked, too, of Janice Rand, who dropped out of university and became a geriatric nurse. Three years later she was convicted of murdering her charges (she was ‘sending them home to God’, her barrister said) and sent to a high-security mental hospital. It was Chick who, after doggedly pursuing her all that time on behalf of poor Aunt Senga’s relatives, managed to secure filmed evidence that convicted her.

  I visited Ferdinand in prison once or twice but he seemed to have a rather two-dimensional character and I gave up on him after a while. He disappeared a few years ago and Maisie – now a maths lecturer in Cambridge – thinks that he might have been killed over a drug deal that went wrong.

  As for the yellow dog, I have no idea what happened to him but I like to imagine him living on, even if only in a book somewhere.

  So that’s it.

  * * *

  Bob had to go – he was meeting Robin, now a social worker, for a drink in the Tay Bridge Bar. I declined his offer to join them.

  I wondered if Bob’s life would have turned out differently if I hadn’t stolen the meaning of life from him.

  Bob discovered the meaning of life one grey day shortly before this story began. When Bob experienced his epiphany he was lying on the gritty carpet, mindlessly practising the Vulcan death grip on Shug. Shug persevered manfully with rolling a joint on the cover of Bob’s Electric Ladyland album. On the television, which no-one was watching, there was news footage of a faraway country that we knew nothing about being bombed.

  Bob changed the television channel. ‘Dr Who,’ he explained to Shug, ‘the second episode of “The Curse of Peladon”. The Ice Warriors are in it, they’re at this alien gathering thing…’ I left the room for a minute and when I came back I found the pair of them in the grip of a strange kind of metaphysical hysteria, flopping around on the carpet like newly caught fish.

  ‘Wow,’ Bob kept repeating, ‘the mea
ning of life, that’s like … big stuff.’

  ‘The meaning of Liff,’ Shug said with a grandiose gesture that knocked his tin of tobacco flying across the room.

  Unfortunately, Bob and Shug were too wasted to elucidate their momentous findings to me. Bob had become distracted by a pan sitting in the middle of the carpet. The pan contained the remains of a spaghetti Bolognese which, in Bob’s acid-etched brain, had just turned into a pit of writhing snakes. By the time he had recovered from this delusion and stopped screaming, both he and Shug had forgotten their great, arcane secret.

  ‘Arse,’ Bob said and struggled to his feet to wander helplessly around the room, looking in drawers and under pillows as if the meaning of life was part of the stuff of the material world.

  Luckily, at that moment, he tripped over his bootlace and the meaning of life was restored to him. Distressed at finding how easy it was to forget something so important, Bob and Shug spent some time discussing how they could preserve it for posterity. Eventually, I took pity on them and suggested they write it down.

  ‘Write it down!’ Bob shouted, gripping Shug’s arm to stay upright as he was in danger of falling over from excitement. They both thought that writing it down was a brilliant idea, almost as brilliant as the meaning of life itself, and, after much searching, Bob found a scrap of ruled paper and wrote, although with some difficulty, because every time he wrote a letter it turned into a little cartoon stick-man and ran away. Finally, he managed to tame the little men into a semblance of literacy and after much discussion it was decided to place this precious piece of paper in an envelope in the drawer of the living-room sideboard.

  Once the meaning of life was safe, Shug and Bob drank a toast to it, in cans of Tennent’s lager, the ones with the pictures of girls on them – Tracy was Bob’s favourite.

  ‘Here’s to us, then,’ Shug said with an effort. Wha’s like us?’

  Rejecting the appropriate answer – ‘Gey few and they’re a’ deid’ – Bob struggled for his own benediction. He furrowed his brow, he thought hard and visibly and finally declared, with great solemnity, ‘Live long and prosper.’

  * * *

  I found the envelope a few days later when I was looking for my matriculation card. I have kept the piece of paper – it sits now in the drawer of my own sideboard in my Breton home – and I look at it occasionally just to remind myself what the meaning of life really is.

  * * *

  This is what Bob had written. Guard it well for it is the meaning of life:

  ‘When you stand on the table you can touch the ceiling.’

  The Hand of Fate by Effie Andrews

  Originally published twenty-six years ago, we are pleased to be issuing this special edition of Effie Andrews’ very first ‘Madame Astarti’ novel, The Hand of Fate, to coincide with a major new television adaptation of the series.

  What the critics say about Effie Andrews:

  ‘A Miss Marple for the Millennium’ Woman’s Realm

  ‘She improves a little with every book’ Yorkshire Post

  ‘Fascinating’ Whitby Gazette

  Other ‘Madame Astarti’ novels include:

  The Wheel of Fortune

  Mermaids Ahoy!

  The Finger of Fate

  And the prize-winning Pick a Card, Any Card

  Effie Andrews was born in Scotland in 1951. She now lives in France.

  In this work of fiction, the characters, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or they are used entirely fictionally.

  Copyright © Effie Andrews 1974

  1

  Chapter One

  Lady Luck

  A lone fisherman up early looking for sea trout found the first body. The fisherman was thinking what a beautiful day it was going to be. The pink-gold rays of a cinematic dawn were gleaming on the dark metallic surface of the sea when he netted the unwanted catch on his little boat, the Lucky Lady. He was not a man given to superstition and yet in the semi-dark he thought he saw silver scales and seaweed hair and believed for one wild, terrible moment that he had caught a mermaid. When he hooked her and pulled her towards the boat, however, he saw it was no mermaid but the bloated body of a woman, draped in what remained of a silver-lamé evening dress. Seaweed was entangled in long hair which looked dark, but by the time he had got her to shore was already drying to a bleached-out blond.

  He grabbed hold of her hand to help her on board the Lucky Lady but her skin peeled off her arm like a long satin glove. The fisherman had to leave her in the water a little longer while he retched over the side of his boat. She drifted lazily off, she was in no hurry, she had been dead five days now and was getting used to her watery element. She was already beginning to suffer a sea-change, her bones were not yet coral but her one remaining eye was an opaque pearl and flat strands of seaweed, crimped at the edges like ribbons, adorned her long tendrils of hair. A whole flotilla of tiny, greedy sea-creatures had seen the early-morning mermaid into safe harbour.

  The woman was finally brought to shore and logged by a pale Constable Collins at 6.32 a.m. precisely. After an undignified struggle to get her out of the boat, the policeman finally lifted her dead-weighted body ashore in his arms. He thought of the warm body of his wife still asleep in their bed in their little modern house and his sky-blue eyes clouded over. What had she meant last night when she’d rolled over in bed and stared at him unpleasantly and said she was dying of boredom? One thing was certain: it couldn’t be worse than death by drowning.

  * * *

  Flashing blue lights guided Inspector Gannet down to the harbour where a crowd of holidaymakers were craning their neck to try and get a view of the excitement. So, yes, Jack Gannet thought, this is how it begins …

  Last Words

  ‘Perhaps,’ J agreed cautiously with the man who would forever be an enemy to him, ‘but on the other hand, perhaps not.’

  Kenny There’s nothing. Nothing. Do you hear me?

  Dod I know.

  Jed Perhaps Rick was right after all.

  ‘Yes, of course I will,’ Flick murmured happily as Jake pulled her into his arms and began to kiss her with fierce abandonment.

  ‘Well, well,’ Madame Astarti said. ‘Whoever would have thought that you were the murderer all along.’

  Duke Thar-Vint mounted his steed Demaal and saluted farewell to his trusty steward Lart. He turned to the Lady Agaruitha riding beside him and said, ‘One chapter may have closed, but the fight for justice will go on for ever.’

  And the winner of the Booker Prize for the year 2001 is … Andrea Garnett for her novel Anthea’s Anguish.

  Whatever we fondly call our own

  Belongs to heaven’s great Lord

  The blessings lent us for a day

  Are soon to be restored

  (Carved on a tombstone in the Howff, Dundee, and used by Terri as an inscription on the tasteful stone arches which form the entrance to all of the pet cemeteries in the hugely successful chain which she started in San Francisco in 1976.)

  Also by Kate Atkinson

  Behind the Scenes at the Museum

  Human Croquet

  Not the End of the World

  One Good Turn

  Case Histories

  Kate Atkinson is the author of a short story collection, Not the End of the World, and five critically acclaimed novels including Case Histories and One Good Turn. She lives in Edinburgh.

  EMOTIONALLY WEIRD. Copyright © 2000 by Kate Atkinson. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Atkinson, Kate.

  Emotionally weird : a novel / Kate Atkinson.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-27999-8

  ISBN-10: 0-312-27999-X

  1. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Scotland—Fiction. I. Title.

  PR6051.T56 E4 2000

  823'.914—dc21

  2001269169

  Originally published in Great Britain by Doubleday, a division of Transworld Publishers Ltd.

  First published in the United States by Picador

  eISBN 9781466840812

  First eBook edition: February 2013

  *To fulfil the requirements of this class you must attend one seminar per week and two individual tutorials per term. The course work for this paper comprises one major assignment which must be a piece of individual, original work – a play, a novella, a collection of short stories, the first five chapters of a novel, a portfolio of poems, or some other work agreed with the course tutor.