Emotionally Weird(112)

‘So much for pastoral innocence.’

~ There’s no such thing as innocence, unless it is in the beating heart of a tiny bird—

—but then Nora is dive-bombed by an angry seagull, which serves her right for being so fanciful.

‘Go on.’ (How tiring all this encouragement is.)

~ No.

When I came round I found myself dry and tucked neatly into the spare bed in the McCue house. Mrs McCue and Mrs Macbeth were sitting either side of me, both of them knitting like enthusiastic tricoteuses .

‘Flu,’ Mrs McCue said, nodding and smiling at me.

‘Very bad flu,’ Mrs Macbeth added.

‘Is that all?’ I asked.

‘You want something worse?’ Mrs McCue puzzled. ‘You nearly drowned, you know,’ she added. ‘Ferdinand saved your life. He’s a good boy,’ she added defensively; ‘they should have given him bail.’

‘He’s back in jail?’

No, this mustn’t happen, we mustn’t start to rhyme. I tried again, ‘How did Ferdinand save my life?’

‘He’d just got a job working down at the docks,’ Mrs McCue explained proudly. ‘He did a lifesaving course while he was in jail, so he knew what to do.’

‘But who pulled me out of the water?’

‘Don’t know,’ Mrs McCue said. ‘Some woman.’

It is the dead of darkness, and the world outside our window is in confusion and uproar. Waves pound the rocks, the heavens roar and quarrel with the sea. The dark skies are torn by lightning so that if we were to look out of the storm-proofed windows of the big house we might see the hapless victims of this night’s havoc – the tempest-tossed seabirds, the shipwrecked sailors, the exhausted mermaids and disorientated narratees and the poor fish hiding in the watery chasms of the deep.

~ The night that Mabel’s baby was born—

‘Baby? What baby?’

~ It was a secret that only I shared. Donald had another stroke – one that robbed him of the power of speech – so he had no way of expressing his astonishment when his wife became miraculously pregnant. Not that I think for a minute that she told him, for she had told no-one else. Donald’s sick-bed had never been a marriage-bed and Mabel remained a virgin, untouched by first Dudley and then Donald. Yet somehow an immaculate conception seemed more likely than Mabel succumbing to the temptations of the flesh. Not that for a moment I thought God – in whom I did not believe – had chosen Mabel as His vehicle for the second coming.

Nor, clearly, did Mabel, for God was now punishing her in the most malign way he could – He no longer spoke to her. Mabel could sit all afternoon in her ladder-back chair in the kitchen after any number of pleasant lunches of cold chops, pork pies and home-pressed tongue sandwiches and not a word would fall from His lips.

No-one noticed that Mabel was pregnant. A few extra pounds of baby seemed to make no difference to her size. She never spoke about the father of her child and I didn’t understand what she planned to do once the baby was born. You can hardly keep a baby hidden.

‘Although you can keep its origins hidden.’

~ Not for ever. Mabel told me about the baby when I was home for the Christmas holidays. She was looking after it well already – dosing herself with cod liver oil, avoiding bad thoughts and spiders and drinking gallons of milk. ‘I’ll turn into milk,’ she laughed, but sadly. And knitting like a demon, of course, the drawers were full of little white lacy garments.

Effie had been in London, trying to rescue some money from the divorce. Unfortunately, she returned after Hogmanay and discovered a set of tiny woollen mittens, the purpose of which even a fool could have guessed at. Effie was like a cat in a box, I thought she was going to rip the baby out of Mabel’s stomach right then and there, and Mabel didn’t make things any better by telling Effie that God loved her when it was clear to everyone that not even God could have loved Effie.

So. The night that Mabel’s baby was born I had been at a ceilidh in the village hall in Kirkton of Craigie. It was Easter and my final school exams were in a few weeks’ time, I hadn’t done anything but study for months. Effie was away for the weekend with some man, I expect.

I’d had such a fine evening at the ceilidh, hurling and birling and falling in love with a strapping farmer’s son. We’d known each other for years, we’d been at the primary school together, but that was the first time he’d ever noticed I was female. I was wearing one of Effie’s cast-offs – a green taffeta dress with a huge skirt – New Look, certainly a new look for me.

I got a lift home on the back of the farmer’s son’s tractor and walked the last few hundred yards home. I was still hot from the dancing and the falling in love and so on, and didn’t feel the cold at all. It was past one in the morning but there was a full moon – a fat, cheesy moon, more suited to a harvest than a cold spring night. The cattle in the fields were all due to calve and I could hear their restless shuffling and puffing, but other than that it was so quiet. I felt as though I was standing on the edge of something high and glorious, flexing my wings and getting ready to fly.