Emotionally Weird (8 page)

‘A certain amount of fear and loathing, a little paranoia, acres of boredom, the Lady Agaruitha in a tower. A lot of new characters that you’ll just have to catch up with as best as you can.’

~ No dragons?

‘Not yet.’

~ The sea’s in your blood, Nora says, the call of the sea.

Did the Stuart-Murrays – luckless landlubbers who farmed the rolled and folded landscape of Perthshire – have the salty, seagoing blood of sailors?

~ Quite the opposite, says Nora.

For it seems that the Stuart-Murrays, whilst mysteriously drawn to the water – witness our ancestral holiday home, or Nora’s peregrinations – are nonetheless incapable of keeping afloat on it. There was a Stuart-Murray sank at Trafalgar, according to Nora, and one aboard the
Mary Rose
, one outward bound on the
Titanic
, one homeward bound on the
Lusitania
, and one long forgotten Stuart-Murray who is said to have lost the king’s treasure in the Forth, although which king and which treasure seems unclear.

I am surprised that Nora ever ventures out in her little
Sea-Adventure
. But it seems the Stuart-Murrays do not even have to be in boats to be drowned at sea, one of Nora’s uncles was believed lost in the great and horrible Tay Bridge disaster, sneaking onto the train at Wormit, the last stop before the bridge, in a fit of youthful high spirits and alcohol. Ticketless, he remained unaccounted for in the lists of the dead.

~ Not your blood in particular, she says, it’s in everyone’s blood, where else does the salt come from?

Nora is watching the sea, through a huge pair of First World War binoculars that she is toting. She says they once belonged to her eldest brother. A brother? She has never mentioned a brother.

~ Oh yes, Nora says nonchalantly, she had a lot of brothers and sisters.

‘Imaginary ones perhaps?’

~ Real, she says, and counts on her fingers, Douglas, Torquil, Murdo, Honoria, Elspeth . . . and those are just the ones who died before she was born. What an unlucky family the Stuart-Murrays seem to be.

~ Oh, that’s nothing, Nora says glumly, not compared with what happened later.

~ From experience, she says darkly.

We drifted on, in and out with the tide, like flotsam, spending our time departing and arriving (or arriving and departing, depending on how you look at it). I grew up a connoisseur of pavilions and winter gardens and miniature golf courses. I may have been mystified by the conjugation of foreign verbs and the complex lives of fractions but I always knew my tide-tables. Nora’s talents (piano, French, Scottish country dancing) qualified her for nothing useful, but she never had trouble finding work in some Sailor’s Rest pub or Crow’s Nest café.

Nora usually lived in wherever she was working so that ‘home’ was some cold hotel attic or a ramshackle room over a public bar where the two of us slept in rooms where the smell of mass catering and stale beer seeped up through the floorboards to join the aroma of wet hand-washed laundry drying dangerously on an Ascot water heater. We lived off other people’s leftovers – salted nuts and olives and maraschino cherries from gin palaces and lounge bars, or restaurant scrapings – wedding trifle from the bottom of catering bowls and stale canapés from dinner-dances. And endless fish and chips, eaten in vinegary haste straight from the newspaper before Nora rushed to work.

No wonder, therefore, that wherever we went I sought out friends with families of a larger and more conventional composition – girls who lived in ordinary houses (thirties semi-detached, good-sized garden), had a stay-at-home, homespun mother, a known father (an accountant, a grocer), at least one sibling, a grandmother, a dog, an aunt or two. Families who spent their lives boiling kettles, flushing toilets, answering phones (ad infinitum, ad nauseam).

Always, just when I had established myself as a cheerful, eager-to-please fixture in the homes of these families, Nora would uproot us again and we would be on a bus to the next small seaside town that looked very like the one we had just left. You would almost have thought that we were on the run from something. And we were, of course.

At that moment a dog appeared from nowhere (as they do) on the pavement opposite. Catching our eye, it assumed a sociable expression and lolloped towards us as if it was crossing a field rather than a road. At that same moment, a 1963 Ford Cortina hurtled into view (in as much as a 1963 Cortina can hurtle), heading inexorably towards the same spot on the road as the dog. Seeing this, Terri darted into the road to save the dog from the Cortina.

Narrative destiny (a powerful force) took charge at that point. The car-dog-girl scenario – lolloping dog, hurtling car, foolish girl – could only end in tears and although the Cortina swerved at the last minute and avoided Terri, it couldn’t help but find the dog. I closed my eyes—

‘I haven’t got time for this,’ he said, ‘bloody dog, why didn’t it look where it was going? I’m late,’ he added in a very agitated voice, ‘very late.’

The dog, meanwhile, wasn’t agitated at all, indeed so still and lifeless that it could have been demonstrating the taxidermist’s art to the crowd that had begun to gather. Terri started to give the dog the kiss of life, breathing into its big Alsatian-derived muzzle with unusual determination.

‘Oh dear,’ a rather feeble voice said behind me, ‘is there anything I can do to help?’ The voice turned out to belong to Professor Cousins, waving a large duck-handled umbrella about, like a man in danger of becoming a caricature of himself.

With much creaking and straining he bent down next to the dog and tried to encourage its recovery by scratching the coarse hair on its sugar-pink belly while the onlookers susurrated in the background, earnestly discussing the best method of resuscitating a dead dog – recommendations varying from ‘gie it a sweetie’ to ‘gie it a skelping’.

However, having Terri’s vampire breath in its lungs seemed to be doing wonders for the yellow dog. It began to come slowly back to life, starting at the far end with its big tail – like a giant rat’s – which started to thump heavily on the tarmac. Next it stretched its back legs, flexing the abnormally long toes that ended in big lizard-like nails. Finally, with a little sigh, it opened its eyes, lifted its head and looked around. It seemed agreeably surprised by the number of interested bystanders it had attracted and whacked its tail more vigorously so that its audience broke into a spontaneous round of applause at this Lazarus-like recovery. The dog got to its feet unsteadily, like a newborn wildebeest. I wondered if it might take a bow, but it didn’t.

Terri regarded this recovery with a certain suspicion. ‘He’s probably in shock,’ she said, her little white face pinched with worry. ‘We still need to get him to a vet.’

‘You’re joking,’ the Cortina driver said. ‘I had to be somewhere else half an hour ago.’ Terri began to hiss like a malevolent kettle, showing her little pointy teeth. Looking more surprised than shocked, the dog waited expectantly for its fate to be decided between the two warring parties. It was the Cortina driver who eventually backed down. ‘Oh all right then,’ he relented, ‘but quickly then, I’m very late,’ and started ushering us all urgently into the car.

The car – which didn’t look as if it had ever seen better days – was a rusted white, more rust than white. I got in the back, followed by Terri and the dog which scrambled in awkwardly and insisted on sitting between us. Professor Cousins climbed gingerly into the front, behaving as if motor cars were a new and untested invention.

‘A jaunt. This is fun,’ he remarked and held out his hand towards the driver. ‘Professor Cousins,’ he said, ‘lovely to meet you. And you are?’

The Cortina driver answered reluctantly, as if the information might be used against him at a later date, ‘Chick. Chick Petrie.’

‘Call me Gabriel,’ Professor Cousins said, smiling and nodding his head.

‘But that’s not your name, is it?’ I asked, puzzled by this sudden alteration of Professor Cousins’ usual Christian names of Edward and Neville, but he just smiled cheerfully and said, ‘Why not?’ and Chick said, ‘What’s in a name and all that, eh, Prof?’

Professor Cousins beamed. ‘Exactly! A man after my own heart, Chick.’

‘A professor, eh?’ Chick said. ‘Me, of course, I was educated in the School of Hard Knocks and the University of Life.’

‘And I’m sure it was a very broad and interesting education, Chick,’ Professor Cousins said.

‘It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there,’ Chick observed darkly. Terri clapped her hands over the dog’s ears. Chick started the engine and a strange smell immediately began to fill the car, the smell of something sweet but dead – rotting strawberries and decaying rat. Before anyone could comment on this assault to our olfactory sensibilities, Chick drove off the pavement with a jolt and into the traffic with a jerk, without looking to see if anything was coming, resulting in a cacophony of hooting horns following us down the Nethergate.

Professor Cousins gestured vaguely behind us saying something about there being a vet at the top of South Tay Street, but before the words had left his lips we had passed the turning and were accelerating round the Angus roundabout as if we were on the Dodgems. Within seconds we were roaring along the approach to the road bridge. Terri shouted at Chick that he was going the wrong way and he shouted back, ‘Wrong way for you maybe, but the right way for me.’ He didn’t even stop at the toll-booth, merely slowing down in what appeared to be a practised manoeuvre and thrusting the toll money into the hand of the collector as he passed, before speeding onto the long, straight stretch of the bridge. I supposed we were in the hands of a madman. Terri leant forward and prodded Chick sharply in the back of the neck. ‘What about the vet?’

‘There’s nothing wrong with the mutt,’ Chick grumbled, glancing at the dog in his rear-view mirror. It was true, the dog did now look the picture of health, sitting up on the seat and as alert as any back-seat driver. But the smell in the car had grown much worse – a foul stench getting fouler the further we drove. ‘What is that?’ Professor Cousins asked.

‘What’s what?’ Chick asked.

‘That smell.’

Chick inhaled as if he was taking the sea-air. ‘Vindaloo,’ he said. He thought for a few seconds before adding ‘and cat.’

‘Cat?’ I queried in alarm.

‘Don’t panic,’ Chick said, ‘it’s dead.’

‘None of us want to go with you,’ Terri said sullenly to Chick.

‘Kidnapped?’ Professor Cousins said, growing quite merry. ‘How exciting. Won’t we have a tale to tell.’

Terri, clutching a handful of dirty yellow fur in one hand, was beginning to look a little green around the gills. ‘It’s a crime, you know,’ she persisted, ‘taking people against their will. You can go to jail.’

Chick snorted dismissively and said, with a certain personal bitterness, that the people who had committed the really serious crimes (murder, mayhem, et cetera) were not to be found behind prison walls but were roaming free in Brazil, or Argentina, ‘or even Fife’.

‘Yeah, well, I don’t care,’ Terri said, ‘I want out.’

‘Suit yourself,’ Chick shrugged, ‘on you go,’ and he reached over behind to open the rear door, temporarily losing control of the car as he did so.

‘Fucking creep,’ Terri snarled at him and bit his arm. (Which is definitely how accidents happen.)

Chick seemed unperturbed, he had the air of a man who was used to being physically and verbally abused on a regular basis. He simply accelerated even more, patting the dashboard affectionately. ‘The good old Mark 1,’ he said, ‘standard model, 1200ccs of effort, top speed seventy-six miles an hour.’

We reached the other end of the road bridge. ‘The Kingdom of Fife,’ Professor Cousins announced, as if we were entering a fairy-tale country.

‘Heuchter-teuchter land,’ Chick sneered.

‘St Andrews,’ Professor Cousins carried on dreamily, ‘my old alma mater.’

‘I thought you said that was Cambridge,’ I puzzled. It was only a couple of hours ago that he had been deliriously describing May Balls and punting and porters and all those other remote activities of academia that were unknown in Dundee.

‘Did I?’ he said.

‘We’re not going to St Andrews,’ Chick said hastily. ‘I’m not a taxi. And I’m bloody late.’

‘Late for what?’ I asked.

‘Surveillance,’ he said, enunciating the word with a certain distaste.

‘Surveillance?’ I queried.

‘Watching people.’

‘I know what it means,’ I said. ‘I just can’t imagine you doing it.’

He took a card from an inside pocket and handed it to me. Grubby and badly printed, it read ‘
Premier Investigations
– all work undertaken, no questions asked’. Chick, it turned out, was (of all unlikely things) a private detective.

‘A private eye,’ Professor Cousins said thoughtfully.

Chick ignored him and looked at his watch agitatedly. ‘I’m going to bloody miss her.’

‘Who exactly are you watching?’ Professor Cousins asked.

‘Some woman,’ Chick said, ‘jealous spouse, usual thing.’ He lit a cigarette (terrifying to observe at speed). ‘Husband’s a nutter, of course,’ he said; ‘they always are.’

‘You don’t have any qualms then,’ Professor Cousins asked Chick, ‘about doing this sort of work, I mean, ethical qualms.’

‘Qualms?’ Chick echoed. ‘Qualms? How?’

Professor Cousins laughed. ‘The more you say it the more ridiculous it sounds. It’s often the way with words, isn’t it? Qualms comes from the Old English, Chick – murder, torment, death.’

‘Fascinating, Gabriel,’ Chick said in such a neutral tone that I couldn’t tell whether he meant it or not.

I leant forward to speak to him and got a whiff of his middle-aged aroma – Old Spice, sweat and stale eighty-shilling ale. Professor Cousins, I couldn’t help but notice, smelt vaguely of attar of roses.

‘Are you following
me
?’ I asked Chick.

He raised a pair of amazed eyebrows so that his forehead made a rubbery concertina and said dismissively, ‘Why on earth would I be following
you
?’

‘The poor girl thinks someone’s following her,’ Professor Cousins said helpfully.

Chick cast a speculative glance at me in his rear-view mirror and said, ‘Do you?’

‘I’m just imagining it,’ I said because I really didn’t want to think otherwise.

‘Poor Christopher – Dr Pike – thought he was being followed,’ Professor Cousins sighed, ‘and look what happened to him.’

‘What happened to him?’ Chick asked after a while when Professor Cousins didn’t elaborate.

‘He had an accident, like our friend here,’ Professor Cousins said, indicating the dog in the back seat who cocked an ear to show he knew he was being talked about.

‘And you don’t think it was an accident?’ Chick said; and Professor Cousins laughed and said, ‘Oh, I’m sure it
was
, the members of my department are notoriously accident-prone. At any one time half of them are in hospital. There won’t be anyone left in the actual university soon.’

‘Professor Cousins thinks someone is trying to kill him,’ I told Chick.

‘You make a great pair,’ Chick said sarcastically, ‘the man who thinks someone’s trying to kill him and the girl who thinks someone’s watching her. And as for Little Miss Sunshine back there . . . You know what they say, don’t you?’ he said to Professor Cousins.

‘No, what do they say, Chick?’

‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’