Always, just when I had established myself as a cheerful, eager-to-please fixture in the homes of these families, Nora would uproot us again and we would be on a bus to the next small seaside town that looked very like the one we had just left. You would almost have thought that we were on the run from something. And we were, of course.
I wake up in the dead of night and find that I can’t remember who I am. Is that normal? Almost certainly not. The feral Siamese have been holding a cats’ concert in the night, a maniacal caterwauling that sends a shiver down the spine of every vertebrate on the island, whether quick or dead. Perhaps they’re engendering more of their own consanguineous kind.
~ Spawn of the devil, Nora says cheerfully next morning, stirring watery breakfast oatmeal with an ancient wooden spurtle. Go on then, she says, dolloping out this gruel in a bowl in front of me. What happened next?
A faint, defiant cry of ‘Jesus Saves’ followed us as we set off listlessly down the Nethergate. A harsh wind was whipping litter and grit off the street and the occasional pink or blue leaflet. A fine Highland rain, like the spray from a plant mister, was falling in the wrong meteorological zone.
Terri wanted to go to the Morgan Tower pharmacy for a bottle of Collis Brown to boil down messily and opiate herself further with, while I was planning to buy a copy of Coles’ Notes on Middlemarch from Frank Russell’s University Bookshop.
At that moment a dog appeared from nowhere (as they do) on the pavement opposite. Catching our eye, it assumed a sociable expression and lolloped towards us as if it was crossing a field rather than a road. At that same moment, a 1963 Ford Cortina hurtled into view (in as much as a 1963 Cortina can hurtle), heading inexorably towards the same spot on the road as the dog. Seeing this, Terri darted into the road to save the dog from the Cortina.
Narrative destiny (a powerful force) took charge at that point. The car-dog-girl scenario – lolloping dog, hurtling car, foolish girl – could only end in tears and although the Cortina swerved at the last minute and avoided Terri, it couldn’t help but find the dog. I closed my eyes—
—when I opened them again the car was up on the pavement and Terri was sitting on the kerb with the dog’s head in her lap. Although generally unattached to the human race, Terri was surprisingly fond of animals, particularly dogs – she was more or less brought up by the family pet (a large Dobermann called Max).
The dog which now lay limply in her arms was a big yellow mongrel with fur the colour of an old teddy-bear or a half-dead camel. The man who would sooner run over a dog than a woman got out of the car and lumbered over to this canine pietà, giving his front bumper a cursory inspection on the way. He had the stocky build of a cheap discotheque bouncer and hair that carpeted the backs of his hands so that you might have thought he was wearing a chimpanzee outfit beneath his crumpled suit. He bent down stiffly to observe the dog, revealing a dreadfully hairy shin. The cheap material of his suit, the colour of Maltesers, stretched tightly over his beefy thighs when he bent down.
‘I haven’t got time for this,’ he said, ‘bloody dog, why didn’t it look where it was going? I’m late,’ he added in a very agitated voice, ‘very late.’
The dog, meanwhile, wasn’t agitated at all, indeed so still and lifeless that it could have been demonstrating the taxidermist’s art to the crowd that had begun to gather. Terri started to give the dog the kiss of life, breathing into its big Alsatian-derived muzzle with unusual determination.
‘Oh dear,’ a rather feeble voice said behind me, ‘is there anything I can do to help?’ The voice turned out to belong to Professor Cousins, waving a large duck-handled umbrella about, like a man in danger of becoming a caricature of himself.
With much creaking and straining he bent down next to the dog and tried to encourage its recovery by scratching the coarse hair on its sugar-pink belly while the onlookers susurrated in the background, earnestly discussing the best method of resuscitating a dead dog – recommendations varying from ‘gie it a sweetie’ to ‘gie it a skelping’.
However, having Terri’s vampire breath in its lungs seemed to be doing wonders for the yellow dog. It began to come slowly back to life, starting at the far end with its big tail – like a giant rat’s – which started to thump heavily on the tarmac. Next it stretched its back legs, flexing the abnormally long toes that ended in big lizard-like nails. Finally, with a little sigh, it opened its eyes, lifted its head and looked around. It seemed agreeably surprised by the number of interested bystanders it had attracted and whacked its tail more vigorously so that its audience broke into a spontaneous round of applause at this Lazarus-like recovery. The dog got to its feet unsteadily, like a newborn wildebeest. I wondered if it might take a bow, but it didn’t.