Emotionally Weird(88)

‘This is where I live,’ I said, steering him into Paton’s Lane. ‘Ah,’ Professor Cousins said, ‘home to Dundee’s own poetic bard –

‘But accidents will happen by land and by sea.

Therefore, to save ourselves from accidents, we needn’t try to flee,

For whatsoever God has ordained will come to pass;

For instance, you may be killed by a stone or a piece of glass.’

Poor Dundee, surely not doomed for ever to be the town of McGonagall and the Sunday Post ?

Professor Cousins’ creaking bones took some time negotiating their way up to the top floor but they triumphed eventually. ‘The air’s quite thin up here,’ he wheezed, leaning on the door-jamb to recover. I could only guess at what state I would find the flat in when I opened the front door.

I think it’s time for some more of the story of my miscreant mother (who is not my mother), don’t you? We are huddled inside, in the kitchen, riding out the storm that Nora has stirred up. A fire burns weakly in the grate of the Eagle range. Nora, for reasons best known to her eccentric self, is wearing diamonds around her neck and in her ears.

‘Real?’ I query.

~ Real, she affirms.

‘Stolen?’

~ Sort of.

‘Evangeline’s?’

~ Maybe.

I sigh with frustration. This is like getting blood out of a stone, drawing teeth from a tiger, wrenching dummies from babies. Has she been in possession of this treasure all through the years of our seaside poverty? Can she explain how she came by them? What a mystery my mother (but not my mother) is.

I decide on the patient approach of the concerned psychiatrist to pull her tale from her. These are deep waters we are fishing in. ‘Tell me your first memory?’ I say encouragingly to her. Surely we will find something innocent here, an insight into the childish building-blocks of character. My own first memory, of drowning, is not so innocent, of course. Perhaps it was a kind of afterbirth memory of swimming in amniotic fluid (for we are fish), and yet even as I write I can feel the icy water, filling my nostrils, my ears, my lungs, dragging me down into the depths of forgetfulness.

My second memory isn’t much better. We were catching a bus – one in an endless series in my fugitive childhood. A distracted Nora, preoccupied with the amount of baggage she was trying to get on board the bus, forgot all about me and left me sitting on a bench in the bus station and was two miles down the road before she realized that something was missing. The driver had to slam his brakes on when Nora stood up suddenly at the back of the bus and started screaming dramatically, ‘My baby! My baby!’ so that for one dreadful moment the driver thought he must have crushed Nora’s baby under his wheels. By the time he understood what she was shouting, Nora had precipitated hysteria in half the passengers and an asthmatic attack in a sensitive young librarian who gave up his calling not long afterwards and set off to travel the world in search of an excitement that could equal that of the wild, red-haired woman at the back of the bus. I’m imagining the librarian obviously.

‘And yet I wasn’t your baby,’ I muse to her, ‘was I?’ But whose baby am I, for heaven’s sake?

~ I thought you wanted my earliest memory?

‘Please.’

~ I am very small and they are very tall.

‘They?’

~ Lachlan and Effie. They must be . . . sixteen and eighteen, maybe a little older. Maybe younger.

‘I get the idea.’

~ It’s summer and they have taken me down to the loch for a picnic. I’ve always been their ‘pet’, their ‘plaything’. The trouble is, they treat their pets and playthings very badly. The sun is very hot and the black water is shining in the sun. Insects are dancing and skating on the surface of the water. I can smell rotting weed and heat and hard-boiled eggs –

(If only I had tried the hypnotic recall approach on her years ago.)

~ We’re sitting on the little jetty and they’re dipping their feet in the water, but my feet won’t reach. I’ve got a splinter in my finger from the rotten planks of wood and I’ve been stung by a nettle but when I cry Effie says that the giant fish-witch who lives in the loch will come and eat me if I don’t stop snivelling.

‘Fish-witch?’

~ Fish-witch. Lachlan says he can’t eat an egg without salt and hurls it overarm into the water where it splashes like a pebble. He’s red in the face from the heat. He says he’s bored. She says she’s bored. They smoke cigarettes. They make faces at each other.

They begin chasing each other, running around the woods, shrieking with laughter – they are always very childish when they’re together. Eventually they grow tired of this and decide to take the little wooden rowing boat out onto the lake. They put me in first, I can feel Effie’s arm round me, slick with sweat. Her hair’s damp on her neck and the cotton print dress she’s wearing is sticking to her body.