(If only I had tried the hypnotic recall approach on her years ago.)
— We’re sitting on the little jetty and they’re dipping their feet in the water, but my feet won’t reach. I’ve got a splinter in my finger from the rotten planks of wood and I’ve been stung by a nettle but when I cry Effie says that the giant fish-witch who lives in the loch will come and eat me if I don’t stop snivelling.
‘Fish-witch?’
— Fish-witch. Lachlan says he can’t eat an egg without salt and hurls it overarm into the water where it splashes like a pebble. He’s red in the face from the heat. He says he’s bored. She says she’s bored. They smoke cigarettes. They make faces at each other.
They begin chasing each other, running around the woods, shrieking with laughter — they are always very childish when they’re together. Eventually they grow tired of this and decide to take the little wooden rowing boat out onto the lake. They put me in first, I can feel Effie’s arm round me, slick with sweat. Her hair’s damp on her neck and the cotton print dress she’s wearing is sticking to her body.
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?’
‘The round window!’ Bob shouted suddenly at the television and Proteus squirmed in terror.
Was Olivia all right? And was an abortion the ‘thing’ she’d had to do? If I was her friend I wasn’t a very good one.
I offered Professor Cousins a cup of tea but at that moment the power went off, much to Bob’s distress as he was destined never to know now what was through the round window.
Bob finally recognized Professor Cousins and started enthusiastically explaining to him his idea for his dissertation: ‘On Jekyll and Hyde, ’cos it deals with like one of the universal myths of western society,’ Bob said enthusiastically, waving his arms around like an uncoordinated beetle. ‘There’s all these ur-stories, ur-plots, ur-myths, right?’
Professor Cousins looked concerned and asked Bob if he always had a stammer.
‘The Enemy Within,’ Bob said, ignoring the question.
‘Stevenson?’ Professor Cousins, furrowing his brow in an effort to follow Bob.
‘No, Star Trek,’ Bob said patiently. ‘Captain Kirk gets split into two people by a transporter malfunction — the good Kirk and the evil Kirk.’
‘Ah, dualistic theories of good and evil,’ Professor Cousins said, ‘Manicheism, Zoroastrianism.’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Bob said, ‘the interesting thing is that the good Kirk can’t live without the evil Kirk — now what does that tell you?’
‘Well . . .’
‘Then there’s this other episode called “Mirror, Mirror” where all the crew of the Enterprise have doubles—’
‘And the doubles are all evil?’ Professor Cousins guessed.
‘Exactly!’ Bob said. ‘And then Kirk has to use this thing called the Tantalus Field—’
I was distracted from this critical analysis by the sight of Proteus trying to eat the top hat piece from the Monopoly board. I supposed it was lucky that he had chosen that rather than the large lump of Moroccan that had been sitting next to it, nonetheless this was no place for a baby.