Emotionally Weird Kate Atkinson

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‘LIKE THE FEEDING OF THE FIVE THOUSAND,’ PHILIPPA SAID cheerfully, making sandwiches from slices of Sunblest and the remains of the salmon, which had now acquired a faint tarnish of iridescent green. Even Goneril had lost interest in it.

In fact there were only eight people at the women’s liberation meeting in Windsor Place and four of those – Andrea, Professor Cousins, Mrs McCue and Mrs Macbeth – were not members of the group, as Heather took it upon herself to point out vociferously and at some length.

‘He’s a man,’ she said indignantly when Professor Cousins made himself busy slaking Mrs McCue and Mrs Macbeth’s endless need for tea. Professor Cousins tottered around the kitchen table with the teapot, enquiring about milk and sugar preferences, proffering teaspoons and murmuring sotto voce apologies for the use of teabags. Professor Cousins bought his Darjeeling fresh by the leafy quarter from Braithwaite’s every week and seemed particularly perturbed by Philippa’s oak-coloured Typhoo.

Mrs McCue sniffed her tea suspiciously as if it might be laced with arsenic.

‘She thinks someone’s trying to kill her as well,’ I explained to Professor Cousins.

‘Well, you know what they say, don’t you?’ he said in a confidential voice to Mrs McCue.

‘Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you?’ she said.

‘Exactly!’ he grinned.

Sheila Lake, smeared with oatmeal and masticated Farley’s rusks – and presumably with a baby hidden about her person somewhere – seemed rather charmed by Professor Cousins’ geisha qualities, complaining that Roger wouldn’t recognize the kettle if it hit him on the head (an attractive idea). She seemed blissfully ignorant of the fact that her husband was planning to move his pregnant (or perhaps no longer pregnant) girlfriend into her sandstone villa in Barnhill.

‘No Kara?’ I asked. ‘No Olivia?’ No-one, in fact, who might take Proteus off my hands – Proteus who was currently asleep on the bed in the spare room, the erstwhile place of repose of Ferdinand and Janet. Janet herself was sleeping peacefully under the kitchen table downstairs, but what of Ferdinand, where was he?

‘He’s taken the dog for a walk,’ Philippa said. Duke gave her a questioning look. She frowned at him. ‘Not that dog, obviously,’ she said, ‘because that dog is here and we can’t ignore the evidence of our senses because then we would enter the territory of casuistry and unnatural doubt, which is all very well in its place. Of course, some people would argue that the truth of factual statements can only be established inductively from particular experiences. Can perceptions yield knowledge of a mind-independent world? Is such a world ever knowable? Does “being” consist in “being perceived”? Is a dog merely a collection of sense data – the smell of a dog, the sound of a dog, the feel of a dog, the taste of a dog, et cetera?’ Philippa paused and, returning Duke’s scrutinizing gaze, said rather lamely, ‘Another dog, Ferdinand’s taken another dog for a walk.’

‘The taste of a dog?’ Mrs Macbeth puzzled.

The McCue kitchen contained two of the things Andrea feared most in life – food and old people – a fact that was making her rather pale and fidgety. She reported being dragooned by Heather to attend this meeting after being lectured on the ethics of eating an egg from the shared fridge, which she claimed she hadn’t even touched – an egg which was marked ‘H’ in black felt-tip pen, ‘Like Humpty-Dumpty,’ Andrea said moodily. She was wearing a smocked and ruffled pinafore that would not have looked out of place on a Victorian child.

‘I thought property was theft?’ I said to Heather.

‘Property’s property,’ she retorted crossly.

‘What does that mean?’ I said, irritated by this tautologous wisdom, ‘like “I’m me”, or “a door is a door”, “a cat’s a cat”?’

‘A man’s a man for a’ that,’ Mrs Macbeth said.

‘Is this a game?’ Professor Cousins asked hopefully.

Mrs McCue was buttering Selkirk bannock. Mrs McCue and Mrs Macbeth had been busy baking in Philippa’s kitchen all morning although, as Mrs McCue confided rather loudly in my ear, not before they had scrubbed everything clean of the McCues’ resident germs.

‘Bannock, anyone?’ Mrs McCue offered, handing round a plate.

‘I thought that was a battle,’ Andrea said, frowning at the huge slab of calories being thrust under her nose.

‘I’m awfie fond of a wee bittie bannock myself,’ Mrs Macbeth said conversationally to no-one in particular. She was wearing a wrap-over overall and was lightly dusted with a talcum of flour.

‘Oh, me too,’ Professor Cousins said enthusiastically. ‘I can’t think of anything better than tucking into a spread prepared by the deft hands of the fairer sex.’

‘Come again?’ Heather said waspishly, her face distorting unattractively with disbelief.

‘I said,’ Professor Cousins began again pleasantly—

‘I heard what you said,’ Heather said rudely. ‘I just couldn’t believe you said it.’

‘Shouldn’t you be at the barricades or something?’ I said to her.

‘There’s no difference between the fight for feminism and the fight for socialism,’ she said, inadvertently eating a piece of Irish tea-loaf that Mrs McCue had just buttered. A raisin lodged unattractively between Heather’s front teeth but I chose not to tell her about it.

Andrea meanwhile nibbled delicately on a slice of Border tart, looking rather faint, while Mrs Macbeth urged a flapjack on her.

‘I like to bake,’ she said. ‘I like to keep my hand in. Or hands in,’ she added, looking down at one of her own midget hands, but then she seemed to grow suddenly confused and hobbled away, patting Andrea’s shoulder affectionately as she passed her. Andrea gave a little shudder.

‘It’s not contagious,’ I reassured her. ‘It’s not like leprosy, you can’t catch old age by touching them.’

‘She seems so very small,’ Andrea whispered to me, nodding in the direction of Mrs Macbeth’s retreating back. ‘Was she small to begin with? Or do we all end up like that?’

‘What?’ Mrs McCue said. ‘It’s rude to whisper, you know.’

‘I said,’ Andrea said more loudly, ‘that she seems very small.’

‘Who? Who seems very small?’ Philippa asked.

‘That . . . small woman,’ Andrea said helplessly, for Mrs Macbeth was now out of sight.

‘She means Mrs Macbeth,’ Mrs McCue said, buttering everything she could get her hands on.

‘Mrs Macbeth?’ Andrea repeated doubtfully.

‘It’s a perfectly good name,’ Mrs McCue said. ‘People are called it.’

‘Well, they’re not called “it”,’ Professor Cousins said and laughed.

‘Look,’ Heather said crossly, ‘this isn’t the WI; we’re supposed to be having a serious meeting about wages for housework.’

Mrs McCue took out a familiar piece of knitting and frowned. ‘Wages for housework? But who would pay them?’

‘The wages of sin,’ Professor Cousins said vaguely. ‘You don’t seem to have a hot-water jug,’ he added to Philippa.

‘What would I want a hot-water jug for?’ she puzzled.

‘For hot water, of course,’ Mrs McCue said. Before this conversation could carry on (‘What would I want hot water for?’ et cetera), Maisie burst into the kitchen, Lucy Lake trailing on her heels.

‘Hello, Emily,’ Sheila said carelessly, when she saw Lucy.

‘Lucy,’ Lucy corrected her. Sheila peered at her eldest more closely and still didn’t seem convinced.

‘Salmon sandwich?’ Philippa coaxed, pushing the plate towards Lucy and Maisie. No-one had so far touched one. Mrs Macbeth wandered back into the room and looked startled, as if she had been expecting to enter a quite different room in a quite different house (and perhaps at a quite different point in the century).

Professor Cousins cranked his skinny cat hams up from his chair and pulled another one out for Mrs Macbeth and said, ‘Do take a seat, Mrs Macbeth,’ so that Heather looked fit to explode at this further affront to her egalitarian sensibilities.

The sight of Maisie reminded me that the last time I saw her I had recklessly abandoned her to Chick’s dubious guardianship.

‘You got home all right then last night?’ I asked her.

She rolled her eyes (‘Oh, don’t,’ Professor Cousins said faintly). ‘It depends what you mean by “all right”,’ she mumbled through a mouthful of bannock.

‘She was late, I know that,’ Philippa said.

‘I had recorder practice,’ Maisie lied artlessly, but then a muffled squealing noise announced that Proteus had woken up. I hoped he hadn’t fallen off the bed.

I had moved Archie’s manuscript from beneath the guest bed before putting Proteus down. He was too young to be exposed to the corrupting influence of J and his cohorts. The latest chapter to be added was particularly nasty. J – or J’s doppelgänger, for he appeared to have acquired at least one recently – was being tortured by a particularly sadistic woman wearing nothing but high-heeled leather boots. More bizarrely still, The Expanding Prism of J had been joined in the spare room by The Wards of Love, like a matching pair of His ’n’ Hers imaginations. I dreaded to think what would happen if the two got mixed up. Before she knew where she was, Flick would be wearing Avengers boots and running up and down endless stairs in European apartment blocks being chased by the vile beasts of the imagination (Paranoia and Melancholia).

I changed Proteus’s nappy, bundling him anyhow into the awkward terry square but pinning it very cautiously in case I pierced his fragile baby flesh. I wondered what I was going to do when I came to the end of Olivia’s supply of nappies. Perhaps I’d have to start washing them. (What a thought.) I jiggled Proteus around on my hip for a while and showed him the view from the window. He held out one fat arm and tried to catch a seagull flying low. Today the Tay was the colour of infinity and made me feel suddenly depressed. Nothing good ever seemed to happen to me. And I was stuck with a madwoman with the same name as me stalking me, and someone else’s baby and Bob for a boyfriend and some horrible virus that had got into my blood and was taking over my body like the alien being that it was.

If only Ferdinand were here right at that very moment he could take me masterfully in his arms and I could wilt under the smouldering gaze of his soulful, troubled eyes. He could trace the outline of my face with his surprisingly gentle fingers – perhaps smile wolfishly – and bury his face in my hair and say in a smoky voice, ‘No woman until now, Effie, has—’ Proteus started to go purple in the face and I realized he was choking on something. I patted him on the back as hard as I dared but he still couldn’t breathe.

In desperation I held him upside down by his ankles and shook him. Thankfully, this extreme measure succeeded in dislodging a wad of paper like an owl pellet and Proteus gave a reassuringly hearty roar of distress. When he’d calmed down I unwound the pellet and discovered a particularly delirious page of Philippa’s dialogue. The Wards of Love really ought to carry a health warning.

When I took Proteus back downstairs I discovered that Professor Cousins was trying to get everyone to play ‘a word game’ which seemed to owe quite a lot to Martha Sewell. He caught sight of me and said, ‘Not The And – you know that game, don’t you, dear?’

The thought of Martha made me feel suddenly stricken with guilt about Terri. By Philippa’s kitchen clock it was now a quarter past one. Terri must surely be awake by now (although perhaps not) and wondering if Hank aka Buddy had gone AWOL.

‘You take three words,’ Professor Cousins was explaining, ‘and you try and make a sentence from them. For example fish,’ he bowed courteously at the ruins of the salmon, ‘table and, um, let me see, erythrophobia.’

‘Erythrophobia?’ Mrs Macbeth said tentatively.

‘Fear of blushing,’ Philippa declared.

‘I didn’t know that,’ Maisie said.

‘So . . .’ Sheila Lake said doubtfully, ‘the salmon on the table had erythrophobia. Is that right?’

‘Exactly!’ Professor Cousins said enthusiastically.

‘What a stupid game,’ Lucy Lake remarked.

‘Can we stop this?’ Heather sulked, but was ignored by everyone.

‘Another one,’ Mrs McCue demanded.

‘Well . . . cat,’ Professor Cousins said, catching sight of Goneril slinking into the kitchen, ‘beetroot and . . . kazoo.’

‘Well, that’s more of a challenge,’ Philippa admitted, but then Mrs Macbeth gave a little screech of alarm as Goneril jumped up on the table and deposited a limp McFluffy in front of her.

‘Jings, crivens and help me Boab,’ Mrs Macbeth exclaimed.

Some drama ensued – Maisie administering mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, Mrs McCue producing a bottle of Macintosh’s smelling salts, and so on, but in the end the unfortunate creature was pronounced dead.

‘There’s no keeping them,’ Philippa sighed. ‘They’re as bad as lemmings.’

Maisie was sanguine about the sudden demise of the latest McFluffy and had already started explaining to Professor Cousins the complexities of hamster heaven, which was a branch of rodent heaven (rather full thanks mainly to the McCue household), itself a division of small mammal heaven, and so on.

‘And hamster heaven,’ Professor Cousins asked, absent-mindedly stroking the silken fur of the little corpse, ‘does that have further sub-divisions – Russian, Golden, Dwarf, and so on?’

‘Dwarf?’ Mrs Macbeth queried quietly but Professor Cousins had already embarked on another game. ‘You take a word of five letters,’ he beamed, ‘“novel”, for example, and then you must find something beginning with each letter – n-o-v-e-l – in each of the following categories – a town, a river, a flower, a writer and a composer. For example – Nottingham, the Nile, nasturtium, Nabokov and, um, let me see – a composer beginning with “N”?’

‘Luigi Nono,’ Philippa said.

‘Who?’

‘He wrote Il canto sospeso,’ Philippa said, ‘a spare, rather enigmatic work, in 1955, followed by Intolleranza in 1960. Quite controversial, interested in social issues, influenced by Webern.’

‘How about Ivor Novello?’ Mrs McCue suggested.

‘Much better,’ Professor Cousins agreed. ‘So – let’s see, a five-letter word, what about “basil”? The herb rather than the man—’

‘What man?’ Sheila asked.

‘Well, any man,’ Professor Cousins said. ‘Any man called Basil. Effie – that is your name, isn’t it?’ I nodded. ‘Why don’t you start?’

‘Me?’

‘Start with “B”,’ he said encouragingly.

‘Why not “A”?’ Mrs McCue puzzled.

I sighed. ‘B . . .’

‘Town, river, flower, writer, composer,’ Professor Cousins coaxed.

‘Birmingham, bluebell, Barthelme, Berlioz.’

‘You missed out the river,’ Lucy Lake said. But no-one could think of a river beginning with B and, before they could, Professor Cousins suddenly gasped, ‘The Duchess of Malfi!’ So I presumed he was meant to be teaching it – or thought he was supposed to be teaching it.

‘Roger and I went there on honeymoon,’ Sheila said vaguely, ‘the Malfi Coast, the Neapolitan Riviera.’

‘No, no, no,’ Professor Cousins corrected her gently, ‘that’s the Amalfi coast.’

‘The Neapolitan Riviera,’ Mrs Macbeth said; ‘it sounds like an ice-cream.’

‘I’ve been to the Riviera,’ Mrs McCue said unexpectedly, ‘the French Riviera. A long time ago, before I was married, before Archie was born. With a man called Frankie.’ She sighed. ‘He was rich. Very romantic, it was – walking under foreign moonlight, smoking those French cigarettes. We drove there in Frankie’s cream Bristol—’

‘A Bristol cream?’ Professor Cousins said, looking round hopefully.

‘No, a cream Bristol, it’s a car.’

‘I’ve never been further than Blairgowrie for the berries,’ Mrs Macbeth said sadly.

‘La Terrazza dell’Infinità,’ Professor Cousins said dreamily. ‘The Terrace of Infinity – that’s on the Amalfi Coast, you know, near somewhere I can’t remember. I had the most charming experience there once.’

‘Really?’ the romantic novelist in Philippa asked.

‘Cover her face,’ Professor Cousins murmured.

‘Whose?’ Mrs Macbeth asked, looking askance. I thought it would be as well to introduce some other topic of conversation and I asked Andrea – who had now finished the entire Border tart and looked as if she was about to throw it all back up again any minute – how her spells were coming along. I was wondering if she could magic up another Weimaraner for me.

‘Do you have dizzy spells too?’ Professor Cousins asked her, full of concern.

‘Magic spells,’ I explained to him.

‘Oh, how thrilling for you,’ Professor Cousins said, clasping his hands over his heart.

‘Well?’ I prompted Andrea, who was looking at Professor Cousins as if he was insane.

‘What exactly were you looking for?’ she asked doubtfully.

‘How about replicating something?’

‘Replicating? Replicating what?’

‘A dog.’ What a lot of problems it would solve if there could be a Hank and a Buddy.

‘Cloning,’ Philippa snorted dismissively, ‘they’ll never achieve that, not in Scotland anyway, and think of the ethical problems.’

‘No, this would solve ethical problems,’ I said. Why was I even having this ridiculous conversation, I wondered.

‘Magic,’ Professor Cousins said wistfully, ‘do you believe in it?’

No I didn’t. But I wished I did.

The front door slammed vigorously and Archie entered the kitchen on a great draught of cold outdoor air. He looked perturbed at the sight of not only Professor Cousins but also Mrs McCue and Mrs Macbeth, cosily ensconced at his kitchen table.

‘It’s like a nursing home in here,’ he complained, glaring at his mother who pulled out a chair and said, ‘Take the weight off your feet, son.’

‘You’ll be late for school,’ Philippa said to no-one in particular so that everyone glanced nervously at their watches, everyone except Maisie and Lucy Lake.

‘An education’s everything,’ Mrs McCue said encouragingly to them.

‘Well, not everything,’ Mrs Macbeth protested. ‘It’s not meat and milk, or weather, or tea or—’

‘Or sheep,’ Maisie offered.

‘Sheep?’ Philippa frowned.

‘Or roof tiles,’ Professor Cousins contributed, getting into the spirit of things, ‘or cushion covers or—’

‘Stop it now,’ a very vexed Heather said, clapping her hands like a nursery school teacher; ‘this is absolute, gratuitous nonsense.’

And so it was.

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