Emotionally Weird(60)

‘Absolutely,’ Gilbert said. ‘In fact here’s one I made earlier, ha, ha.’ He produced a plate of brownies which turned out to be surprisingly good.

‘They’re lovely,’ I said to him.

‘Oh, thank you,’ he said, clasping my hand. ‘It’s so nice of you to say that.’

Miranda reappeared, more lethargic than ever but not so comatose that she couldn’t eat Andrea’s share of brownies.

‘Well?’ Kara said to her, and she made a face and took a long thin box out of her pocket and opened it to reveal a shiny surgical-steel scalpel.

‘Whoa – phasers on stun, Mr Spock,’ Bob said in alarm.

‘I don’t think Captain Kirk would say “Whoa”!’ Shug said.

‘It’s not logical, Captain,’ Bob agreed. (Bob, you will have noticed, tended to cast himself in his mind as the entire crew of the Enterprise rather than any one particular member.)

I don’t know why, but I had presumed that we would be going home after we had eaten. No such luck, it seemed, as everyone was now extraordinarily mellow and laid back, especially for people so intent on goat-slaughtering.

‘That woman’s phoned again, this morning,’ Bob said to me suddenly, ‘while you were at the . . .’

‘University?’

‘Yeah.’

‘And?’ I asked him patiently.

‘And . . . she said she was going to come round tonight. To see you.’

‘And you’ve just thought to tell me now?’

‘There’s a bus,’ Robin said indifferently. ‘The road’s just over the hill.’

No-one, it seemed, was coming with me. Robin had begun a game of Go with Kevin – possibly the most boring board game ever devised – and Terri was intent on staying to save the condemned goat by kidnapping it (naturally) although I couldn’t imagine what she planned to do with a billy-goat in her fourth-floor Cleghorn Street flat. Andrea uncharacteristically offered to show me the way to the bus-stop but only, as I discovered to my cost, so she could talk endlessly about Shug.

Our route, apparently, took us past the standing stones which were ‘Over there somewhere,’ Andrea said, pointing vaguely into the darkness and tramping off before I could question her orienteering skills.

We tripped over brambles, fell into burns, slid on the thickly frosted grass and bumped into badly parked cows before finally encountering a steep hill that we had to haul each other up like funicular trains until we were sweating and freezing at the same time, all the time the air full of Andrea’s Shug catechism – Do you think he likes me? Do you think he really likes me? Do you think he loves me? Do you think he really loves me? And so on.

By the time we reached the seven sisters, Balniddrie was no more than a couple of pinpricks of light in the distance. For a moment, I thought I heard a strange pagan chant of ‘Kill the goat! Kill the goat!’ followed by a scream but Andrea said I’d imagined it and I hoped she was right.

Careless of any bad-tempered wizardry that might be lurking, Andrea began dancing around the stones in an abandoned one-woman eightsome reel. ‘Sky magic,’ she said breathlessly.

The standing stones, although only four of them were still actually standing, were about the same height as Andrea, roughly hewn and pointed like the teeth of a gigantic cat. Andrea flung her arms around an upright one in a dramatic fashion and, hugging it, said, ‘Feel the earth magic.’ I gave the nearest stone a tentative embrace but experienced no thaumaturgy – the stone felt like a stone, clammy and napped with lichen. What was I doing cavorting with boulders in the middle of nowhere? I should have a pair of warm arms embracing me instead of the cold clasp of a megalith.

‘Are you sure this is the way to the bus-stop?’ I asked her, but before she could answer I noticed something astonishing. I was developing astronomical skin! The back of my hand was like a réseau , a perfect grid of lace waiting to be mapped by stars. Andrea was searching on the ground for agates and still wittering on about the mystical properties of rocks, but I was hypnotized by my hand – even as I watched it the skin was expanding and magnifying into a huge stretch of parchment. My pores were like tiny, distant stars and the lines on the surface of the skin were the ghostly paths of the heavenly bodies. My cosmic self was about to have a glimpse of immanence.

‘Wow,’ I whispered (I couldn’t help myself). ‘This is amazing, Andrea.’

‘You ate the brownies, didn’t you?’ she said, rather wearily.

I don’t know how much time passed while I was contemplating my celestial body but when I tore myself away there was no sign of Andrea. I called her name, but received no answer, only an echo ringing in the gelid air. I looked behind the stones, I looked at the stones – perhaps they really were accursed maidens. They gave no indication, however, of harbouring lapidified girls. I touched one cautiously but did not go so far as to whisper ‘Andrea?’ in its mossy ear.