Emotionally Weird Kate Atkinson

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BOB WAS FAST ASLEEP IN BED WHEN I ENTERED THE FLAT. THE bedroom curtains were open and when I went to draw them I was reminded of Ferdinand – a comparison that couldn’t possibly work in Bob’s favour, especially as he was now sleepmumbling something about herring (‘They’ve got knives!’).

Something caught my eye down on the street – a figure was standing in the doorway of a building. It was surely the woman who had asked me the time only a few minutes ago. She struck a match to light a cigarette and I could see her hair – the colour of old threepenny-bits – and her perfectly straight nose. I suddenly realized who it was that she had a look of – the height, her carriage, the way she stood with feet splayed – she was like a poor and scrawny version of my mother, a prototype of Nora that hadn’t quite worked. The little flame of the match caught something else too – bitterness in the set of her features, disappointment etched in her skin.

~ What a good police witness you would make, Nora says, rather cynically.

The woman caught sight of me, turned away, and disappeared into the darkness.

I shivered with the cold and slid into bed beside Bob, who was clutching a blue rubber hot-water bottle in the shape of a small teddy-bear.

‘Show by the use of reason,’ he muttered, ‘that reason itself is unreliable.’

I couldn’t help but wonder if Bob really had been to a John Martin concert. On page 58 I looked out of the third-floor window as if I’d just seen something interesting. The thing I had seen was Bob, deep in conversation with one of Archie’s postgraduate students, a young woman who was built like a pencil and whose doctoral thesis (Losing the Plot) was on Finnegans Wake, thus making her totally unsuitable for Bob. I would have thought it an innocent enough encounter if it hadn’t been for the expression on Bob’s face – bright and interested, almost, dare I say it, flirtatious. Had he looked at me like that once? If he had I could no longer remember. I hoped he wasn’t planning on being unfaithful to me, at least not with such a very plain girl.

‘Shagging Shug?’ Bob said contemplatively when we were woken in the middle of the night by noises from Shug’s flat below. ‘Forever Changes’ was seeping up through the floorboards, a sure sign that Shug was in a mellow mood. The strains of ‘Andmoreagain’ were counterpointed by the inarticulate grunts and troats of coition, with an occasional whinny that sounded suspiciously like Andrea.

It’s impossible, as we all know, to fall asleep to the sounds of someone else’s lovemaking (except possibly Bob’s) and so we had to wait out the denouement. (‘What are they doing for so long?’ Bob puzzled.)

To pass the time, Bob suggested a game. I vetoed his usual choices – ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral’, the inevitable ‘I-Spy’ and Bob’s favourite game, naming the Seven Dwarves; he had never yet managed to get all seven at one time. Eventually we settled on ‘The Minister’s Cat Went Shopping’ (‘The Minister’s Cat went to town and bought an Aberdeen Angus cow,’ and so on), and by the time our downstairs neighbours had finally finished fornicating, the poor cat was trying to manoeuvre a large walnut wardrobe through the door of the manse.

Just as I was finally dropping off to sleep, Bob said, ‘Oh yeah, that woman phoned again.’

‘And?’

‘I said you did live here, after all.’

‘And?’ I prompted.

‘She said she’d be in touch.’

‘And you didn’t find out who she was?’

‘Was I supposed to?’

Someone – Mother Nature, presumably – was hurling handfuls of sleet like wet sand at the window and I shivered and moved closer to Bob’s unyielding body and thought about Ferdinand in the hope that I would dream about him – I love my love with an F because he is Felicitous. I hate him with an F because he is Felonious. I fed him with Fern cakes and Forbidden fruit. His name is Ferdinand and he lives in the Far North – but instead all night long I dreamt I was a seagull because Bob had put his copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull, the only book he had actually read all year (apart from The It Book of Drugs), under my pillow.

I was awake at seven but it felt like the middle of the night. I tried and failed to go back to sleep. Bob was snoring with delirious abandon – a complex and apparently random pattern of snorts and dramatic gasps like a large carp drowning on air.

Reluctantly, I heaved myself out of bed. At least there was electricity, even though it made little impression on the morning Murk. I made myself a cup of instant coffee and draped myself in a blanket so that I resembled a tepee and with a heavy heart began to type.

Jack Gannet was a man who believed there was a logic that underpinned existence and if he couldn’t find the logic then he had faith that it was unavailable rather than non-existent. Absence of evidence, he said, did not mean evidence was absent. One of the men he relied upon to back this belief up was Henry Machin, the pathologist.

Henry Machin picked up a scalpel and looked at it affectionately.

‘What do you think – accident?’ Jack Gannet asked hopefully.

The pathologist laughed, a hollow sound that you could imagine came out of the same box as the noise of swishing scythes and hissing pendulums. ‘Doubt it,’ he said. He was one of those people who always saw the funny side of everything, Jack Gannet thought morosely.

He threw a tentative glance at the new constable – Collins – to see if he was the fainting sort, but so far he looked normal. Whatever that was. Constable Collins, pale and gently loitering in the background, had helped to bring the dead woman ashore and felt that it was his duty to see his charge through to the end. Traces of her red nail varnish, he noticed, could still be seen where her fingertips hadn’t been eaten. He wondered what kind of sea-creatures did that. Shrimp? Constable Collins liked shrimp and often bought a tub of them when he was down on the Front. Did shrimp eat people? And if in turn you ate the shrimp did that technically make you into a cannibal? And what about scampi? His wife, who said she was dying of boredom – which would be a first for the medical world – was very fond of scampi. He couldn’t imagine what scampi looked like swimming around in the sea.

‘How long has she been in the water, do you think?’ Jack Gannet asked Henry Machin.

‘Hard to tell,’ the pathologist said. ‘At this time of year the water’s warm; decomposition sets in quickly. She looks a bit of a mess.’

‘So do I first thing in the morning,’ Jack Gannet said wearily. ‘Five days maybe?’ He kept his voice respectfully low when he was talking about the dead for sometimes he had this eerie feeling that they could hear him, that they hadn’t quite . . . gone.

He knew this was no accident, he could feel it like a vibration, like an angry aura of wasps. Henry Machin slipped the scalpel into the dead mermaid flesh like a hot knife in butter and Constable Collins fainted quietly so as not to disturb anyone.

The morning post clattered through the letterbox. It contained a rather threatening note, signed by Joan, the departmental secretary, reminding me that my essay for Professor Cousins (‘Tragedy plus Time equals Comedy’ Discuss) was several weeks overdue. I wondered if it worked the other way round – Comedy plus Time equals Tragedy? Perhaps not.

The brusque, almost callous, tone of the note indicated that it had been penned by someone other than Professor Cousins, who, even if he remembered omissions and absences, never cared enough to reprimand people for them.

I decided that, rather than speak to him, I would leave him a letter, beseeching leniency, and plead a dying grandmother in mitigation. Is my grandmother dead? Or grandmothers in the plural, for surely there must have been two of them unless autogenesis runs in the family?

~ Dead, Nora says.

‘And your grandmothers, what about them?’

~ Very dead, and I only had one.

But you can’t have only one grandmother, that’s illogical. Everyone has two. Don’t they?

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