‘Well. I’m not used to this kind of thing,’ he says, staring at his feet.
‘Begin at the beginning,’ I tell him, remembering Mrs Macbeth’s dictum (which she may well have stolen off someone), ‘and carry on until you’ve finished.’
‘Hm.’
— Start with the weather, I always like to do that.
‘It was weird weather,’ Chick says. ‘Warm but rainy, like a monsoon or something. Thunderstorms. And animals appearing that didn’t belong. A puma was found wandering the hills in the glen. I had to get a bloody zoo keeper up from Edinburgh.’
— Oh, I’d forgotten that, Nora says. The hunters were all stalking it, they said there was no closed season on cats.
‘And fish,’ Chick said, ‘there was an angler claimed to have caught an angelfish. Another one said he netted a mermaid. People were aff their heid with the weather. And those bloody wasps, they were everywhere, in people’s hair, in their beds, in their baffies, their biscuit tins. Mind that woman over at Kembie,’ he says, turning to Nora, ‘got stung when she was hanging out her washing and dropped down deid. And it was jam-making time so the women were aff their heid, the wasps were aff their heid. Everyone was aff their heid.
‘Raspberry,’ he says, suddenly, unexpectedly wistful, ‘raspberry was the sweetest.’
Who would have thought Chick a jam-connoisseur?
‘She made such a lot of it,’ he continues, ‘forever stirring that jeely-pan. I dropped in one morning to warn her about a Geordie gang that were raiding over the border — stealing stuff out of folk’s houses. No-one kept their doors locked thereabouts.
‘It was like a Turkish bath in that kitchen. She gave me a bit of mutton pie and some green beans, leftover rice pudding, a cup of tea.’
(The way to Chick’s heart is clearly the traditional route.)
‘It just went on from there.’ Chick shrugs. ‘She was lonely, I was lonely. She’d never had a man, never had her furrow ploughed —’
— Charming.
‘She was married to that dried-up old crippled stick. She was such a nice woman, she started off telling me that God loved me, but I think she’d changed her mind by the end. We’d knocked over a few jam pots in the heat of things. The stuff was everywhere. Wasps were throwing themselves against the window —’
Realization has been dawning slowly, very slowly, on me.
‘Oh my God,’ I say to Chick. ‘You’re my father?’
So I have gained my inheritance, which is to say, my blood. My mother was my mother, my father is my father.
On the last day of winter, which is the very next day, we go down to the shore and Nora takes the — rather gratuitous — diamonds from her overcoat pocket and flings them into the grey ocean where they disappear into the waters with a steaming hiss.
‘Aff her heid,’ Chick says to me and I can only agree.
— There, Nora says, that’s the end of that.
‘You promised madwomen in the attics.’
— One madwoman, I only promised one madwoman and there wasn’t enough room for her.
I suppose Effie will do well enough for our story’s madwoman.
‘Aye,’ Chick says. ‘Aff her heid, that one.’
— I could put an attic in if you really wanted, Nora offers, in an agreeable mood now she is rid of her tale.
But I think we will leave it at that.
— No attic?
‘No attic.’
1999
The Meaning of Life
IT IS ALL ENDINGS NOW.
Lachlan left nothing but debts after all, and the diamonds that were at the bottom of the sea were all that was left of the Stuart-Murrays’ wealth. No body was ever found in the Tay but nor was there any more word from Effie.
I never took my degree. Instead my new, unlooked-for father took me back to Dundee to collect my belongings — Bob was sitting the last paper of his finals at the time (he got a third-class degree, but didn’t understand how), but I didn’t hang around to see him.
I stayed with Chick for a while — he had a sort of hovel in Peddie Street, we had to climb out of the downstairs window to get to the outside toilet — and he made a great effort to be paternal, which mostly meant buying me fish and chips and offering me cigarettes every time he lit up. It wasn’t long before I left Dundee — leaving the north for ever to find my fortune elsewhere — but I kept in close touch with Chick as well as ‘the mingin’ little bastards’, who were my half-siblings, of course (much to Moira’s fury). Chick died a few years ago but I think of him fondly.
It was Chick who persuaded Nora that it was safe for her to return to the land of the living and she took things up much where she had left off, becoming a mature student and taking a degree in marine biology. She married a diver — a handsome one, you will be pleased to know — and he knows the story of her life as a murderess and a fugitive. They have a little boat called Sea-Adventure II that they more or less live on and they wander around the warmer parts of the world like a pair of sea-gypsies. So, there’s a happy ending. I don’t see Nora often but that’s all right. She will always be my mother, as far as I’m concerned.
I have been back to Dundee very recently, crossing over the rail bridge under a sky of saltire blue. I saw the stumps of Thomas Bouch’s disastrous bridge, the seals — as freckled and speckled as mistle thrushes — sunning themselves on the sandbanks in the middle of a Tay that was the colour of the sea on the Neapolitan Riviera. Dundee had changed and yet hadn’t changed. There were new buildings — a contemporary arts centre, a big blue medical research building — and old ones had disappeared — the Overgate, the Wellgate Steps and the flat in Paton’s Lane where I had once lived with Bob. The headline on the newspaper stand was ‘Dundee reptile saved’, proving that the local press remained as Dundeecentric as ever.
I had lunch in the new arts centre, overlooking the Tay. I visited the Howff graveyard and I bought tea in Braithwaites’ and fern cakes from Goodfellow and Steven. I wandered round the university. Watson Grant was no longer there, of course. Aileen left him in 1973 to live with her lover — a dashing pilot stationed at RAF Leuchars. Grant Watson declared personal bankruptcy a year later, lost his tenure, got taken into Liff for a while. Now he lives quietly in Devon and works as a bookbinder.
Dr Dick was no longer there either — he moved to Lancaster University — and Maggie Mackenzie died of a blood clot on the brain a few minutes after I patted her hand and said goodbye to her in the DRI. Professor Cousins died years ago after handing over the reins of the English department to Christopher Pike, who had undergone a miraculous recovery.
To my astonishment, I saw Bob again. The reason I was in Dundee was because I was on a book tour, of sorts. To everyone’s surprise, but mostly mine, I had eventually become a writer of detective fiction — the genteel kind for nervous people who like their crime free of anything to do with urban decay, computers or sex, and for foreigners who like their English detectives to be quaint and colourful.
I was giving a reading, to a modest audience, in James Thin’s bookshop in the High Street. Halfway through, I looked up and saw a figure staring in through the plate glass of the window like a curious fish in a tank.
I thought he was another madman and returned to reading. A few minutes later the madman came into the shop and hovered annoyingly behind the rest of the audience. Only after the usual questions were done with did the madman — overweight, balding, a rather sleazy air — speak.
‘Is it really you?’ he said, his natural nasal Essex returned.