Emotionally Weird(26)

The rain streamed down the windscreen, obscuring the view of the street. Terri asked Chick why he didn’t put the windscreen wipers on. Moving himself as little as possible, Chick leant forward and pressed a button. The wipers creaked into life, moving slowly across the windscreen, with a horrible fingernails-on-a-blackboard kind of noise.

‘That’s why,’ he said and turned them off and closed his eyes again. ‘Now how about we keep our mouths shut and our eyes peeled?’

‘What a horrible idea,’ Professor Cousins murmured to himself. The air in the car was damp and didn’t sit well with the rank smell of the dog nor with the original awful odour which had now changed quality into something woolly and fungoid. I suppose it was a good thing there was no heating in Chick’s car or else new life forms might have been incubated, but nonetheless it was freezing cold and I was glad of the proximity of the dog’s big, warm, smelly body.

‘I don’t suppose you’ve got any of that waccy-baccy, have you?’ Chick asked me suddenly.

‘No, sorry.’

‘Pity.’

‘We could play a game,’ Professor Cousins said hopefully.

‘A game?’ Chick said suspiciously. ‘How?’

‘How not?’ Professor Cousins said, showing an unexpected command of the Scottish tongue.

‘You mean poker?’ Chick said.

‘Well, I was thinking more of a word game, Chick,’ Professor Cousins said, ‘like “Doublets”, say – that’s where you turn one word into another, “Head” into “Tail” for example.’ Everyone looked at him blankly and he said encouragingly, ‘It’s easy – head–heal– teal–tell–tall–tail. See? You try – turn “Dog” into “Cat”.’ The dog looked up in alarm. Terri stroked it back into sleep. Professor Cousins was puzzled by our inability to understand ‘Doublets’.

‘It was invented by Lewis Carroll, you know,’ he said rather sadly.

‘Wasn’t he the one who liked little girls?’ Chick asked.

‘I am going to Alyth where I shall advertise abominable alcohol,’ Professor Cousins said.

Chick gave him a wary look. ‘We’re not going to Alyth.’

Professor Cousins laughed. ‘No, no, it’s another game; you see you go somewhere and you have to do something using the same letter of the alphabet – I am going to Blairgowrie where I shall brave the braying beasts.’ Professor Cousins tried again, ‘I am going to Cupar where I shall cut cheap cabbages.’

‘Maybe we could just go to Dundee,’ Terri muttered.

‘And do what?’ Professor Cousins smiled encouragingly. Everyone – apart from the dog and Professor Cousins – turned rather nasty at this point, especially when Chick suggested that Terri might like to fuck off to Forfar and do something illegal with a ferret.

Which put an end to the conversation for a good ten minutes, at which point Terri said, ‘I’m hungry,’ and Professor Cousins said, ‘And I wouldn’t mind going to the little boys’ room.’

‘Little boys?’ Chick queried, giving him a sideways look.

‘And it’s uncomfortable back here,’ Terri complained. I imagined that this was what it was like being on a family outing in a car (there were so many aspects of normal family life I seemed to have missed out on). But instead of a regular family – mother, father, sister, grandmother, Golden Retriever in a Vauxhall Victor – I had to make do with this strange patched-up affair with neither blood nor love in common.

‘Anything to eat in here?’ Professor Cousins asked hopefully, opening the glove compartment and bringing out an assortment of objects – a deck of dog-eared playing-cards adorned with photographs of big women in various states of undress (‘Fascinating,’ Professor Cousins murmured), a pair of handcuffs, a paper bag of squashed fern cakes from Goodfellow and Steven, a length of washing-rope, a large kitchen knife and a police warrant-card that displayed a photograph of Chick with more hair and less flesh.

‘Don’t ask me how I managed to hang onto that,’ Chick said.

‘How did you manage to hang onto that?’ Terri asked.

‘Piss off.’ Chick stuffed all the items back in the glove compartment except for the fern cakes, which he distributed amongst the Cortina’s occupants.

‘So you were on the force then, Chick?’ Professor Cousins asked and then turned round to us in the back seat and grinned and said, ‘A “pig”, isn’t it?’ as if we needed a translation. According to Chick, who didn’t seem the most reliable of narrators, he had been a detective inspector until there had been some misunderstanding over a holiday in Lanzarote that had landed him ‘in the doghouse’.