“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 irra-tional. Of course, he got it from other children; she was sure of
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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 sighed. What did she want to talk about? She would ask him questions, he was sure of that, and she would give him a lecture about bears. He would listen, of course, but if she was going to try to get him to tread on any lines, then the answer would be no. Bertie knew what happened if you trod on lines. Of course he understood that there was no question of bears; bears were just a metaphor for disaster, that’s all they were. But try to explain that to an adult – just try.
“I’d like to ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind, Bertie,”
she said. “You know how Mummy is, don’t you, with her intellectual curiosity? Silly Mummy! But Mummy does like to know what’s going on in her little boy’s head, that’s all.”
“I don’t mind,” Bertie muttered, crossing his fingers as he spoke. It was well known that if you crossed your fingers, you could lie with impunity. Would his mother cross her fingers in the police station? he wondered. Perhaps he would suggest it to her closer to the time.
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“I’ve been wondering where you get your ideas from,” Irene began. “I know that you get a lot of things from Daddy or from me.” (Mostly me, she thought. Thank heavens.) “And you learn a lot from your teacher at the Steiner School, of course. But you must also pick up some things from the other children. You do, don’t you?”
Bertie shrugged his shoulders. “Maybe,” he said. He thought of the other children he knew: Tofu, Hiawatha, Olive.
He was not sure if he learned much from any of them. Tofu knew virtually nothing, as far as Bertie could ascertain.
Hiawatha hardly ever said anything, and anyway he spoke with a curious accent that very few people could understand. And as for Olive, she was always imparting information to others, but it was almost always quite wrong. Bertie had been shocked to discover that Olive thought Glasgow was in Ireland. And she held this view although she had actually been there –
“Well, it seemed like it was in Ireland,” she had said in her own defence. And then she had said that a tiger was a cross between a lion and a zebra and had stuck to this position even after Bertie had pointed out that lions ate zebras and would therefore never get to know one another well enough to have
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offspring. Olive had simply stared at him and said: “What’s that got to do with it?” And so they had left the subject where it stood.
“Perhaps you’ll tell me some of the things you pick up from other children,” coaxed Irene. “Do you know any counting rhymes, for example?”
“Counting rhymes?” asked Bertie.
“Yes,” said Irene. “Here’s one that I remember. Shall I tell it to you?”
