Emotionally Weird(71)

I demurred; the Cortina looked as if it was actually decomposing now. Chick, too, seemed to have deteriorated since I last saw him.

‘Go on, get in,’ he said in a way that he must have thought persuasive. Getting in a car once with him was foolishness, twice might have been from necessity, but to get into the Cortina a third time was nothing short of lunacy.

‘I’m supposed to be doing an essay on George Eliot,’ I said, climbing into the cold, smelly car.

‘Oh yeah, who’s he?’ Chick asked, pulling away from the kerb in a nasty grinding of gears.

‘ She ’s a woman.’

‘Really?’ Chick said. ‘I knew a woman once called Sidney, she worked as a stoker on the White Star line, can you believe that?’

A greasy fish supper sat on the dashboard. ‘Chip?’ Chick offered, holding up something cold and limp. ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ he said to himself when I waved it away. He ate the chips as he drove. ‘How’s the Prof? Nice guy, that. And the Yank?’

‘Terri.’

‘That’s a man’s name,’ Chick said.

‘She’s not a man.’

Chick finished his poke of chips, threw the paper out of the window and wiped his hands on the knees of his trousers. We were covering Dundee in an apparently random fashion on a route that took us along the Hawkhill and up the Hilltown and then back to the Sinderins and the Hawkhill again. This route took us to a newsagent, two different betting shops, a phone-box, an off-licence, a slow, mystifying drive past the Sheriff Court and a short tour of the docks. I noticed Watson Grant coming out of one of the betting shops. ‘Look,’ I said, giving Chick a dig in the ribs because he was absorbed in reading his Sporting Life (although, interestingly, still driving the Cortina), ‘there’s Grant Watson.’

‘Who?’

‘Watson Grant, you’re working for him, remember? Following his wife?’

‘Not any more,’ Chick said, ‘he couldn’t pay his bloody bill. Mr middle-class university lecturer,’ Chick said with some disgust, ‘he’s a bloody compulsive gambler.’

‘No?’

‘Yep.’

‘Maybe that’s why his wife’s having an affair,’ I said, remembering Aileen Grant’s rather sorrowful features.

‘Bet your bottom dollar she’ll leave him,’ Chick said, ‘then he’ll be in a real pickle.’

‘Why?’

‘Insurance policy,’ Chick said, ‘on his mother-in-law.’

‘Mrs Macbeth?’

‘You know her?’ Chick said suspiciously.

‘So, Grant Watson has an insurance policy on Mrs Macbeth?’

‘No, his wife has one on her, what’s-her-name?’

‘Aileen.’

‘Aileen, she’s got the insurance policy, but it’ll walk when she walks.’

‘I think I see. If Mrs Macbeth died now , or indeed if Aileen Grant died now, Watson Grant would get the money. But if Aileen divorces him he won’t get any money when Mrs Macbeth dies?’

~ I like this exposition, Nora says, everything being explained in black and white, you should do more of it.

‘Yes, but,’ Chick said, ‘in black and white terms—’ but we were interrupted by his dropping his burning cigarette into his lap and narrowly avoiding a lamp-post that was ‘in the way’.

Everything Chick did seemed invested with suspicious intent, although much of his behaviour was probably harmless. He stopped off for a ‘pish’ in the public conveniences in Castle Street. He went to Wallace’s for the classic Dundee take-away – a plain bridie and ‘an inginininaa’ (‘an onion one as well, if you would be so kind’). I declined one. After driving through the Seagate Bus Station – to the extreme irritation of a driver trying to reverse a huge Bluebird bound for Perth – we paused near the gates of the High School where a torrent of pupils was emerging from its dark neo-classical portals.

A tall pretty girl separated herself from the mass and walked towards the car. She had cropped dark hair and was so very neat and tidy in her public school grey that I felt I should offer to write out lines, ‘First impressions can never be made twice,’ and so on. She was carrying a huge briefcase of homework and wearing the yellow hoops of a prefect on her blazer sleeve.

Chick rolled down the window as she drew nearer and I wondered if I shouldn’t shout out a warning, especially when he took out a packet of Polos and offered one to her. Chick looked exactly like the kind of person who starred in public information films about not taking sweets from strangers. The girl took the mint, bent down, kissed Chick on the cheek and said, ‘Thanks, Dad,’ gave him a little wave, and carried on walking.