Emotionally Weird(100)

I stood up and the room immediately broke up into thousands of little dots, as if I’d suddenly stepped inside a pointillist painting. I couldn’t be sure, but I could have sworn I saw the elusive shape of the yellow dog on the far side of the room. I wondered if it was an hallucination or a mirage? And was the yellow dog now my quest since Terri had gone to hide in a place rhyming with Glasgow? Perhaps, Lassie-like, it was trying to show me the way to Kara.

I struggled heroically across the wasteland of the ballroom floor, occupied now by a frenzy of people dancing to Santana, only to find when I arrived on the other side that there was no sign of Bob anywhere, or of the yellow dog. It was very hot and airless by now and a herd of people milled around aimlessly, amplified and distorted by the candlelit mirrors and my dappled vision. My blood pressure was low and falling and there was a blackness closing in around me and I knew I had to get out of that room or I was going to pass out, and the last thing I wanted was attention from any of the drug-fuelled medical students in Forres.

I finally managed to fight my way out of the room, passing Davina on the way –

‘There,’ I say to Nora, ‘you owe me a pound.’

– and entered what must have once been the billiards room, where the air was slightly fresher. No-one was wielding a cue and the green baize of the large billiards table was currently occupied by the apparently unconscious body of Gilbert, splayed out over a Scalectrix set, much to the annoyance of the people who wanted to play with it. Around him, small groups of people, without exception male, were sitting on the floor playing Risk and Diplomacy, Mah-jong and – naturally – Go. If only they would. The atmosphere in the room was so boring it could have caused living flesh to petrify and I hurried away, pausing only to heave Gilbert’s prostrate form into the recovery position.

I tried a door at the far end of the billiards room and found it opened into a small room that was entirely dark, save for the light coming from a television set that was showing Dad’s Army . In the doorway I bumped into Shug, who said, ‘Out on the ran-dan, eh, hen?’ and put his arms around me. He was very drunk and said, ‘So how about it – you and me?’ and I had to push him away and remind him that he was ‘Bob’s pal’ and therefore couldn’t shag me. Where was Bob? Shug shrugged (as he had to do sooner or later). ‘Dunno.’

I lurched on, up a small servants’ staircase to the mysterious upper regions of the house where, in a cold bedroom heated to no effect by an oil-filled radiator, Kara and Jill were sitting cross-legged on the floor. Deposited on the cold candlewick of the double bed was Jill’s child with the unpronounceable name, two more sleeping infants of indeterminate age and – to my extreme relief – Proteus.

‘Welcome to the nursery,’ Kara said, lighting up a joint.

‘You got him back OK, then?’ I said, looking at Proteus’s peaceful sleeping face.

‘Are you all right?’ she said to me. ‘You look a bit pale.’

‘I feel a bit pale.’

Kara reached out and grabbed my wrist and took my pulse in a professional sort of way. ‘I’ve got a St Andrew’s Ambulance Brigade certificate,’ she said, but then she let go of my wrist and said indifferently, ‘You’re dead.’

‘Do you want to stay here and babysit for us?’ Jill asked. Dead Babysitter , now that would be a good title for something. I made a vague mental note to tell Robin.

I moved on, back down another small staircase, and tried other rooms, unsure now whether I was looking for something or not. Perhaps like Professor Cousins I would recognize it when I found it. In a small back room I found a solitary boy, alone with a bong and an overwhelming scent of burning sage that drove me straight out again into a room with another television – an old Philips portable sitting in the middle of the floor. There was no audience for the country being burned on screen and I felt I had a duty to stay and watch for a few minutes but then I started to feel ravenously hungry and wondered if I could find my way back to the kitchen.

Instead, I found what seemed to be a quite separate wing of the house. Forres must have been designed by Borges and constructed by Escher, I had no idea if I was facing north, south, east or west, or even which floor I was now on. I peered cautiously into a room that might once have been a grand upstairs drawing-room but was now a dystopian vision of carnal debauchery as, by the light of several smoky candles, naked bodies writhed in a tapsie-teerie abandonment worthy of Bosch.

‘Do you mind?’ a disembodied voice said. ‘This is a serious massage class.’