Free Love Over Scotland by Alexander McCall Smith Page B

“corroboration” before. It was very interesting; one day she would have to attempt to measure the extent of his vocabulary. She had seen a kit which enabled one to do just that: one asked the meaning of certain words and then extrapolated from the results. Extrapolation, she thought. Would Bertie know what extrapolation meant?
    She decided to indulge Bertie. “Very well, Bertie,” she said. “You can come to the police station with me. I don’t think that there’s much to be seen there, quite frankly. Police stations are rather boring places, I understand.”
    Bertie looked puzzled. “Then why do people like to read about them, if they’re so boring?”
    Irene laughed. “I suppose that’s because the people who write about them–people like that Ian Rankin–have no idea what a real police station is like!”
    “So they just make it up?” asked Bertie. “Does Mr Rankin just make everything up?”
    “He has a very active imagination,” said Irene. “He makes Edinburgh sound very exciting, with all those bodies and so on. But that’s not at all what real life’s like. Real life is what we do, Bertie. Real life is you and me. Valvona and Crolla. That sort of thing.”
    Bertie thought for a moment. “Poor Mr Rankin,” he said after a while. “It’s sad that he has to make things up. Do you think he’s unhappy, Mummy? Do you think that having to tell so many fibs makes him unhappy?”
    Irene reached down and patted Bertie on the head. It was a gesture which Bertie particularly disliked, and he dodged to avoid her hand. “Dear Bertie,” she said. “Don’t you worry about Ian Rankin! He’ll be fine. I don’t think he knows that he’s making things up, I really don’t. I think he probably believes it’s all true.” She paused. “But anyway, Bertie, let’s not concern ourselves too much about all that. If we’re going to Gayfield Square, then we should leave now. And then, afterwards, we can go and buy sun-dried tomatoes at Valvona and Crolla. Would you like that?”
    Bertie said that he would, and a few minutes later they were making their way up Scotland Street to the Drummond Place corner. Irene walked slowly, while Bertie skipped ahead of her. Every so often he would turn round and run back to join his mother, before detaching himself from her again. She noticed that when he skipped, he kept his gaze carefully on the pavement in front of him. And his gait, too, was controlled, as if he was taking care to avoid putting his feet…It was that old business with the bears and the lines again, she thought, with irritation. It really was most vexing that Bertie, who appeared to know what corroboration was, who was able to speak Italian with such fluency, and who could reel off all the main scales, major and minor, should believe that if he put his foot on a line in the pavement, bears would materialise and eat him. She had no idea where he got such notions from. She had never encouraged magical thinking in her son; she had always pointed out that darkness was just the absence of light, not cover for all sorts of ghosts and bogles; she had never encouraged any of that nonsense, and yet here he was being irrational. Of course, he got it from other children; she was sure of that. There was even now a whole world of childish belief–lore and language–that survived the most determined rationalistic attempts to tame it. And those belief structures still seemed able to lay a claim to the juvenile mind, sending it off down ridiculous avenues of fantasy.
    She called out to Bertie, who had skipped ahead and was just about to turn the corner. Hearing his mother’s voice, Bertie stopped, turned round, and then began to run back to her.
    “I want to talk to you, Bertie,” said Irene. “We can talk as we walk along.”
    Bertie looked crestfallen. He had planned to keep some distance between himself and his mother, in case anybody should think that he belonged to her. Now this would be impossible. He