Terri liked to keep her ethnic origins chameleon, sometimes hinting at Italian, sometimes pogrom-fleeing Russian, a touch of the Orient, a hint of the Hebrew. Only I knew the dull mongrel mix of Irish navvies, Dutch dairymen and Belgian coalminers who by mere genetic chance had given her the appearance of an exotic houri or a handmaiden of Poe. We were the best of friends, we were the worst of friends. We were the sisters we’d never had. I felt sorry for someone so at odds with the mainstream of humanity. Sometimes I wondered if my role in Terri’s life wasn’t to mediate between her and the living, like a vampire’s assistant.
Although she hated staying in it, Terri did have her own ruffled lair in Cleghorn Street — an unappealing cold-water flat that wasn’t good for much other than storing her coffin of earth. In a rare fit of activity she had painted it purple throughout, a colour-scheme that did nothing to alleviate her own darkness. At least Terri, unlike myself, had worked out her future destiny — she was going to marry a very old, very rich man and then ‘screw him to death’. She wouldn’t be the first, but I doubted whether she would find a suitable candidate in Dundee.
I fumbled around in the dark for a candle. We were in the midst of a discontented winter of strikes and three-day weeks which meant there was no electricity this morning. If I had been capable of forethought, which I feared I never would be, I would have bought a torch by now. I would also have managed to acquire a Thermos flask. And a hot-water bottle. And batteries. I wondered how many three-day weeks it would take before civilization began to break down. Sooner for some than others, I supposed.
From the window I could see that across the water in Fife they had electricity. The houses of Newport and Wormit were studded with cheerful lights as more purposeful people than us embarked on their day. If it had been daylight we would have had a magnificent view of the rail bridge and its freight of trains, the black iron lacework curving lazily across a Tay that was sometimes silvery, often not, and which in today’s dark dawnlight was like a ribbon of tar running past the city.
In the bedroom, Bob was still fast asleep. In these night-like days of hibernation his waking hours were even more severely curtailed than usual.
‘The butterfly’s got the cornflakes,’ a sleepfaring Bob warned us in a loud voice.
‘I don’t know what you see in him,’ Terri said.
‘Neither do I,’ I said gloomily.
It couldn’t have been his looks that attracted me, as Bob looked much like everyone else did — the Zapata moustache, the gold hoop earring, the greasy Royalist locks curling over badly deported shoulders. He looked, if anything, like a tramp — an impression reinforced by the second-hand army boots and the oversized air-force greatcoat he habitually wore.
Bob had recently discovered the meaning of life, a discovery that seemed to have made no difference whatsoever to his everyday existence.
I met Bob the first week I was at university. I was already eighteen years old and thought that I could discern a certain librarian caste to my features and was afraid I would end up a lonely figure, forever wandering a spinster wasteland, and it was mere chance that Bob was the first person to cross my path the morning I decided to lose my virginity.
I met him when he ran me over. Bob was on a bicycle and I was on a pavement, which perhaps gives an indication of whose fault the accident was. I broke my wrist (or rather, Bob broke my wrist), and the exciting combination of circumstances — drama, blood and a brown-eyed man — all served to make me think that destiny had spoken and therefore I should listen.
Bob hit me because he swerved to miss a dog. The man who would sooner run over a woman than a dog introduced himself by bending over me where I lay on the pavement, staring at me in amazement, as if he’d never seen a woman before, and saying, ‘Wow, what a bummer.’
The dog came out of the accident unscathed, if a little surprised, and was returned to its tearful owner. Bob rode to the Dundee Royal Infirmary in the ambulance with me and had to be physically stopped from inhaling the gas and air.
Terri had finally taken her sunglasses off after tripping over Bob’s boots left carelessly in the middle of the floor. There were many drawbacks to living with Bob, not the least of which was the way he created a mysterious amount of self-replicating debris that constantly threatened to engulf him.
With no power and the cupboard bare, we had to imagine breakfast. Hot chocolate and cinnamon toast for Terri, while I preferred Braithwaites’ ‘Household’ blend tea with one of Cuthbert’s well-fired white rolls, its outside crisp and blackened, its inside filled with doughy white air. We remained hungry, however, for you cannot really eat your own words.
‘Well, at least being up at this hour means we’ll make it to Archie’s tutorial on time for once,’ I said, without any great enthusiasm, but when I looked at Terri closely I realized she had fallen asleep. She should take more care, she had just the kind of sluggish metabolism that gets people buried alive in family crypts and glass coffins. In some ways (but not in others) Terri would have made the perfect wife for Bob — they could have simply slept their way through married life. Rip van Winkle and Duchess Anaesthesia, the lost, sleepy daughter of the Romanovs.
I gave her a little pinch and said, ‘You know you shouldn’t—’ but then I came under the sleep spell as well.
Sometimes I wondered if we weren’t all unwittingly taking part in drug trials being conducted covertly by a pharmaceutical company, perhaps for a drug with the opposite effects of speed. They could just call it Slow when it hit the market. Perhaps that was who was watching me — an undercover research assistant observing the effects of Slow on his unsuspecting guinea-pig. Because I was sure someone was watching me. (‘Well, you know what they say,’ Bob said, in what I think was a misguided effort to comfort me, ‘just because you’re paranoid it doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.’)
For several days now I had been aware of the unseen eyes on me, of the inaudible feet dogging my every footstep. I hoped it was merely the projection of a heated imagination rather than the beginnings of some paranoid delusional breakdown that would end on a locked ward in Liff, the village where the local mental hospital was located. (‘Take more drugs,’ was the advice of Bob’s best friend, Shug.)
I woke up with a jolt. My head had been pillowed uncomfortably on the edge of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the book had left a painful gouge in my cheek. Terri was making little whimpering noises, dreaming about chasing rabbits again.
I shook her awake, ‘Come on, we’re going to be late.’
My new resolution, rather late in my final year I realized, was to attend all the lectures, tutorials and seminars that I was supposed to. This was in a vain bid to curry favour with as many of the English department staff as possible because I was now so behind with my work that it was becoming increasingly unlikely that I would even be able to sit my degree, let alone pass it. I didn’t understand how I’d got so behind with everything, especially when I was trying so hard to keep up.
Terri was even more behind than I was, if that was possible. The George Eliot essay (‘ Middlemarch is a treasure house of detail, but an indifferent whole.’ Can Middlemarch be defended against this criticism by Henry James?) was just one of the many pieces of work that we hadn’t managed to do.
I dressed as if for a polar expedition in as many clothes as I could find — woollen tights, a long needlecord pinafore dress, several reject men’s golfing sweaters that had been acquired in a St Andrews Woollen Mill sale, scarf, gloves, knitted hat, and, lastly, an old beaver coat, bought for ten shillings in the pawn shop at the West Port, a coat that still had a comforting old lady smell of camphor and violet cachous about it.