Emotionally Weird Kate Atkinson

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‘You’re back!’ Brian’s voice boomed out of the depths of The Crab and Bucket.

‘I haven’t been anywhere, you daft pillock,’ Madame Astarti said, fighting her way past the draped fishing nets and glass floats that made up the interior decor of The Crab and Bucket – or The Crab as it was known affectionately by the locals. It was the kind of pub that holidaymakers went into thinking it looked authentic and interesting (it smelt of raw fish) and hurried out of again without even having put glass to lip. This was not so much on account of the gloomy green underwater lighting or the dead stuffed fish in glass cases around the wall, as the unwelcoming hostility of the natives. If Custer had had The Crab and Bucket’s regulars on his side he would have lived to stand another day.

Madame Astarti did not even have to glance in the barman’s direction – a melancholic man called Les (or Les Miserables, as the locals called him behind his back) – for him to put out a glass and start filling it with a large measure of gin and a token splash of tonic.

‘I,’ Brian said cheerfully, ‘have been to hell and back.’

‘Don’t exaggerate, you’ve been shopping in Scarborough with Sandra,’ Madame Astarti said, heaving herself onto a bar stool next to Brian. ‘Where is she anyway?’

‘On her way,’ Brian said, plunging his face as far as he could into his glass and inhaling beer fumes. A little spasm of pain crossed his face and he said, ‘Left my ruddy arch supports out.’ Madame Astarti commiserated with him. ‘Ah, Rita,’ Brian said, ‘why didn’t I marry you instead?’

‘Because I wouldn’t have you,’ Madame Astarti said and gave him a sharp rap on his knuckles with her–

—what? Her fan-shaped wafer-biscuit? Her crystal ball? Oh dear God, this was so tiring. I was developing some kind of fever, one of those hot and cold things. I took two paracetamol and went to bed with Bob’s blue teddy-bear hot-water bottle and read The Indian Uprising. Then I must have dozed off because the next thing I knew Bob was lying in bed beside me, claiming to have spent the night in The Tavern – a particularly debauched student watering-hole – which was strange because Shug had telephoned from there an hour earlier asking if I knew where Bob was.

‘If Alice comes,’ Bob said earnestly to me, ‘and either Bernard or Charles comes, Dotty will show up. Bernard and Edward will either both come, or both stay away, and Alice will put in an appearance if and only if Charles and Edward are both going to be there. So Dotty won’t be there if Alice isn’t.’

‘Bob, what are you talking about?’

‘Don’t ask me,’ he said, ‘given the premises of the above –

a) Could all five people come? Could only four come, and if so which four? Could three, and if so which three? Could two, and if so which two? Could one, and if so which one? Could none of them come?

b) In what circumstance will Alice come?

c) Whose absence will be sufficient to ensure the absence of Bernard?

d) Is it possible for Bernard to come without either Alice or Edward coming?’

I was asleep by then, of course.

Madame Astarti’s head was throbbing. She peered into the dregs of her glass suspiciously. She had a hangover already and she hadn’t even finished drinking. There was a man once, long ago, who had tried to spike her drink in an effort to sell her into the white slave trade and since then she had felt you should be as alert as possible when getting drunk. Not that it was likely that anyone was after her for the white slave trade any more.

‘I’ve never really understood what that was,’ Sandra said. It seemed to Madame Astarti that Sandra’s thin red lips mouthed the words a second or two behind the sound and she leant forward to tell Sandra that she was out of synch with herself but lurched and nearly toppled from the stool.

‘What is it exactly you don’t understand, my darling?’ Brian asked Sandra, ‘the word “white”, the word “slave” or the word “trade”?’

Sandra’s neck and cleavage had grown scrawny over the years so that parts of her now resembled a chicken. She crossed one artificially tanned leg over the other and waved a gold strappy-sandalled foot around. ‘Coming to see the show this season, Rita?’

‘As if I would miss it,’ Madame Astarti replied. Brian and Sandra weren’t just Brian and Sandra, they were also ‘The Great Pandini and his Lovely Assistant, Sabrina’ – staple fodder for summer shows and holiday-camp seasons across the land. Every evening, Brian abandoned his British Home Stores pullover and polyester slacks and was transformed into a vampirish figure courtesy of a top-hat and a swirling black cape lined with scarlet satin ‘from Remnant Kings at seventy-five pence a metre – that’s fifteen shillings a yard to you and me,’ Sandra said to Madame Astarti. Sandra herself donned fishnets and black satin and prepared herself for being sawn in half and vanished.

‘Dickie Henderson,’ Sandra said, ‘now there was a great performer.’

‘Is he dead?’ Brian asked.

‘Could be,’ Madame Astarti said gloomily. The heat and the noise in The Crab and Bucket were beginning to make her feel quite ill.

‘Another one?’ Brian asked cheerfully, more to himself than anyone else.

‘You’ve had too much already,’ Sandra said. ‘I’ll have a port and lemon, you’ll have a half, no more. Rita?’

‘Don’t mind if I do.’

‘Fag?’

‘Go on, then.’

‘Did you hear about that woman?’ Sandra asked, her face looming in and out of focus, ‘the one in the sea. Dreadful thing.’

‘Do they know who she is yet?’ Brian asked, downing his half and then staring hopefully into the bottom of the glass as if he was expecting it to come back.

‘Was, Brian, was,’ Sandra corrected him. ‘She is no more. Her name, I believe, was Anne-Marie Devine.’

‘Was what?’ Madame Astarti said, spilling her drink all over herself.

‘Anne-Marie Devine,’ Sandra repeated, ‘a lady of the night. Rita, are you all right?’

‘A lady of the night?’ Brian said.

Sandra took another cigarette out of the packet. ‘Give us a light,’ she said to Brian.

Oh no, Madame Astarti thought, they were beginning to –

‘Poor cow,’ Brian said. ‘I wonder what she looked like?’

‘About my height,’ Sandra said, ‘not very bright.’

‘I bet she’s a sight.’

‘Give you a fright.’

Madame Astarti moaned, the room was beginning to spin, she must get out of this nightmare.

The wind roars, the seas howl. Nora is standing on the headland like the figurehead on the prow of a ship. I think she is trying to conjure up a storm. It is a diversionary tactic – she will do anything rather than finish her tale.

My mother is not my mother. My father is not my father. Nora’s father is not her father. Lo we are as jumbled as a box of biscuits.

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