Emotionally Weird (11 page)

‘Somebody just phoned for you,’ he said, spilling grains of cold yellow rice onto the carpet.

‘Who?’

‘Dunno. Some woman.’

‘My mother?’

‘Don’t think so.’

Of course not, what was I thinking, Nora didn’t have a phone. Nora didn’t even have electricity.

‘She sounded . . . weird,’ Bob said.

‘Weird? You mean weird accent?’

‘Quite correct, Captain.’

No-one ever phoned me. The only reason we had a phone was because it was paid for by Bob’s father and mother – Bob Senior and Sylvia – so that Sylvia could remind Bob to have a wash occasionally and not eat Angel Delight at breakfast.

Although you would never think it to look at him, Bob had a more than adequate family back in Essex, a fact that he usually denied because they were such models of suburban decorum. I found Bob’s family – Bob Senior, his mother Sylvia and his sister Cherry and a buxom black Labrador called Sadie – strangely charismatic; they lived the kind of banal, tediously quotidian lives that I’d always longed for – eating roast chicken, changing sheets, going for boring Sunday outings in the family car, treading on fitted wool carpets, taking holidays in Spain, entertaining from a full drinks cabinet. For me, they were the most attractive thing about Bob.

We spent nearly every vacation with them in the pleasantly anodyne atmosphere of their house in Ilford, so much more normal than Nora’s wrack and insular home. Bob, on these visits, was his usual self, sleeping most of the day and then hanging around all evening, waiting for his parents to go to bed so that he could skin up a joint and watch
Come Dancing
.

Bob slept in his boyhood room, which, despite Sylvia’s best cleaning efforts, had never been purged of the smell of the teenage Bob – a heady perfume of sweaty socks and unwashed foreskins, of night emissions and illicit lager. It was decorated with football-themed wallpaper and still contained his old Dinky cars and the grotesquely misshapen soft toys that Sylvia had lovingly knitted for him.

I was always sequestered in the guest room, to prevent any ‘shenanigans’ – as Bob Senior put it – taking place. (‘As if,’ Bob Junior said.) The guest room provided an antiseptic yet pleasant environment, with its decor of overblown wallpaper roses, the rag rug on the floor, the clean magnolia paintwork and the flimsy flowered curtain that let in the orange glow of sodium street lights. I spent long hours in there, reading my way through the miscellany of guest-room reading matter (old
National Geographic
s, dog-eared Agatha Christies,
Reader’s Digest
s) and listening to the sounds of a well-ordered house. I couldn’t help thinking how much better off I would have been as a child with Sylvia as my mother – in fact, I would have been a different person altogether. Instead, I had been subjected in my formative years to Nora’s sloppy habits and laissez-faire philosophies (‘Well, don’t go to school if you don’t want to.’)

~
I was teaching you free will, Nora says grumpily.

It was surprising I got an education at all, scraping through seaside secondary schools – Whitley Bay being the last town in our coastal odyssey. Only after Nora had waved me off on the train from Newcastle did she leave her job in a dingy hotel and set off back to the land of her birth and to the Stuart-Murrays’ holiday home.

‘And what did this mysterious woman say?’ I asked Bob.

He shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

‘Well, she must have said something. You can’t say nothing.’

‘She said,’ Bob said, with theatrical patience, ‘“is there someone called Euphemia there?”’

‘And you said?’

‘No, of course.’

Bob was amazed when I explained to him that ‘Effie’ was short for Euphemia (‘You know, Bob – Robert?’) and seemed rather put out that I hadn’t taken the time to clarify this before. Of course, this was the person who for the first few weeks of our relationship thought I was called ‘F.E.’ like some kind of college or an abbreviated swear word.

No-one ever called me Euphemia, no-one ever had. Who could know me by that name? Who other than someone calling from the obliterated past? Nora’s memory was like history itself – partial, fallible, inclined to oblivion – but surely there were other people somewhere who remembered – a best friend, a cousin, a schoolteacher.

The doorbell rang. It was Shug, who mooched into the flat and settled down on the sofa, burying himself in a
Spiderman
comic.

‘Can’t stay long,’ he said, ‘things to do, people to see.’

‘Yeah, well I have to go to the bog,’ Bob said as if this was a meaningful rejoinder.

Shug, unlike Bob, always had things to do and people to see. He spent his life disappearing off on mysterious trips and errands – off to Whitfield to see ‘the man’, out to the country to ‘get his head straight’ (which usually resulted in the exact opposite happening) or down south to some festival or other. Or at least that’s what he
said
– I had once spotted Shug in town, dressed (bizarrely) in a Territorial Army uniform, and on another occasion I had seen him pushing a toddler on the swings in Magdalen Yard Green. Perhaps he was leading a double life – perhaps I should warn Andrea before she found herself committing bigamy. On the other hand, it would give her something to write about.

‘I’ve got an essay to do,’ I said and took myself off to the bedroom because it was obvious I wasn’t going to get any peace if I stayed with Bob and Shug.

The bedroom was an icebox and I had to wear gloves, which made typing rather laborious. I worked on an ancient little Underwood that had a misaligned ‘t’ which made everything I wrote seem perpetually jaunty and surprised, which was rarely the way it was. I had a deadline, so to speak. Martha wanted the first draft of
The Hand of Fate
by the coming Friday, ‘or else’. I typed one-fingered and with difficulty.

Madame Astarti’s stall was in a prime position, between the fish stall and the bomb. The bomb was a Second World War torpedo set in concrete and bore a plaque remembering the men of Saltsea who died in the war. It was deactivated, of course, but just occasionally as Madame Astarti sat in her booth a few feet away from its hulking metal she did wonder – how did you know for sure if it was dead? If it had gone dead.

‘Hear about the body?’ Frank asked cheerfully.

Lou Rigatoni was the nearest thing Saltsea had to the Mafia, which wasn’t very near, it was true, but near enough for most people. The Rigatonis had begun the ice-cream empire (‘The Best Scoop in the North!’) which now dominated the north-east stretch of coastline (or ‘The Yorkshire Riviera’ as Vic Leggat, the leader of the local council, would have it known) and had now expanded to include amusement arcades and fish and chip shops and anything that could turn a profit.

‘Heard the news?’ Lou Rigatoni asked. ‘They’ve found a body in the sea, some woman.’ He was lingering in a way that was making Madame Astarti nervous.

‘Yes, well, must be getting on,’ she said, fiddling with the padlock on her booth; ‘things to do, people to see – you know how it is.’

‘Yes indeed,’ Lou Rigatoni laughed, ‘I myself have to see a man about a dog.’ And with that he doffed his hat again and was gone.

‘Poor dog,’ thought Madame Astarti.

‘You hadn’t forgotten, had you?’ she said.

‘No,’ I sighed, ‘I hadn’t forgotten.’ Although I had, of course.

I feel as if I am waiting for something but I have no idea what that might be. I think I have been waiting all my life, waiting for someone to find me – a grandfather to claim me as his kin or the ghost of my father to appear and tell me his story. On the Oban birth certificate (a forgery, Nora confesses blithely) he is ‘unknown’, an anonymous person who seemed to have somehow slipped from Nora’s memory, a man who made so little impression on her that she couldn’t always be sure of his name and when I asked about him as a child she would say he was called Jimmy, sometimes Jack, occasionally even ‘Ernie’. Any Tom, Dick or Harry would do apparently.

~ He could have been anyone, she says stoutly.

‘He must have been someone.’

The dead sometimes forget the living but the living rarely forget the dead. Not, however, in the case of my father. Half of what made me is completely missing – the forensics of my father a mystery. In their absence I am free to imagine him, but, unfortunately, even in my imagination he is leaving – on the deck of a ship, at the wheel of a car or leaning out of the window of a train carriage, his face obscured by clouds of steam from the engine.

From the occasional careless remark on Nora’s part during my childhood, I deduced that our moneyless, itinerant existence in the Sea Views and Sailor’s Rests of the English seaside was not the life that Nora had been born to. I wondered if perhaps Nora had got with child through a secret passion – impregnated by some black-hearted scoundrel, a passing vagabond perhaps, a groom in the stables or a gypsy in a wood – and that her angry father had thrown her out of the family home to find her own way in the world. I imagined her locked out in the cold and the driven snow, giving birth to me – her bastard daughter – in some freezing hovel.

‘Was it like that?’ I ask her, as I have asked her many times before.

Nora looks at me thoughtfully.

~ Not exactly, she says.

I dreamt that one day Nora’s father – chastened and forgiving – would find me and claim me as granddaughter and heir, and I would be restored to my rightful place in a world where people stay in one place and sleep in their own beds at night and avoid unnecessary journeys. Of course, life is composed almost entirely of journeys, necessary and unnecessary, but mostly unnecessary in my opinion.

I am waiting for Nora to give myself to me, to tell me about the time before my memory began, before I myself began.

‘Perhaps you could start with Douglas,’ I prompt her.

~ Who?

‘Your brother.’

But she’s already gone, striding across the cliff-top towards the house.