A Spot of Bother

by Mark Haddon

  Ray stared at her without saying a word. Then he stood up, walked sullenly into the hallway, picked up his jacket and slammed the front door behind him.

  Jesus.

  She went into the kitchen, gripped the edge of the sink and hung on to it very tightly for about five minutes so she didn’t scare Jacob by screaming or smashing something.

  She took a swig of milk from the fridge and walked upstairs. Jacob was sitting on the side of his bed, still in his coat, hood up, looking tense, the way he did after parental arguments, waiting for that taxi to the orphanage.

  She sat on the bed and pulled him onto her lap. “I’m sorry I got angry.” She felt him soften as his little arms reached around her. “You get angry sometimes, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” he said, “I get angry with you.”

  “But I still love you.”

  “I love you, too, Mummy.”

  They held each other for a few seconds.

  “Where did Daddy Ray go?” asked Jacob.

  “He went out. He doesn’t like arguments very much.”

  “I don’t like arguments.”

  “I know,” said Katie.

  She slid the hood from his head, brushed a few flakes of cradle cap from his hair, then kissed him.

  “I love you, little squirrel. I love you more than anything in the whole wide world.”

  He squiddled free. “I want to play with my truck.”

  35

  George took a bus into Peterborough and checked into the Cathedral Hotel.

  He had never liked expensive hotels. On account of the tipping, mostly. Who did you tip, on what occasions, and how much? Rich people either knew instinctively or didn’t give a damn if they offended the lower orders. Ordinary people like George got it wrong and doubtless ended up with spit in their scrambled eggs.

  This time, however, he felt none of that niggling anxiety. He was in shock. There was going to be unpleasantness later. He was in no doubt about that. But, for the moment, it was rather comforting to be in shock.

  “Your credit card, sir.”

  George took his card back and slid it into his wallet.

  “And your room key.” The receptionist turned to a hovering porter. “John, can you show Mr. Hall to his room?”

  “I think I can find my own way,” said George.

  “Third floor. Turn left.”

  Upstairs, he emptied his rucksack onto the bed. He hung the shirts, sweaters and trousers in the wardrobe and folded his underwear in the drawer below. He unpacked the smaller items and arranged them neatly on the table.

  He relieved himself, washed his hands, dried them on a ridiculously fluffy towel then rehung it squarely on the heated rail.

  He was coping really very well in the circumstances.

  He removed a plastic tumbler from its sanitary covering and filled it with whiskey from a small bottle in the minibar. He removed a bag of KP peanuts and consumed both standing at the window looking across the jumbled gray roofscape.

  It could not be simpler. A few days in a hotel. Then he would arrange to rent somewhere. A flat in the city, perhaps, or a small village property.

  He finished the whiskey and put a further six peanuts into his mouth.

  After that his life would be his own. He would be able to decide what to do, who to see, how to spend his time.

  Looked at objectively, one could see it as a positive thing.

  He crimped the top of the half-eaten peanuts and laid them on the table, then rinsed the tumbler, dried it using one of the complimentary tissues and replaced it beside the sink.

  Twelve fifty-two.

  A spot of lunch and then a constitutional.

  36

  When David had gone Jean wandered down to the kitchen in her dressing gown.

  Everything glowed a little. The flowers in the wallpaper. The clouds piled in the sky at the end of the garden like snowdrifts.

  She made a coffee and a ham sandwich and took a couple of paracetamol for her knee.

  And the glow began to fade a little.

  Upstairs, when David was holding her, it seemed possible. Putting all of this behind her. Starting a new life. But now that he was gone it seemed preposterous. A wicked idea. Something people did on television.

  She looked at the wall clock. She looked at the bills in the toast rack and the cheese plate with the ivy pattern.

  She suddenly saw her whole life laid out, like pictures in a photo album. Her and George standing outside the church in Daventry, the wind blowing the leaves off the trees like orange confetti, the real celebration only starting when they left their families behind the following morning and drove to Devon in George’s bottle-green Austin.

  Stuck in hospital for a month after Katie was born. George coming in every day with fish-and-chips. Jamie on his red tricycle. The house in Clarendon Lane. Ice on the windows that first winter and frozen flannels you had to crack. It all seemed so solid, so normal, so good.

  You looked at someone’s life like that and you never saw what was missing.

  She washed up her sandwich plate and stacked it in the rack. The house seemed suddenly rather drab. The scale round the base of the taps. The cracks in the soap. The sad cactus.

  Perhaps she wanted too much. Perhaps everyone wanted too much these days. The washer-dryer. The bikini figure. The feelings you had when you were twenty-one.

  She headed upstairs and, as she changed into her clothes, she could feel herself slipping back into her old self.

  I want to go to bed with you at night and I want to wake up with you in the morning.

  David didn’t understand. You could say no. But you couldn’t have that kind of conversation and pretend it never happened.

  She missed George.

  37

  George read the Peter Ackroyd book over a long lunch in a crowded and slightly substandard pizzeria on Westgate.

  He had always thought of solitary diners as sad. But now that he was the solitary diner, he felt rather superior. On account of the book, mostly. Learning something while everyone else was wasting time. Like working at night.

  After lunch he took a walk. The city center was not the best place for sauntering and it seemed a little absurd to hail a taxi in order to be dropped off in the middle of nowhere, so he began walking through Eastfield toward the ring road.

  He would have to collect the car sometime. At night perhaps, to minimize the chance of bumping into Jean. But was it his car? The last thing he wanted was an unseemly argument. Or worse, to be accused of theft. Perhaps, all in all, it might be better to buy a new car.

  He was walking in the wrong direction. He should have walked west. But walking west would have taken him toward Jean. And he did not want to be taken toward Jean, however picturesque the countryside in her vicinity.

  He crossed the ring road, skirted the industrial estates and found himself striding, at last, between green fields.

  For a while he felt invigorated by the cold air and the open sky and it seemed that he was getting all the benefits of a stout walk along the Helford, but without Brian’s company and six hours on a train.

  Then an elderly factory loomed into view on his left-hand side. Rusted chimneys. Box ducts. Stained hoppers. It was not a thing of beauty. Nor was the broken fridge dumped in the layby up ahead.

  The grayness of the sky and the unrelenting flatness of the surrounding fields began to weigh on him.

  He wanted to be working on the studio.

  He realized that he would no longer be able to work on the studio.

  He would have to embark on some other project. A smaller project. A cheaper project. Gliding came to mind unbidden and had to be rapidly chased away.

  Chess. Jogging. Swimming. Charity work.

  He could still draw, of course. And drawing could be done anywhere with little expense.

  It occurred to him that Jean might want to leave the house. To live somewhere else. With David. In which case he would still be able to work on the studio.
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br />   And this was the cheering thought which enabled him to turn round and begin walking energetically back into town.

  By the time he reached the center it was growing dark. But it did not yet seem late enough for him to return to the hotel and take dinner in the restaurant. Luckily, he was passing a cinema and realized that he had not watched a film on the big screen for a good many years.

  Training Day seemed to be a sleazy police thriller. Spy Kids was clearly for younger viewers and A Beautiful Mind, he recalled, was about someone going insane and was therefore probably best avoided.

  He bought a ticket for Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The reviews had been favorable and he remembered enjoying the book at some time in the dim and distant past. He had his ticket clipped and found himself a seat in the center of the auditorium.

  A teenage girl sitting with a group of other teenagers in the row in front turned to see who had sat behind them. George glanced around and realized that he was a solitary and somewhat elderly man sitting in a cinema full of young people. It was not quite the same as lingering near a playground, but it made him feel uncomfortable.

  He got up, made his way back to the aisle and found a seat in the center of the front row where the picture would be larger and clearer and no one could accuse him of anything untoward.

  The film was rather good.

  Some forty minutes in, however, the camera lingered on the face of Christopher Lee who was playing the evil Saruman and George noticed a small area of darkness on his cheek. He might have thought nothing of it except that he remembered reading a newspaper article about Christopher Lee having died recently. What had he died of? George couldn’t remember. It was unlikely to have been skin cancer. But it could have been. And if it was skin cancer then he was watching Christopher Lee dying in front of his eyes.

  Or perhaps it was Anthony Quinn he was thinking about.

  He racked his brain, trying to recall the obituaries he had been reading over the past few months. Auberon Waugh, Donald Bradman, Dame Ninette de Valois, Robert Ludlum, Harry Secombe, Perry Como…He could see them, lined up like the warring minions in the film itself, the disposable foot soldiers in some vast war between elemental forces utterly beyond their control, every one of them being pushed unstoppably toward the edge of a mighty ravine in a cruel cosmic game of shove ha’penny, wave after wave disappearing over the edge and falling screaming into the abyss.

  When he looked at the screen again he found himself watching close-up after close-up of grotesquely magnified faces, every one of them bearing some peculiar growth or region of abnormal pigmentation, each one of them a melanoma in the making.

  He did not feel well.

  Then the Orcs reappeared, and he could see them now for what they were, subhuman creatures from whose heads the skin had been peeled back so that they no longer had lips or nostrils, their faces composed entirely of raw, live meat. And whether it was because their appearance seemed like the effect of some malignant skin disease, or whether it was because they were skinless and therefore immune from skin cancer, or whether this made them unnaturally prone to it and, like albino children in the Sahara, they were dying of cancer from the moment they entered the world, he did not know, but it was more than he could stomach.

  No longer caring what the other members of the audience thought of him, he stood up and steered a zigzag path back up the sloping aisle to the doorway, burst into the shockingly bright and empty foyer, staggered through the big swinging doors and found himself in the relative darkness of the street.

  38

  Jean was settling down with a glass of wine to watch the evening news when Brian called to say that George hadn’t arrived. They agreed that he was probably sitting in a siding near Exeter cursing Virgin Trains. Jean put the phone down and forgot the conversation.

  She dug a turkey burger out of the freezer, put the steamer on to boil and began peeling carrots.

  She ate supper watching some romantic nonsense with Tom Hanks. The credits were rolling when Brian rang again to say that George had still not arrived. He said he would ring back in an hour if he hadn’t heard anything.

  The house seemed suddenly very empty indeed.

  She opened another bottle of wine and drank a glass rather too quickly.

  She was being silly. Accidents didn’t happen to people like George. And if they did (like when he got that piece of glass in his eye in Norwich) he rang home immediately. If he ended up in hospital there would be a sheet of paper in his jacket pocket with Brian’s phone number on it with directions to the cottage and very possibly a hand-drawn map.

  Why was she even thinking about such things? Too many years spent worrying about teenage children going to parties and taking drugs. Too many years spent remembering birthdays and unplugging hot curling tongs left on bedroom carpets.

  She poured another glass of wine and tried to watch more television, but she couldn’t sit still. She washed up. Then she emptied the fridge. She cleaned the gunk from the little drainage outlet at the back, washed the racks in hot, soapy water, swabbed the sides down and dried them with the tea towel.

  She tied the top of the rubbish bag and took it into the garden. Standing beside the bin she heard the whack-whack-whack of a police helicopter. She looked up and saw the black silhouette sitting at the top of a long cone of searchlight in the dirty orange sky above the town center. And she couldn’t suppress the stupid idea that they were looking for George.

  She went inside and locked the door and realized that if she heard nothing in the next hour she was going to have to ring the police.

  39

  Jamie staggered through the next few days like a zombie and lost a mansion in Dartmouth Park to John D. Wood by having self-pitying daydreams about Tony instead of sucking up to the elderly owners.

  On the third day he made himself a laughingstock in the office by doing some lazy cutting and pasting and advertising a third-floor studio flat with a swimming pool on Primelocation.com.

  At which point he decided to pull himself up by his bootstraps. He found a Clash CD in the glove compartment of the car, put it on loud and made a mental list of all the things about Tony which drove him up the wall (smoking in bed, lack of culinary skills, unashamed farting, the spoon-tapping thing, the ability to talk for half an hour about the complexities of installing a Velux window…).

  Back at home, he ritually broke the CD in half and threw it in the bin.

  If Tony wanted to come back he could make the first move. Jamie wasn’t going to crawl. He was going to be single. And he was going to enjoy it.

  40

  The atmosphere in the town center was becoming noticeably more rowdy as young people began gathering for a night of heavy drinking. So George made his way down Bridge Street to the river for some peace and quiet and an explanation for the hovering helicopter.

  When he reached the quayside he realized that whatever was happening was both more serious and more interesting than he had imagined. An ambulance was parked on the road and a police car was pulled up behind, its blue light revolving in the cold air.

  Ordinarily he would have walked away, not wanting to be thought ghoulish. But nothing was ordinary today.

  The helicopter was so low that he could feel the noise as a vibration in his head and shoulders. He stood by the little chain-link fence next to the Chinese restaurant, warming his hands in his trouser pockets. A searchlight from the base of the helicopter was moving in zigzags over the surface of the water.

  Someone had fallen into the river.

  A gust of wind blew a brief crackle of walkie-talkie noise toward him then whisked it away again.

  In its own macabre way it was rather wonderful. Like a film. The way life rarely was. The little yellow oblong of the ambulance window, the sliding clouds, the water choppy under the downdraft from the helicopter, everything brighter and more intense than usual.

  Farther down the river two paramedics in fluorescent yellow jackets were walking methodic
ally down the towpath, shining torches into the water and poking submerged objects with a long pole. Looking for a body, presumably.

  A siren whooped and was immediately turned off. A car door slammed.

  He glanced down at the water in front of him.

  He had never really looked at the river this closely before. Not at night. Not when the level was up. He had always assumed that he would have no problems if he fell into any water. He was a decent swimmer. Forty lengths every morning whenever they stayed in a hotel with a pool. And when John Zinewski’s Fireball capsized he had been scared, briefly, but it had never occurred to him that he might drown.

  This was different. It did not even look like water. It was moving too swiftly, coiling and eddying and rolling over on itself like a large animal. Upstream of the bridge it was heaped in front of the stanchions like lava negotiating a rock. Below the stanchions it vanished into a black sinkhole.

  He could suddenly see how heavy water really was when it was moving en masse, like tar or treacle. It would drag you down or grind you against a concrete wall and there would be nothing you could do about it, however good a swimmer you were.

  Someone had fallen in the river. He realized suddenly what this meant.

  He imagined the first shock of the violent cold, then the desperate scrabble for a handhold on the bank, the stones greasy with moss, fingernails breaking, clothes becoming rapidly waterlogged.

  But maybe this was what they had wanted. Maybe they had thrown themselves in. Maybe they had made no attempt to climb out, and the only struggle was the struggle to let go, to silence that hunger for light and life.

  He pictured them trying to swim down into the dark. He recalled the passage on drowning in How We Die. He saw them trying to breathe water, their windpipe closing in spasm to protect the soft tissue of the lungs. With their windpipe closed they would have been unable to breathe. And the longer they spent not breathing the weaker they would become. They would start to swallow water and air. The water and the air would be churned into a foam and the whole grisly process would take on an unstoppable momentum. The foam would make them gag (these details had stuck really quite vividly in his memory). They would vomit. The vomit would fill their mouth and in that terminal gasp when the lack of oxygen in their bloodstream finally relaxed the spasm in their windpipe, they would have no option but to swallow it down, water, air, foam, vomit, the lot.