Emotionally Weird (41 page)

‘Of course, the interesting thing,’ he says when we have all digested his strangely cooked story, ‘is that the day the “mystery woman” dived off the bridge was the day
before
you fell in the dock.’

~ Oh, no ghost stories, Nora says with a shiver, I really can’t abide them.

~ Yes, Chick, Nora says, and to do that you must tell us
your
story.

‘How?’ Chick asks, looking suddenly worried. ‘I’ve told mine, remember –
I found the bodies. The old guy was dead
– and so on.’

~ I know everything, Chick, Nora says softly, and I mean everything.

Chick sighs, like a man who knows he’s up a blind alley with his back against the wall and a knife at his throat.

‘Well. I’m not used to this kind of thing,’ he says, staring at his feet.

‘Begin at the beginning,’ I tell him, remembering Mrs Macbeth’s dictum (which she may well have stolen off someone), ‘and carry on until you’ve finished.’

‘Hm.’

~ Start with the weather, I always like to do that.

‘It was
weird
weather,’ Chick says. ‘Warm but rainy, like a monsoon or something. Thunderstorms. And animals appearing that didn’t belong. A puma was found wandering the hills in the glen. I had to get a bloody zoo keeper up from Edinburgh.’

~ Oh, I’d forgotten that, Nora says. The hunters were all stalking it, they said there was no closed season on cats.

‘And fish,’ Chick said, ‘there was an angler claimed to have caught an angelfish. Another one said he netted a mermaid. People were aff their heid with the weather. And those bloody wasps, they were everywhere, in people’s hair, in their beds, in their baffies, their biscuit tins. Mind that woman over at Kembie,’ he says, turning to Nora, ‘got stung when she was hanging out her washing and dropped down deid. And it was jam-making time so the women were aff their heid, the wasps were aff their heid. Everyone was aff their heid.

‘Raspberry,’ he says, suddenly, unexpectedly wistful, ‘raspberry was the sweetest.’

Who would have thought Chick a jam-connoisseur?

‘She made such a lot of it,’ he continues, ‘forever stirring that jeely-pan. I dropped in one morning to warn her about a Geordie gang that were raiding over the border – stealing stuff out of folk’s houses. No-one kept their doors locked thereabouts.

‘It was like a Turkish bath in that kitchen. She gave me a bit of mutton pie and some green beans, leftover rice pudding, a cup of tea.’

(The way to Chick’s heart is clearly the traditional route.)

‘It just went on from there.’ Chick shrugs. ‘She was lonely, I was lonely. She’d never had a man, never had her furrow ploughed –’

~ Charming.

‘She was married to that dried-up old crippled stick. She was such a nice woman, she started off telling me that God loved me, but I think she’d changed her mind by the end. We’d knocked over a few jam pots in the heat of things. The stuff was everywhere. Wasps were throwing themselves against the window –’

Realization has been dawning slowly, very slowly, on me.

‘Oh my God,’ I say to Chick. ‘
You’re
my father?’

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.

~ 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 heid, 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.’

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 Dundeecentric 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.

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 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 meaning 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.’