Emotionally Weird Page 22

  Unnoticed by Mrs Dalzell, Janet had escaped her shopping-basket and was now making a bee-line for Miss Anderson. Mrs Dalzell’s Mary Poppins smile slipped slightly when she saw the dog. ‘Whose dog is that?’ she barked, looking round enquiringly at her charges. Janet had begun to dig furiously at the side of the grave, trying to cover the coffin with earth. ‘It’s your dog, isn’t it?’ Mrs Dalzell said accusingly to Mrs Macbeth. ‘It’s Janet, isn’t it?’ She frowned. ‘Have you been hiding her somewhere?’

  Maisie ran forward and scooped up the muddy, bedraggled body of the gravedigging dog and said, ‘She’s my dog now. Mrs Macbeth gave her to me.’ Maisie pouted in a way that wasn’t very fetching and did her impression of a little girl, whereas in reality, as we all knew, she was a seventy-year-old woman trapped in the helpless body of a small child.

  Mrs Dalzell didn’t look entirely convinced but she started to rally her flock and direct them towards the gates and the waiting minibus.

  ‘First stop Spandau,’ Mrs McCue said loudly as Mrs Dalzell snapped at her heels.

  I followed them out of the cemetery, while Maisie pirouetted down the path. We were just in time to see Professor Cousins being herded onto the minibus. I shouted to him but he didn’t hear and it was Chick who hooked him by his thin elbow and steered him away.

  ‘If he goes in that place he’ll probably never get out again,’ he said to no-one in particular. Some bizarre sleight-of-hand then proceeded to take place whereby Janet was stuffed back in the shopping-basket and furtively returned to her rightful owner – Mrs McCue and Mrs Macbeth behaving throughout like rather poor amateur actors trying to recreate a Bond movie.

  Chick looked at Maisie playing chalkless hopscotch in the rain. ‘I suppose you want taking home,’ he said gruffly to her, ‘whoever you are.’

  ‘Her name’s Lucy Lake,’ Professor Cousins said helpfully.

  We got in the car and set off on the usual narrative detour – betting shops, off-licences, et cetera, even a rather lengthy sojourn for Professor Cousins and Chick in The Galleon Bar of the Tay Centre Hotel which Maisie and I preferred to sit out in the car, playing ‘Switch’ with Chick’s tasteless playing-cards.

  Our route to Windsor Place took us past the university, now a hotbed of activity, people coming and going with a restless energy not hitherto witnessed on those premises. A crowd of people had gathered outside the Tower, from the fourth-floor balcony of which a bed sheet had been hung on which, in red paint that looked like blood (but presumably wasn’t), someone had written the words THE TIGERS OF WRATH ARE WISER THAN THE HORSES OF INSTRUCTION.

  ‘What the fuck does that mean?’ Chick said, slowing down as a group of people spilled into the road. ‘Fucking students.’ Catching sight of Maisie in the rear-view mirror, he added, ‘excuse my French.’

  ‘I’ve heard worse,’ she said phlegmatically. ‘Look – there’s Dad,’ she exclaimed, pointing at a figure standing on the grass outside the Students’ Union. ‘Dad’ turned out to be Roger Lake – fired up, in oratorical mode, shouting and gesticulating for the benefit of a small group of students.

  If Maisie carried on much longer with this charade she would forget who she was. ‘He’s not actually your father,’ I reminded her.

  ‘Really?’ Professor Cousins said to her. ‘And yet you look so much like him.’

  * * *

  Professor Cousins clambered out of the car and snailed towards the Tower. It was at that moment that I noticed an ambulance was parked up ahead, obstructing the road, and adding to a general sense of drama around the environs of the university. Chick started hooting the Cortina’s horn impatiently. An ambulanceman glared angrily at him and mouthed something I couldn’t understand, although the gesture he made seemed clear enough. He was helping his partner to load their cargo – a seemingly unconscious body, strapped on a stretcher.

  ‘Oh look, it’s Spotty Dick,’ Maisie said excitedly. ‘Do you think he’s dead?’

  I craned my neck to get a better view – she was right, it was Dr Dick on the stretcher. His carcass was wrapped in a red blanket that made him look even paler than usual, did indeed make him look rather dead. I got out of the car and went over to his limp form. ‘Are you all right?’ I asked him.

  ‘Do you know him?’ one of the ambulancemen asked.

  ‘Sort of,’ I admitted reluctantly. ‘What happened to him? Was he injured in the demonstration?’

  ‘What demonstration?’ the ambulanceman said, looking round. He spotted the banner and read out, ‘The tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of destruction – what does that mean?’

  The ambulanceman, although quite short, was young and had sandy hair and kind eyes and the capable manner of all men in uniform.

  ‘What does anything mean?’ I said, smiling at him. He smiled back.

  ‘Excuse me,’ Dr Dick said, struggling into a sitting position, ‘am I going to expire here in the street while you flirt with this…’ he struggled to find the right word, ‘this girl?’

  The ambulanceman looked at Dr Dick and said mildly, ‘You seem lively enough for someone who’s expiring.’

  ‘A very professional diagnosis,’ Dr Dick said sulkily, flopping back onto the stretcher.

  ‘What happened to you?’ I asked him again. ‘Were you caught up in the protest?’

  Dr Dick squinted at me unattractively. One of the lenses in his little academic spectacles had acquired a crack, giving him an oddly glaikit look. His eyelashes were pale and rather stubbly, like those of a pig. ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ he said. He seemed reluctant, however, to explain how he had ended up on the stretcher and it was the ambulanceman who finally told me that Dr Dick had slipped on an icy pavement and cracked his ankle bone. He grimaced, although I wasn’t sure whether this was from the pain in his ankle or the unheroic nature of his injury.

  ∼ Icy? Nora queries. It was raining a minute ago.

  ‘You’re not the only one who can control the weather.’

  ‘Nothing to be ashamed of,’ the ambulanceman said. ‘Casualty’s full of old wifies who’ve done the same thing.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Dr Dick said. He motioned me closer to him and hissed in my ear, ‘I think I was pushed. I think someone tried to kill me.’

  ‘Pushed off a pavement?’ I repeated incredulously. ‘Wouldn’t they have pushed you off something higher if they’d wanted to kill you?’

  ‘Hop in,’ the ambulanceman said to me. I hesitated.

  ‘Do. Please,’ Dr Dick said weakly.

  I was trying to think of a good reason (although really I had several) not to go in the ambulance when Chick suddenly drove off in a great crashing of gears, hooting noisily as he overtook the ambulance.

  ‘What a tube,’ the ambulanceman said.

  Maisie waved cheerfully at me as the car sped by. I recalled the image of the yellow dog being driven away in much the same manner and wondered what the chances were of Maisie arriving home.

  ‘Thank you,’ Dr Dick murmured to me, ‘you’re a good girl.’

  * * *

  In the DRI we took some time at reception, mainly because Dr Dick couldn’t think of who to put down as his next-of-kin. It seemed to be a toss-up between his ex-wife Moira and myself and despite my protestations that I wasn’t related to him in any way he finally chose me. Also at the reception desk was a Spanish-looking woman with a nail stuck in her hand. When I glanced at the form she was filling in I saw that in the space where it said ‘next-of-kin’ she was writing ‘Jesus’. Perhaps she was a friend of Janice Rand. She gave Jesus a surname (Barcellos) which, to my knowledge, was more than anyone else ever had.

  After a long wait, during which I engaged in the most desultory of conversations with Dr Dick – mostly about his childhood ailments (measles, German measles, whooping cough, chickenpox, mumps, glandular fever, plague) – a nurse came and said, ‘Dr McCrindle will see you now,’ and took Dr Dick into a cubicle to be examined behind garish flowered curtains that must have offended his taste.


  * * *

  A lot of time passed without anything happening. The peeling beige paint on the waiting-room walls was relieved only by a poster encouraging me to brush my teeth after every meal. Dr McCrindle came out of Dr Dick’s cubicle and smiled at me wolfishly. More time passed. A student nurse ran down the corridor, shouting, ‘Jake, come back.’ More time passed. I read my way through a pile of the People’s Friend, looked through my George Eliot essay, which had got as far as, James’s dislike of George Eliot’s stylistic method is rationalized into the strange statement that, ‘Its diffuseness … makes it too copious a dose of pure fiction’, which wasn’t very far at all and, finally, I wrote some Hand of Fate –

  ‘Good morning, Rita,’ Lolly Cooper said cheerfully, ‘lovely morning, isn’t it?’ Cooper’s was an old-fashioned sort of bakery, the baking still done at the back of the premises by Lolly’s husband, Ted. Rumours abounded in Saltsea about Ted’s terrible temper. He was a dusty, flour-clad presence, a kind of eminence blanc, who whistled all the time in a manner that Madame Astarti found faintly menacing. Lolly, on the other hand, was a frilly sort of woman with fluffy hair who wore Peter Pan collars or big soft kitten bows tied at her neck. Madame Astarti always imagined that Lolly Cooper kept a very neat house with a well-stocked fridge and sets of matching towels, something Madame Astarti herself never expected to achieve.

  ‘What are you after today, Rita?’ Lolly said, wringing her hands together like a woman with a dreadful secret even though the expression on her face was one of extreme, almost excessive, cheerfulness.

  ‘Small white farmhouse, please,’ Madame Astarti said and then laughed and said, ‘maybe I should go to an estate agent’s for that?’ but Lolly just looked at her blankly with a fixed smile on her face.

  ‘Never mind,’ Madame Astarti sighed.

  ‘And a bit of a treat for elevenses?’ Lolly said, and together they conducted the ritual of surveying the trays of iced fancies and cream cakes.

  ‘Jam doughnut?’ Lolly said. ‘An Eccles cake?’ The thin strain of a slightly wobbly whistle could be heard coming from the back. It sounded to Madame Astarti like ‘Oh Mein Papa’. She’d never thought of it as a frightening tune before.

  ‘Chelsea bun?’ Lolly went on, a mad look on her face. ‘Chocolate eclair? Iced teacake? Cream puff?’

  * * *

  I closed my eyes and when I opened them again the woman who had been watching me in Balgay cemetery was standing in front of me. I flinched and stood up too suddenly, making myself dizzy.

  ‘Why are you following me?’ I demanded. Close up, I could see the alcoholic’s skin, mottled like a reptile, see the lines in her sun-cured face. Her hair looked brassy and green as if she spent too much time in over-chlorinated swimming-pools.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, her accent hard and tight, South African perhaps, or Rhodesian; ‘I wonder if you can help me – I’m looking for my daughter?’

  ‘Who are you?’

  ‘Effie.’

  ‘No, I’m Effie,’ I said. I was beginning to feel sick. It was too hot in the hospital, like an overheated greenhouse.

  The woman laughed but in a strangled, off-key kind of way and it struck me that she might be insane.

  I struggled to make sense of her. ‘You’re my mother’s sister, Effie? You’re dead,’ I added, rather impolitely.

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘not her sister.’ But then a nurse walked briskly up to me and said, ‘You can go in and see your dad now if you like.’

  ‘My dad?’ I repeated, bewildered. The woman began to walk away, her too-high heels stabbing the hospital linoleum. ‘Wait!’ I shouted after her but she had already pushed her way through the swing doors and disappeared.

  I felt weak, as if I was going to faint. I was probably the one who ought to be admitted to a ward, not Dr Dick. (But who would I put as my next of kin? My mother is not my mother. Her sister is not her sister. Her father is not her father. My father is not my father. My aunt is not my aunt. Et cetera.)

  ‘Cubicle three,’ the nurse said.

  Of course I knew it was Dr Dick in cubicle three not my anonymous father choosing a bizarre location in which to come back from the dead, but for just a moment, as my hand went out to draw the curtain back, I felt a little shiver of excitement. If it was my father lying there what would I say to him? More importantly what would he say to me?

  Dr Dick was examining the cast on his ankle. ‘I’m sure it’s not the only thing that’s broken,’ he complained without even looking at me, ‘and they wouldn’t listen when I told them I was tachycardic, they could at least have run an ECG. And I banged my head, how do they know I haven’t got concussion?’

  ‘Did you tell that nurse you were my father?’ I interrupted him.

  ‘Of course I didn’t,’ Dr Dick said indignantly. ‘I’m not even old enough to be your father, although I feel it,’ he added, lying back on his pillows. He removed his spectacles and rubbed the bridge of his nose. ‘My head hurts,’ he said again. I had to admit, he did look exhausted. I felt an unusual twinge of pity for him and reached out and clasped one of his hands in mine. He smelt of Savlon.

  ‘You’re a good girl,’ he murmured. Like all hypochondriacs, Dr Dick was distressed at finding he actually had something wrong with him and ended up making such a fuss (‘Is he often hysterical?’) that the junior house officer on duty decided it would be easier to keep him in overnight than it would be to persuade him to go home.

  I was shooed away by a nurse with a bedpan who whisked the curtains around the bed with great theatricality as if she was about to perform a disappearing trick on Dr Dick. I hung about for a minute, unsure what to do until the nurse suddenly popped her head through the curtains and said, ‘This might take some time. Don’t worry,’ and then added, with routine cheerfulness, ‘we’ll take good care of your dad.’

  It felt very late, although the clock in reception only said nine o’clock.

  ‘Bye,’ the receptionist said indifferently, ‘take care now.’

  * * *

  It was snowing outside, big, wet flakes that whirled dramatically in the wind but dissolved as soon as they landed on the ground. They found their way inside the collar of my coat as I trekked along Dudhope Terrace against a strong headwind. A bus sailed by like a ghostly galleon. Dudhope Castle, cloaked in a swirl of snow, seemed to glow eerily as I passed it. The street was deserted and I began to feel anxious. I glanced behind but the snow made phantasmagoric shapes in the dark that made me more nervous so I kept my head down and shuffled on. Where was Chick when you needed him? Or better still Ferdinand, who had been absent from this tale for far too long.

  ∼ Yes, bring Ferdinand back, Nora urges. You left him stranded on a beach, it’s time he returned. He’s the only remotely sexually attractive male in the entire story.

  (You must forgive the eagerness of my mother (who is not my mother). Remember – she is a virgin. Not to mention a murderess and a thief.)

  We must pause for a second. We have come to a critical fork in the path. If I had a choice of white knights on chargers come to save me – admittedly only from the weather, but it was very bad weather – which would I prefer, Chick or Ferdinand? A foolish question surely, for there could be only one answer –

  The snow was beginning to settle thickly and most of the traffic had stopped but I could just make out the yellow headlights of a car, moving slowly towards me along the Lochee Road. The car was almost obscured by the snow as it slewed to a gentle skidding halt on the other side of the road. It was a Wolseley Hornet. The driver’s window rolled down and Ferdinand’s handsome features resolved themselves out of the white kaleidoscope of snow.

  ‘Hop in,’ he said, in a curious echo of the ambulanceman earlier in the evening. Here was excellent good fortune.

  The Hornet presented a perfect contrast to Chick’s Cortina. Its new-smelling interior was warm and its little engine chugged manfully through what was now a raging blizzard. It even had a tape-deck fitted on which John Martin
’s ‘Bless The Weather’ was, fittingly, playing.

  Ferdinand seemed somewhat edgy. He hadn’t shaved recently, which made him look older and more dangerous. His eyes, I was relieved to see, were green and the dark hollows beneath them hinted at sleeplessness and the criminal in him seemed more evident than before. His navy-blue Guernsey, I noticed, was spiked with needles of coarse yellow dog hair. There was sand on the floor of the car and the slight brackish scent of the seaside that I knew only too well.

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ he asked. He sounded hoarse as if he had a sore throat and I offered him a Strepsil, which he declined.

  ‘So?’ Ferdinand asked, tapping his hand impatiently on the steering-wheel.

  ‘So?’ I repeated absently.

  ‘So where do you want to go?’

  ‘Anywhere.’

  He gave me a funny look so I narrowed it down to Terri’s address in Cleghorn Street as we were already quite near there and it successfully removed the Bob factor from the me–Bob–Ferdinand equation.

  As we drove, Ferdinand kept glancing warily in the rear-view mirror but there were no other vehicles on the road, even the buses had stopped running. I tried to make polite small talk with him although he seemed distinctly taciturn, if not downright moody. He did, however, finally volunteer the information that he was out prowling the streets looking for a dog.

  ‘Yellow mongrel, rather sanguine temperament?’ I hazarded.

  ‘How did you know that?’ he asked, looking at me in amazement. His eyes narrowed and his face grew menacing. ‘You’ve not been following me, have you?’

  ‘Of course not, Ferdinand,’ I said.

  ‘How do you know my name?’

  ∼ I think you should kiss him before he disappears again, my giddy mother (but not – et cetera) interjects.

  Personally, I think it better if this kind of thing develops naturally between two people, rather than as a result of intervention. On the other hand, I may never get this opportunity again.