Emotionally Weird(29)

There was an air of palpable gloom which seemed to centre on the coffin. Perhaps when unhappy people die they release an effluvium of depression, like marsh gas. What happened, I wondered, to the molecules of the dead? Do they wait around, to be absorbed into any passer-by? I put my hand over my nose and mouth like a surgical mask just in case I inhaled any of Senga.

The funeral service seemed suddenly to dwindle away into nothing and the mourners shuffled out of their seats and left the coffin to its fate. Janice Rand passed us by without acknowledgement. The electricity came back on, the harsh light rendering the church less attractive.

‘What are you doing here?’ Chick said when he saw us and then looked at his watch and said, ‘Shite – that’s never the time, is it?’ then looked heavenward and mumbled an apology for his language. He made a hasty sign of the cross and rushed out of the church.

Surprised by the haste of his departure, we were rather slow to follow and by the time we got outside Bob and Professor Cousins had been decanted from the Cortina which was already pulling away from the kerb and nosing its way bullishly into the traffic. The dog’s sleepy face appeared in the back window. I almost expected it to raise a paw in farewell but instead it gave an enormous yawn, exposing surprisingly wolfish teeth.

‘I’m off,’ Bob said, and was gone before I had time to say I would go with him.

‘Me too,’ Terri said, hastily setting off in the direction of the Cortina and its canine hostage to fortune.

Professor Cousins and I hung around on the pavement like people who’d been unexpectedly thrown out of a party and were wondering what to do next.

‘Well, I suppose that’s the end of the excitement for today,’ Professor Cousins said, rather dolefully.

I accompanied him back to the university. I watched him walking up the path to the Tower, his back stooped and his legs bowed. He seemed too fragile and ancient to battle the biting winds that howled perpetually around the base of the Tower. He struggled to open the big doors of the building until a janitor finally took pity on him and yanked them open for him.

I trudged home, an icy interstellar wind at my back and a shadow on my shoulder all the way. (‘We know we are sought,’ Archie told me, ‘and expect to be found,’ which I thought sounded quite biblical but Olivia said it was from Dangling Man by Saul Bellow.)





Chez Bob





I FOUGHT MY WAY INTO THE FLAT IN PATON’S LANE. THE hallway was currently being blocked by a variety of objects – four tyres from a 1957 Riley 1.5 saloon, which was all that was left of Bob’s disastrous attempt at car ownership (a long story that does not need telling); an art deco standard lamp that we had never got to work, and a stuffed King Emperor penguin that Bob had been unable to resist bidding for at the Ward Road auction rooms but which had been relegated to the hall because of the strange scent it gave off of death and badly digested fish.

Despite my best efforts the flat remained a filthy place, smelling of curry powder and incense with a strange undertone of asafoetida. Bob never dusted or tidied (‘Why fight entropy?’) and rubbish of all kinds seemed to be attracted to him as if he was some kind of living dustbin.

An important part of my leaving-Bob daydream was the place I would live in without him – an uncluttered white space full of nothing but me. And perhaps a coffee table. And a bowl of perfect green apples. Joni Mitchell on the stereo. A white rug.

For all of this time I had been expecting Bob to change, change into somebody more energetic, more interesting – into someone else, in fact. It had dawned on me, only very slowly, that this was never going to happen. In the beginning I had liked Bob because he was Bob (although heaven knows why); now I was beginning to dislike him for the same reason. I was living with someone whose hobby was playing air guitar and who sincerely thought he was going to be a Time Lord when he grew up.

‘Hey,’ Bob said when he saw me. He was wearing a tank-top knitted by his mother for the larger version of Bob that she kindly held in her mind’s eye, and straight jeans which I had turned into massive flares for him by inserting pieces of old flannelette sheeting the colour of Germolene.

He was sprawled on the floor, watching the innocent little girl on the test card with a touching devotion. The rays from television sets were vital to Bob’s continued existence on this planet, in the way that oxygen is for other people. He claimed that the three-day week was having an adverse effect on his metabolism. Bob had bought his small black-and-white portable set with the proceeds from his one and only summer job – counting trees in Camperdown for the parks department. Bob didn’t actually count the trees individually but looked at ‘a whole bunch’ of them and calculated how many there were, as in, ‘That looks like about twenty trees.’ As you can imagine, he usually got it completely wrong.