Emotionally Weird (23 page)

‘Taste?’ Philippa offered, holding up a ladle.

Philippa was wearing a pair of Archie’s trousers and a fisherman’s smock in a thick brown moleskin material, and had tied an Indian silk scarf, Apache-style, around her hair. She trawled for something in the pocket of her smock and netted a new and very sleepy McFluffy. After trying in vain to rouse it, she stuffed it back in her pocket. Somewhere in the depths of the house I could hear the sound of energetic hoovering.

I was sitting at one end of the McCues’ huge pine kitchen table sipping reluctantly at a cup of acrid coffee that Philippa had forced on me. Goneril, looking cross-eyed in the morning light, was slumped on an essay entitled, ‘
How can I tell whether what seems to be a memory of mine is in fact a genuine one?
’ She was washing herself indolently, every now and then dislodging little feathery dandelion tufts of feline fur that floated through the air. I watched one of them land delicately in the soup.

‘I think she’s got some kind of mange,’ Philippa said, chucking the cat under the chin.

The salmon, a little the worse for wear – indeed, only half of it now remained – occupied the centre of the table. It had been poached for the party and in an effort to restore it to life its silver-lamé skin had been replaced with cucumber slices and its dead eye with a stuffed olive. It wasn’t fully dressed; many of its cucumber scales had fallen off, revealing pink flesh underneath. Here and there a few flakes of skin still lingered like the scurf of stars. A row of cooked shrimp had been placed along its back, perhaps as a garnish, perhaps as a misguided attempt to recreate its spinal cord.

‘You didn’t come to our party,’ Philippa chided, throwing a huge handful of salt in the soup.

‘Sorry. I had to write an essay.’

It was cold in the Windsor Place kitchen, that horrible damp cold that makes you feel suddenly melancholy. All the windows were misted up from the soup-making and from the rack of wet laundry that was hanging over the radiator. I cast a cursory glance over the clothes, wondering if any of them belonged to Ferdinand, some intimate garment perhaps that had touched his skin, but all I caught a glimpse of was a pair of Archie’s huge, slightly grey Y-fronts and quickly looked away. No wonder all the McCues always smelt faintly of cooking. Except for Ferdinand, of course.

‘So, how’s Ferdinand?’ I asked Philippa, trying to sound off-hand.

‘Oh, you know Ferdinand?’ Philippa said. ‘How nice.’

The sound of the vacuuming grew more insistent until finally Mrs McCue hoovered herself into the room on the end of a Goblin cylinder. She was followed by Mrs Macbeth, who had slung a net bag from her walking-frame to act as a container for cleaning materials – a tin of Mansion House polish, a box of Flash, a large bottle of Parozone, a pink bottle of Windolene – things that had probably never seen the inside of the McCue house before. Bringing up the rear, Duke shouldered his way into the kitchen. I almost expected to see a feather duster in his mouth.

Mrs McCue hoovered noisily over the vinyl, picking up anything in her path – egg-shells and cabbage stalks, broken pencils, assorted grit, bushels of cat fur, the odd Brussels sprout. Finally, to my relief, she switched the machine off and said, ‘That’s enough for now.’

Sensing the need for an explanation, Philippa said, ‘Good old Ma’s doing some cleaning for me. And her friend, too, of course,’ she added.

‘Just making ourselves useful,’ Mrs McCue said.

‘That bathroom,’ Mrs Macbeth said
sotto voce
to me, shaking her head in disbelief. She waved the bottle of Parozone like a Molotov cocktail.

‘They let you out again then?’ I asked.

‘They don’t keep them under lock and key,’ Philippa said irritably, ‘it’s not a
prison
. And anyway, they’re always out. They’re never
in
.’

Mrs McCue muttered something under her breath as she sat down next to me. Goneril opened one evil eye and assessed her fearlessly.

‘Lunch,’ Philippa said. I made a move to escape; I couldn’t think of anything worse than eating Philippa’s soup, but Mrs McCue laid a heavy hand on my arm and said, ‘It
is
nice to see you.’

Philippa slopped soup into bowls and slung a large sliced Sunblest onto the table with a thud that made Goneril flinch but not move.

‘Unhygienic,’ Mrs McCue hissed, giving the cat a surreptitious pinch. Goneril ground her body further into the essay, as if digging in for the duration. Maisie flung herself into the kitchen, reporting that she was starving, and tore into the Sunblest’s plastic wrapper and started stuffing soft doughy pieces of bread into her mouth. She was accompanied by a hollow-eyed, adenoidal girl – Lucy Lake, Roger and Sheila’s eldest offspring, who was in Maisie’s class at Park Place Primary. They both had the same neglected air about them with their unbrushed hair and unkempt uniforms. Mrs Macbeth couldn’t resist the urge to spit on a handkerchief and give Lucy Lake a quick rub.

‘We can have some of this salmon as well,’ Philippa said, dishing out plates and cutlery; ‘it needs eating up.’

Mrs McCue eyed the salmon doubtfully. The stuffed olive eye of the fish returned her gaze with a certain inscrutability.

‘Food poisoning,’ Mrs McCue whispered when Philippa turned her attention back to the soup pot. ‘It may as well have “salmonella” stamped on its forehead.’

‘Such a bonny word that,’ Mrs Macbeth said. ‘It would make a lovely name for a girl. Salmonella.’

‘Is that where the word comes from, from salmon?’ Maisie asked the room in general, and Philippa said, ‘No, it’s the name of the man who discovered it.’

‘Mr Salmon?’ Maisie said sceptically.

‘
Do
fish have foreheads?’ Mrs Macbeth puzzled.

‘Well, they have fingers,’ Lucy Lake smirked.

‘Really?’ Mrs Macbeth said, looking worried.

Maisie picked the small naked body of a shrimp off the salmon and scrutinized it. ‘What do shrimp eat?’ she asked speculatively. ‘Do you think they eat drowned people?’

‘We’ll make a philosopher of you yet,’ Philippa said brightly.

Maisie braved a shrimp, biting it in half delicately, and reported it ‘pure bowfing’. Mrs McCue said she couldn’t imagine what shrimp looked like swimming around in the sea and Lucy Lake said, ‘Like insects, probably.’ Philippa clapped her hands and said, ‘Stop it, before this goes any further,’ because everyone had begun to look rather sick.

Philippa took the new McFluffy from her smock pocket and looked at it quizzically. It did seem rather limp and lifeless. She gave it a little shake and it woke up with a start. Maisie took it from her mother and placed it on her shoulder and crooked her head so that it could nestle into her neck.

‘That looks very uncomfortable,’ Mrs Macbeth said.

‘It is,’ Maisie said, eating her soup awkwardly.

‘What’s this?’ Mrs Macbeth asked, poking at the manuscript on the table.

‘I’m writing a novel,’ Philippa said.

‘Why?’ Mrs Macbeth asked.

‘Why not? It’s a doctor/nurse romance, I’m going to send it to Mills & Boon. Archie thinks I’m prostituting my art, of course,’ Philippa said cheerfully (a common cry, it seemed), ‘but as far as I’m concerned that’s a specious argument based on the premise that all art is didactic in origin. Don’t you think?’ she said, turning to Mrs Macbeth.

‘Hmm,’ Mrs Macbeth said, shuffling through the manuscript. As a diversion from answering unanswerable questions she began to read out loud:
‘Flick’s cornflower blue eyes sparkled with devilment. Jake McCrindle may think he was better than she was because he was a high-flying house doctor and she was a mere first-year student nurse but she would soon show him
—’ ‘Flick?’ Mrs Macbeth queried. ‘Flick? Are you sure?’

‘Isn’t Flick the name of a horse?’ Lucy Lake asked.

‘No, that’s Flicka,’ I told her. ‘
My Friend Flicka
.’

‘You have a friend called Flicka?’ Philippa asked, interested.

‘A-hem [or something like that],’ Mrs Macbeth said,
‘Flick had been on the men’s surgical ward only two days and already had clashed twice with the arrogant Dr McCrindle who seemed to think he was God’s gift both to St Vernon’s and to the nurses who worked there.’

‘Was there a St Vernon?’ asked Mrs McCue, who was contriving to knit and eat soup at the same time.

‘Perhaps you’re thinking of the football pools,’ Mrs Macbeth offered.

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Philippa said dismissively, ‘it’s fiction.’

He smiled wolfishly at her—’

‘That was close,’ Mrs Macbeth said hoarsely, sinking back into her seat – as if a brush with death was part of her daily routine. She examined the fish bone. ‘A fish bone,’ she said, shaking her head in a mystified way. ‘Where did that come from?’

‘A fish?’ Lucy Lake (a sarcastic child) offered. The salmon was saying nothing. Mrs McCue gave Mrs Macbeth a cigarette to aid her recovery and lit one herself. ‘I’m saving for a Philips toaster,’ she said, ‘that’s a lot of cigarettes to smoke.’

A door closed and I heard water running upstairs. I wondered if this signalled the presence of Ferdinand somewhere in the house. I made my excuses and tip-toed up the litter-laden stairs. Sadly, the bathroom was empty of Ferdinand, although it did contain an unusual smell of male cleanliness – toothpaste, shaving foam and Lifebuoy soap – as if someone more used to regular institutional habits than the rest of the McCues had just vacated it. Beneath the smells of personal hygiene I could detect faint traces of Ferdinand’s own animal scent and if I listened closely I could almost hear the fading echo of his heartbeat.

The bathroom was a paean to sixties’ taste, from the sickly primrose yellow suite with transparent acrylic taps to the herringbone pine panelling which extended even to the ceiling where recessed lights glimmered darkly. There were mats of soapy hair in the plugholes and a deposit of slimy grey in the tub and another one of crusty brown in the toilet bowl, and an anaemic spider plant struggled for life on the windowsill, its leaves weighed down by a coating of talcum powder. The assorted reading matter of the different McCues was piled randomly on top of the cistern –
Rubber Monthly
, the
Beano
, and back issues of the
Philosophical Quarterly
.

Of Ferdinand himself, however, there was no sign. I looked in the upstairs rooms, hoped for his sleeping form in the spare bedroom where I had first encountered it, but could find nothing, only Mrs Macbeth’s old dog, Janet, asleep on the bed. She was snoring noisily, her breath rumbling loosely in her chest, but woke up when I sat on the bed and pushed her dry black nose into my hand. (‘Aye, she’s a wee bittie wabbit,’ Mrs Macbeth said mysteriously.)

I heard voices in the hall and peering over the banisters caught a glimpse of Ferdinand. Awake, he seemed more feral, with a hungry look about him as if he could happily eat raw meat and snap the spines of small animals if necessary. Unfortunately, he was just leaving the house, kissing Mrs McCue on the cheek and saying, ‘Bye, Gran.’

‘I don’t know.’ Who knows where characters go when they’re not needed? Into some kind of limbo, I suppose. Like death or dreaming. Perhaps he was with the yellow dog which had slipped off the page with such ease.

~ Where could they be? Nora asks, keen on this idea. St Andrews, on the beach? That would be nice.

‘What, like – “The yellow dog ran ahead of the man who was walking along the empty stretch of beach, his collar up against the biting wind, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his leather jacket” – that kind of thing?’

~ Better weather.

‘“The yellow dog frolicked in the waves ahead of a man strolling along the beach. His naked feet revelled in the warmth of the sand and the seawater, his face soaking up the summer sun.” How about that?’

~ You could give it some plot, Nora says. God knows you need some. Something could
happen.

‘Like?’

~ A plane could fall out of the sky, a woman could walk out of the water, a bomb could go off.

‘I’m not writing that kind of book.’

~ You could.