Emotionally Weird (9 page)

‘Far enough,’ Chick said enigmatically.

‘More or less,’ Chick said.

‘How do you know you haven’t missed her?’ Terri asked, reviving a little now that we were stationary.

‘I don’t,’ Chick said.

‘Aren’t you supposed to have flasks of hot soup?’ I said to him, ‘and crossword puzzles, and tapes of classical music?’

‘How about a camera?’ Professor Cousins asked him eagerly, then added, ‘Or binoculars? A notepad? What about a newspaper to hide behind?’

Chick wrestled a
Racing Post
out of his pocket and waved it in the air. ‘It’s not like that, Gabriel,’ he said; ‘you’ve seen too many films.’

‘On the contrary, Chick,’ Professor Cousins said, rather sadly, ‘I haven’t seen enough.’

‘Mind you,’ Chick said, after a few minutes’ contemplative silence, ‘you come across some rum things in this job, Gabriel. I expect I could write a novel about what I’ve seen.’

‘I’m sure you could,’ Professor Cousins said, with more encouragement than was strictly necessary.

‘They say everyone has a novel inside them, don’t they?’ Chick said, warming to the subject now.

‘Yeah, and maybe that’s where it should stay,’ Terri growled. Chick responded with something derogatory about students, something to the effect that he was paying his taxes so that we could lie around all day having sex and taking drugs.

‘Don’t think I’m not grateful,’ Terri snapped, and Chick snapped back, ‘Awa’ and bile yer heid.’ The car was too cramped for this kind of behaviour, something the dog understood if no-one else did. It suddenly gave a huge walrus sigh of boredom, turned round and round in an effort to dislodge myself and Terri from the back seat, then flopped down heavily and closed its eyes.

‘It didn’t just die, did it?’ Terri asked, giving the dog an anxious poke. It opened one eye and gave her a thoughtful look.

‘Keep still, will you?’ Chick said tetchily. ‘You’re drawing attention to us.’

‘Married, Chick?’ Professor Cousins asked conversationally after a while.

Chick scowled and said, ‘Who wants to know?’

‘Just asking.’

‘Man about town, that’s me,’ Chick said airily.

‘Oh, absolutely, aren’t we all,’ Professor Cousins laughed.

After a pause Chick said, ‘Bloody woman, bloody Moira, bloody cow. Took everything – the house, the furniture, the kids – not that I mind her taking
them
, mingin’ little bastards,’ he said reflectively. I was reminded of Dr Dick, whose ex-wife was also a Moira, a self-contained Aberdonian – a research chemist – who had summoned just enough emotion to petition for divorce. That, apart from assonance, must surely be the only thing that Chick and Dick could ever have in common.

With an exasperated sigh Chick put his
Racing Post
away, stubbed out his cigarette and settled back in his seat, closed his eyes and said, ‘Don’t let me go to sleep.’ Who was it that Chick reminded me of? I wondered.

‘You’re looking at me,’ he said, without opening his eyes.

‘I was just trying to think who you reminded me of.’

‘I’m a one-off,’ Chick said. ‘They broke the mould when they made me.’ It began to rain, heavy drops thudding on the roof of the car.

‘Goodness, it’s raining cats and dogs,’ Professor Cousins commented. The dog’s ears gave an interested twitch but it didn’t bother waking up. I wondered what happened to the Tara-Zanthian stock market when this particular weather phenomenon occurred.

The rain streamed down the windscreen, obscuring the view of the street. Terri asked Chick why he didn’t put the windscreen wipers on. Moving himself as little as possible, Chick leant forward and pressed a button. The wipers creaked into life, moving slowly across the windscreen, with a horrible fingernails-on-a-blackboard kind of noise.

‘That’s why,’ he said and turned them off and closed his eyes again. ‘Now how about we keep our mouths shut and our eyes peeled?’

‘What a horrible idea,’ Professor Cousins murmured to himself. The air in the car was damp and didn’t sit well with the rank smell of the dog nor with the original awful odour which had now changed quality into something woolly and fungoid. I suppose it was a good thing there was no heating in Chick’s car or else new life forms might have been incubated, but nonetheless it was freezing cold and I was glad of the proximity of the dog’s big, warm, smelly body.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any of that waccy-baccy, have you?’ Chick asked me suddenly.

‘No, sorry.’

‘Pity.’

‘We could play a game,’ Professor Cousins said hopefully.

‘A game?’ Chick said suspiciously. ‘How?’

‘How not?’ Professor Cousins said, showing an unexpected command of the Scottish tongue.

‘You mean poker?’ Chick said.

‘Well, I was thinking more of a word game, Chick,’ Professor Cousins said, ‘like “Doublets”, say – that’s where you turn one word into another, “Head” into “Tail” for example.’ Everyone looked at him blankly and he said encouragingly, ‘It’s easy – head–heal– teal–tell–tall–tail. See? You try – turn “Dog” into “Cat”.’ The dog looked up in alarm. Terri stroked it back into sleep. Professor Cousins was puzzled by our inability to understand ‘Doublets’.

‘It was invented by Lewis Carroll, you know,’ he said rather sadly.

‘Wasn’t he the one who liked little girls?’ Chick asked.

‘I am going to Alyth where I shall advertise abominable alcohol,’ Professor Cousins said.

Chick gave him a wary look. ‘We’re
not
going to Alyth.’

Professor Cousins laughed. ‘No, no, it’s another game; you see you go somewhere and you have to do something using the same letter of the alphabet – I am going to Blairgowrie where I shall brave the braying beasts.’ Professor Cousins tried again, ‘I am going to Cupar where I shall cut cheap cabbages.’

‘Maybe we could just go to Dundee,’ Terri muttered.

‘And do what?’ Professor Cousins smiled encouragingly. Everyone – apart from the dog and Professor Cousins – turned rather nasty at this point, especially when Chick suggested that Terri might like to fuck off to Forfar and do something illegal with a ferret.

Which put an end to the conversation for a good ten minutes, at which point Terri said, ‘I’m hungry,’ and Professor Cousins said, ‘And I wouldn’t mind going to the little boys’ room.’

‘Little boys?’ Chick queried, giving him a sideways look.

‘And it’s uncomfortable back here,’ Terri complained. I imagined that this was what it was like being on a family outing in a car (there were so many aspects of normal family life I seemed to have missed out on). But instead of a regular family – mother, father, sister, grandmother, Golden Retriever in a Vauxhall Victor – I had to make do with this strange patched-up affair with neither blood nor love in common.

‘Anything to eat in here?’ Professor Cousins asked hopefully, opening the glove compartment and bringing out an assortment of objects – a deck of dog-eared playing-cards adorned with photographs of big women in various states of undress (‘Fascinating,’ Professor Cousins murmured), a pair of handcuffs, a paper bag of squashed fern cakes from Goodfellow and Steven, a length of washing-rope, a large kitchen knife and a police warrant-card that displayed a photograph of Chick with more hair and less flesh.

‘Don’t ask me how I managed to hang onto that,’ Chick said.

‘How did you manage to hang onto that?’ Terri asked.

‘Piss off.’ Chick stuffed all the items back in the glove compartment except for the fern cakes, which he distributed amongst the Cortina’s occupants.

‘So you were on the force then, Chick?’ Professor Cousins asked and then turned round to us in the back seat and grinned and said, ‘A “pig”, isn’t it?’ as if we needed a translation. According to Chick, who didn’t seem the most reliable of narrators, he had been a detective inspector until there had been some misunderstanding over a holiday in Lanzarote that had landed him ‘in the doghouse’.

‘If the cow had kept her big mouth shut it would have been all right,’ Chick said.

The ‘cow’ was now resident in Errol, in a new house, and said house was serving as a love nest for the cow and her new ‘bidie-in’, a gigolo, Chick claimed, whose day job was an insurance claims loss adjuster – a man, Chick reported vituperatively, who possessed a full head of hair and a brand new yellow Ford Capri 3000 and thought he was the cat’s pyjamas. The cow, the gigolo and the mingin’ little bastards had formed an economic conspiracy to bring about the financial ruin of Chick, Chick said.

‘It’s a dog’s life, Chick,’ Professor Cousins said, giving him a comforting pat on his hairy hand. Chick snatched the hand away, muttering something about ginger beer. Chick’s eyebrows, I couldn’t help but notice, almost met in the middle – a sure sign of a werewolf. Or so Nora had told me.

Chick said, ‘Tell me if anything catches your eye’ (Professor Cousins shuddered), and then appeared to fall asleep. Soon Professor Cousins himself was snoring in the front seat. When I glanced at Terri, I saw that she too had given in to her customary narcoleptic state. I amused myself by watching the sedate suburban activity of mothers pushing prams and old ladies sweeping paths. After half an hour, a woman came out of the house we were supposed to be watching. She had nothing of the Jezebel about her, in fact she seemed remarkable, if anything, for her ordinariness. In her thirties, with short brown hair, she wore a nondescript mac and carried a shopping-bag. She looked as if she was off to collect her messages rather than conduct an adulterous liaison. She smiled and said hello to a woman walking past with a Labrador and then got into a Hillman Imp parked at the kerb and drove off. I didn’t wake Chick up. It seemed to me the woman had a perfect right to go about her business unmolested by complete strangers. (Although is there any such thing as a partial stranger?)

Chick snorted suddenly, looked at his watch and said, ‘That’s enough of that. Fish supper, anyone?’ and I realized who he reminded me of. Like the ghost of Christmas Future Chick was a picture of what Bob was going to be like in his middle age.

Chick started the engine and Terri assumed the tense position of a crash test dummy. We stopped at the first chip shop we came to and Professor Cousins said, ‘Oh my treat, please, it’s been such a lovely day out.’

‘Very good of you, Gabriel,’ Chick said, full of bonhomie at the sight of someone else’s wallet. ‘I’ll have an extra single fish in that case.’

‘As opposed to . . . a married fish?’ Professor Cousins said vaguely.

‘Ha bloody ha,’ Chick said, popping a whole pickled egg in his mouth.