Emotionally Weird: A Novel by Kate Atkinson

Author:Kate Atkinson [Atkinson, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Psychological, Families, Students, Scotland, General, Literary, Sagas, Mothers and Daughters, Fiction
ISBN: 9780312279998
Google: 3HSNPLvO1JQC
Amazon: 031227999X
Publisher: Picador
Published: 2001-07-01T07:00:00+00:00

Chez Bob

UNBELIEVABLY, IT WAS ONLY EIGHT O’CLOCK WHEN I got home. I ate Cornish Wafers and Philadelphia cream cheese; I watched the news, although I turned it off when it showed trees being napalmed. I read Me and Miss Mandible and listened to After the Gold Rush ; I washed out a pair of tights and sewed on a button. I ate more Cornish Wafers, but I had run out of Philadelphia. I wrote a halfhearted sentence of Henry James ( James’s implication is not only that the novel is episodic and fragmented but also that it is a vehicle for far too much analytic and philosophical intrusion on the part of the author herself –) until finally I went to bed only to be woken a couple of hours later by Shug and Bob rolling in with a couple of traffic cones and a clutch of warm rolls from Cuthbert’s all-night bakery. Of my mysterious promised visitor there had been no sign at all.

~ Have you guessed who she is yet? I ask Nora, who is chewing on a Jacob’s cream cracker from a packet she’s found in a tin at the back of a cupboard. I can smell its staleness. Nora has coiled her hair up in a careless heap and I can see fiery little tendrils curling at her neck. Today our hair is very red on account of the rain that is threatening us. For we live in a raincloud. Nora says she can feel the rheumaticky weather in her bones. She says she is a human barometer.

‘Do you recognize her?’

~ Do you think that’s a weevil? she asks, staring at the cream cracker.

Bob and Shug started playing a relentless, noisy game of Diplomacy until, overcome by an attack of the munchies, they went out into the darkness on a quest for Mars Bars. The clock by the bed said six o’clock. I wondered if it was morning or night. It didn’t make any difference, I was wide awake anyway. There seemed to be nothing for it but to write.

Madame Astarti took an early lunch, ambling out to buy fish and chips from a little place down a side street called ‘The Catch Of The Day’. It was off the tourist track and much frequented by the locals. It was a comfortable, old-fashioned kind of place with tiled pictures of fish and a back room with a coal fire. It took a minute or two for Madame Astarti to notice that it was no longer the chip shop it had been, but was now called ‘The Codfather’ and had been fitted out in stainless steel and pale blue plastic.

‘One of each, please, Sharon,’ she said, ‘and perhaps an extra portion of chips,’ she added as an afterthought.

‘Scraps?’ Sharon offered.

‘Oh yes, scraps,’ Madame Astarti agreed.

‘Mushy peas?’

‘Go on then,’ Madame Astarti said.

‘Pickled onion?’

‘All right.’ Madame Astarti drew the line at a pickled egg. You had to draw the line somewhere, after all.

The fish supper came on a cardboard tray with a plastic fork.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.