I must have fallen asleep, for the next thing I knew I was woken by the ringing of the telephone. I seemed to be alone in the flat. I picked my way through the remains of the cat biryani strewed across the floor. When I picked up the receiver I found only silence on the line — a condensed absence of noise that seemed to contain unspoken words and unasked questions. Then I heard the click of the receiver being replaced at the other end and the line went dead.
I discovered a note written in Bob’s primary-school hand informing me that he and Shug had gone to see John Martyn in New Dines. The phone rang again and I snatched at the receiver this time. Philippa McCue’s compelling tones echoed in my ear reminding me that I was supposed to be babysitting.
‘You hadn’t forgotten, had you?’ she said.
‘No,’ I sighed, ‘I hadn’t forgotten.’ Although I had, of course.
Something Fishy
THE SEA AROUND THE POINT IS A CURDLED YELLOW BREW, AND THE sun is an anaemic and watery thing that has struggled all day to crawl up its daily arc in a white squall of a sky.
I have borrowed dead Douglas’s binoculars and am keeping watch on the cliffs, although there is nothing to see except for the seals treading water in the Sound, their black heads bobbing on the water like rubber balls. Occasionally, far away on the cloudy blur of water and sky that passes for the horizon around here, the shape of a ship glides by, like a theatrical illusion — a cardboard silhouette being moved across a painted sea. Perhaps we are on an insula ex machina, an artificial place not in the real world at all — a backdrop for the stories we must tell.
I feel as if I am waiting for something but I have no idea what that might be. I think I have been waiting all my life, waiting for someone to find me — a grandfather to claim me as his kin or the ghost of my father to appear and tell me his story. On the Oban birth certificate (a forgery, Nora confesses blithely) he is ‘unknown’, an anonymous person who seemed to have somehow slipped from Nora’s memory, a man who made so little impression on her that she couldn’t always be sure of his name and when I asked about him as a child she would say he was called Jimmy, sometimes Jack, occasionally even ‘Ernie’. Any Tom, Dick or Harry would do apparently.
— He could have been anyone, she says stoutly.
‘He must have been someone.’
The dead sometimes forget the living but the living rarely forget the dead. Not, however, in the case of my father. Half of what made me is completely missing — the forensics of my father a mystery. In their absence I am free to imagine him, but, unfortunately, even in my imagination he is leaving — on the deck of a ship, at the wheel of a car or leaning out of the window of a train carriage, his face obscured by clouds of steam from the engine.
From the occasional careless remark on Nora’s part during my childhood, I deduced that our moneyless, itinerant existence in the Sea Views and Sailor’s Rests of the English seaside was not the life that Nora had been born to. I wondered if perhaps Nora had got with child through a secret passion — impregnated by some black-hearted scoundrel, a passing vagabond perhaps, a groom in the stables or a gypsy in a wood — and that her angry father had thrown her out of the family home to find her own way in the world. I imagined her locked out in the cold and the driven snow, giving birth to me — her bastard daughter — in some freezing hovel.
‘Was it like that?’ I ask her, as I have asked her many times before.
Nora looks at me thoughtfully.
— Not exactly, she says.
I dreamt that one day Nora’s father — chastened and forgiving — would find me and claim me as granddaughter and heir, and I would be restored to my rightful place in a world where people stay in one place and sleep in their own beds at night and avoid unnecessary journeys. Of course, life is composed almost entirely of journeys, necessary and unnecessary, but mostly unnecessary in my opinion.
I am waiting for Nora to give myself to me, to tell me about the time before my memory began, before I myself began.
‘Perhaps you could start with Douglas,’ I prompt her.
— Who?
‘Your brother.’
But she’s already gone, striding across the cliff-top towards the house.
My babysitting services were required because Philippa and Archie were going to a dinner party at the home of the Dean. When I arrived at their house in Windsor Place I found Archie standing at the kitchen sink, stoking up beforehand in case there might not be enough food and drink on offer at the Dean’s table — desperately quaffing the dregs of an old bottle of Bordeaux — a leftover from a French holiday en famille — between mouthfuls of a cold shepherd’s pie that he’d foraged from the depths of the fridge.
‘Politics,’ he said to me, ‘that’s the name of the game — Maggie Mackenzie hasn’t been invited, you’ll notice. Nor Dr Clever-Dick. And as for Grant Watson, or whatever his name is — what a no-hoper.’
‘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.