‘Do you recognize her?’
— Do you think that’s a weevil? she asks, staring at the cream cracker.
Bob and Shug started playing a relentless, noisy game of Diplomacy until, overcome by an attack of the munchies, they went out into the darkness on a quest for Mars Bars. The clock by the bed said six o’clock. I wondered if it was morning or night. It didn’t make any difference, I was wide awake anyway. There seemed to be nothing for it but to write.
Madame Astarti took an early lunch, ambling out to buy fish and chips from a little place down a side street called ‘The Catch Of The Day’. It was off the tourist track and much frequented by the locals. It was a comfortable, old-fashioned kind of place with tiled pictures of fish and a back room with a coal fire. It took a minute or two for Madame Astarti to notice that it was no longer the chip shop it had been, but was now called ‘The Codfather’ and had been fitted out in stainless steel and pale blue plastic.
‘One of each, please, Sharon,’ she said, ‘and perhaps an extra portion of chips,’ she added as an afterthought.
‘Scraps?’ Sharon offered.
‘Oh yes, scraps,’ Madame Astarti agreed.
‘Mushy peas?’
‘Go on then,’ Madame Astarti said.
‘Pickled onion?’
‘All right.’ Madame Astarti drew the line at a pickled egg. You had to draw the line somewhere, after all.
The fish supper came on a cardboard tray with a plastic fork. ‘What happened here?’ Madame Astarti asked.
‘Modern times,’ Sharon said, ‘that’s what happened.’ Shades of Lou Rigatoni, if Madame Astarti wasn’t mistaken. Clearly, he was a man who wasn’t going to be satisfied until he bought up everything on the coast.
Madame Astarti ate her fish and chips out of the tray, sitting on a bench on the pier, watched, from a discreet distance, by a yellow dog. She could see part of the harbour festooned with blue-and-white crime-scene tape like bunting, but there were few onlookers as there was no longer anything to see. The tide was now out as far as it could go and the exposed beach littered with bodies in various stages of pinkness, like boiled shrimp. They looked dead, although Madame Astarti presumed they weren’t.
Over by the donkeys she spotted Councillor Vic Leggat deep in conversation with one of Lou Rigatoni’s henchmen. What were they up to? She wondered. No good, probably. She tossed the yellow dog a chip.
‘Captain’s log supplemental,’ Bob announced, rolling in around dawn, ‘subject has entered pon farr, the Vulcan mating cycle. You are the lovely T’Pring — fancy a shag?’ An offer which I rebuffed rather swiftly and Bob was soon sleeping the deep sleep of the innocent fool.
Madame Astarti waddled back along the pier. My, my, she thought to herself (but who else do you think to?), that was some sea-fret that was rolling in. A great white wall of fog was moving inland, beyond it everything dark and obscure and yet in front of it the sun shone gloriously on the beach and the holidaymakers. Some of them had noticed the sea-fret by now and had jumped up in alarm. It looked like something out of a horror film, a malevolent presence swallowing everything before it. The fog horn started booming, a deep, thrilling vibration that Madame Astarti could feel resonate in her bones. They called it haar in Scotland, didn’t they? It was a funny word. She had been up there once with a Jock. A Jock called Jock. Haar Haar.
‘Wet fish!’ Bob shouted in his sleep and began to laugh uncontrollably until I smothered him with a pillow.
The House of Fiction
NO WOMAN IS AN ISLAND, EXCEPT FOR MY MOTHER. HER LEGS ARE growing into the rock, her head is surrounded by clouds, her skin is covered in barnacles and her breath holds the weather in it. Or perhaps that’s just my imagination.
She is wearing ugly black wellingtons that she has found in a cupboard somewhere. The wellingtons are too big for her but she doesn’t care. She has her face turned up towards the white fogged sky, she is smelling the weather, like an animal.
Fog is rolling in from the sea, wave after wave of whiteness. A sea-fret. I watch it coming. We walk like blind women along the fog-bound cliff-top path.
— A fine haar, Nora says, as if it was something to admire. But it is obscuring the sound of her voice. She’s dissolving in the white fog, melting into it.
— I was thinking about the day you were born and how I killed —
Her voice dwindles, taken by the fog. It presses against my face like a cold, wet shroud. When I look again I can’t tell what is Nora and what is haar. A strange keening noise rises above the muffled cushion of white.
— Whales, Nora says, lost at sea.
‘Do whales get lost at sea? What a strange idea.’
— We get lost on land. Why shouldn’t they get lost at sea?
I try and catch up with her. ‘So,’ I shout to her through the brumy air, ‘everyone in your family died and then you were born?’
— More or less, she says, a distant, disembodied voice.
‘Go on.’ I want to hear her voice as much as I want to hear her story. I don’t know where the edge of the cliff is, don’t know where I am. I am afraid of the fog, it’s like something out of a horror story. Her voice is the thread that keeps me safe.
— Well, Nora says thoughtfully, this is how it was:
Marjorie was a big raw-boned, red-haired woman from a Perthshire military family whose ancestors had fought everywhere, from the wrong side at Culloden to the right side at Corunna. She married Donald Stuart-Murray when she was thirty-five; no-one else wanted her and she couldn’t think of anything else to do even though Donald’s first wife was still warm in her coffin and his catalogue of personal disasters was long.
The Princess of Wales herself had been at Donald’s first wedding to Evangeline, held in London way back in the previous century, but only a duke could be mustered the second time round for the rather less flamboyant nuptials at St Giles’ in Edinburgh. Marjorie wore Evangeline’s diamonds but, like the new bride, they failed to sparkle under a miserable Edinburgh sky.
Donald set about replacing his lost children, first with a girl, Deirdre, who went to be Honoria’s playmate almost straight away, then a boy, Lachlan, followed swiftly by Effie and then, finally, fourteen long years later, the afterthought that was Eleanora—
‘You mean you? I think you should tell this in the first person.’
— Why?
‘To make it more real.’
— I would prefer it if it was less real.
Silence.
‘That’s it?’ I call into the fog but receive no answer.
When I finally get back to the house Nora is boiling up a mishmash of something unpalatable in an old cloth.
— Clootie dumpling, she says. Carry on, do.
Philippa was in the kitchen, stirring a vast vat of soup, a hotchpotch made from anything she’d been able to find, not all of it necessarily edible.
‘Everything but the kitchen sink,’ she laughed. The soup was thin and rancid-looking and smelt of rotten cabbage leaves, and something living seemed to be swimming around in it.
‘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.