‘One of each, please, Sharon,’ she said, ‘and perhaps an extra portion of chips,’ she added as an afterthought.
‘Scraps?’ Sharon offered.
‘Oh yes, scraps,’ Madame Astarti agreed.
‘Mushy peas?’
‘Go on then,’ Madame Astarti said.
‘Pickled onion?’
‘All right.’ Madame Astarti drew the line at a pickled egg. You had to draw the line somewhere, after all.
The fish supper came on a cardboard tray with a plastic fork. ‘What happened here?’ Madame Astarti asked.
‘Modern times,’ Sharon said, ‘that’s what happened.’ Shades of Lou Rigatoni, if Madame Astarti wasn’t mistaken. Clearly, he was a man who wasn’t going to be satisfied until he bought up everything on the coast.
Madame Astarti ate her fish and chips out of the tray, sitting on a bench on the pier, watched, from a discreet distance, by a yellow dog. She could see part of the harbour festooned with blue-and-white crime-scene tape like bunting, but there were few onlookers as there was no longer anything to see. The tide was now out as far as it could go and the exposed beach littered with bodies in various stages of pinkness, like boiled shrimp. They looked dead, although Madame Astarti presumed they weren’t.
Over by the donkeys she spotted Councillor Vic Leggat deep in conversation with one of Lou Rigatoni’s henchmen. What were they up to? She wondered. No good, probably. She tossed the yellow dog a chip.
‘Captain’s log supplemental,’ Bob announced, rolling in around dawn, ‘subject has entered pon farr , the Vulcan mating cycle. You are the lovely T’Pring – fancy a shag?’ An offer which I rebuffed rather swiftly and Bob was soon sleeping the deep sleep of the innocent fool.
Madame Astarti waddled back along the pier. My, my, she thought to herself (but who else do you think to?), that was some sea-fret that was rolling in. A great white wall of fog was moving inland, beyond it everything dark and obscure and yet in front of it the sun shone gloriously on the beach and the holidaymakers. Some of them had noticed the sea-fret by now and had jumped up in alarm. It looked like something out of a horror film, a malevolent presence swallowing everything before it. The fog horn started booming, a deep, thrilling vibration that Madame Astarti could feel resonate in her bones. They called it haar in Scotland, didn’t they? It was a funny word. She had been up there once with a Jock. A Jock called Jock. Haar Haar.
‘Wet fish!’ Bob shouted in his sleep and began to laugh uncontrollably until I smothered him with a pillow.
The House of Fiction
NO WOMAN IS AN ISLAND , EXCEPT FOR MY MOTHER . HER LEGS ARE growing into the rock, her head is surrounded by clouds, her skin is covered in barnacles and her breath holds the weather in it. Or perhaps that’s just my imagination.
She is wearing ugly black wellingtons that she has found in a cupboard somewhere. The wellingtons are too big for her but she doesn’t care. She has her face turned up towards the white fogged sky, she is smelling the weather, like an animal.
Fog is rolling in from the sea, wave after wave of whiteness. A sea-fret. I watch it coming. We walk like blind women along the fog-bound cliff-top path.
~ A fine haar, Nora says, as if it was something to admire. But it is obscuring the sound of her voice. She’s dissolving in the white fog, melting into it.
~ I was thinking about the day you were born and how I killed –
Her voice dwindles, taken by the fog. It presses against my face like a cold, wet shroud. When I look again I can’t tell what is Nora and what is haar. A strange keening noise rises above the muffled cushion of white.
~ Whales, Nora says, lost at sea.
‘Do whales get lost at sea? What a strange idea.’
~ We get lost on land. Why shouldn’t they get lost at sea?
I try and catch up with her. ‘So,’ I shout to her through the brumy air, ‘everyone in your family died and then you were born?’
~ More or less, she says, a distant, disembodied voice.
‘Go on.’ I want to hear her voice as much as I want to hear her story. I don’t know where the edge of the cliff is, don’t know where I am. I am afraid of the fog, it’s like something out of a horror story. Her voice is the thread that keeps me safe.
~ Well, Nora says thoughtfully, this is how it was:
Marjorie was a big raw-boned, red-haired woman from a Perthshire military family whose ancestors had fought everywhere, from the wrong side at Culloden to the right side at Corunna. She married Donald Stuart-Murray when she was thirty-five; no-one else wanted her and she couldn’t think of anything else to do even though Donald’s first wife was still warm in her coffin and his catalogue of personal disasters was long.