A Spot of Bother

by Mark Haddon

  “You are happy with Ray, aren’t you?” asked Mum.

  “Yes, Mum, I’m happy with Ray.”

  “Good.” Her mother readjusted her glasses. “Now. Flowers.”

  After an hour or so, they heard footsteps and Katie turned round to see Jacob grinning in the doorway, his trousers and nappy dragging from one leg.

  “I did a poo. I did it…I did it in the toilet. All on my own.”

  Katie scanned the perfect beige carpet for brown chunks. “Well done you.” She got up and walked over. “But you really should have given me a shout first.”

  “Grandpa said he didn’t want to wipe my bottom.”

  After she’d put Jacob to bed Katie came downstairs to find Mum pouring two glasses of wine and saying, “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  Katie took the wine, hoped it was something trivial and the pair of them went through to the living room.

  “I know you’ve got a lot to think about at the moment and I know I shouldn’t be saying this to you.” Mum sat down and took an uncharacteristically large gulp of wine. “But you’re the only person who really understands.”

  “OK…” said Katie, gingerly.

  “Over the last six months…” Mum put her hands together as if she was about to pray. “Over the last six months I’ve been seeing someone.”

  Mum said the phrase “seeing someone” very carefully, as if it were French.

  “I know,” said Katie, who really, really, really did not want to be talking about this.

  “No, I don’t think you do,” said Mum, “I mean…I’ve been seeing another man.” She paused and said, “A man who is not your father,” just to make it absolutely clear.

  “I know,” Katie said again. “It’s David Symmonds, isn’t it. The chap who used to work with Dad.”

  “How on earth did you…?” Mum gripped the arm of the sofa.

  It was briefly rather fun, having Mum on the back foot. And then it wasn’t, because her mother looked terrified.

  “Well…” Katie cast her mind back. “You said you’d met him in the shop. He’s separated from his wife. He’s an attractive man. For his age. You said you’d met him again. You started buying expensive clothes. And you were…you were holding yourself in a different way. It seemed pretty clear to me that you were…” She let the sentence dangle.

  Mum was still gripping the arm of the sofa. “Do you think your father knows?”

  “Has he said anything?”

  “No.”

  “Then I think you’re safe,” said Katie.

  “But if you noticed…”

  “Girl radar,” said Katie.

  Girl radar? It sounded wrong as soon as it came out of her mouth. But Mum was relaxing visibly.

  “It’s OK, Mum,” said Katie, “I’m not going to give you a hard time.”

  Was it OK? Katie wasn’t sure. It looked a bit different now it was out in the open. So long as Mum didn’t want sex tips.

  “Except it’s not OK,” said Mum, plowing doggedly on.

  For a short, fuddled moment Katie wondered if Mum was pregnant. “Why not?”

  She examined the varnish on her nails. “David has asked me to leave your father.”

  “Ah.” Katie stared into the wobbly orange light coming from the fake coal fire and remembered Jamie, years ago, taking it apart to examine the little metal propellers turned by the hot air coming off the bulbs.

  “Actually,” said Mum, “that’s unfair to David. He said he wants me to come and live with him. But he understands that I might not want to. That it might not be possible.”

  Now Katie was on the back foot.

  “He doesn’t want to rush me. And he’s happy for things to stay as they are. He just wants…He wants to spend more time with me. And I want to spend more time with him. But it’s very, very difficult. As you can imagine.”

  God, he smoked those weird ladies’ cigars, didn’t he. “What about Dad?”

  “Well, yes, there is that, too,” said Mum.

  “He’s in the middle of having a nervous breakdown.”

  “He’s certainly not very well.”

  “He can’t leave the bedroom.”

  “Actually, he does come down occasionally,” said Mum. “To make tea and go to the video shop.”

  Katie said, quietly but firmly, “You can’t leave Dad. Not at the moment. Not while he’s like this.”

  Katie had never stood up for Dad before. She felt oddly noble and grown up, putting her prejudices to one side.

  “I’m not planning to leave your father,” said Mum. “I just wanted…I just wanted to tell you.” She leaned over and took Katie’s hand for a few moments. “Thank you. I feel better for having got it off my chest.”

  They sat in silence. The orange light flickered under the plastic coals and Katie heard a distant burst of Hollywood gunfire from upstairs.

  Mum eased herself off the sofa. “I’d better go and see if he needs anything.”

  Katie sat for several minutes, staring at the foxhunting print on the far wall. The storm over the hill. The lopsided farm dog. The fallen rider who, she could see now, was about to be crushed by the hooves of the horses jumping the hedge behind him.

  She’d seen it every day for eighteen years and never really looked at it.

  She poured herself another glass of wine.

  The frightening thing was how alike they were. She and Mum. Putting the thing with David to one side for the moment. Putting the thing with Ray to one side for the moment.

  Mum was in love.

  She replayed the words in her head and knew that she should feel moved. But what did she feel? Only sadness for that fallen rider whose approaching death she’d never seen before.

  She was crying.

  God, she missed Ray.

  53

  The following weekend Jamie went to Bristol to stay with Geoff and Andrew. Something else he was able to do now he was single again. He and Geoff had seen each other pretty much every month since college. Then Jamie made the mistake of bringing Tony along.

  God, the last visit would be burnt into his memory forever. Andrew talking about imaginary numbers and Tony assuming it was some kind of intellectual one-upmanship. Despite Andrew being an actual maths lecturer. Tony getting his own back with the KY toothpaste story and some rather theatrical belching. So that Jamie had to send flowers and a long letter when they got back to London.

  Geoff had put on a bit of weight since their last meeting, and he’d gone back to wearing glasses. He looked like the wise owl in a children’s story. He had a new job, too, doing the finances for a software firm that did something utterly incomprehensible. He and Andrew had moved into a rather grand house in Clifton and adopted a Highland terrier called Jock who clambered into Jamie’s lap as they sat in the garden drinking tea and smoking cigarettes.

  Then Andrew arrived, and Jamie was shocked. The age difference had never seemed relevant. Andrew had always been the leaner, fitter man. But he looked old now. It wasn’t just the stick. You could break an ankle at eighteen. It was the way he moved. As if he expected to fall.

  He shook Jamie’s hand. “Sorry I’m late. Got held up in some stupid committee. You’re looking well.”

  “Thank you,” said Jamie, wanting to return the compliment but not being able to.

  Jamie and Geoff cycled to a postcard pub in the country while Andrew and Jock took the car.

  It seemed sad, at first, the way Geoff’s life was being narrowed by Andrew’s illness. But Geoff seemed as devoted as he’d ever been, and eager to do anything to help Andrew. And this made Jamie sad in a different way.

  He simply didn’t understand. Because he could suddenly see Tony’s point. Andrew was a generous man. But he didn’t do small talk and he didn’t ask questions. When the conversation moved out of his sphere he switched off and waited for it to move back.

  Andrew retired to bed early and Jamie and Geoff sat in the garden finishing off a bottle of wine.

&
nbsp; Jamie talked about Katie and Ray and tried to explain why the relationship made him uneasy. The way Ray cramped her style. The gulf between them. And only when he was doing this did he realize how much of what he was saying applied to Geoff and Andrew. He tried to change the subject.

  Geoff could read him like a book. Perhaps every conversation came round to this subject eventually. “Andrew and I have a very nice life together. We love one another. We look after one another. We don’t have as much sex as we once did. To be honest, we don’t really have sex at all. But, without putting too fine a point on it, there are ways of dealing with that.”

  “Does Andrew know?”

  Geoff didn’t answer the question. “I’ll be there for him. Always. Until the end. That’s the thing he knows.”

  An hour later Jamie lay on the pull-out bed, looking at the roll of carpet and the defunct skiing machine and the cello case and felt that rootless ache he always felt in business hotels and spare rooms, the smallness of your life when you took the props away.

  It disturbed him, Geoff and Andrew. And he wasn’t sure why. Was it Geoff having sex with other men and Andrew knowing and not knowing? Was it the thought of Geoff watching his lover growing old? Was it because Jamie wanted the unconditional love they had? Or because that unconditional love seemed so unattractive?

  The following week he spent three days running the interviews for the new secretary and sorting out all the attendant paperwork. He went to Johnny’s leaving do. He saw A Beautiful Mind with Charlie. He went swimming for the first time in two months. He ate a takeaway Chinese in the bath with The Dark Side of the Moon cranked up to nine downstairs. He read The Farewell Symphony and the fact that he finished it in three days almost made up for how fantastically depressing it was.

  He needed someone.

  Not for sex. Not yet. That came a couple of weeks later, in his experience. You started finding ugly guys attractive. Then you started finding straight guys attractive. Then you had to do something about it pretty quickly because by the time you started thinking you’d settle for sex with one of your female friends you were heading for a whole barrel-load of trouble.

  He needed…The word companion always made him think of elderly playwrights in silk smoking jackets holed up in Italian coastal towns with their handsome secretaries. Like Geoff, but with more glamour.

  He wanted…There was that feeling when you held someone, or when someone held you. The way your body relaxed. Like having a dog on your lap.

  He needed to be close to someone. Wasn’t that what everyone wanted?

  He was getting a bit old for the outdoor stuff and clubs always seemed to him like stag nights, with the hormones flowing in the opposite direction. Men doing what they’d done since they came down from the trees, gathering in herds to get drunk and talk bollocks, anything to avoid the nightmares of being serious or having nothing to do.

  Besides, Jamie’s track record was not good. Simon the Catholic priest. Garry and his Nazi memorabilia. Christ, you’d think people would either confess these things up front or avoid mentioning them at all, instead of announcing them over breakfast.

  Halfway round Tesco he put a tin of sweetened condensed milk into his basket but came to his senses at the checkout and quietly slid it to the side of the conveyor belt when no one was watching.

  Back at home he was lying on the sofa toggling idly between Antiques Roadshow and something about the Great Wall of China when he realized that he could ring Ryan.

  He went to get his address book.

  54

  At four o’clock the following day Katie made the mistake of saying to Jacob, “Well, buddy, half an hour and we’ll head back to London.”

  Cue tears and high-volume wailing.

  “I hate you.”

  “Jacob…”

  She tried talking him down but he was winding up for a big one. So she put him in the living room and closed the door and said he could come out when he’d calmed down.

  Mum caved almost immediately and went in, saying, “Don’t be mean to him.” Two minutes later he was eating Maltesers in the kitchen.

  What was it with grandparents? Thirty years ago it was smacking and bed with no tea. Now it was second helpings of pudding and toys on the dining table.

  She packed the car and said goodbye to Dad. When she told him Mum was going to the doctor he looked petrified but she’d run out of sympathy several hours back. She kissed him on the forehead and closed the bedroom door quietly behind her.

  She manhandled a thrashing Jacob into the car and Hey presto, as soon as he knew resistance was futile he slumped backward, silent and exhausted.

  Two and a half hours later they pulled up outside the house. The hall light was on and the curtains were closed. Ray was there. Or had been.

  Jacob was in a coma, so she lifted him out of his seat and carried him to the front door. The hallway was silent. She hefted him upstairs and laid him down on his bed. Maybe he’d sleep through. If Ray was lurking she didn’t want an argument while ministering to a waking child. She slipped his shoes and trousers off and put the duvet over him.

  She heard a noise and went back downstairs.

  Ray appeared in the hallway carrying the blue holdall and Jacob’s Spider-Man rucksack from the car. He paused, briefly, looked up, said, “Sorry,” then took everything through to the kitchen.

  He meant it. She could see. There was something broken about him. She realized how rarely she ever heard someone say sorry and mean it.

  She followed him and sat down on the opposite side of the table.

  “I shouldn’t have done that.” He was nudging a ballpoint pen round in little circles with his finger. “Running off. It was stupid. You should be able to go out for coffee with who you like. It’s none of my business.”

  “It is your business,” said Katie. “And I would have told you—”

  “But I would have been jealous. I know. Look…I’m not blaming you for anything…”

  Her anger had vanished. She realized that he was more honest and more self-aware than any member of her own family. How had she not seen this before?

  She touched his hand. He didn’t respond.

  “You said you couldn’t marry someone who treated you like that.”

  “I was angry,” said Katie.

  “Yeh, but you were right,” said Ray. “You can’t marry someone who treats you like that.”

  “Ray—”

  “Listen. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking over the last few days.” He paused, briefly. “You shouldn’t be marrying me.”

  She tried to interrupt but he held up his hand.

  “I’m not the right person for you. Your parents don’t like me. Your brother doesn’t like me—”

  “They don’t know you.” Those three days alone in the house she’d been glad of the space and the quiet. Now she could see him walking out for a second time and it terrified her. “Anyway, it’s got nothing to do with them.”

  He narrowed his eyes a little while she was talking, letting it wash over him like the pain from a headache. “I’m not as clever as you. I’m not good with people. We don’t like the same music. We don’t like the same books. We don’t like the same films.”

  It was true. But it was all wrong.

  “You get angry and I don’t know what to say. And, sure, we get along OK. And I like looking after Jacob. But…I don’t know…In a year’s time, in two years’ time, in three years’ time—”

  “Ray, this is ridiculous.”

  “Is it?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He looked directly at her. “You don’t really love me, do you?”

  Katie said nothing.

  He carried on looking at her. “Go on, say it. Say, ‘I love you.’”

  She couldn’t do it.

  “You see, I love you. And that’s the problem.”

  The central heating clicked on.

  Ray got to his feet. “I need to go to bed.”

  “It’s only
eight o’clock.”

  “I haven’t slept for the past few days. Not properly…Sorry.”

  He went upstairs.

  She looked around the room. For the first time since she and Jacob had moved in she could see it for what it was. Someone else’s kitchen with a few of their belongings pasted onto it. The microwave. The enamel bread bin. Jacob’s alphabet train.

  Ray was right. She couldn’t say it. She hadn’t said it for a long time now.

  Except that it was wrong, putting it like that.

  There was an answer, somewhere. An answer to everything Ray had said which didn’t make her feel selfish and stupid and mean-spirited. It was out there. If only she could see it.

  She took hold of the ballpoint pen Ray had been playing with and lined it up with the grain of the tabletop. Maybe if she could place it with absolute accuracy her life wouldn’t fall apart.

  She had to do something. But what? Unpack the bags? Eat supper? It all seemed suddenly pointless.

  She went to the sideboard. Three plane tickets for Barcelona were sitting in the toast rack. She opened the drawer and took out the invitations and the envelopes, the guest list and the list of presents. She took out the photocopied maps and hotel recommendations and the books of stamps. She carried it all to the table. She wrote names at the top of all the invitations and put them into the envelopes with the folded sheets of A4. She sealed them and stamped them and arranged them in three neat white pagodas.

  When they were done she grabbed the house keys and took the envelopes to the end of the road and posted them, not knowing whether she was trying to make everything come out right by positive thinking, or whether she was punishing herself for not loving Ray enough.

  55

  Jean booked an appointment and drove George to the surgery after school.

  It was not something she was looking forward to. But Katie was right. It was best to take the bull by the horns.

  In the event he proved surprisingly malleable.

  She put him through his paces in the car. He was to tell Dr. Barghoutian the truth. None of this nonsense about sunstroke or coming over light-headed. He was not to leave until Dr. Barghoutian had promised to do something. And he was to tell her afterward exactly what Dr. Barghoutian had said.