Emotionally Weird (21 page)

‘They’re to sell,’ she snapped, ‘and besides, we’ve got electricity, for heaven’s sake.’

Robin emerged from ‘the wine cellar’, which was actually another pig-pen, carrying several bottles of home-made wine – rose-hip, elderberry and a rather lethal-looking parsnip.

‘I’ll just uncork the reds,’ he said, ‘so that they can breathe for a moment.’ I had a sudden rather unnerving glimpse of the polite schoolboy lurking within the hairy chrysalis – of Robin helping out at parental cocktail parties, handing round salted nuts and topping up the tonic in large, middle-class gins.

‘Yeah,’ Robin admitted, shamefaced, ‘Surrey. Dad owns a firm of estate agents.’

‘Lucky you.’

Andrea and Shug had reappeared by now, their pupils dilated from either drugs or a bout of sexual activity or – more likely – both. Bob also turned up, although where he had been was less clear – another transporter malfunction, I suppose.

‘I am not a number,’ he whispered defiantly to me, casting about warily for a giant bubble that had apparently been chasing him.

Several people I’d never seen before made an appearance for the meal, all of them Balniddrians, presumably.

‘Balniddrians,’ Kevin said, writing the word down in a tiny little notebook. ‘Good name.’

The meal was a strange primeval slop of semi-identifiable ingredients – brown rice, potatoes, carrots, something that might or might not have been a vegetable, all of it vaguely goat-smelling even though not a morsel of goat was in it, according to a vow on his mother’s life that Terri made Gilbert swear on his knees.

‘What did you do with that pan of wax that was on the stove?’ Jill asked Gilbert, who pretended not to hear.

Proteus was ‘asleep somewhere’ according to a rather vague Kara but Jill’s unpronounceable child was up long past her bedtime and had to be force-fed her rice-carrot-wax sludge before falling asleep with her head on the table, by which time she had acquired an almost feverish complexion.

‘You should try Heinz toddler jars,’ Bob said earnestly to Jill, who said, equally earnestly, ‘Never.’

‘Babies should eat what we eat,’ Kara said.

‘I think we should eat what babies eat,’ Bob said.

‘I think we should just eat babies,’ Terri murmured, a remark which, luckily for her, went unheard.

Before long Bob found himself unwittingly taking part in the ‘what age should you stop breastfeeding’ argument, even at one point arguing vehemently against feeding on demand because it would lead to a generation of layabouts and slackers.

‘Watch it, Bob,’ Shug said, laying a reasonable hand on his arm, ‘you’re turning into a Klingon.’ Perhaps there was another Bob inside Bob – a conventional person who would grow up to be a teacher and vote Liberal and worry about his pension. A Bob who would one day rip off the rubbery facemask of the false Bob and take his place in the world of alarm clocks, Burton suits and lunchtime bank queues.

‘Is there a pudding?’ Kevin asked, trying to ignore the whole unpalatable topic of conversation of infant nutrition.

‘Absolutely,’ Gilbert said. ‘In fact here’s one I made earlier, ha, ha.’ He produced a plate of brownies which turned out to be surprisingly good.

‘They’re lovely,’ I said to him.

‘Oh, thank you,’ he said, clasping my hand. ‘It’s so nice of you to say that.’

Miranda reappeared, more lethargic than ever but not so comatose that she couldn’t eat Andrea’s share of brownies.

‘Well?’ Kara said to her, and she made a face and took a long thin box out of her pocket and opened it to reveal a shiny surgical-steel scalpel.

‘Whoa – phasers on stun, Mr Spock,’ Bob said in alarm.

‘I don’t think Captain Kirk would say “Whoa”!’ Shug said.

‘It’s not logical, Captain,’ Bob agreed. (Bob, you will have noticed, tended to cast himself in his mind as the entire crew of the
Enterprise
rather than any one particular member.)

‘University?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And?’ I asked him patiently.

‘And . . . she said she was going to come round tonight. To see you.’

‘And you’ve just thought to tell me now?’

‘There’s a bus,’ Robin said indifferently. ‘The road’s just over the hill.’

No-one, it seemed, was coming with me. Robin had begun a game of Go with Kevin – possibly the most boring board game ever devised – and Terri was intent on staying to save the condemned goat by kidnapping it (naturally) although I couldn’t imagine what she planned to do with a billy-goat in her fourth-floor Cleghorn Street flat. Andrea uncharacteristically offered to show me the way to the bus-stop but only, as I discovered to my cost, so she could talk endlessly about Shug.

Our route, apparently, took us past the standing stones which were ‘Over there somewhere,’ Andrea said, pointing vaguely into the darkness and tramping off before I could question her orienteering skills.

We tripped over brambles, fell into burns, slid on the thickly frosted grass and bumped into badly parked cows before finally encountering a steep hill that we had to haul each other up like funicular trains until we were sweating and freezing at the same time, all the time the air full of Andrea’s Shug catechism –
Do you think he likes me? Do you think he really likes me? Do you think he loves me? Do you think he really loves me?
And so on.

By the time we reached the seven sisters, Balniddrie was no more than a couple of pinpricks of light in the distance. For a moment, I thought I heard a strange pagan chant of ‘Kill the goat! Kill the goat!’ followed by a scream but Andrea said I’d imagined it and I hoped she was right.

Careless of any bad-tempered wizardry that might be lurking, Andrea began dancing around the stones in an abandoned one-woman eightsome reel. ‘Sky magic,’ she said breathlessly.

The standing stones, although only four of them were still actually standing, were about the same height as Andrea, roughly hewn and pointed like the teeth of a gigantic cat. Andrea flung her arms around an upright one in a dramatic fashion and, hugging it, said, ‘Feel the earth magic.’ I gave the nearest stone a tentative embrace but experienced no thaumaturgy – the stone felt like a stone, clammy and napped with lichen. What was I doing cavorting with boulders in the middle of nowhere? I should have a pair of warm arms embracing me instead of the cold clasp of a megalith.

‘Are you sure this is the way to the bus-stop?’ I asked her, but before she could answer I noticed something astonishing. I was developing astronomical skin! The back of my hand was like a
réseau
, a perfect grid of lace waiting to be mapped by stars. Andrea was searching on the ground for agates and still wittering on about the mystical properties of rocks, but I was hypnotized by my hand – even as I watched it the skin was expanding and magnifying into a huge stretch of parchment. My pores were like tiny, distant stars and the lines on the surface of the skin were the ghostly paths of the heavenly bodies. My cosmic self was about to have a glimpse of immanence.

‘Wow,’ I whispered (I couldn’t help myself). ‘This is amazing, Andrea.’

‘You ate the brownies, didn’t you?’ she said, rather wearily.

I don’t know how much time passed while I was contemplating my celestial body but when I tore myself away there was no sign of Andrea. I called her name, but received no answer, only an echo ringing in the gelid air. I looked behind the stones, I looked
at
the stones – perhaps they really were accursed maidens. They gave no indication, however, of harbouring lapidified girls. I touched one cautiously but did not go so far as to whisper ‘Andrea?’ in its mossy ear.

The power must have gone off because there were no comforting lights from the farms and cottages spread around the hillside, no visible topography of any kind. It was so quiet I could have heard a mouse rustling through the stiff grass, or an owl’s wing swooping, but no mouse rustled and no owl swooped.

Then the silence rumbled into unwelcome life with the sound of heavy breathing – a slack snorting that belonged to something teratoid and beastly. From behind the crest of the hill steam clouds of ogreish breath bellowed into the cold air and a phosphorescence rose like a nightmarish sunrise, fringing the stone sisters with an unearthly arc light. I didn’t wait to find out the source of this strange incandescence but took off, stumbling down the hill as fast as I could.

The stertorous breathing, like a labouring steam engine, was following me, but I didn’t look behind. It was accompanied now by a dreadful reek of foul-smelling stinkhorn and hard-boiled egg sandwiches. I tripped over a root and fell into something cold and plashy which I hoped was nothing worse than a burn, although I could feel oozing icy mud. For a second I thought I caught a glimpse of something gleaming in the dark – a flash of silver and bronze, something fishy and scaly and then in an instant it had gone and everything was quiet.

‘No, it’s fiction.’

A light appeared in the distance, less alien and monstrous than before but nonetheless bobbing across the darkened landscape like a will-o’-the-wisp. As the light got closer it started to resolve itself into not, as I’d hoped, a bus, but a car. The car slowed to a halt beside the bus-stop and the driver leant over and opened the passenger door.

‘You’ve missed the bus,’ a familiar voice said. ‘Get in.’

I got into the car and slammed the door. ‘You
are
following me, aren’t you?’

‘In your dreams,’ Chick said.

Until very recently, time had been a slow slurry of nothingness for me; now the days were suddenly packed to overflowing, a turn of events that I found surprisingly unwelcome.

‘A dragon?’ Chick queried mildly, as if I’d said something as unremarkable as ‘a door’ or ‘a Dandie Dinmont’.

Chick took a half-bottle of Bell’s from his pocket, took a large swig and then handed it to me. The whisky tasted sour and made me gag, but I kept it down.

‘Good girl,’ he said. We were silent for a long while and then Chick said reflectively, ‘I was a good policeman, you know.’

‘I believe you. Did you work on any famous cases?’ I asked him, thinking about
The Hand of Fate
, wondering if Chick could be some help with police procedure, modes of detection, and so on.

He gave me a sideways look and after a while said, ‘I worked on the Glenkittrie case. Ever hear of that?’

‘No.’

‘Famous in its day,’ he said, draining the dregs of the whisky.

‘Tell me about it.’

‘Some other time,’ he said and peered into the empty bottle as if he was trying to conjure up more whisky.

~ You’ve got a party to go to, she reminds me, very like someone who is trying to change the subject.