Emotionally Weird(40)

‘Doffed,’ Mrs McCue said, ‘that’s a strange word, eh?’

‘It sounds . . . historical,’ Mrs Macbeth said, ‘it’s not a word you hear often these days.’

‘That’s because men dinnae wear hats the way they used to,’ Mrs McCue said. ‘There were times,’ she said to Maisie, ‘when hats had names – the trilby, the fedora—’

‘Homburg,’ Mrs Macbeth offered, ‘the porkpie.’

‘The porkpie?’ Kevin queried doubtfully.

‘Yes indeed,’ Mrs McCue affirmed, ‘the Glengarry, the bowler, a nice Panama in the summer.’

‘Doff,’ Mrs Macbeth said dreamily, ‘doff, doff, doff. The more you say it the dafter it sounds.’

‘It would be a good name for a dog,’ Mrs McCue said, looking at Janet noisily asleep at Mrs Macbeth’s feet.

‘Do you mind . . .’ Kevin said. ‘And spurred his steed away to . . .’ I nodded off. I think I preferred it when Kevin was writing about the dragons.

When I woke up he had gone.

‘What a tube,’ Maisie said and Mrs McCue agreed. ‘Aye a gey queer laddie,’ she said.

Prompted by some innocent small talk on my part (‘So did you always live in Largs, Mrs McCue?’), Archie’s errant mother raided her spangled memory and embarked on her life story, a commonplace enough tale, I suppose – a broken heart, a lost child, death, abandonment, loneliness, fear. This was the condensed version of her life story, naturally, otherwise we would have been there for seventy-odd years. We came up to date with her current mooring at The Anchorage.

Before long Mrs Macbeth was unpicking her own life for me – she had been a jute spinner in the Dens Road Works and the first time she tried to get married she was ‘jilted at the altar’. Why is it that everyone has had an interesting and dramatic life except for me?

~ Don’t be so sure, Nora says.

Mrs Macbeth’s fiancé was already on an émigré boat to Canada when she was stepping into the church in full bridal finery on her father’s arm. Mrs Macbeth shook her head sadly and said that she had never quite recovered from this betrayal. ‘Although I take comfort,’ she said, contemplating an Iced Gem, ‘from the fact that he’s deid the noo. And I married Mr Macbeth and we were very happy together.’

‘Mr Macbeth’. How odd that sounded, as if the Thane of Cawdor had decided to give up on ambition and settled in the suburbs and worked towards his pension.

‘It all seems like yesterday,’ she concluded sadly.

‘Aye, you dinnae age inside,’ Mrs McCue said; ‘inside you’re aye young.’

‘How young?’ Maisie asked.

‘Twenty-one,’ Mrs McCue said.

‘Twenty-five,’ Mrs Macbeth said.

~ Well, personally, Nora says, I feel a hundred years old.

But you must excuse my mother, she has led a very strange life.

Once started, neither Mrs Macbeth nor Mrs McCue seemed inclined to stop – I suppose that by the time you’re old you have acquired quite a lot of things to talk about (your whole life, in fact) and after a while I just let their lullaby voices wash over me without really listening. They were talking about people in The Anchorage – Miss Anderson (‘a crabbit wee wifie’), Mrs Robertson (‘a nice wee wifie’) and Billy (‘a poor soul’). Many of these people appeared to be in the grip of strange notions. Miss Anderson, for example, had a terrible fear of premature burial, while Billy was convinced that his dead body was going to be stolen for (unspecified) nefarious purposes. Mrs Macbeth herself seemed disturbed by the idea that no-one was going to check that it really was her body in the coffin and not one belonging to someone else (although you would think that might be a good thing).

‘Mistaken identity,’ she said. How grisly these preoccupations seemed for people with a view of the water. Something, Mrs McCue said, was killing the old people. Not just old age then? I asked.

‘No,’ Mrs McCue said airily, waving her knitting needles about in a dangerous fashion, ‘I know for a fact that someone’s trying to kill me.’

‘Oh aye,’ Mrs Macbeth said cheerfully, ‘me too.’ I thought of Professor Cousins who had said exactly the same thing to me only this morning (what an incredibly long day it was turning out to be).

‘Just because you’re paranoid,’ I said to Mrs McCue, ‘it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’ She gave me a worried look.

‘So who do you think’s trying to kill you?’ Maisie asked, finally finding a topic of conversation more interesting than television. ‘Dad?’