Emotionally Weird (36 page)

Donald had another stroke and became bedridden. Whenever I came home from school it was to the smell of the sick-room. The house was full of nurses coming and going, mainly going – Donald was a terrible patient, most of his nurses only stayed a few weeks; one only lasted a night after Donald threw a full urinal at her head.

Then Mabel Orchard came.

‘And?’

~ And everything.

There was something melancholic about an empty dressing-room, Madame Astarti thought, even threatening in a funny way. It reminded her of
Stage Fright
or clowns. Madame Astarti had always found clowns frightening. They were so . . . unfunny.

There was no sign of a packet of cigarettes anywhere, but there were clothes hanging on a rail and a coat on a hanger on the back of a door and Madame Astarti went through the pockets of all of them, gingerly, because you never knew what you would find in a strange pocket, but she found nothing. She tried the cupboard. The door handle was stiff and she had to pull hard on it. She nearly fell over backwards when it suddenly responded—

b) University teachers don’t have a special case.

c) The miners work harder than the university teachers.

d) The miners will get a bigger rise than the university teachers.

e) No group will get a bigger rise than the miners.

f) If one group works harder than another group, it will get a bigger rise.

g) A group will get a bigger rise than another group only if it has a special case and the other group doesn’t.

And that,’ Bob said in an exasperated voice, ‘isn’t even the difficult bit – right?’

‘“
M
”,’ Bob continued ‘is “the miners”, “u” is “the university teachers”, “sx” is “x has a special case”, “hxy” is “x works harder than y”, “bxy” is “x will get a bigger rise than y”, Universe of Discourse is groups of workers. Show by constructing a formal derivation that (c), (f) and (g) together imply (b). You don’t know how to do this stuff by any chance, do you?’ he asked this anonymous female hopefully. ‘My girlfriend thinks I have no brain.’

‘And is she right?’

‘Ha, ha,’ Bob said. ‘You’re quite witty, aren’t you?’

The door to the bedroom was ajar and I gave it a nudge so that it opened just wide enough for me to catch a glimpse of Bob lazing naked amongst a tumble of empurpled sheets.

‘Brain and brain, what is brain?’ Bob said in a ridiculous voice. I nudged the door a little further until I could see the
Finnegans Wake
girl lying with the sheet pulled decorously up over her torso but nonetheless presumably naked also.

‘What are you
talking
about?’ she said in an exasperated tone.

I pushed the door wide open.

‘Arse,’ Bob said eloquently when he saw me. The
Finnegans Wake
girl screamed realistically.

‘It’s
Star Trek
,’ I said helpfully to her, ‘an episode called “Spock’s Brain”, from the third series.’ I shut the bedroom door. I couldn’t think of anything else to do.

I was about to leave when the phone rang. I picked it up and listened in silence to the voice at the other end. Finally, I said, ‘Right, I’ll tell him then.’

‘The power’s off?’ he guessed. ‘We’re out of tea? You’re leaving me?’ he added rather dejectedly.

I sighed. ‘No, none of those things. Your father’s dead.’

Poor Bob Senior, a man I hardly knew really apart from the odd conversation over the tea-table about the state of the garden or the politics of state. Nonetheless, it was I who had the tears running down my face, while Bob stared helplessly at the
Finnegans Wake
girl, already pulling her clothes on and heading for the door.

What a particularly bad twenty-four hours it had been.

Frank finally managed to yank open the shutters of his stall just as the little aircraft plunged into the sea with a kind of plopping noise. A few minutes later a woman struggled out of the water and waded ashore. Not often you saw that, Madame Astarti thought.

Frank was indifferent to the woman walking out of the water, instead he was screaming at what he had found inside his stall. Where his plaice and haddock and tubs of whelks were usually displayed was an altogether more sinister cold water fish – the body of a dead woman lay on the slab, with a lemon stuck in her mouth and a few sprigs of parsley for garnish.

Mabel was very religious; she claimed she’d had visions as a child, something which hadn’t gone down very well with the strict and obscure Christian sect that her parents were members of, who branded her a fanciful and heretical child, one teetering dangerously on the brink of papism and idolatry. Now Mabel no longer bothered with the edifices and ritual of the Church but claimed, like Joan of Arc before her, that God spoke to her in person all the time, although sometimes he sent his Son to have a word and very occasionally she was blessed with a
tête-à-tête
with the Holy Ghost Himself. Like Joan of Arc, she was also engaged in a one-woman battle with the enemy, but in the case of Mabel it was the forces of Satan rather than the English (which is not the same thing, despite what some may say).

Mabel was herself English, born in Bristol to a family that, despite its earthbound name, had been seafaring for centuries, manning men-o’-wars, submersing in submarines and ferrying cargoes of slaves across the great wide ocean. The last male in the Orchard line – Mabel’s brother – had been torpedoed on the China Seas and there was a general sense of disappointment in the family that the nautical genes were going to die out with Mabel, who had decided to remain as chaste as a nun.

Although she had spent her whole childhood wishing for children of her own, Mabel had forsaken personal happiness and all thought of marriage and married love after her fiancé – Dudley – was shot through the heart at Tobruk, this in spite of the little Bible Mabel had given him as a parting gift and which had nestled snugly in the pocket of his uniform waiting to catch bullets and save his life – in the manner of a story she had read in a magazine. After it fatally failed to fulfil this function, Mabel was uncertain as to whether she should stop believing in God or in fiction. She chose the latter and never opened a magazine – or even a newspaper – from that day forward. After Dudley died Mabel trained as a nurse. If he had lived she had planned to fill her arms with so many babies that when they grew up there would be enough Orchards to crew the entire British naval fleet if necessary.

Mabel wore a plain gold crucifix around her neck, given to her by Dudley on his last leave, and the chain was so thin that it was beginning to disappear into the folds and rolls of flesh around her chin. For Mabel was fat. There was no politer word for it. Her personal God put no restrictions on appetite or intake, indeed, Mabel had a feeling that he actively encouraged her to eat. And her body, she reasoned, was made by Him, so what better way to praise His works than to develop more of it. It was God, after all, who had put all this bounty on earth – even lardy cakes and black bun – who was she to shun it? Lachlan, when he first met her, called her ‘the cow’ and she did possess a strange passing resemblance to a Jersey in the colour of her hair, the length of her lashes, the flesh on her ample fallow flank. Yet she was stately, almost majestic, in her bulk – more like a great tribal queen than a milch-cow and when she ate – which was often – she was as delicate as a cat.

‘Well-upholstered,’ mumbled Donald – who still had the power of speech, if little else, and had taken an uncharacteristic ‘shine’ to his new caretaker. Mabel was so relentlessly nice to him with her ‘God bless you’s and ‘Jesus loves you’s that he began to believe this propaganda and the idea that God might still love him, despite his flaws, wrought a strange change in his character and made him almost bearable. And, although now in his seventies, Donald was still capable of appreciating a female bosom and took considerable, albeit heathen, pleasure in trying to catch sight of Mabel’s butterfat breasts through her cheap blouses, as she bent over him to attend to some intimate bodily function or other of his.

Unfortunately for Donald, he was now paralysed down his left side and could not really put his thoughts into action.