Emotionally Weird Page 8

  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 test crash 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.

  * * *

  I thought we would be on our way home now but as we neared the bridge Chick took a sudden turning and drove down into Newport-on-Tay and then parked the car again on the opposite side of the road from a driveway that curved away into a thick screen of laurel bushes. After a short while a car emerged from the driveway – the very same Hillman Imp as before, still being driven by the nondescript woman. Perhaps Chick was using some kind of sixth sense to follow her rather than simple powers of observation. The woman drove off in the direction of Wormit and another vehicle emerged from the driveway, a slow-moving hearse this time laden with a coffin. It was followed by a solitary car. Terri perked up considerably at the sight of the hearse.

  ‘Anyone you know?’ said Professor Cousins, giving an affectionate kind of nod in the direction of the coffin.

  ‘Not personally,’ Chick said impassively.

  We drove off, slowly as if we were following the hearse, and I caught sight of a sign at the bottom of the driveway, The Anchorage – a home from home for the elderly, and told Professor Cousins that The Anchorage was currently home to Archie’s mother and he said, ‘Really? I never think of him as someone who has a mother.’

  As we drove around the roundabout on the approach road to the bridge I saw a hooded figure by the side of the road, thumb stuck out into the rain.

  ‘There’s no room,’ Terri protested to Chick as he slowed down. The hooded hitchhiker ran towards the back door of the Cortina. He looked like one of those sinister figures from urban myths, the ones who end up killing everyone in the car and then drive off with a boot-load of bodies and pick up a pretty young girl who’s been ditched by her boyfriend and is looking for a ride home, blah, blah, blah. I was surprised that Chick, not overflowing with the milk of human kindness, had stopped but perhaps he recognized his younger more innocent self as the hitchhiker turned out to be none other than—

  ‘Bob!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Put him in the boot,’ Terri said hastily to Chick, but to no avail as Bob was already squeezing himself in beside me, to the particular annoyance of the dog, who could see that there wasn’t enough room for this many bodies in a Cortina. The dog finally ended up sitting on Terri’s knee, although it would probably have been easier the other way round as the dog had a slightly larger volume.

  ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ I asked Bob.

  ‘I could ask the same of you,’ he said, unhelpfully, although it turned out that Bob had accidentally taken the wrong bus, believing himself to be on the way out to Balniddrie for a mellow afternoon in the country with Robin and had found himself instead in the more foreign reaches of Fife.

  ‘Transporter malfunction,’ he said, delving deep into the pocket of his greatcoat and discovering a Caramac bar.

  We were nearly over the bridge, the Tay beneath us was the colour of wet slate. Dundee grew nearer and nearer and Professor Cousins sighed with satisfaction and said, ‘Well, what a day.’

  ‘It’s not over yet,’ Chick said.

  * * *

  The funeral-paced hearse easily got the lead on us as Chick was a man who had obviously never watched a crow fly and executed several more detours once we arrived in Dundee – betting shops, The Golden Fry for a deep-fried pizza and so on – before finally bringing the Cortina to a halt, parked half on and off the pavement outside the Phoenix bar, not far from where he had run into the dog. Professor Cousins looked at the Phoenix and its solicitation to ‘Drink and be whole again beyond confusion’ (an unlikely outcome, you would think) and said wistfully to Chick, ‘Time for a wee dochan-dorris, Chick, my man?’ in his strangled dog-Scots. But Chick had already exited the car and was running up the street and dashing up the steps of the Catholic church on the Nethergate.

  ‘Where’s he gone?’ Professor Cousins asked, peering through the rain-smeared window.

  ‘Church, I think he’s gone to church,’ I ventured.

  ‘He didn’t seem the religious sort,’ Professor Cousins mused, ‘although a philosophical chap, don’t you think?’

  A hearse was parked outside the church; of course they all look alike, but it seemed likely that it was the one from The Anchorage.

  ‘I think he’s gone to a funeral,’ I said.

  * * *

  ‘Do you think he’s all right?’ Terri asked after ten minutes of waiting. ‘Not like I care or anything.’

  ‘Who is he anyway?’ Bob asked, his curiosity typically slow to be aroused.

  ‘A gumshoe,’ Professor Cousins said with relish.

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘A private investigator,’ I explained.

  ‘Wow.’

  Some desultory conversation followed during which Bob accidentally revealed that he was, to a certain extent, an English student. Professor Cousins was bewildered by this information, never having encountered Bob before.

  ‘Well, I’m a kind of … underground student,’ Bob said, rather unsatisfactorily. We waited another ten minutes and then Terri and I decided to go and find out what had happened to Chick.

  The church was Tardis-like, much bigger inside than it was outside, and was full of noises the sources of which were invisible – echoing footfalls and discreet coughing – as if there were people hiding behind screens and in the hollow crypts of the building. The coffin was miles away at the far end of an aisle that was like an airport runway. There was only a handful of mourners, scattered strategically around an ocean of pews, and they all turned to look at us as we entered. We sat down at the back and Terri gave me a little nudge to indicate how happy she was with the venue.

  In the absence of electricity the church was lit by dozens of candles. The priest presiding over the funeral was old and bulky, his black priest’s frock stained and strained over a big housekeeper-fed belly. The funeral service was complex and mysterious and seemed to have little to do with the corpse, who appeared to be called ‘Senga’.

  On the distaff side of the church I spotted Janice Rand. She was with a Christian friend – an unattractive girl with the beginnings of alopecia and thick-rimmed spectacles. You could tell just by looking at her that she’d spent her adolescence in a church youth-club playing table-tennis and ‘Kumbayah’ on acoustic guitar. Janice was carrying a handbag that looked as if it must have once belonged to her mother. It had a peeling Lifeboat sticker on the side.

  There was a knot of old ladies at the front of the church – Senga’s friends presumably – some of whom were clutching shopping-bags as though they’d stepped into the church by accident while out picking up their messages in Littlewoods.

  There was an air of palpable gloom which seemed to centre on the coffin. Perhaps when unhappy people die they release an effluvium of depression, like marsh gas. What happened, I wondered, to the molecules of the dead? Do they wait around, to be absorbed into any passer-by? I put my hand over my nose and mouth like a surgical mask just in case I inhaled any of Senga.

  The funeral service seemed suddenly to dwindle away into nothing and the mourners shuffled out of their seats and left the coffin to its fate. Janice Rand passed us by without acknowledgement. The electricity came back on, the harsh light rendering the church less attractive.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Chi
ck said when he saw us and then looked at his watch and said, ‘Shite – that’s never the time, is it?’ then looked heavenward and mumbled an apology for his language. He made a hasty sign of the cross and rushed out of the church.

  Surprised by the haste of his departure, we were rather slow to follow and by the time we got outside Bob and Professor Cousins had been decanted from the Cortina which was already pulling away from the kerb and nosing its way bullishly into the traffic. The dog’s sleepy face appeared in the back window. I almost expected it to raise a paw in farewell but instead it gave an enormous yawn, exposing surprisingly wolfish teeth.

  ‘I’m off,’ Bob said, and was gone before I had time to say I would go with him.

  ‘Me too,’ Terri said, hastily setting off in the direction of the Cortina and its canine hostage to fortune.

  Professor Cousins and I hung around on the pavement like people who’d been unexpectedly thrown out of a party and were wondering what to do next.

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s the end of the excitement for today,’ Professor Cousins said, rather dolefully.

  I accompanied him back to the university. I watched him walking up the path to the Tower, his back stooped and his legs bowed. He seemed too fragile and ancient to battle the biting winds that howled perpetually around the base of the Tower. He struggled to open the big doors of the building until a janitor finally took pity on him and yanked them open for him.

  I trudged home, an icy interstellar wind at my back and a shadow on my shoulder all the way. (‘We know we are sought,’ Archie told me, ‘and expect to be found,’ which I thought sounded quite biblical but Olivia said it was from Dangling Man by Saul Bellow.)

  Chez Bob

  I fought my way into the flat in Paton’s Lane. The hallway was currently being blocked by a variety of objects – four tyres from a 1957 Riley 1.5 saloon, which was all that was left of Bob’s disastrous attempt at car ownership (a long story that does not need telling); an art deco standard lamp that we had never got to work, and a stuffed King Emperor penguin that Bob had been unable to resist bidding for at the Ward Road auction rooms but which had been relegated to the hall because of the strange scent it gave off of death and badly digested fish.

  Despite my best efforts the flat remained a filthy place, smelling of curry powder and incense with a strange undertone of asafoetida. Bob never dusted or tidied (‘Why fight entropy?’) and rubbish of all kinds seemed to be attracted to him as if he was some kind of living dustbin.

  An important part of my leaving-Bob daydream was the place I would live in without him – an uncluttered white space full of nothing but me. And perhaps a coffee table. And a bowl of perfect green apples. Joni Mitchell on the stereo. A white rug.

  For all of this time I had been expecting Bob to change, change into somebody more energetic, more interesting – into someone else, in fact. It had dawned on me, only very slowly, that this was never going to happen. In the beginning I had liked Bob because he was Bob (although heaven knows why); now I was beginning to dislike him for the same reason. I was living with someone whose hobby was playing air guitar and who sincerely thought he was going to be a Time Lord when he grew up.

  ‘Hey,’ Bob said when he saw me. He was wearing a tank-top knitted by his mother for the larger version of Bob that she kindly held in her mind’s eye, and straight jeans which I had turned into massive flares for him by inserting pieces of old flannelette sheeting the colour of Germolene.

  He was sprawled on the floor, watching the innocent little girl on the test card with a touching devotion. The rays from television sets were vital to Bob’s continued existence on this planet, in the way that oxygen is for other people. He claimed that the three-day week was having an adverse effect on his metabolism. Bob had bought his small black-and-white portable set with the proceeds from his one and only summer job – counting trees in Camperdown for the parks department. Bob didn’t actually count the trees individually but looked at ‘a whole bunch’ of them and calculated how many there were, as in, ‘That looks like about twenty trees.’ As you can imagine, he usually got it completely wrong.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Bob asked.

  ‘With you, don’t you remember?’

  ‘No.’ Bob was eating the remains of a two-day-old biryani from the Lahore on the Perth Road. The chicken in the biryani bore a worrying anatomical resemblance to cat. Bob’s idea of a balanced diet left something to be desired. When I first met him he lived off fish suppers from The Deep Sea, the occasional tin of dog food (‘Why not?’) and jars of cold baby food, the latter a particularly sensible way of eating in Bob’s opinion – no cooking, no washing-up, no thought at all beyond whether to have ‘Lamb and Vegetables’ or ‘Pears and Custard’. Or both. It was wasted on babies, Bob said, and his only complaint was that Heinz didn’t do fish and chips in toddler-sized jars.

  I spent some time weaning him onto more regular student meals – sausage and chips, egg and beans, mince and anything and fish pie – the latter a concept that Bob found particularly bizarre for some reason and he kept repeating, ‘Wow, fish pie,’ until I had to ask him to stop. I took him shopping in Betty White’s on the High Street once and he couldn’t get over the idea that a shop could sell both fish and vegetables – ‘That’s not … natural,’ he said. Although not as unnatural, in Bob’s opinion, as fish farms.

  * * *

  What if I didn’t leave Bob? What if our slouch towards commitment ended at the altar? What would it be like if I occupied the wife-shaped space next to Bob? My life as a wife. In a Barratt’s starter-home, with an avocado bathroom and a three-piece suite in leather. If we ever had a child (a curious idea) I thought we should call it Inertia. Although our occasional dull missionary encounters didn’t seem passionate enough to produce anything as real and lasting as a child, even one called Inertia, and Bob (more likely to consult Mr Spock than Dr Spock) wasn’t fit to be in charge of a push-and-pull lawnmower let alone a baby in a pram.

  I did so hope that Bob was a dress rehearsal, a kind of mock-relationship, like a mock-exam, to prepare me for the real thing, because if I tried to imagine Bob in a grown-up life I could only visualize him slumped on the leather sofa, watching Jackanory with a huge joint in his hand.

  ‘Somebody just phoned for you,’ he said, spilling grains of cold yellow rice onto the carpet.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Dunno. Some woman.’

  ‘My mother?’

  ‘Don’t think so.’

  Of course not, what was I thinking, Nora didn’t have a phone. Nora didn’t even have electricity.

  ‘She sounded … weird,’ Bob said.

  ‘Weird? You mean weird accent?’

  ‘Quite correct, Captain.’

  No-one ever phoned me. The only reason we had a phone was because it was paid for by Bob’s father and mother – Bob Senior and Sylvia – so that Sylvia could remind Bob to have a wash occasionally and not eat Angel Delight at breakfast.

  Although you would never think it to look at him, Bob had a more than adequate family back in Essex, a fact that he usually denied because they were such models of suburban decorum. I found Bob’s family – Bob Senior, his mother Sylvia and his sister Cherry and a buxom black Labrador called Sadie – strangely charismatic; they lived the kind of banal, tediously quotidian lives that I’d always longed for – eating roast chicken, changing sheets, going for boring Sunday outings in the family car, treading on fitted wool carpets, taking holidays in Spain, entertaining from a full drinks cabinet. For me, they were the most attractive thing about Bob.

  We spent nearly every vacation with them in the pleasantly anodyne atmosphere of their house in Ilford, so much more normal than Nora’s wrack and insular home. Bob, on these visits, was his usual self, sleeping most of the day and then hanging around all evening, waiting for his parents to go to bed so that he could skin up a joint and watch Come Dancing.

  Bob slept in his boyhood room, which, despite Sylvia’s best cleaning efforts, had ne
ver been purged of the smell of the teenage Bob – a heady perfume of sweaty socks and unwashed foreskins, of night emissions and illicit lager. It was decorated with football-themed wallpaper and still contained his old Dinky cars and the grotesquely misshapen soft toys that Sylvia had lovingly knitted for him.

  I was always sequestered in the guest room, to prevent any ‘shenanigans’ – as Bob Senior put it – taking place. (‘As if,’ Bob Junior said.) The guest room provided an antiseptic yet pleasant environment, with its decor of overblown wallpaper roses, the rag rug on the floor, the clean magnolia paintwork and the flimsy flowered curtain that let in the orange glow of sodium street lights. I spent long hours in there, reading my way through the miscellany of guest-room reading matter (old National Geographics, dog-eared Agatha Christies, Reader’s Digests) and listening to the sounds of a well-ordered house. I couldn’t help thinking how much better off I would have been as a child with Sylvia as my mother – in fact, I would have been a different person altogether. Instead, I had been subjected in my formative years to Nora’s sloppy habits and laissez-faire philosophies (‘Well, don’t go to school if you don’t want to.’)

  ∼ I was teaching you free will, Nora says grumpily.

  It was surprising I got an education at all, scraping through seaside secondary schools – Whitley Bay being the last town in our coastal odyssey. Only after Nora had waved me off on the train from Newcastle did she leave her job in a dingy hotel and set off back to the land of her birth and to the Stuart-Murrays’ holiday home.