UNBELIEVABLY, IT
WAS ONLY EIGHT O’CLOCK WHEN I got home. I ate
Cornish Wafers and Philadelphia cream cheese; I watched the news,
although I turned it off when it showed trees being napalmed. I
read Me and Miss Mandible
and listened to After the Gold Rush; I washed out a
pair of tights and sewed on a button. I ate more Cornish Wafers,
but I had run out of Philadelphia. I wrote a halfhearted sentence
of Henry James (James’s
implication is not only that the novel is episodic and fragmented
but also that it is a vehicle for far too much analytic and
philosophical intrusion on the part of the author herself
–) until finally I went to bed only to be woken a
couple of hours later by Shug and Bob rolling in with a couple of
traffic cones and a clutch of warm rolls from Cuthbert’s all-night
bakery. Of my mysterious promised visitor there had been no sign at
all.
~ Have you
guessed who she is yet? I ask Nora, who is chewing on a Jacob’s
cream cracker from a packet she’s found in a tin at the back of a
cupboard. I can smell its staleness. Nora has coiled her hair up in
a careless heap and I can see fiery little tendrils curling at her
neck. Today our hair is very red on account of the rain that is
threatening us. For we live in a raincloud. Nora says she can feel
the rheumaticky weather in her bones. She says she is a human
barometer.
‘Do you recognize
her?’
~ Do you think that’s a
weevil? she asks, staring at the cream cracker.
Bob and Shug
started playing a relentless, noisy game of Diplomacy until,
overcome by an attack of the munchies, they went out into the
darkness on a quest for Mars Bars. The clock by the bed said six
o’clock. I wondered if it was morning or night. It didn’t make any
difference, I was wide awake anyway. There seemed to be nothing for
it but to write.
Madame Astarti
took an early lunch, ambling out to buy fish and chips from a
little place down a side street called ‘The Catch Of The Day’. It
was off the tourist track and much frequented by the locals. It was
a comfortable, old-fashioned kind of place with tiled pictures of
fish and a back room with a coal fire. It took a minute or two for
Madame Astarti to notice that it was no longer the chip shop it had
been, but was now called ‘The Codfather’ and had been fitted out in
stainless steel and pale blue plastic.
‘One of each,
please, Sharon,’ she said, ‘and perhaps an extra portion of chips,’
she added as an afterthought.
‘Scraps?’ Sharon
offered.
‘Oh yes, scraps,’ Madame
Astarti agreed.
‘Mushy
peas?’
‘Go on then,’ Madame
Astarti said.
‘Pickled
onion?’
‘All right.’ Madame
Astarti drew the line at a pickled egg. You had to draw the line
somewhere, after all.
The fish supper came on
a cardboard tray with a plastic fork. ‘What happened here?’ Madame
Astarti asked.
‘Modern times,’ Sharon
said, ‘that’s what happened.’ Shades of Lou Rigatoni, if Madame
Astarti wasn’t mistaken. Clearly, he was a man who wasn’t going to
be satisfied until he bought up everything on the
coast.
Madame Astarti ate her
fish and chips out of the tray, sitting on a bench on the pier,
watched, from a discreet distance, by a yellow dog. She could see
part of the harbour festooned with blue-and-white crime-scene tape
like bunting, but there were few onlookers as there was no longer
anything to see. The tide was now out as far as it could go and the
exposed beach littered with bodies in various stages of pinkness,
like boiled shrimp. They looked dead, although Madame Astarti
presumed they weren’t.
Over by the donkeys she
spotted Councillor Vic Leggat deep in conversation with one of Lou
Rigatoni’s henchmen. What were they up to? She wondered. No good,
probably. She tossed the yellow dog a chip.
‘Captain’s log
supplemental,’ Bob announced, rolling in around dawn, ‘subject has
entered pon
farr, the Vulcan mating cycle. You are the
lovely T’Pring – fancy a shag?’ An offer which I rebuffed rather
swiftly and Bob was soon sleeping the deep sleep of the innocent
fool.
Madame Astarti
waddled back along the pier. My, my, she thought to herself (but
who else do you think to?), that was some sea-fret that was rolling
in. A great white wall of fog was moving inland, beyond it
everything dark and obscure and yet in front of it the sun shone
gloriously on the beach and the holidaymakers. Some of them had
noticed the sea-fret by now and had jumped up in alarm. It looked
like something out of a horror film, a malevolent presence
swallowing everything before it. The fog horn started booming, a
deep, thrilling vibration that Madame Astarti could feel resonate
in her bones. They called it haar in Scotland, didn’t they? It was
a funny word. She had been up there once with a Jock. A Jock called
Jock. Haar Haar.
‘Wet fish!’ Bob
shouted in his sleep and began to laugh uncontrollably until I
smothered him with a pillow.
