Emotionally Weird(31)

~ I was teaching you free will, Nora says grumpily.

It was surprising I got an education at all, scraping through seaside secondary schools – Whitley Bay being the last town in our coastal odyssey. Only after Nora had waved me off on the train from Newcastle did she leave her job in a dingy hotel and set off back to the land of her birth and to the Stuart-Murrays’ holiday home.

‘And what did this mysterious woman say?’ I asked Bob.

He shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

‘Well, she must have said something. You can’t say nothing.’

‘She said,’ Bob said, with theatrical patience, ‘“is there someone called Euphemia there?”’

‘And you said?’

‘No, of course.’

Bob was amazed when I explained to him that ‘Effie’ was short for Euphemia (‘You know, Bob – Robert?’) and seemed rather put out that I hadn’t taken the time to clarify this before. Of course, this was the person who for the first few weeks of our relationship thought I was called ‘F.E.’ like some kind of college or an abbreviated swear word.

No-one ever called me Euphemia, no-one ever had. Who could know me by that name? Who other than someone calling from the obliterated past? Nora’s memory was like history itself – partial, fallible, inclined to oblivion – but surely there were other people somewhere who remembered – a best friend, a cousin, a schoolteacher.

The doorbell rang. It was Shug, who mooched into the flat and settled down on the sofa, burying himself in a Spiderman comic.

‘Can’t stay long,’ he said, ‘things to do, people to see.’

‘Yeah, well I have to go to the bog,’ Bob said as if this was a meaningful rejoinder.

Shug, unlike Bob, always had things to do and people to see. He spent his life disappearing off on mysterious trips and errands – off to Whitfield to see ‘the man’, out to the country to ‘get his head straight’ (which usually resulted in the exact opposite happening) or down south to some festival or other. Or at least that’s what he said – I had once spotted Shug in town, dressed (bizarrely) in a Territorial Army uniform, and on another occasion I had seen him pushing a toddler on the swings in Magdalen Yard Green. Perhaps he was leading a double life – perhaps I should warn Andrea before she found herself committing bigamy. On the other hand, it would give her something to write about.

‘I’ve got an essay to do,’ I said and took myself off to the bedroom because it was obvious I wasn’t going to get any peace if I stayed with Bob and Shug.

The bedroom was an icebox and I had to wear gloves, which made typing rather laborious. I worked on an ancient little Underwood that had a misaligned ‘t’ which made everything I wrote seem perpetually jaunty and surprised, which was rarely the way it was. I had a deadline, so to speak. Martha wanted the first draft of The Hand of Fate by the coming Friday, ‘or else’. I typed one-fingered and with difficulty.

Madame Astarti walked along the prom to her booth. The sea this morning was an expanse of blue, you couldn’t see the join between sea and sky. It was like standing on the edge of infinity.

‘Morning, Rita,’ Frank the fishman said as Madame Astarti unlocked her booth. Frank’s stall was a work of art – kippers in herringbone patterns and wheels of dead-eyed haddock. This morning’s centrepiece was a big silver salmon, a lemon stuck in its mouth and a wreath of parsley about its neck. ‘Rita’ was what most people called Madame Astarti, a fact she always found intriguing because it wasn’t actually her name.

Madame Astarti’s stall was in a prime position, between the fish stall and the bomb. The bomb was a Second World War torpedo set in concrete and bore a plaque remembering the men of Saltsea who died in the war. It was deactivated, of course, but just occasionally as Madame Astarti sat in her booth a few feet away from its hulking metal she did wonder – how did you know for sure if it was dead? If it had gone dead.

‘Hear about the body?’ Frank asked cheerfully.

The sound of the music coming from the other room was loud and indistinct. It sounded like Deep Purple but it could have been anything with a drummer really. I could hear Bob and Shug descending slowly into reefer madness; they were talking about their fantasy future in which they co-owned a vastly successful head shop and spent all day discussing the finer points of the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. They were reciting some kind of dope mantra to each other – ‘Red Leb, blue dots, Paki black, Moroccan zero zero, THC.’ I put on a pair of ear-muffs made, sadly, from rabbit fur.



‘A penny for them, Madame Astarti,’ a silky voice said in her ear and Madame Astarti gave a little scream and jumped.