Emotionally Weird (12 page)

‘What about the Professor?’

‘The who?’

Archie finished off the shepherd’s pie and started truffling around in the fridge again, finally retrieving a plate of leftover roast chicken and Brussels sprouts. I never ate anything from the McCues’ fridge when I was babysitting, there were things lurking in there that I recognized from two years ago – rancid dairy products and strange life forms blooming and reproducing in old Mason jars. Philippa, a Girton old girl and a part-time lecturer in the Philosophy department, was the slapdash sort and kept a remarkably filthy house.

Philippa had also recently become infected with the writing sickness and had embarked on her own novel – a doctor/nurse romance (
The Wards of Love
) in which the heroine bore the unlikely name of ‘Flick’ and which Philippa was intending to send to Mills & Boon. The large farmhouse table in the kitchen seemed to be acting as Philippa’s desk – it was littered with papers, unmarked essays and textbooks. Philippa’s surprisingly neat philosopher’s hand was much in evidence, particularly on a great sheaf of narrow-lined foolscap, the aguish aura of which suggested it must be her novel.

Words peeled off the page –
hair the colour of a field of ripe wheat . . . eyes like drops from the bottomless depths of an azure ocean
– and rained onto the Nairn cushion vinyl. The McCues’ dog, Duke, pattered into the kitchen. Duke was a burly, barrel-shaped Rottweiler made up of muscle and solid fat and built like a wrestler, a dog that looked like it was permanently on the verge of dying of boredom. He shook his weighty head as if he was being plagued by ear-mites and dislodged a scatter of small romantic words like a broken rope of pearls.

Duke sniffed around the floor looking for something to eat other than words; the kitchen floor usually rendered up any number of food deposits. Today there was a raw egg that someone had dropped and not bothered to clean up. Duke licked up the egg with one sweep of his tongue, skilfully avoiding the broken shell, and then sat down heavily as if his legs had given way and drooled at the chicken drumstick that Archie was gnawing on like a caveman.

Adding to the general air of disarray in the McCue household were a number of animals. In descending order of size after Duke these were: a hefty cat called Goneril; a Dutch rabbit (Dorothea); a guinea-pig (Bramwell); and, finally, a hamster called McFluffy who was replaced by a new McFluffy every few months whenever the old McFluffy was either eaten by Goneril, trodden on by Philippa or sat on by Duke (or vice versa). A considerable number of McFluffies had simply packed their pouches and escaped from prison, disappearing into the innards of the house, so that behind the wainscoting and under the floorboards there now lived a tribe of feral hamsters conducting guerrilla warfare against the McCue household.

The current McFluffy was sleeping in a nest of shredded
Evening Telegraph
s, in a cage in the corner of the kitchen. The cage was precariously balanced on top of a Christmas-sized tin of Quality Street, containing five years of unfiled household receipts, and a copy of Kierkegaard’s
Fear and Trembling
.

Goneril slunk into the kitchen and wound her body like a fat skein of wool around my feet. A piebald queen whose white patches had grown a urine-yellow, like the pelt of an old polar bear, Goneril was an unattractive cat with dead fish breath and slovenly habits that she’d probably caught off Philippa. She was a cat who liked no-one, especially not Crispin, not after an unfortunate accident involving a tab of acid and a tin of Kit-E-Kat during his last long vacation.

Archie put his plate in the sink, already overloaded with dirty plates, burnt baking trays and Pyrex dishes that had acquired an unsavoury patina from years of McCue cooking. On the dull stainless-steel draining-board a huge raw salmon was laid out as if waiting for a post mortem.

‘We’re having a party,’ Archie said, indicating the salmon, rather morosely. It didn’t look like a party-going sort of fish; its silver-lamé scales may have gleamed under the kitchen lights but its dead eye was lustreless and fixed and it had leaked blood onto the draining board. The cat made a great pretence of not seeing the fish.

‘Yes,’ Philippa shouted suddenly from the hallway, ‘Effie should come to the party.’ She appeared in person in the kitchen doorway a few seconds later, carrying a giant-sized tin of dog food. She smelt vaguely of lard. At the sight of the dog food, Duke changed his dribbling allegiance from one spouse to the other, worshipping at Philippa’s big feet like a slavering Sphinx.

‘A few students at the party would be a good idea,’ Philippa said to Archie.

‘Why?’ he asked doubtfully.

‘Because,’ Philippa said impatiently, ‘being popular with students looks good.’

‘Does it?’ Archie said, looking even more doubtful.

‘Bring a friend,’ Philippa said imperiously to me. She would have made a good wife for Macbeth; she certainly wouldn’t have fretted about a few blood spots.

Philippa’s physique was remarkably similar to Duke’s, although, unlike Duke, Philippa was wearing a kaftan. She hadn’t got round to buttoning up the front properly and her jaded, wrinkled bra was visible as well as quite a lot of jaded, wrinkled breast. The hem of the kaftan ended mid-calf, thus revealing Philippa’s unshaven legs, bare despite the inclement weather, growing stoutly out of a pair of red leather clogs that looked as if they were on the run from something Grimm. Philippa had dramatic badger hair – black with a swathe of white through it – which tonight she was wearing in a long squaw braid.

She was quite an embarrassing sort of person really, constantly referring to menstruation and sponge tampons and vaginal examinations so that she made women’s health sound like car maintenance. A stalwart of the university women’s liberation group, she was always urging us to examine our genitals in hand mirrors and stop shaving our body hair.

‘Right,’ Philippa said, making her way to the front door with Archie, myself and assorted animals tailing after her, ‘there’s food in the fridge if you get hungry, Effie, no sweets for Maisie, make her do homework, remember no television – except
Tomorrow’s World
because that’s educational, sort of, but she has to go to bed straight afterwards – the Dean’s phone number’s on the table if you have an emergency.’ Finally rattling to a stop, Philippa shrugged herself into an enormous Mexican-style poncho. She was still clutching the tin of dog food and I wondered if she was taking it with her to the party instead of a bottle of wine. Or just trying to drive Duke to the brink of insanity – a state of mind you had to judge, not from his expression of terminal canine ennui, but from the amount of dog slobber he was producing.

Archie, meanwhile, was admiring himself in the hall mirror, smoothing his hair and adjusting his tasteless kipper tie. Despite having a physical resemblance to a large sea-mammal, Archie was under the impression that he was attractive to women, which, for reasons beyond my comprehension, he was. (‘Maybe you’re not a woman?’ Andrea suggested.)

‘Of course,’ Archie said to me, via the medium of the mirror, ‘I don’t believe in bourgeois crap like dinner parties, it’s just a means to an end. Right,’ he said, finally satisfied with his appearance, ‘I’ll be off. Don’t take any nonsense from you know who.’

‘Who?’

‘You know,’ Philippa said. ‘The old mare.’ (Or at least, that was what it sounded like.) She was halfway down the path by now and she turned and shouted, ‘Catch!’ and bowled the tin of dog food underarm to me. Philippa had once been captain of Cheltenham Ladies’ College cricket team. And somehow she still was.

Maisie’s full name was Maisie Ophelia. I can’t help but think that it’s an unfortunate custom to name children after people who come to sticky ends. Even if they are fictional characters, it doesn’t bode well for the poor things. There are too many Judes and Tesses and Clarissas and Cordelias around. If we must name our children after literary figures then we should search out happy ones, although it’s true they are much harder to find. (‘Ratty’ and ‘Mole’ are Maisie’s suggestions.)

‘Do you have homework?’ I asked her.

‘Not really,’ she said, without taking her eyes off the television.

‘I do,’ I said gloomily, taking George Eliot out of my bag. I commenced to write very slowly –
James’s judgement that
Middlemarch
is an ‘indifferent whole’ is refuted by even a superficial reading of the novel, when we cannot help but be struck by the highly wrought nature of the writing, the function of character, the careful thematic structuring and the balancing and illusion of autogenesis, something for which the paralleling of action and moral consequence
– but then I must have fallen asleep again because the next thing I knew I was being rudely awoken by a scream and it was a little while before I understood that the scream had come from the television set, rather than one of the various inhabitants of the house.

Maisie was deeply engrossed in a black-and-white horror film of some kind. The woman who was screaming – tall and blond with her hair in a perfect French pleat and apparently called Irma – seemed to have realized (rather late in the day) that she had stopped for the night at a bed and breakfast run by a vampire, even though you would have thought, as B and B names go, ‘Castle Vlad’ wasn’t exactly ‘Sea View’ or ‘The Pines’.

‘She’s really thick,’ Maisie said admiringly.

I tried to shift position; I was incredibly uncomfortable – Duke was slumped heavily on my feet while curled up in my lap, like a large evil netsuke, was Goneril. Not only that, but Maisie’s bony body was sticking into me on one side, while on my other side, an old woman I had never seen before was fast asleep, her head lolling uncomfortably on my shoulder.

The old woman had skin that was the texture and colour of white marshmallows and in a poor light (which was always) you might have mistaken her hair for a cloud of slightly rotten candyfloss. Although fast asleep, she was still clutching a pair of knitting needles on which hung a strange shapeless thing, like a web woven by a spider on drugs. She looked so peaceful it seemed a shame to wake her up.

‘Maisie?’ I said quietly.

‘Mm?’

‘There’s an old woman on the sofa with us.’

Maisie tore her eyes away from the television to lean over and look and said, ‘It’s just Granny.’

‘Granny?’

‘My dad’s mum.’ (How strangely complicated that sounded.)

Surely she was supposed to be in The Anchorage in Newport-on-Tay, looking at the water?

‘She escaped,’ Maisie said.

Now that I looked at her I could see that Mrs McCue looked vaguely familiar. Despite Andrea’s belief that ‘all old people look alike’ I thought I recognized her from the shoal of mourners at ‘Senga’s’ funeral that afternoon. Mrs McCue woke up and automatically began to knit. After a while she stopped and sighed and, looking at me with yellowing rheumy eyes, said wistfully, ‘I’m dying for a cup of tea.’ She seemed to be altogether from the jaundiced end of the spectrum – the whites of her eyes were the colour of Milky Bars and her horsy teeth resembled blank Scrabble tiles.

It seemed churlish not to comply with her heartfelt request and so I levered Duke off my feet – no easy task – shoogled Goneril off my knee as gently as I could to avoid being bitten, and finally struggled free of the bookending bodies of Maisie and the dowager Mrs McCue, who both immediately shifted to fill the space I’d vacated.

While the kettle was coming to the boil I went to the toilet—