~ Oh, no ghost stories, Nora says with a shiver, I really can’t abide them.
~ We still have another loose end, Nora says, and who better to tie it up than our detective.
‘Me?’ Chick says.
~ Yes, Chick, Nora says, and to do that you must tell us your story.
‘How?’ Chick asks, looking suddenly worried. ‘I’ve told mine, remember – I found the bodies. The old guy was dead – and so on.’
~ I know everything, Chick, Nora says softly, and I mean everything.
Chick sighs, like a man who knows he’s up a blind alley with his back against the wall and a knife at his throat.
‘Well. I’m not used to this kind of thing,’ he says, staring at his feet.
‘Begin at the beginning,’ I tell him, remembering Mrs Macbeth’s dictum (which she may well have stolen off someone), ‘and carry on until you’ve finished.’
‘Hm.’
~ Start with the weather, I always like to do that.
‘It was weird weather,’ Chick says. ‘Warm but rainy, like a monsoon or something. Thunderstorms. And animals appearing that didn’t belong. A puma was found wandering the hills in the glen. I had to get a bloody zoo keeper up from Edinburgh.’
~ Oh, I’d forgotten that, Nora says. The hunters were all stalking it, they said there was no closed season on cats.
‘And fish,’ Chick said, ‘there was an angler claimed to have caught an angelfish. Another one said he netted a mermaid. People were aff their heid with the weather. And those bloody wasps, they were everywhere, in people’s hair, in their beds, in their baffies, their biscuit tins. Mind that woman over at Kembie,’ he says, turning to Nora, ‘got stung when she was hanging out her washing and dropped down deid. And it was jam-making time so the women were aff their heid, the wasps were aff their heid. Everyone was aff their heid.
‘Raspberry,’ he says, suddenly, unexpectedly wistful, ‘raspberry was the sweetest.’
Who would have thought Chick a jam-connoisseur?
‘She made such a lot of it,’ he continues, ‘forever stirring that jeely-pan. I dropped in one morning to warn her about a Geordie gang that were raiding over the border – stealing stuff out of folk’s houses. No-one kept their doors locked thereabouts.
‘It was like a Turkish bath in that kitchen. She gave me a bit of mutton pie and some green beans, leftover rice pudding, a cup of tea.’
(The way to Chick’s heart is clearly the traditional route.)
‘It just went on from there.’ Chick shrugs. ‘She was lonely, I was lonely. She’d never had a man, never had her furrow ploughed –’
~ Charming.
‘She was married to that dried-up old crippled stick. She was such a nice woman, she started off telling me that God loved me, but I think she’d changed her mind by the end. We’d knocked over a few jam pots in the heat of things. The stuff was everywhere. Wasps were throwing themselves against the window –’
Realization has been dawning slowly, very slowly, on me.
‘Oh my God,’ I say to Chick. ‘ You’re my father?’
So I have gained my inheritance, which is to say, my blood. My mother was my mother, my father is my father.
On the last day of winter, which is the very next day, we go down to the shore and Nora takes the – rather gratuitous – diamonds from her overcoat pocket and flings them into the grey ocean where they disappear into the waters with a steaming hiss.
‘Aff her heid,’ Chick says to me and I can only agree.
~ There, Nora says, that’s the end of that.
‘You promised madwomen in the attics.’
~ One madwoman, I only promised one madwoman and there wasn’t enough room for her.
I suppose Effie will do well enough for our story’s madwoman.
‘Aye,’ Chick says. ‘Aff her heid, that one.’
~ I could put an attic in if you really wanted, Nora offers, in an agreeable mood now she is rid of her tale.
But I think we will leave it at that.
~ No attic?
‘No attic.’
1999
The Meaning of Life
IT IS ALL ENDINGS NOW.
Lachlan left nothing but debts after all, and the diamonds that were at the bottom of the sea were all that was left of the Stuart-Murrays’ wealth. No body was ever found in the Tay but nor was there any more word from Effie.
I never took my degree. Instead my new, unlooked-for father took me back to Dundee to collect my belongings – Bob was sitting the last paper of his finals at the time (he got a third-class degree, but didn’t understand how), but I didn’t hang around to see him.
I stayed with Chick for a while – he had a sort of hovel in Peddie Street, we had to climb out of the downstairs window to get to the outside toilet – and he made a great effort to be paternal, which mostly meant buying me fish and chips and offering me cigarettes every time he lit up. It wasn’t long before I left Dundee – leaving the north for ever to find my fortune elsewhere – but I kept in close touch with Chick as well as ‘the mingin’ little bastards’, who were my half-siblings, of course (much to Moira’s fury). Chick died a few years ago but I think of him fondly.