Emotionally Weird by Kate Atkinson Page A

had obviously never watched a crow fly and executed several more detours once we arrived in Dundee – betting shops, The Golden Fry for a deep-fried pizza and so on – before finally bringing the Cortina to a halt, parked half on and off the pavement outside the Phoenix bar, not far from where he had run into the dog. Professor Cousins looked at the Phoenix and its solicitation to ‘Drink and be whole again beyond confusion’ (an unlikely outcome, you would think) and said wistfully to Chick, ‘Time for a wee doch-an-dorris, Chick, my man?’ in his strangled dog-Scots. But Chick had already exited the car and was running up the street and dashing up the steps of the Catholic church on the Nethergate.
    ‘Where’s he gone?’ Professor Cousins asked, peering through the rain-smeared window.
    ‘Church, I think he’s gone to church,’ I ventured.
    ‘He didn’t seem the religious sort,’ Professor Cousins mused, ‘although a philosophical chap, don’t you think?’
    A hearse was parked outside the church; of course they all look alike, but it seemed likely that it was the one from The Anchorage.
    ‘I think he’s gone to a funeral,’ I said.
    ‘Do you think he’s all right?’ Terri asked after ten minutes of waiting. ‘Not like I care or anything.’
    ‘Who is he anyway?’ Bob asked, his curiosity typically slow to be aroused.
    ‘A gumshoe,’ Professor Cousins said with relish.
    ‘Uh?’
    ‘A private investigator,’ I explained.
    ‘Wow.’
    Some desultory conversation followed during which Bob accidentally revealed that he was, to a certain extent, an English student. Professor Cousins was bewildered by this information, never having encountered Bob before.
    ‘Well, I’m a kind of . . . underground student,’ Bob said, rather unsatisfactorily. We waited another ten minutes and then Terri and I decided to go and find out what had happened to Chick.
    The church was Tardis-like, much bigger inside than it was outside, and was full of noises the sources of which were invisible – echoing footfalls and discreet coughing – as if there were people hiding behind screens and in the hollow crypts of the building. The coffin was miles away at the far end of an aisle that was like an airport runway. There was only a handful of mourners, scattered strategically around an ocean of pews, and they all turned to look at us as we entered. We sat down at the back and Terri gave me a little nudge to indicate how happy she was with the venue.
    In the absence of electricity the church was lit by dozens of candles. The priest presiding over the funeral was old and bulky, his black priest’s frock stained and strained over a big housekeeper-fed belly. The funeral service was complex and mysterious and seemed to have little to do with the corpse, who appeared to be called ‘Senga’.
    On the distaff side of the church I spotted Janice Rand. She was with a Christian friend – an unattractive girl with the beginnings of alopecia and thick-rimmed spectacles. You could tell just by looking at her that she’d spent her adolescence in a church youth-club playing table-tennis and ‘Kumbayah’ on acoustic guitar. Janice was carrying a handbag that looked as if it must have once belonged to her mother. It had a peeling Lifeboat sticker on the side.
    There was a knot of old ladies at the front of the church – Senga’s friends presumably – some of whom were clutching shopping-bags as though they’d stepped into the church by accident while out picking up their messages in Littlewoods.
    There was an air of palpable gloom which seemed to centre on the coffin. Perhaps when unhappy people die they release an effluvium of depression, like marsh gas. What happened, I wondered, to the molecules of the dead? Do they wait around, to be absorbed into any passer-by? I put my hand over my nose and mouth like a surgical mask just in case I inhaled any of Senga.
    The funeral service seemed suddenly to dwindle away into nothing and