Emotionally Weird(119)

It was Chick who persuaded Nora that it was safe for her to return to the land of the living and she took things up much where she had left off, becoming a mature student and taking a degree in marine biology. She married a diver – a handsome one, you will be pleased to know – and he knows the story of her life as a murderess and a fugitive. They have a little boat called Sea-Adventure II that they more or less live on and they wander around the warmer parts of the world like a pair of sea-gypsies. So, there’s a happy ending. I don’t see Nora often but that’s all right. She will always be my mother, as far as I’m concerned.

I have been back to Dundee very recently, crossing over the rail bridge under a sky of saltire blue. I saw the stumps of Thomas Bouch’s disastrous bridge, the seals – as freckled and speckled as mistle thrushes – sunning themselves on the sandbanks in the middle of a Tay that was the colour of the sea on the Neapolitan Riviera. Dundee had changed and yet hadn’t changed. There were new buildings – a contemporary arts centre, a big blue medical research building – and old ones had disappeared – the Overgate, the Wellgate Steps and the flat in Paton’s Lane where I had once lived with Bob. The headline on the newspaper stand was ‘Dundee reptile saved’, proving that the local press remained as Dundeecentric as ever.

I had lunch in the new arts centre, overlooking the Tay. I visited the Howff graveyard and I bought tea in Braithwaites’ and fern cakes from Goodfellow and Steven. I wandered round the university. Watson Grant was no longer there, of course. Aileen left him in 1973 to live with her lover – a dashing pilot stationed at RAF Leuchars. Grant Watson declared personal bankruptcy a year later, lost his tenure, got taken into Liff for a while. Now he lives quietly in Devon and works as a bookbinder.

Dr Dick was no longer there either – he moved to Lancaster University – and Maggie Mackenzie died of a blood clot on the brain a few minutes after I patted her hand and said goodbye to her in the DRI. Professor Cousins died years ago after handing over the reins of the English department to Christopher Pike, who had undergone a miraculous recovery.

To my astonishment, I saw Bob again. The reason I was in Dundee was because I was on a book tour, of sorts. To everyone’s surprise, but mostly mine, I had eventually become a writer of detective fiction – the genteel kind for nervous people who like their crime free of anything to do with urban decay, computers or sex, and for foreigners who like their English detectives to be quaint and colourful.

I was giving a reading, to a modest audience, in James Thin’s bookshop in the High Street. Halfway through, I looked up and saw a figure staring in through the plate glass of the window like a curious fish in a tank.

I thought he was another madman and returned to reading. A few minutes later the madman came into the shop and hovered annoyingly behind the rest of the audience. Only after the usual questions were done with did the madman – overweight, balding, a rather sleazy air – speak.

‘Is it really you?’ he said, his natural nasal Essex returned.

It really was me but could it really be him? Yes, it seemed.

We went for coffee the next day in a little café on the Perth Road. Bob was now a Modern Studies teacher at the Morgan Academy. Two children, divorced, a new girlfriend – this latter said shyly. Middle-aged, middling happy, a droop to the shoulders. ‘What more is there to say?’ Bob shrugged. ‘Drink too much, smoke too much, try not to think too much,’ he laughed.

We chatted about Kevin – for Kevin Riley is now, of course, the second most famous writer of fantasy in Britain. His latest book, The Balniddrian Conspiracy – the most recent in the seemingly endless Chronicles of Edrakonia – was at the top of the paperback bestseller list.

I told Bob how once, browsing in a second-hand bookshop in Suffolk, I discovered a long out of print book entitled The Invasion of the Tara-Zanthians which was indeed about a group of alien invaders who introduce a currency based on the domestic cat and dog. It had not been written by ‘The Boy With No Name’ but by someone called ‘Colin Hardy’. So that was one mystery cleared up.

We talked, too, of Janice Rand, who dropped out of university and became a geriatric nurse. Three years later she was convicted of murdering her charges (she was ‘sending them home to God’, her barrister said) and sent to a high-security mental hospital. It was Chick who, after doggedly pursuing her all that time on behalf of poor Aunt Senga’s relatives, managed to secure filmed evidence that convicted her.

I visited Ferdinand in prison once or twice but he seemed to have a rather two-dimensional character and I gave up on him after a while. He disappeared a few years ago and Maisie – now a maths lecturer in Cambridge – thinks that he might have been killed over a drug deal that went wrong.