Emotionally Weird Read online

  Anyway, she concluded with a somewhat rueful sigh, the outcome of all this had been a return to urban living accompanied by (sadly) a divorce on account of the playwright’s rampant adultery, but also (happily) Martha’s first collection of poetry, Chicken Spirits, ‘Critically acclaimed, but hardly a bestseller. But then which would you rather have, after all?’

  ‘A bestseller?’ Andrea suggested.

  Martha was planning to break out of the ghetto of poetry. She had, she claimed, an unwritten novel, which seemed like a contradiction in terms to me (like the unspoken word). Martha’s novel was about a female author getting over her writer’s block by discovering that in a former life she had been Pliny the Elder – so probably not a bestseller.

  ‘They say everyone has a novel inside them, don’t they?’ Janice Rand suddenly piped up.

  ‘Not everyone can write it though, Janice,’ Martha admonished gravely.

  There was some kind of commotion going on outside, every so often a shout of ‘Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh’ went up and I wondered if the protesters knew he was dead, and if that made any difference. Martha glanced out of the window and frowned at what she saw.

  I tried the words in a different order – trowel, vilifies, bracteate – but this didn’t result in any inspiration. Martha was always urging us to ‘Write what you know,’ (how boring books would be if everyone adhered to that principle!) but although vilifies was a word I felt comfortable with, my knowledge of bracteates and trowels was limited. Oh, for a good etymological dictionary to be carried on one’s person at all times.

  Nora has no dictionary, there are no books on the island apart from the Bible by my bed. Nora appears to have banished books, except for the one she herself keeps, writing every day, her ‘diary’. But how can you keep a diary when nothing ever happens, except the weather?

  ∼ Yes, but there’s so very much weather, Nora says.

  The words didn’t help matters at all, prising themselves off the printed page and hanging around like bored flies, adding further to the instability of the phenomenal world. Terri, in the twilight world of the zombie, was writing the three words over and over again. She looked quite content.

  Martha wandered over to the window and leant with her forehead on the glass as if she was trying to absorb daylight. (I was surprised we didn’t all have rickets.) Andrea used this opportunity to lean over and whisper to me that she thought a bracteate was a kind of animal, possibly a frog. Which sounded like wishful thinking to me. Nora, of course, believes that we all have a totem animal, a manifestation of our spiritual nature in the animal world. (‘Your mother sounds kind of cool,’ Andrea said. Misguidedly.)

  Andrea whispered in my ear that she thought her spirit animal was a cat. How predictable. Why do girls always think of themselves as cats? I didn’t suppose Andrea would much enjoy ripping the insides out of tiny helpless mammals or licking her own nether regions or being chased by mad dogs or eating cat food without the help of cutlery.

  Kevin’s glasses had slipped down his nose as he stared at bracteate, trowel and vilifies. If we were animals (which we are, I know), Kevin would be a sponge – a sea-cucumber perhaps or something rounder and squishier. But what I might be I did not know. (I prefer monosyllables. They stick to the page better.)

  ‘Surely sponges aren’t animals?’ Andrea puzzled.

  ‘What do you think they are then?’

  ‘Vegetables?’ she hazarded.

  This was a bit like playing ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral’ with Bob, or – worse – asking Bob general knowledge questions. (Question: ‘What is Formosa now called? Bob’s answer: ‘Cheese?’)

  Andrea gave up and started colouring the words in instead.

  ‘Right,’ Martha said suddenly, ‘ten minutes are up.’ Only ten minutes had passed? What a nightmare. How long would it take before the hour was up? I calculated miserably – nearly three thousand words at this rate, more than ten pages. Time for some omission and reduction. Surely no-one would miss, for example, nine sentences on the theme of ‘The man vilifies the bracteate trowel.’ And so on.

  ‘I didn’t say a sentence,’ Martha reprimanded irritably, ‘I asked for a paragraph. I asked for text. Do you understand what text is?’ You could tell that she wanted to slip the word ‘morons’ into this sentence somewhere.

  ‘Well, according to Proust,’ Professor Cousins said helpfully, ‘it’s a web.’ Professor Cousins hadn’t even managed a sentence, despite all his diagrams.

  ‘Does this mean,’ he asked Martha plaintively, ‘that I should abandon all hope of becoming a writer?’

  ‘Yes,’ Martha said.

  ‘Thank goodness for that,’ Professor Cousins said.

  ‘Let’s turn to your assignments,’ Martha said tetchily.

  * * *

  It was when the bell rang at five to twelve and no-one moved that a horrible realization dawned on me – this was a two-hour seminar. I thought about fainting but that was Andrea’s usual ruse for getting out of sticky situations.

  Martha had just singled out a passage in Kara’s novella that she said she found particularly meaningful. The passage was an intimate description of killing a chicken. The poor bird had so far been chased, strangled and plucked and the Kara-like narrator currently had her hand inside the chicken’s egg tube (or whatever the technical term is), rescuing unlaid eggs.

  ‘Those last little yolks,’ Martha said, nodding sagely, ‘so good for an egg custard.’

  The mewing noise that Proteus had been making throughout this critique suddenly escalated into a loud bawling and Kara hauled him out of his basket and slapped him carelessly on a breast. We moved on swiftly to Davina and everyone prepared for extreme boredom. It wasn’t that Davina couldn’t write it was just that she had nothing to say. Andrea wasn’t much better. ‘Anthea’s not been doing much lately,’ Andrea said, looking rather faint.

  ‘Does she ever?’ Robin said.

  ‘All right, all right,’ Andrea said and began to read reluctantly. ‘The bees could be heard before they were seen.’

  ‘Have you started?’ Kara asked.

  ‘Yes, of course I’ve started,’ Andrea said peevishly. ‘Shall I start again?’ she asked Martha.

  ‘If you must.’

  ‘The bees could be heard before they were seen. The girl, leaning out of the window, thinking about what her father had said at breakfast, worried, irrationally, she knew, that the bees would fly into her hair –’

  ‘The bees?’ Martha checked. ‘As in honey?’ Perhaps like me she had been under the delusion that they were alphabet Bs, imagining them in a monoliteral swarm around Andrea’s head.

  ‘She preferred not to think about where her fears came from. She was, though she did not know it, on the brink of an unhappy discovery. Would she have cared if she had known? And yet in some way, she already knew everything.’

  Martha stifled a yawn.

  ‘Then she’s omniscient?’ Davina asked. ‘But you have to be a narrator to be omniscient, don’t you? She doesn’t narrate, she’s … narrated.’

  I am narrated therefore I am. What would that be – a narratee? That can’t be a word. It sounds like a sea-animal. The young narratees leapt and frolicked in the wake of the ship. The narratees swam in playful circles.

  ‘Effie?’ Martha said. ‘Something you want to share with us?’

  ‘No, not really.’

  ‘Your assignment?’

  ‘It’s at a problematic stage, I need to work on the metastructure some more.’

  Martha raised a perfect circumflex of an eyebrow and gave me a pitying look. ‘Try,’ she said.

  I sighed and started to read –

  ‘Penny for them, Madame Astarti,’ a voice boomed behind her.

  ‘I should be a rich woman, Jack Gannet,’ Madame Astarti said to him, ‘for all the thoughts I’m having today.’

  ‘Take a stroll along the prom?’ Jack Gannet said, offering her his arm.

  ‘Always the gentleman, Jack,’ Madame Astarti m
urmured appreciatively. Indeed ‘Gentleman Jack’ had been his nickname during his days on the Met, on account of his good manners, but Jack Gannet didn’t like that, he thought it made him sound too like a criminal. And Jack Gannet was perhaps one of the straightest coppers on the force. Jack Gannet and Madame Astarti went a long way back, almost as far as Sheffield and that was a very long way indeed. There had been a few occasions during his rise to Chief Inspector when he had been thankful for Madame Astarti’s help, not that he liked to admit it.

  ‘It’s not the weather for murder,’ Jack Gannet sighed, wiping his brow.

  ‘Murder?’ Madame Astarti queried sharply.

  ‘The woman found in the sea, just had the pathologist’s report back on the body. It was decomposing fast, of course, bodies don’t last long in the sea, especially in this weather. Ice-cream?’

  Madame Astarti felt confused. The woman was killed by ice-cream?

  Jack Gannet stopped suddenly so that Madame Astarti, whose braking distance was quite long, slammed into him.

  ‘Rigatoni’s,’ Jack said cheerfully, ‘the best scoop in the north.’ They were outside the big Rigatoni ice-cream parlour on the Prom, the flagship one, and he opened the door and gestured Madame Astarti inside and to a table in the window. A buxom waitress appeared and smiled warmly at Jack.

  ‘Hello, Deirdre,’ he said. ‘I think we’d both like a Five-Scoop-Sundae-Special, please, even though it’s a Saturday,’ he added and Deirdre laughed, far too much, Madame Astarti thought, for such a feeble joke.

  ‘How was she killed?’ Madame Astarti asked eagerly, sticking her fan-shaped wafer into the heart of her sundae.

  ‘Difficult to say for sure,’ Jack Gannet frowned, ‘but it looks like she was strangled.’

  ‘Crime of passion, perhaps,’ Madame Astarti said thoughtfully.

  ‘Well,’ Jack Gannet said. ‘You know that frog–’

  —The frog is large and green and cool to the touch.

  ∼ It’s not a frog, Nora says, it’s a toad. She strokes it, a toad-wife, and kisses it gently on the top of its head, an indignity it suffers in silence. When she places it on the floor at her feet it contemplates her for a few seconds as if it’s worshipping her, before hopping lazily out of the door.

  ∼ I must pick nettles, she says, for soup.

  ‘It’s winter, there are no nettles.’

  ∼ Well, I have to go and pick something, she says vaguely. She is avoiding telling me her story. I know why – it is not a pretty tale.

  ‘If I were you,’ Martha said to me, ‘I would think seriously about doing a secretarial course so that you can get a job when you don’t graduate.’

  But if she was me she wouldn’t say such nasty things.

  * * *

  Janice Rand read out a poem that was something to do with the sun in the sky and the birds flying by and no-one could think of a single thing to say about it.

  ‘Robin?’ Martha sighed.

  ‘OK,’ Robin said. ‘I’ve been reworking a scene from Life Sentence. I wasn’t really happy with it before. I’ll just read all the parts, shall I? Unless someone else wants to read? No? Right, well this is the scene where Dod, Jed and Kenny are discussing whether Rick had been right to do what he did –’ Robin took a deep breath and closed his eyes. There was silence for quite a long time and then he suddenly started reading:

  DOD Yes, but I mean –

  JED Look, there isn’t any point.

  DOD I mean –

  JED It’s all finished now anyway. It’s over, we just don’t know it.

  DOD If I thought for a minute that you were –

  JED Yeah.

  DOD I mean …

  KENNY It’s meaningless. Meaning less. Less and less. Why bother?

  DOD But do you know what I’m talking about (shouts)? Do you know what I mean?

  And so on (ad infinitum, ad nauseam) until the audience died, one by one, a death of a thousand small words.

  ‘What did Rick do?’ Andrea puzzled but Robin’s answer was drowned out by the groans of those who didn’t want to remember. Kara patted Proteus vigorously on the back and he burped obligingly, then she turned him round and placed him on the other breast. Outside, I could hear someone singing ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone’ in a flat voice, to the two-chord accompaniment of an acoustic guitar.

  I was just searching in my pocket for a handkerchief – I was sure I was coming down with a cold, I was feeling quite lightheaded – when I discovered a crumpled piece of paper. I spread it out on the little desk-table and discovered it was the page of The Expanding Prism of J where J falls over the banister. I wished I’d found it earlier, I could have handed it in to Martha and pretended I’d written it – I expected it was just the kind of writing she would like.

  ‘Do you think you could pay attention?’ Martha said to me so I screwed the piece of paper up in a ball and stuffed it back in my pocket.

  ‘And so, finally, to Kevin,’ she said, turning her gaze reluctantly on our fantasist. ‘How is Edrakonia this week, Kevin?’ Martha had tried to persuade Kevin that his magnum opus was not suitable for the course assignment and had indeed told him at one point she was going to fail him point blank if he didn’t stop writing ‘garbage’, but lately she seemed to have become inured to Edrakonia. If nothing else, Kevin could be relied upon to have actually done some writing and there was something about the eager expression on his bovine face that made you feel so dreadfully sorry for him that you couldn’t help but encourage his one pleasure in life. Kevin read in a kind of Benny Hill accent -

  ‘Duke Thar-Vint and his trusty steward Lart, who himself was of a noble family through the blood of his mother, Martinella, daughter of Si-Jagdar –’

  ‘Martinella – is that like the female form of “Martin”?’ Robin asked.

  ‘No,’ Kevin said.

  ‘Because if it is,’ Robin persisted, ‘it’s a really crap name.’

  ‘Shut up.’

  ‘Duke Thar-Vint and his steward Lart –’

  ‘Trusty steward,’ Kara reminded him.

  ‘Thank you,’ Kevin said sarcastically, ‘Trusty steward Lart, were journeying to the Vale of Tyra-Shakir for the great celebration of the feast of Joppa –’

  ‘That’s in Edinburgh,’ Andrea objected. ‘They’re hardly going to go on some great epic journey on their stupid shaggy mountain ponies to go to Edinburgh, are they?’

  Kevin ignored her. ‘It will be difficult travelling but the feast must be observed –’ Kevin interrupted himself for once to explain, ‘Of course, parties really are a pre-Murk thing, the Murk is a bit like Cromwell’s Protectorate,’ he explained, ‘no singing, no dancing, that kind of thing.’

  Professor Cousins looked perplexed. ‘And so … the dragons are Royalists?’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Kevin scowled, ‘the dragons don’t hold with affiliation.’ His face took on a dreamy expression. ‘Before the Murk, the Duke Thar-Vint was renowned for his parties – the food was wonderful, naturally—’

  ‘Naturally,’ Martha said.

  ‘The entertainments were spectacular – the famous acrobats of Hartha-Melchior, the jugglers of Wei-Wan, the dressage horses from the plains of—’

  ‘Kevin,’ Martha said looking very pained, ‘could you just get on?’

  ‘If the Duke Thar-Vint hadn’t stolen the treasure of Alsinelg to begin with he wouldn’t be in this mess,’ Kara said.

  ‘Yes, but that’s the whole point,’ Kevin said crossly.

  ‘Kevin,’ Martha warned.

  ‘The Duke Thar-Vint scanned the vast horizon for signs of danger. This journey would be perilous, he knew – the greatest test yet of his courage and ingenuity. It was spring, yet not a green bud was to be seen. In the old days before the Murk fell on the land the steppes of Chargap would have been ablaze with flowers, the Verduna plants like tiny blue stars and the Rykil which the wise women of the steppes plucked and used for their healing properties.

  His faithful steed, Demaal, sniffed
the air –

  ∼ How long are you going to go on without stopping him? Nora asks, rather irritably. You’re wasting words.

  ‘There isn’t a finite stock of them.’

  ∼ How do you know? You might suddenly just run out and then you won’t be able to finish the—

  Chez Bob

  For James the spectre of the omniscient author cannot be dismissed lightly. He cannot sanction interference with the interior drama of the novel. Given historical perspective, I think it is easier for us to recognize this aspect of the book as a precondition of the type of realism to which George Eliot subscribed.

  I wasn’t sure I actually understood that sentence. I had stolen it from a book, but that didn’t necessarily mean it was any good. I tried it out on Andrea, who had come home with me instead of going to work on Annasach, the student newspaper, and was now hanging around disconsolately in Paton’s Lane in the hope that Shug might turn up. She was laying out her Tarot pack amongst the clutter on the table.

  ‘You couldn’t just magic up an essay for me, could you?’ I asked her.

  ‘Magic isn’t to be used for selfish purposes or personal gain,’ she intoned solemnly as if she was reading from a necromancer’s primer.

  I still felt queasy from Martha’s tutorial. Perhaps there was a bug going around. It was extraordinarily cold in the flat, even though both bars of the electric fire were burning. The fire was giving off an unpleasant smell of molten dust and melting fuses.

  ‘Damart,’ Andrea said enigmatically when I queried the wisdom of wearing broderie-anglaise in this weather.

  The Court of the Crimson King was playing very loudly on the stereo and every time I tried to turn it down Bob wandered back over to it and innocently turned it up again. He was eating Marmite straight from the jar and looking perplexed.

  Bob had recently begun to make incoherent attempts at study and he was surrounded now by a chaotic sea of textbooks and essays. The textbooks – Descartes’ Discourse on Method, Woozley’s Theory of Knowledge, Ayer’s Foundation of Empirical Knowledge – were mostly stolen – Bob didn’t think that stealing books was actually a crime (‘Thought’s free, isn’t it?’) – and remained steadfastly unopened, as if he was hoping to absorb their contents by osmosis.