Emotionally Weird(32)

‘You frightened the life out of me,’ she said, patting her fluttering heart (or where Madame Astarti thought of her fluttering heart – which was actually her left lung). Lou Rigatoni laughed and doffed his hat, which Madame Astarti thought was a fedora but wasn’t sure.

Lou Rigatoni was the nearest thing Saltsea had to the Mafia, which wasn’t very near, it was true, but near enough for most people. The Rigatonis had begun the ice-cream empire (‘The Best Scoop in the North!’) which now dominated the north-east stretch of coastline (or ‘The Yorkshire Riviera’ as Vic Leggat, the leader of the local council, would have it known) and had now expanded to include amusement arcades and fish and chip shops and anything that could turn a profit.

‘Heard the news?’ Lou Rigatoni asked. ‘They’ve found a body in the sea, some woman.’ He was lingering in a way that was making Madame Astarti nervous.

‘Yes, well, must be getting on,’ she said, fiddling with the padlock on her booth; ‘things to do, people to see – you know how it is.’

‘Yes indeed,’ Lou Rigatoni laughed, ‘I myself have to see a man about a dog.’ And with that he doffed his hat again and was gone.

‘Poor dog,’ thought Madame Astarti.

I must have fallen asleep, for the next thing I knew I was woken by the ringing of the telephone. I seemed to be alone in the flat. I picked my way through the remains of the cat biryani strewed across the floor. When I picked up the receiver I found only silence on the line – a condensed absence of noise that seemed to contain unspoken words and unasked questions. Then I heard the click of the receiver being replaced at the other end and the line went dead.

I discovered a note written in Bob’s primary-school hand informing me that he and Shug had gone to see John Martyn in New Dines. The phone rang again and I snatched at the receiver this time. Philippa McCue’s compelling tones echoed in my ear reminding me that I was supposed to be babysitting.

‘You hadn’t forgotten, had you?’ she said.

‘No,’ I sighed, ‘I hadn’t forgotten.’ Although I had, of course.





Something Fishy





THE SEA AROUND THE POINT IS A CURDLED YELLOW BREW , AND THE sun is an anaemic and watery thing that has struggled all day to crawl up its daily arc in a white squall of a sky.

I have borrowed dead Douglas’s binoculars and am keeping watch on the cliffs, although there is nothing to see except for the seals treading water in the Sound, their black heads bobbing on the water like rubber balls. Occasionally, far away on the cloudy blur of water and sky that passes for the horizon around here, the shape of a ship glides by, like a theatrical illusion – a cardboard silhouette being moved across a painted sea. Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina , an artificial place not in the real world at all – a backdrop for the stories we must tell.

I feel as if I am waiting for something but I have no idea what that might be. I think I have been waiting all my life, waiting for someone to find me – a grandfather to claim me as his kin or the ghost of my father to appear and tell me his story. On the Oban birth certificate (a forgery, Nora confesses blithely) he is ‘unknown’, an anonymous person who seemed to have somehow slipped from Nora’s memory, a man who made so little impression on her that she couldn’t always be sure of his name and when I asked about him as a child she would say he was called Jimmy, sometimes Jack, occasionally even ‘Ernie’. Any Tom, Dick or Harry would do apparently.

~ He could have been anyone, she says stoutly.

‘He must have been someone.’

The dead sometimes forget the living but the living rarely forget the dead. Not, however, in the case of my father. Half of what made me is completely missing – the forensics of my father a mystery. In their absence I am free to imagine him, but, unfortunately, even in my imagination he is leaving – on the deck of a ship, at the wheel of a car or leaning out of the window of a train carriage, his face obscured by clouds of steam from the engine.

From the occasional careless remark on Nora’s part during my childhood, I deduced that our moneyless, itinerant existence in the Sea Views and Sailor’s Rests of the English seaside was not the life that Nora had been born to. I wondered if perhaps Nora had got with child through a secret passion – impregnated by some black-hearted scoundrel, a passing vagabond perhaps, a groom in the stables or a gypsy in a wood – and that her angry father had thrown her out of the family home to find her own way in the world. I imagined her locked out in the cold and the driven snow, giving birth to me – her bastard daughter – in some freezing hovel.