Free Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson Page A

general.’
    We turned to go and Janice shouted after us, ‘Jesus can save you!’ She looked rather doubtful as if He might draw the line at us. ‘Jesus is the Son of God,’ she added, in case we didn’t know. ‘He came once to save us,’ she said, rather stroppily, ‘and He’ll come again. He might even be here now.’
    A blast of cold air swung the front door open with a loud crash and we all jumped, but especially Janice who looked as if – just for a fraction of a second – she believed that Jesus had walked into Dundee University’s Student Union. She should warn Him about the lack of hot food. It wasn’t Jesus, unless He had chosen to return as a scruffy student from the Socialist Society, carrying a box of newly printed leaflets – small pink ones as opposed to Janice’s small blue ones.
    ‘Because blue is the colour of heaven?’ I asked her but she just scowled at me. The boy from the Socialist Society pushed one of his leaflets into my hand. It said, ‘Stop the War Now’. He tried to give one to Janice but she wouldn’t take it unless he in turn took one of her leaflets and when we hurried out of the door they were still having a stand-off, thrusting leaflets aggressively at each other.
    Nora, who has been snoring gently by the cold ashes of the kitchen grate, wakes up and yawns.
    ~ Did I miss anything? she asks.
    ‘A certain amount of fear and loathing, a little paranoia, acres of boredom, the Lady Agaruitha in a tower. A lot of new characters that you’ll just have to catch up with as best as you can.’
    ~ No dragons?
    ‘Not yet.’
    Nora has sea-change eyes. Today they are a murky rock-pool brown because the gulls are being chased inland by a determined south-westerly. The wind on the cliffs is so strong that sometimes we find ourselves walking backwards.
    I am strangely at home in this salty air, I am in my element.
    ~ The sea’s in your blood, Nora says, the call of the sea.
    Did the Stuart-Murrays – luckless landlubbers who farmed the rolled and folded landscape of Perthshire – have the salty, seagoing blood of sailors?
    ~ Quite the opposite, says Nora.
    For it seems that the Stuart-Murrays, whilst mysteriously drawn to the water – witness our ancestral holiday home, or Nora’s peregrinations – are nonetheless incapable of keeping afloat on it. There was a Stuart-Murray sank at Trafalgar, according to Nora, and one aboard the Mary Rose , one outward bound on the Titanic , one homeward bound on the Lusitania , and one long forgotten Stuart-Murray who is said to have lost the king’s treasure in the Forth, although which king and which treasure seems unclear.
    I am surprised that Nora ever ventures out in her little Sea-Adventure . But it seems the Stuart-Murrays do not even have to be in boats to be drowned at sea, one of Nora’s uncles was believed lost in the great and horrible Tay Bridge disaster, sneaking onto the train at Wormit, the last stop before the bridge, in a fit of youthful high spirits and alcohol. Ticketless, he remained unaccounted for in the lists of the dead.
    ~ Not your blood in particular, she says, it’s in everyone’s blood, where else does the salt come from?
    Nora is watching the sea, through a huge pair of First World War binoculars that she is toting. She says they once belonged to her eldest brother. A brother? She has never mentioned a brother.
    ~ Oh yes, Nora says nonchalantly, she had a lot of brothers and sisters.
    ‘Imaginary ones perhaps?’
    ~ Real, she says, and counts on her fingers, Douglas, Torquil, Murdo, Honoria, Elspeth . . . and those are just the ones who died before she was born. What an unlucky family the Stuart-Murrays seem to be.
    ~ Oh, that’s nothing, Nora says glumly, not compared with what happened later.

There Are Places Between Edinburgh and Dundee

I HAVE A STONE HOT - WATER BOTTLE , WRAPPED IN AN OLD SWEATER , that I hug to my body in a vain effort to keep warm at nights. It is difficult to sleep when the darkness