Emotionally Weird (18 page)

‘Those last little yolks,’ Martha said, nodding sagely, ‘so good for an egg custard.’

The mewing noise that Proteus had been making throughout this critique suddenly escalated into a loud bawling and Kara hauled him out of his basket and slapped him carelessly on a breast. We moved on swiftly to Davina and everyone prepared for extreme boredom. It wasn’t that Davina couldn’t write it was just that she had nothing to say. Andrea wasn’t much better. ‘Anthea’s not been doing much lately,’ Andrea said, looking rather faint.

‘Does she ever?’ Robin said.

‘All right, all right,’ Andrea said and began to read reluctantly. ‘The bees could be heard before they were seen.’

‘Have you started?’ Kara asked.

‘Yes, of course I’ve started,’ Andrea said peevishly. ‘Shall I start again?’ she asked Martha.

‘If you must.’

‘The bees could be heard before they were seen. The girl, leaning out of the window, thinking about what her father had said at breakfast, worried, irrationally, she knew, that the bees would fly into her hair –’

‘The bees?’ Martha checked. ‘As in honey?’ Perhaps like me she had been under the delusion that they were alphabet Bs, imagining them in a monoliteral swarm around Andrea’s head.

‘She preferred not to think about where her fears came from. She was, though she did not know it, on the brink of an unhappy discovery. Would she have cared if she had known? And yet in some way, she already knew everything.’

Martha stifled a yawn.

‘Then she’s omniscient?’ Davina asked. ‘But you have to be a narrator to be omniscient, don’t you? She doesn’t narrate, she’s . . . narrated.’

I am narrated therefore I am. What would that be – a narratee? That can’t be a word. It sounds like a sea-animal. The young narratees leapt and frolicked in the wake of the ship. The narratees swam in playful circles.

‘Effie?’ Martha said. ‘Something you want to share with us?’

‘No, not really.’

‘Your assignment?’

‘It’s at a problematic stage, I need to work on the metastructure some more.’

Martha raised a perfect circumflex of an eyebrow and gave me a pitying look. ‘Try,’ she said.

I sighed and started to read –

‘I should be a rich woman, Jack Gannet,’ Madame Astarti said to him, ‘for all the thoughts I’m having today.’

‘Take a stroll along the prom?’ Jack Gannet said, offering her his arm.

‘Always the gentleman, Jack,’ Madame Astarti murmured appreciatively. Indeed ‘Gentleman Jack’ had been his nickname during his days on the Met, on account of his good manners, but Jack Gannet didn’t like that, he thought it made him sound too like a criminal. And Jack Gannet was perhaps one of the straightest coppers on the force. Jack Gannet and Madame Astarti went a long way back, almost as far as Sheffield and that was a very long way indeed. There had been a few occasions during his rise to Chief Inspector when he had been thankful for Madame Astarti’s help, not that he liked to admit it.

‘It’s not the weather for murder,’ Jack Gannet sighed, wiping his brow.

‘Murder?’ Madame Astarti queried sharply.

‘The woman found in the sea, just had the pathologist’s report back on the body. It was decomposing fast, of course, bodies don’t last long in the sea, especially in this weather. Ice-cream?’

Madame Astarti felt confused. The woman was killed by ice-cream?

Jack Gannet stopped suddenly so that Madame Astarti, whose braking distance was quite long, slammed into him.

‘Rigatoni’s,’ Jack said cheerfully, ‘the best scoop in the north.’ They were outside the big Rigatoni ice-cream parlour on the Prom, the flagship one, and he opened the door and gestured Madame Astarti inside and to a table in the window. A buxom waitress appeared and smiled warmly at Jack.

‘Hello, Deirdre,’ he said. ‘I think we’d both like a Five-Scoop-Sundae-Special, please, even though it’s a Saturday,’ he added and Deirdre laughed, far too much, Madame Astarti thought, for such a feeble joke.

‘How was she killed?’ Madame Astarti asked eagerly, sticking her fan-shaped wafer into the heart of her sundae.

‘Difficult to say for sure,’ Jack Gannet frowned, ‘but it looks like she was strangled.’

‘Crime of passion, perhaps,’ Madame Astarti said thoughtfully.

‘Well,’ Jack Gannet said. ‘You know that frog–’

~ It’s not a frog, Nora says, it’s a toad. She strokes it, a toad-wife, and kisses it gently on the top of its head, an indignity it suffers in silence. When she places it on the floor at her feet it contemplates her for a few seconds as if it’s worshipping her, before hopping lazily out of the door.

~ I must pick nettles, she says, for soup.

‘It’s winter, there are no nettles.’

~ Well, I have to go and pick something, she says vaguely. She is avoiding telling me her story. I know why – it is not a pretty tale.

But if she was me she wouldn’t say such nasty things.

‘OK,’ Robin said. ‘I’ve been reworking a scene from
Life Sentence
. I wasn’t really happy with it before. I’ll just read all the parts, shall I? Unless someone else wants to read? No? Right, well this is the scene where Dod, Jed and Kenny are discussing whether Rick had been right to do what he did –’ Robin took a deep breath and closed his eyes. There was silence for quite a long time and then he suddenly started reading:

I was just searching in my pocket for a handkerchief – I was sure I was coming down with a cold, I was feeling quite light-headed – when I discovered a crumpled piece of paper. I spread it out on the little desk-table and discovered it was the page of
The Expanding Prism of J
where J falls over the banister. I wished I’d found it earlier, I could have handed it in to Martha and pretended I’d written it – I expected it was just the kind of writing she would like.

‘Do you think you could pay attention?’ Martha said to me so I screwed the piece of paper up in a ball and stuffed it back in my pocket.

‘And so, finally, to Kevin,’ she said, turning her gaze reluctantly on our fantasist. ‘How is Edrakonia this week, Kevin?’ Martha had tried to persuade Kevin that his
magnum opus
was not suitable for the course assignment and had indeed told him at one point she was going to fail him point blank if he didn’t stop writing ‘garbage’, but lately she seemed to have become inured to Edrakonia. If nothing else, Kevin could be relied upon to have actually done some writing and there was something about the eager expression on his bovine face that made you feel so dreadfully sorry for him that you couldn’t help but encourage his one pleasure in life. Kevin read in a kind of Benny Hill accent –

‘No,’ Kevin said.

‘Because if it is,’ Robin persisted, ‘it’s a really crap name.’

‘Shut up.’

‘Thank you,’ Kevin said sarcastically,
‘Trusty steward Lart, were journeying to the Vale of Tyra-Shakir for the great celebration of the feast of Joppa—’

‘That’s in Edinburgh,’ Andrea objected. ‘They’re hardly going to go on some great epic journey on their stupid shaggy mountain ponies to go to Edinburgh, are they?’

Kevin ignored her.
‘It will be difficult travelling but the feast must be observed—’
Kevin interrupted himself for once to explain, ‘Of course, parties really are a pre-Murk thing, the Murk is a bit like Cromwell’s Protectorate,’ he explained, ‘no singing, no dancing, that kind of thing.’

Professor Cousins looked perplexed. ‘And so . . . the dragons are Royalists?’

‘No, no, no,’ Kevin scowled, ‘the dragons don’t hold with
affiliation
.’ His face took on a dreamy expression. ‘Before the Murk, the Duke Thar-Vint was renowned for his parties – the food was wonderful, naturally—’

‘Naturally,’ Martha said.

‘The entertainments were spectacular – the famous acrobats of Hartha-Melchior, the jugglers of Wei-Wan, the dressage horses from the plains of—’

‘Kevin,’ Martha said looking very pained, ‘could you just get on?’

‘If the Duke Thar-Vint hadn’t stolen the treasure of Alsinelg to begin with he wouldn’t be in this mess,’ Kara said.

‘Yes, but that’s the whole point,’ Kevin said crossly.

‘Kevin,’ Martha warned.

His faithful steed, Demaal, sniffed the air—

‘There isn’t a finite stock of them.’

~ How do you know? You might suddenly just run out and then you won’t be able to finish the—