— Who knows, Nora says.
‘So — he might be alive.’
— Maybe, Nora admits with a sigh.
And my genuine mother as opposed to the fake whose company I keep. ‘Dead, I suppose?’
— Very.
Is there anyone in the world that I am related to by blood?
Hank pushed his cold nose impatiently into my gloved hand to encourage me to move. I stroked his lovely velvety pelt and smelt his warm meaty breath.
He led me back to the entrance of the park and sat down patiently for me to put on his collar and lead, but just as I was about to buckle his collar a car drove up and pulled to a halt as if it was being driven by a stunt man and the familiar and over-excited figures of the Sewells clambered out. They were dressed for the weather, Jay in a windbreaker, Martha in Morland boots, an ankle-length sheepskin and a large fur-trimmed hat. Martha spotted the dog and stood rooted to the spot, screaming his name, while Jay ran towards us, skidding and sliding on the icy pavement and finally falling in an undignified heap in front of a very excited Hank and a not so excited me.
Martha hurried towards us as fast as the snow would allow her, taking little baby steps to avoid falling on her skinny derrière, crying out all the time, ‘My baby, my baby boy.’ Jay hauled himself to his feet and surprised me by catching me in a bear hug, jamming my face into his windbreaker so that I could smell the sweet, almost feminine smell of his aftershave and the breath freshener he was sucking.
‘Oh my God,’ he said, releasing me, ‘how can we ever thank you? Anything you want is yours, Edie.’
‘Effie.’
Anything I wanted? A fatted calf? A chest of treasure dredged up from the bottom of the ocean, brimming over with ropes of pearls, opals like bruises and emeralds like dragons’ eyes? A father? Ferdinand? A degree? But there was so much strung-out emotion fogging the air that it seemed too cold and calculating to request any of these things. Jay wiped a hand across his eyes and said to Martha, ‘Let’s get this guy home,’ while Martha, who now had tears streaming down her face, said in a rusty voice, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever been as happy in my life as I am at this moment.’
Words failed me.
But not for ever.
I stood and watched the happily reunited family drive away, the Sewells’ car fishtailing on the icy surface of Pentland Avenue. I still had Hank’s collar and lead in my hand and a couple of other hardy dog walkers gave me curious looks as if I was walking an invisible dog. I stood for a long time getting colder and colder, wondering what to do, and finally, because I couldn’t think of anything, I took my invisible dog for a walk in the park.
Eventually I headed home. I couldn’t find the courage to tell Terri that I had lost her dog. What chance was there that I could somehow get hold of another identical Weimaraner before Terri noticed that the original one was missing? Or perhaps I could employ Chick to re-kidnap Hank? Perhaps — most unlikely of all — Martha and Jay Sewell could find it in their hearts to come to some kind of custody arrangement with Terri.
These impossible thoughts were clouding my brain as I ploughed down Blackness Avenue through the icy grey slush that the snow had now become. On the Perth Road I was hailed by Professor Cousins, wearing strange rubbery overshoes and a red scarf tied around his head like a child or someone with an old-fashioned toothache. I could almost imagine that he had mittens on ribbons threaded through his sleeves.
I lent him my arm as he was slipping and sliding all over the pavements in an alarming way.
‘No sand on the pavements,’ he observed cheerfully, ‘that’s how accidents happen, you know.’ Perhaps Professor Cousins had become magically attached to me in some way — like a mitten on a ribbon — and I would have to spend the rest of my life entertaining him. I supposed there were worse ways to spend a life.
‘This is where I live,’ I said, steering him into Paton’s Lane. ‘Ah,’ Professor Cousins said, ‘home to Dundee’s own poetic bard — ‘But accidents will happen by land and by sea. Therefore, to save ourselves from accidents, we needn’t try to flee, For whatsoever God has ordained will come to pass; For instance, you may be killed by a stone or a piece of glass.’
Poor Dundee, surely not doomed for ever to be the town of McGonagall and the Sunday Post?
Professor Cousins’ creaking bones took some time negotiating their way up to the top floor but they triumphed eventually. ‘The air’s quite thin up here,’ he wheezed, leaning on the door-jamb to recover. I could only guess at what state I would find the flat in when I opened the front door.
I think it’s time for some more of the story of my miscreant mother (who is not my mother), don’t you? We are huddled inside, in the kitchen, riding out the storm that Nora has stirred up. A fire burns weakly in the grate of the Eagle range. Nora, for reasons best known to her eccentric self, is wearing diamonds around her neck and in her ears.
‘Real?’ I query.
— Real, she affirms.
‘Stolen?’
— Sort of.
‘Evangeline’s?’
— Maybe.
I sigh with frustration. This is like getting blood out of a stone, drawing teeth from a tiger, wrenching dummies from babies. Has she been in possession of this treasure all through the years of our seaside poverty? Can she explain how she came by them? What a mystery my mother (but not my mother) is.
I decide on the patient approach of the concerned psychiatrist to pull her tale from her. These are deep waters we are fishing in. ‘Tell me your first memory?’ I say encouragingly to her. Surely we will find something innocent here, an insight into the childish building-blocks of character. My own first memory, of drowning, is not so innocent, of course. Perhaps it was a kind of afterbirth memory of swimming in amniotic fluid (for we are fish), and yet even as I write I can feel the icy water, filling my nostrils, my ears, my lungs, dragging me down into the depths of forgetfulness.
My second memory isn’t much better. We were catching a bus — one in an endless series in my fugitive childhood. A distracted Nora, preoccupied with the amount of baggage she was trying to get on board the bus, forgot all about me and left me sitting on a bench in the bus station and was two miles down the road before she realized that something was missing. The driver had to slam his brakes on when Nora stood up suddenly at the back of the bus and started screaming dramatically, ‘My baby! My baby!’ so that for one dreadful moment the driver thought he must have crushed Nora’s baby under his wheels. By the time he understood what she was shouting, Nora had precipitated hysteria in half the passengers and an asthmatic attack in a sensitive young librarian who gave up his calling not long afterwards and set off to travel the world in search of an excitement that could equal that of the wild, red-haired woman at the back of the bus. I’m imagining the librarian obviously.
‘And yet I wasn’t your baby,’ I muse to her, ‘was I?’ But whose baby am I, for heaven’s sake?
— I thought you wanted my earliest memory?
‘Please.’
— I am very small and they are very tall.
‘They?’
— Lachlan and Effie. They must be . . . sixteen and eighteen, maybe a little older. Maybe younger.
‘I get the idea.’
— It’s summer and they have taken me down to the loch for a picnic. I’ve always been their ‘pet’, their ‘plaything’. The trouble is, they treat their pets and playthings very badly. The sun is very hot and the black water is shining in the sun. Insects are dancing and skating on the surface of the water. I can smell rotting weed and heat and hard-boiled eggs —