Emotionally Weird Read online

  The guddle of essays had all been salvaged from people I’d never heard of – ‘Could scientific advance show that we are never really free?’ by an unlikely-sounding Wendy Darling Brandy; ‘Is there a Cartesian Circle?’ by someone called Gary Seven and ‘What has Hume shown about our belief in miracles?’ by an Audrey Baxter.

  Bob frowned at a list of English essays. ‘You haven’t got an essay on George Eliot, have you?’ he asked me.

  Bob’s methodology for writing essays was straightforward: he simply cut up other people’s essays and stuck them together again in a random way. Of course, we’re all plagiarists and forgers of one kind or another, if only in our minds, and Bob’s cut-up technique, although occasionally resulting in gibberish, generally passed muster with the somewhat dazed and confused members of staff.

  Bob had a list of ‘Senior Honours Essays, Session 1971–72’ in his hand and read aloud in his monotone, ‘Whenever Hume is aware of himself in any degree, he is aware of a perception, and when he is not aware of any perceptions he has no conception of himself. Discuss.’ He poked his ear in bewilderment. ‘I mean what’s that all about when it’s at home?’

  ‘It’s life, Bob,’ I said, ‘but not as you know it.’ He picked up Kant’s Impossibility of an Ontological Proof and showed the cover to us as if it was something we might never have seen before.

  ‘It’s a book,’ Andrea told Bob.

  ‘I know,’ Bob said, shaking his head wearily. ‘Is the self just a bundle of perceptions?’ he read mournfully from a Philosophy past paper. ‘If so, does anything hold the bundle together? Discuss.’ Bob ruminated on his Marmite. ‘Who are you supposed to discuss it with? Yourself?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You are going to travel a long way,’ Andrea said to him indifferently, turning over a fan of Tarot cards, ‘meet with much failure and die a horrible death.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ Bob said.

  * * *

  Shug turned up with Robin. ‘Where’ve you been?’ Andrea said.

  ‘Out and about,’ Shug said carelessly, ‘things to do, people to see.’

  Andrea wanted to go and see a matinée of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (which Bob had slept the whole way through), while Shug wanted to go to the film society to see W. R. – Mysteries of the Organism. Robin skinned up a joint and started reading aloud from the Dandy. Would I spend the rest of my life with these people?

  James believes that Middlemarch lacks an overall unity, that it is a mere string of disparate incidents which lack any true dramatic purpose …

  The doorbell rang and Andrea let Terri in. She was in an unusual state of agitation. ‘I’ve seen him,’ she said breathlessly to me.

  ‘Seen who?’ I asked.

  ‘The dog, the yellow dog. He was following that weird girl, the medic that lives at Balniddrie.’

  ‘Miranda,’ Robin said.

  ‘Robin,’ Terri said, noticing him for the first time. She sat down next to him on the sofa and did something strange with her face. It took me a while to work out that she was trying to smile at him. He shrank away from her in fear. ‘How are you, Robin?’ Terri asked.

  He stared at her like a panicked rabbit and stuttered, ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Well,’ she said cajolingly, ‘are you thinking of going home soon?’

  ‘Yeah, why?’ he said, shrinking even further away. ‘You want to come home with me?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘She just wants a lift,’ I explained to him because he looked as if he was going to throw up or pass out.

  ‘A trip to the country?’ Shug said. ‘That would be cool.’

  ‘Listen to this,’ Bob said, reading aloud, ‘Symbolize the following argument in the symbolism of Compound-Proposition Logic, and show it valid by any means (construction of a formal derivation, complete truth table, or indirect truth-table method): If I exist, I exist as a sentient being; if I exist and don’t know it, I don’t exist as a sentient being. Now if I know I exist, I’m certain of that fact and I can prove it; but, although I can prove I exist, I still feel doubtful about it. So I don’t exist. (“E”, “S”, “K”, “C”, “P”)’

  Luckily, at that moment, Bob’s brain exploded.

  ∼ Plot development? Nora murmurs quietly, almost to herself.

  ‘Is not necessary in this post-modern day and age,’ I tell her firmly.

  Cloudminding

  ‘Captain’s log: stardate 5818.4,’ Bob announced as we clambered awkwardly into the transport for our trip to the country.

  Our chauffeur, Robin, had recently acquired new ‘wheels’. Unfortunately, the wheels were attached not to his skinny body but to an old hearse. The hearse didn’t appear to have been decommissioned in any way, I noticed – it still retained its bier, for example, thus making it rather difficult for people travelling in the back unless, like Bob, they were eager to lie horizontally and rehearse being a corpse. Terri settled for riding shotgun up front with Robin and brooding darkly for the entire journey. Now that she’d achieved her goal of a lift out to Balniddrie she had no intention of treating Robin like a human being.

  As I squeezed myself reluctantly into the wreath-space at one side of Bob’s prone carcass I suddenly thought of Senga, cabined in her coffin in the Catholic church and now, presumably, locked away for ever underground. Andrea and Shug crammed themselves in opposite me so that we might have been at an Irish wake, but with no drink and a corpse that occasionally said to itself things like, ‘Can you repair the ship’s engines in time, Mr Scott?’

  Driving a hearse didn’t worry him, Robin explained (although nobody had asked him to), because being a Buddhist he was phlegmatic about death, ‘Because I know I’ll come back.’

  ‘What as?’ Terri asked. ‘A protozoa?’

  ‘I think you’ll find,’ Robin said, ‘that protozoa is a plural form, it would have to be protozoon.’ Perhaps Robin was on such a tedious karmic journey that he would just come back as himself. I’m sure it was no coincidence that his name was almost an anagram of ‘boring’.

  ‘Reincarnation,’ Shug said hoarsely. ‘What goes around, comes around, eh?’ He lit up a joint that immediately filled the all-too-small space with a fug of acrid smoke. If we crashed how would the circumstances of my death ever be explained to my mother? (Or, rather, the woman who has masqueraded as my mother for the last twenty-one years.) Perhaps it would be some comfort that I had eliminated the middle-man and saved her the undertaker’s fees.

  ‘If you can say what it is, then that is not it,’ Robin said sententiously and apropos of nothing as far as I could see. Terri twirled her moth-eaten parasol menacingly in his direction.

  ‘Things equal to the same thing are equal to each other,’ a gnomic Bob contributed.

  ‘Pythagoras?’ Robin puzzled.

  ‘James T. Kirk.’

  Robin manoeuvred the hearse away from the kerb and Bob shouted happily, ‘Warp speed, Mr Sulu.’ What a simple creature he was. If only my needs were as lacking in emotional complexity as Bob’s.

  ‘Eastern stuff,’ Robin said bobbishly, ‘it’s like so much more in touch with what’s really real. Stripped of materialism and intellectual bullshit. Look at the haiku.’ Robin thumped the steering-wheel of the hearse enthusiastically. ‘Compare that to the moribund structures of English poetry.’

  ‘What’s a haiku?’ Andrea asked.

  ‘It’s a three-line poem of five, seven and five syllables,’ Robin said, ‘so simple, so essential. The plural of haiku is haikai,’ Robin said, warming to his subject, ‘or at least that refers to a related series of haiku. The haiku was originally—’

  ‘The enormous dog stuck in a beautiful vase of white peonies,’ Bob said.

  ‘What?’ Robin gave Bob a worried look in the rear-view mirror of the hearse.

  Bob lifted his shaggy head off the veneer and metal of the bier and declared, in a ponderously poetic way:

  ‘The enormous dog

  stuck in a beautiful vase

  of whi
te peonies –

  ‘That’s a haiku. I’m a poet,’ he laughed, ‘and I know it.’

  Bob himself had once tried to become a Buddhist – the sound of one hand clapping kept him occupied for days – but had given up in the end because he couldn’t see the point of it. Of course, much of Bob’s behaviour had a curiously Zen quality to it and if you viewed some of the things he said as koans rather than nonsensical rubbish he might have almost seemed wise. Almost. Take slugs, for instance, a genus of the animal kingdom particularly despised by Bob’s father, a keen vegetable grower. Wouldn’t it be less hassle, Bob Junior suggested, on a home visit during which Bob Senior was setting out endless beer traps for his pesty foe, wouldn’t it be less hassle if they simply bypassed the vegetables and ate the slugs?

  ‘And meditation,’ Bob said, staring at the ceiling of the hearse, ‘that ought to be easy, it’s just thinking about nothing, isn’t it? But when you try to think about nothing…’ Bob lapsed into a mystified silence, aided by the Curly-Wurly he’d just found in his greatcoat pocket.

  We were accelerating along the Perth Road at a speed much faster than is normally associated with exequies and therefore causing considerable consternation amongst our fellow motorists, especially when we overtook them. A sedate Wolseley sedan containing an elderly couple mounted the pavement in distress and a rogue nun along Riverside crossed herself in horror. To make matters worse, we were in convoy with another of Balniddrie’s inhabitants, a fey former Harrovian called Gilbert who was driving an old ambulance – so it seemed as though we were hurrying to the aftermath of some dreadful disaster, rather than going for a simple trip to the country – although Bob, for some reason, seemed to be under the impression that we were on a starfleet expedition to collect the element zienite.

  ‘God,’ he said, once the Curly-Wurly allowed him to speak again, ‘do Buddhists believe in God? And what is God anyway? I mean, who’s to say I’m not God?’

  ‘There are standing stones at Balniddrie, you know,’ Andrea said, ignoring this metaphysical prattle. ‘They’re supposed to be seven sisters who were dancing on top of this hill and were turned to stone by an angry wizard.’

  ‘Why was he angry?’ Shug asked.

  ‘Oh, they always are,’ she said glumly.

  Considering they lived at Balniddrie, Robin and Gilbert seemed woefully lacking in any understanding of how to get there so that we crossed and re-crossed our own path several times, even finding ourselves at one point driving through the flatlands of the Carse of Gowrie (or the boundaries of the Romulan Neutral zone, depending on who you were). The occupants of the hearse were no help with navigation as it appeared that none of us had a sense of direction. Bob had once famously caught the circular bus and been trapped on it for hours and I, of course, have been lost all my life.

  ‘Wow,’ Bob said, peering like a curious cadaver through the window of the hearse, ‘cows.’

  Andrea frowned at him and said to me, ‘He doesn’t get out much, does he?’

  Robin executed a death-defying U-turn at the Errol turn-off. Not long after that it began to hail, huge mothballs of ice clattering against the windscreen. The hailstones began to accumulate, obscuring the view of the road because the windscreen wipers of the hearse had long since given up the ghost, as it were.

  The purpose of two lengths of hitherto mysterious string was now revealed by Robin. One of the pieces of string came in through the driver’s window of the hearse, the other through the passenger window. Robin tugged at his piece of string and one of the windscreen wipers jerked towards him.

  ‘See?’ Robin said hopefully to Terri. ‘Your turn now.’ Her reply was succinct and negative.

  * * *

  Robin eventually gave the hearse its head and it nosed patiently through the hinterland of the Carse and along the long straight avenues of trees that are the back roads of Angus.

  ‘Wow, sheep,’ Bob said.

  Finally, the hearse made a left turn at a sign that said ‘Wester Balniddrie’, and progressed up a rough road to a boxy old farmhouse that was harled and painted a darker shade of sky, which is to say grey.

  ‘Prepare to beam down, Dr McCoy,’ Bob said, ‘and investigate new life forms.’

  We drove past a front lawn that looked as if it had once been a neat tapestry of box hedges and clipped yew but was now a wilderness of nettles and rusted objects. Robin parked the hearse in a cobbled yard at the back of the house where a range of dilapidated farm buildings were huddled together trying to shelter from the weather. When we were disinterred from the confines of the hearse and its lingering afterscent of embalming fluid and chrysanthemums, I discovered that it was even colder than it had been in town. A frost had already begun to ice over the cobbles of the yard.

  Bob had fallen asleep in the time it took to park and had to be winkled out of the back door of the hearse like a sleepy winter bear out of its cave.

  ‘Magic Bob – how’ya doing?’ Gilbert said when he caught sight of him. Gilbert was the scion of an ancient aristocratic family that had fallen somewhat into disrepute. His mother had obtained a scandalous divorce from his father which Gilbert always maintained was on account of bestiality although what I think he meant was that his father had been beastly to his mother. With his etiolated body and rather inbred eyes he gave the appearance of being slightly defective but he had lovely manners and was rather sweet, not to mention rich. If he hadn’t borne such a close resemblance to a beansprout I would have been happy to leave Bob for him.

  ‘Hey,’ Bob said to Gilbert, and the two of them wandered off together.

  Shug had already disappeared, Andrea trailing on his heels like a lovesick dog. Trying to avoid Robin, I followed Terri into the house, through a disintegrating weatherboarded porch and down a freezing stone-flagged passage which was littered with boots and wellingtons, bits of bicycles, the top half of a skeleton suspended on a stand (a relic of earlier medics who had once lived here), most of the engine from a small car, the stuffed and mounted head of a stag and a jumble of demijohns and carboys – some empty, some fermenting with risky things found in hedgerows. A rack of old Irn-Bru bottles, home-corked and labelled ‘Elderflower champagne’, pointed at us in a threatening way like a broadside of light artillery. An accident waiting to happen, in my opinion.

  The passage led to the kitchen, a vast room that must have once been full of warmth and farm-cooking but was now glacially cold and dominated by a huge Aga that Miranda, the current medic (a vocation that seemed to be driven more by the availability of drugs than any desire to heal the sick), was tending listlessly, like someone in a fairy story put under a spell of drudgery.

  ‘The dog you were with this afternoon,’ Terri said without preamble to her, ‘where is he now?’

  Miranda, who looked as though she was mainlining intravenous Valium, said, ‘What dog?’

  ‘The dog that was following you.’

  ‘There was a dog following me?’ Miranda said. ‘Why?’ Terri’s interrogation of Miranda petered out eventually but not until she had completely exhausted every possibility on the Miranda/yellow dog axis: (‘Maybe he’s on your bed and you just haven’t noticed?’ ‘Maybe you’ve hidden him in your wardrobe because you don’t want anyone to see him?’ and so on). If Miranda had had more energy – she looked as asthenic as a vampire’s victim – I think she would have punched Terri.

  She reluctantly offered us something to drink and Terri chose coffee which turned out to be made of oats or barley, or maybe beans, and she gagged impolitely on it. I didn’t fare much better with the tea Miranda had stewing on the hob of the Aga; the tea leaves were like iron filings and the milk in it was rank with the taste of goat.

  Gilbert reappeared, sans Bob, but accompanied by Kevin who had materialized out of nowhere. I was surprised to see Kevin who, despite being born and bred in the countryside, was immune to its pastoral charms (‘Green, green, green – what’s the point?’). He was wearing a short brown anorak that looked as if it was left over f
rom his trainspotting days.

  Miranda had grown bored with her task now and abandoned the Aga to Gilbert’s ministrations. She shrugged on a white coat and said, ‘Obs and Gynie,’ by way of explanation.

  ‘Don’t forget you’re killing the goat tonight,’ Gilbert reminded her in his terrifically posh accent as she went out the door.

  ‘Why does it have to be me?’ she asked sullenly.

  ‘Because,’ Gilbert said reasonably, ‘you’re the doctor.’

  The occupants of Balniddrie took turns in cooking (although Miranda was generally excused as there was a paranoid house rumour that she was overly interested in toxicology), and today was Gilbert’s day apparently.

  ‘At home the servants do all the cooking,’ he said, ‘so this is terrific fun.’ He opened one of the doors of the Aga to reveal a loaf of heavy dark bread proving lop-sidedly. He took out a large pottery bowl and removed the rather dirty tea-towel that was covering it. ‘Yoghurt,’ he announced as if he was introducing it to us. The yoghurt smelt even more goatish than the milk and had separated into gelatinous curds and a thin wershy whey.

  ‘Do you think that’s what it’s supposed to be like?’ he asked Terri, who almost fell off her chair in surprise as no-one had ever previously thought to ask her a question about cooking (or indeed about anything). Rather gratified, she did her best. ‘Try jam,’ she said.

  ‘What a fantastic idea,’ Gilbert said, retrieving a jar of jam from a damp and mouldering pantry that I never wanted to see the insides of. The jam was elderberry and had retained a lot of the little twiggy stalks. It also contrived, strangely for jam, to be sour. He stirred it enthusiastically into the yoghurt.

  ‘I’ve got more yoghurt somewhere,’ he said, yanking open another of the Aga’s doors and finding, to his surprise, a pile of (we must hope) clean nappies.