Emotionally Weird(89)

Lachlan rows the boat to the middle of the loch and then he jumps in the water and starts pretending to drown. Effie dives in, like a knife in the water, and they start racing each other to the shore. Lachlan does a butterfly stroke, splashing like a waterwheel, but he can’t catch Effie, who swims as sleekly as an otter and reaches the bank several lengths ahead of him. They clamber out and shake themselves like dogs. Then they start chasing each other again, screaming and laughing and they run off into the woods.

Then everything falls silent. After a long time of waiting for them to return and an even longer time of realizing they’re not going to, I fall asleep in the heat. When I wake up my skin is sore from the heat. The sun has started to sink behind the trees now and it’s growing cold. I’m terrified the fish-witch is going to rise out of the water like a leaping black salmon and eat me.

I fall asleep again. When I wake it’s dawn – the loch is covered in mist but by the time anyone comes to look for me, the mist has dissolved and the sun is high again. I am the only person ever admitted to the local cottage hospital who is suffering from sunburn and hypothermia at the same time. Afterwards, they said I had run away from them, but really I think they were trying to get rid of me.

‘Why?’

~ Because they were wicked, of course.

‘But you learned about boats and swimming from your sister, didn’t you?’ I puzzle to her. ‘Did that come later?’

~ Not from her, she never taught me anything. I learned in case she tried to drown me.





Chez Bob





I WAS EXPECTING BOB TO BE ASLEEP BUT HE WAS SITTING ON the sofa watching Playschool , eating Heinz stewed apples from the jar and speaking conversationally to an invisible person sitting next to him. ‘And thus I recognize that the certainty and truth of all knowledge depends on the sole knowledge of a true God, so that before I knew him, I could not know any other thing perfectly. Is Descartes entitled to this conclusion?’ He looked up and said, ‘Hey,’ when he saw us.

‘Hey,’ Professor Cousins replied amiably.

Bob nodded in the direction of Proteus, companionably sharing the sofa with him and said, rather guiltily, ‘I’m only finishing what he didn’t want.’ Proteus was propped up and bumpered with pillows and cushions. He was covered in food from head to toe, not just the stewed apples but a variety of suspect stains which Bob helpfully mapped – ‘Marmite, Ambrosia Creamed Rice, Ready Brek – this thing’s a gannet.’ Well, it takes one to know one.

Professor Cousins perched himself gingerly on the edge of the only other available seating – a chair on which a pair of Bob’s Dr Who underpants were unbecomingly draped.

‘Why is Proteus here?’ I asked Bob, who gave the baby a speculative look and said, ‘Is that its name?’

‘It’s a he. It’s Kara’s baby, you’ve seen him lots of times before.’

‘Oh, yes,’ Professor Cousins said, ‘of course, that big girl who always smells of the barnyard. He’s a nice little chap, isn’t he?’

‘But why is he here ?’ I persisted patiently to Bob.

With a long-suffering sigh, Bob tore his eyes away from Big Ted, Little Ted and friends. ‘Because that girl left him here.’

‘And out of the millions, if not billions, of girls in the world which one would that be?’

‘She said she was your friend.’

‘Terri?’

‘No.’

‘Andrea?’

‘The lovely one,’ Bob said, his features softening as if he was a devout Catholic referring to the Virgin Mary.

‘Olivia?’

‘She said she had something she had to do and would you look after him.’

Perhaps Proteus has taken on the role of the parcel in Pass the Parcel, or a chain letter that had to be handed on. Perhaps – after bringing good luck and wealth to everyone who dutifully passed him on (and unfortunate consequences to those who didn’t) – he would eventually get back to Kara. If the odds were against him he could pass through the hands of the entire population of the world before returning to his mother. How old would he be then? And how long would it take for a baby to be handed round the world? (That would be an interesting experiment.)

‘Wouldn’t it be easier just to find his mother and hand him back?’ Professor Cousins suggested, unwrapping his head from the red scarf, like a boiled pudding, or even a clootie dumpling.

‘What’s-her-name said something about Karen being at a women’s thingy meeting in Windsor Place,’ Bob said.

‘You mean Kara?’

‘Do I?’

‘At a women’s liberation group meeting?’