‘The forces of darkness,’ he said conspiratorially.
‘The . . .?’
‘Forces of darkness,’ he repeated. ‘They’re all around us and they’re trying to destroy us. We should get out of here,’ he added, ‘before they spot us.’
‘Ah, yes, but that doesn’t mean that someone’s not out to get them.’
~ You’ll never make a crime writer.
‘This isn’t a crime story. This is a comic novel.’
A distraught Kevin appeared as if out of nowhere, along with all three of Olivia’s flatmates. ‘An overdose,’ one of them whispered to me.
‘I found her,’ Kevin said when he saw me. He was sweating uncomfortably and a wheeze like that of Mrs Macbeth’s old dog was coming from his chest. ‘I came to ask her if I could borrow her George Eliot essay,’ he said.
‘She did Charlotte Brontë,’ I said flatly.
‘She had an abortion yesterday,’ one of her flatmates said to me as we watched Olivia being loaded into the back of the ambulance. ‘It’s a shame, she loved babies.’
‘Loved?’ It was only then that I realized that Olivia wasn’t unconscious – Olivia was dead.
‘People are already dead.’
~ Who?
‘Miss Anderson, poor Senga.’ (Not to mention most of Nora’s family, but I suppose it’s tactless to mention that.)
~ They don’t count, we didn’t know them. Don’t kill Olivia. I shall stop listening to you, I shall leave, I shall . . .
She searches for the biggest threat she can think of. And finds it –
~ I shall
erase
.
‘Oh, all
right
, calm down.’
After an agony of waiting the heavy door swung open and I dashed – as well as one can dash when hampered by a raging fever and a recalcitrant girl – up the stairs to her flat. One of Olivia’s flatmates was in the process of letting Kevin in. He was stammering on about George Eliot as I barged into him, sending him flying into the flat.
‘Olivia!’ I gasped to one of her flatmates.
‘She’s in her room, what’s the—’
Olivia’s door was locked. I told Kevin this was a matter of life and death, Olivia’s to be more precise, and he responded as heroically as Thar-Vint might have done by throwing his soft body repeatedly against the solid door until it gave in to his chivalrous bulk and opened with a splitting of wood.
Olivia was lying on her bed. An empty bottle of tablets and the remains of a glass of whisky were tumbled on the carpet. Her eyes were half open and she whispered to me, ‘Is Proteus OK?’ – which proved, if proof were necessary, what a charitable and altruistic person Olivia was. He was in good hands, I reported, and quite well – a sentence which contained one truth and one lie, which is a good balance in my opinion.
I pushed Miranda forward and said sternly, ‘Right – do something.’
‘Like ring for an ambulance?’ she said vaguely.
‘I’ve done that,’ Kevin said, dropping to his knees by Olivia’s bedside. Olivia’s lovely lip started to tremble and she began to weep – because beautiful girls weep where ordinary ones merely cry and grow blotchy (although Terri had a tendency to howl) – and I put my arms around her and stroked her hair and then burst into tears myself (because that was more the kind of girl I was).
‘For God’s sake,’ Miranda said crankily, ‘get some black coffee and start walking her round the room.’
‘Please do,’ I said faintly. My throat was swollen and my skin felt as hot and dry as desert sand, even though I had cold gooseflesh. I walked off quickly although I was having terrible difficulty co-ordinating my arms and legs. My legs felt weightless, as if I was on the moon, and I was worried that they might just float away. Other parts of me – my hands and my head most noticeably – felt as if they were being subjected to tremendous G-forces. Perhaps I should have consulted Miranda after all and explained to her that I was in the grip of the fading, falling disease.
I walked through town, not going anywhere in particular as long as it wasn’t home. I walked down Seagate, thought about going to the cinema but didn’t. The sickly smell of whisky drifted from a bonded warehouse and made me feel sick to my stomach. I carried on, down Candle Lane to Marketgait, across Marketgait to the Victoria Dock, where the ancient frigate
Unicorn
had found her final berth. Further off, a huge Scandinavian freighter was unloading wood and the smell of pine was carried through the foggy air. The water in the dock was brown and filmy and did not smell good, but I threw in a silver coin and wished for happiness and stepped back from the edge because the pull of water is a powerful thing and I expect many people have accidentally drowned on account of it.
Someone was standing next to me, a shadow on my vision, and laid a claw of a hand on my arm. I recoiled from the touch. It was the water-baby. The bad girl. The woman who is not the sister of the woman who is not my mother. (Not surprisingly) I didn’t have a full understanding of these tangled family ties and I asked her, rather tentatively in case the answer was in the affirmative, ‘
You
’re not my mother, are you?’
She made a face as if the idea was distasteful, though I think it was probably caused by some kind of alcoholic palsy. Her bony hand was still gripping my arm. When she spoke it was a sibilant, ‘Listen.’
‘Eleanora,’ she said and sucked through her teeth as if she was smoking a joint, ‘or Nora, as she calls herself, is a murderer.’
‘Murderess,’ I corrected her weakly.
‘She killed my father, she poisoned her stepmother, she tried to drown me, and very nearly succeeded I might tell you. It was sheer chance I didn’t die.’
‘Killed her father?’ I echoed vaguely.
‘Not
her
father,’ Effie said, her harsh accent making her sound impatient, ‘
my
father, not her father.
Her
father was a wonderful man. The world never appreciated Lachlan for what he was.’
I was very confused. Perhaps the fever was making me delirious. ‘Lachlan was Nora’s father? I don’t understand, I thought Donald was her father?’
‘Are you OK?’ a voice asked in my ear. The voice sounded tiny, as if it belonged to a gnat or someone far away, but it had Effie’s accent. I tried to say something but my tongue was too big in my mouth. My ears were filling up with fog. I felt my legs going from under me and held out my hands to ward off the ground when I fell – but there was no ground to fall onto, only space and air and then, finally, foul-smelling freezing-cold dock water.
I was plunged down to the bottom as if liquid lead ran in my veins, as if I was the bob on the end of a fathom-line, sent to measure the watery Murk. There was a taste of oil and sewage, there was darkness and there was bemusement too, for it seemed I had forgotten how to swim, despite having been carefully taught by Nora when I was small in a variety of municipal swimming baths up and down the coast.
But suddenly, without any effort on my part, I was shooting up to the surface, choking and coughing and fighting desperately to get a breath. I could see the
Unicorn
’s wooden hull looming out of the fog and caught a glimpse of Effie’s impassive features as she stood on the dock, but before I could shout to her for help I found myself being pulled back down to the bottom. The water was colder and darker this time and I was surprised when I popped back up to the surface again like a stopper out of a bottle of elderflower champagne. I had barely got a breath when the waters closed over my head a third time – which we all know must be the last.
The water no longer felt so cold, nor, strangely, so dark, and I was able to look around me a little and see that it was teeming with fish. They were not the kind of fish one might have expected to find in the sludgy waters of the Dundee docks – there were blue carp and shining golden orfs and the king of the fish, the great silver salmon. And then the most unexpected thing yet occurred – a mermaid pushed her way through a curtain of weedy fronds and swam into view. She had a huge fishscaled tail and her long hair trailed behind her like ribbons of seaweed. She lifted me in her strong arms and held me to her woman’s breast as we swam up through the water, through a trail of silver bubbles, up, up and up until we were finally once more in our natural element, which is to say, air, and I caught a glimpse of the mermaid’s face and it was Effie. The water-baby.
I was landed on the dock by invisible hands, but was not weighed and measured as a record catch. Instead I felt my chest being pummelled by one of the dockers who had been unloading the timber freighter, so that the first breath I took was scented with the pine of northern forests. When I finally opened my eyes, it was to the friendly face of the yellow dog. It thumped its tail on the pavement in recognition and grinned at me. Then I passed out.
I’ve never thought of Nora as having a scientific kind of mind, never think of her having any left-brain at all.
~ Yes, really, she says. I remember that it did nothing but rain that summer. That was nothing unusual, of course, but it was so warm as well and often the air had a heavy, tropical feel to it as if we were in the middle of some great climatic change. It was the strangest weather – purple, stormladen skies, air humming with static. I saw hornets for the first time, droning through the air as if they could hardly lift their own weight. And we were plagued all summer by wasps, one bike after another turning up, under the eaves, in the attics, in the lilacs overhanging the lawn. Mabel bought cyanide to poison them but apparently she’d bought the wrong kind – powder instead of gas – and we didn’t get rid of the wasps until the first frost of winter.
Then Effie came to stay, trying to avoid the sordid details of the divorce courts and the relentless pursuit of a
Daily Express
reporter intent on a photograph to reveal the face of the notorious co-respondent to the public. Apparently, the divorce courts had been shown photographs of every part of her anatomy
except
her face.
Effie was continually loathsome the whole time, hanging about the house, listless and bored, muttering vile things about Mabel – her size, the common food she cooked, her dubious morals. Mabel smiled at Effie and told her God loved her.
‘No he fucking doesn’t,’ she spat back. Effie was convinced Mabel was nothing more than a gold-digger and was terrified that she was going to lose whatever inheritance was left (which was very little and mostly composed of Evangeline’s diamonds, which Mabel had never worn), and although she hated sick-rooms she spent a lot of time sitting by Donald’s bed trying to find out details of his will.
She considered her father to be completely ‘ga-ga’ and had consulted her solicitor – Effie spent half her time with solicitors now – about getting the marriage declared null and void. I kept out of her way, she never had a good word for me. ‘Every time I look at you,’ she said, ‘I see myself getting older.’
Effie spent a lot of time on the telephone to Lachlan, who was still living in Edinburgh, trying to persuade him to visit, which he did eventually, in August. He brought his neurasthenic wife, the judge’s barren daughter—
‘Oh, give her a name, for heaven’s sake.’
~ Sure?
‘Yes.’
~ Pamela.
‘Thank you.’
~ His neurasthenic wife, Pamela, city born and bred and highly averse to the country. Pamela took to her bed almost immediately, complaining of headaches and humidity. Mabel spent her time ferrying iced tea and aspirin and arrowroot biscuits up the stairs and reassuring Pamela that despite all signs to the contrary, God loved her very much. An ungrateful Pamela complained that Mabel smelt of bacon fat, which wasn’t true – she smelt of Yardley’s freesia talcum powder and jam, for it was jam-making season and Mabel spent hours at a time stirring the boiling fruit and sugar in Woodhaven’s old copper jeely-pans that she had burnished up again with lemon juice and elbow grease. Jam-making was a dangerous activity because of the plague of wasps, so that before she began her task Mabel had to seal up the kitchen windows and warn no-one to trespass over the threshold of the kitchen.
She must have been making the jam for herself, for no more than two pots a year were consumed in that house. Effie was too bitter to have a sweet tooth and Donald certainly didn’t eat any jam, he was now living off sops and milk soup. He had recently begun to suffer dreadful pains in his stomach. The local doctor, who was surprised Donald was still alive anyway – a fact that was probably due to Mabel’s careful nursing – guessed at ulcers and prescribed Milk of Magnesia.
Lachlan and Effie spent all their time together, usually out of the house, driving or walking in the hills, sometimes swimming in the loch, in the rain, always plotting how to get rid of Mabel. Mabel herself was serenely indifferent to them, humming happily to herself as she went about her lowly tasks. She seemed like a woman keeping a secret to herself, and I was surprised that Effie – who had so many secrets of her own – didn’t try to prise it out of her.
The whole week that Effie and Lachlan were visiting, the short summer nights were rent by Donald’s roars of pain, nights already disturbed by the beastly moans of the cattle, newly deprived of their little calves, and the bleating of the sheep torn from their lambs.
‘So much for pastoral innocence.’
~ There’s no such thing as innocence, unless it is in the beating heart of a tiny bird—
—but then Nora is dive-bombed by an angry seagull, which serves her right for being so fanciful.
‘Go on.’ (How tiring all this encouragement is.)
~ No.