A Spot of Bother

by Mark Haddon

  She hadn’t eaten since four. She put the kettle on. She took down a packet of Maryland Chocolate Chip Cookies, ate six standing up, felt slightly sick and put the remainder back into the cupboard.

  How could Ray sleep at times like this?

  Had she ever loved him? Or was it just gratitude? Because he got on so well with Jacob. Because he had money. Because he could fix every machine under the sun. Because he needed her.

  But, shit, those were real things. Even the money. Christ, you could love someone who was poor and incompetent and share a life that staggered from one disaster to the next. But that wasn’t love, that was masochism. Like Trish. Go down that road and you ended up living in a shed in Snowdonia while Mr. Vibrational Healing carved dragons out of logs.

  She didn’t give a damn about the books and the films. She didn’t care what her family thought.

  So why did she find it so hard to say she loved him?

  Maybe because he’d marched into that café like Clint Eastwood and hurled a wastebin down the street.

  In fact, now that she came to think about it, he had a bloody nerve. He disappeared for three days. Didn’t even let her know he was alive. Then he pitched up, said sorry a few times, told her the wedding was off and expected her to say that she loved him.

  Three days. Jesus.

  You wanted to be a father, you had to show a damn sight more responsibility than that.

  Maybe they shouldn’t get married. Maybe it was a ridiculous idea, but if he was going to try and blame it on her…

  God. That felt better. That felt a lot better.

  She put down her mug and marched upstairs to wake him up and read him the riot act.

  60

  George decided to do it on Wednesday.

  Jean was taking a long-planned trip to see her sister. She had made vague noises about canceling if George needed company but he was insistent that she should go.

  When she finally rang from Northampton to say that she had arrived safely and to check that George was OK, he gathered the equipment. He would not have a great deal of energy or time once he had begun, so everything had to be in place.

  He washed two codeine down with a large tumbler of whiskey. He stacked three elderly blue towels in the bathroom. He put the cordless phone on the kitchen table, filled the tray of the washing machine with powder and left the door open.

  He took an empty, two-liter ice-cream carton from the back of the larder, made sure the lid fitted, then carried it upstairs with a couple of bin liners. He laid the bin liners on the floor and balanced the ice-cream tub on the bath taps. He opened the first-aid kit and placed it on the bathroom shelf.

  The whiskey and codeine were beginning to take effect.

  He went back downstairs, got the scissors out of the drawer and sharpened them with the little gray whetstone they used for the carving knife. For good measure he sharpened the carving knife too, and took both implements upstairs, laying them on the end of the bath opposite the taps.

  He was scared, naturally. But the chemicals were beginning to dull the fear, and the knowledge that his problems would soon be over spurred him on.

  He closed the curtains in the bathroom and the doors in the hallway. He turned off all the lights and waited for his eyes to become accustomed to the darkness. He removed his clothes, folded them and left them in a neat pile at the head of the stairs.

  He was going into the bathroom when he realized that he did not want to be found unconscious on the floor of his own bathroom wearing no clothes. He put his underpants back on.

  He turned the shower to warm, pointed the spray at the far wall and slid the plastic shuttering across.

  The bath mat was thick and furry. Could it be washed? He was not entirely sure. He moved it to the far side of the room for safety’s sake.

  He placed his foot onto the base of the bath to test the temperature of the water. Perfect. He stepped in.

  This was it. Once he had started there would be no turning back.

  He made a final check that everything was in place. The scissors, the ice-cream tub, the bin liners…

  The first part, he knew, would be the hardest. But it would not last for long. He took a deep breath.

  He picked up the scissors in his right hand, then ran the fingers of his left hand over his hip, looking for the lesion. He gripped the flesh around it, and the queasy prickle that spread from his fingers and up his arm (much as if he were picking up a spider or dog mess) only confirmed the necessity of what he was doing.

  He pulled the lesion away from his body.

  He glanced down, then looked away.

  His flesh was stretched into a white peak, like hot cheese on a pizza.

  He opened the jaws of the scissors.

  Take a deep breath, then blow out as the pain comes. That was what the osteopath had said.

  He pressed the blades of the sharpened scissors around the stretched skin and squeezed hard.

  He did not need to remember to breathe out. It happened entirely of its own accord.

  The pain was so far beyond any pain he had felt before that it was like a jet aircraft coming in to land a couple of feet above his head.

  He looked down again. He had not expected such a large volume of blood. It looked like something from a film. It was thicker and darker than he would have predicted, oily almost, and surprisingly warm.

  The other thing he noticed when he looked down was that he had failed to sever completely the flesh around the lesion. On the contrary, it was flapping from his hip like a small and very raw steak.

  He took hold of it again, reopened the scissors and attempted to make a second incision. But the blood made gripping difficult and the fat seemed tougher this time.

  He leant over, put the scissors on the end of the bath and picked up the carving knife.

  When he stood upright, however, a swarm of tiny white lights drifted across his field of vision and his body seemed farther away than it was meant to be. He put his hand out to steady himself on the tiled wall. Unfortunately, it was still wrapped around the carving knife. He let go of the carving knife and pressed his hand against the wall. The knife fell into the bath and came to land with its point embedded in the top of George’s foot.

  At this moment the entire room began to rotate. The ceiling swung into view, he got a vivid close-up of that little avocado-green magnet contraption which held the soap, then the hot tap struck him in the back of the head.

  He lay on his side staring down the length of the bath. It looked as if someone had killed a pig in it.

  The lesion was still attached to his body.

  Holy mother of God. The traumatized cancer cells were doubtless flowing through the isthmus of flesh between flap and hip, setting up little colonies in his lungs, his bone marrow, his brain…

  He knew, now, that he did not have the strength to remove it.

  He had to get to hospital. They would cut it off for him. Perhaps they would cut it off for him in the ambulance if he explained the situation carefully enough.

  He got very slowly onto his hands and knees.

  His endorphins were not working terribly well.

  He was going to have to negotiate the stairs.

  Damn.

  He should have done the whole thing in the kitchen. He could have stood in that old plastic bath the kids used in summer. Or was that one of the items he removed from the back of the garage in 1985?

  Very possibly.

  He leant over the side of the bath and grabbed one of the towels.

  He paused. Did he really want to press towel fluff into an open wound?

  He got carefully to his feet. The little white lights came and went again.

  He glanced down. It was difficult to make out what was what in the general area of the wound, and looking at it made him feel a little sick. He turned his head away and rested his eyes briefly on the spattered tiling.

  Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out. Three. Two. One.

  He glanced down again. H
e picked up the severed flap by its outer side and pressed it back into place. It did not fit very well. Indeed, the moment he let go it slid out of the wound and swung unpleasantly on its damp red hinge.

  Something was actually pulsing in the wound. It was not a reassuring sight.

  He took hold of the flesh again, held it in place, then pressed the towel on top of it.

  He waited for a minute then got to his feet.

  If he rang an ambulance straightaway they might come too soon. He would do a little tidying first, then ring.

  First of all he had to clean the shower.

  When he reached up to take hold of the showerhead, however, it seemed higher than he remembered and his torso was not keen on being stretched.

  He would leave it and invent some story for Jean when she got back from Sainsbury’s.

  Was she at Sainsbury’s? It was all a little hazy.

  He decided to put his clothes on instead.

  This, too, he realized, was not going to be easy. He was wearing a pair of blood-soaked underpants. There were clean pairs of underpants in the chest of drawers in the bedroom, but they were on the far side of ten yards of cream carpet, and there was a considerable volume of blood running down his leg.

  He could have planned this better.

  He pressed the towel a little more firmly against the wound and wiped the blood from the floor by standing on top of the other two towels and shuffling slowly around the bathroom for a couple of minutes. He tried to bend down to pick up the two towels prior to tossing them into the bathtub, but his body was no keener on being bent than it was on being stretched.

  He decided to cut his losses. He staggered into the bedroom and dialed 999.

  When he looked back to the doorway, however, he saw that he had left footprints on the cream carpet. Jean was going to be very unhappy.

  “Police, fire or ambulance?”

  “Police,” said George, not thinking. “No. Wait. Ambulance.”

  “Just connecting you…”

  “You’re through to the ambulance service. Can I take your number, caller?”

  What was his phone number? It seemed to have slipped his mind. He used it so rarely.

  “Hello, caller?” asked the woman on the other end of the line.

  “I’m sorry,” said George. “I can’t remember the number.”

  “That’s OK. Go ahead.”

  “Right, yes. I seem to have cut myself. With a large chisel. There is quite a lot of blood.”

  Katie’s number, for example. He could remember that with no trouble whatsoever. Or could he? To be honest, that number seemed to have slipped his mind as well.

  The woman on the other end of the line said, “Can you tell me your address?”

  This, too, took some effort to recall.

  After putting the phone down he realized, of course, that he had forgotten to find the chisel before getting into the bath. Jean was going to be cross enough already. If she discovered that he had made the mess while cutting the cancer off with her special scissors she would be incandescent.

  The chisel, however, was in the cellar, and the cellar was a long way away.

  He wondered whether he had remembered to put the phone down.

  Then he wondered whether he had got around to remembering his address before putting the phone down. Assuming he had indeed put the phone down.

  They could trace calls.

  At least they could in films.

  But in films you could make someone pass out by squeezing their shoulder.

  He caught sight of himself in the hall mirror and wondered why a crazy, old, naked, bleeding man was standing next to their phone table.

  The cellar steps were really very difficult.

  Before he and Jean got much older it might be an idea to put in a new staircase with a shallower rake. A handrail might not go amiss, either.

  Crossing the cellar he put his foot on something which felt very like one of those small Lego bricks Jacob sometimes left lying around the house, the ones with the single nobble. He stumbled and dropped the towel. He picked the towel up again. It was covered in sawdust and a variety of dead insects. He wondered why he was holding a towel. He put it on the lid of the freezer. For some reason the towel appeared to be soaked in blood. He would have to tell someone about that.

  The chisel.

  He reached into the little green basket and retrieved it from beneath the claw hammer and the retractable tape measure.

  He turned to leave, his knees buckled softly beneath him and he rolled sideways into the paddling pool which they kept semi-inflated to prevent mold forming on the inner surfaces.

  He was looking at a picture of a fish from very close up. There was a spout of water coming from the top of the fish’s head, which suggested that it was a whale. But it was also red, which suggested that it might be another kind of fish altogether.

  He could smell rubber and hear the splash of water and see little scallop shapes of sun sparkle dancing in front of him, and that rather attractive young woman from the hotel in Portugal in her lime-green bikini.

  If his memory served him correctly, that was the place where they served the poisonous dessert in the scooped-out pineapples.

  He seemed to be in a great deal of pain, though it was hard to say precisely why.

  He was also very tired.

  He would sleep for a while.

  Yes, that seemed like a good idea.

  61

  Katie was going to save her marriage.

  She rang the office at eight. She was planning to leave a message and was caught on the hop when Aidan answered the phone (if he didn’t sound so bloody perky she might have suspected him of sleeping in the office; she couldn’t imagine him doing extra work if other people weren’t watching).

  “Let me guess,” said Aidan, wearily. “You’re sick.”

  It would have been simpler to say yes, but it was a day for being honest. And, in any case, she’d never liked agreeing with Aidan. About anything. “I’m fine, actually. But I need the day off.”

  “No can do.”

  There was a gurgling noise in the background. Was it possible that he was urinating while talking on the cordless phone? “You can live without me for a day.”

  “The Henley had the fire officer round. Their license for the ballroom has been revoked. So, we have some work to do.”

  “Aidan?” she said, in that growly snap you used to make bad children stop what they were doing right now.

  “What?” he said, in that slightly quivery voice bad children used when you did the growly snap.

  “I’m staying at home. I’ll explain later. I’ll find you a new venue tomorrow.”

  Aidan reasserted himself. “Katie, if you’re not here by ten o’clock—”

  She put the phone down. It was entirely possible that she no longer had a job. It didn’t seem terribly important.

  Ray turned up just after nine, having dropped Jacob at nursery. He rang the office and talked to a few people to make sure everything didn’t crash and burn in his absence. Then he said, “What now?”

  Katie threw him his coat. “We take a tube into London. You get to choose what we do this morning. I get to choose what we do this afternoon.”

  “OK,” said Ray.

  They were going to start all over again. But this time she wouldn’t be single and desperate. She’d find out whether she liked him instead of just needing him.

  They could deal with his anger-management issues later. Besides, if the wedding was off, it was someone else’s job.

  Ray wanted to go on the Millennium Wheel. They bought a pair of advance tickets then ate ice creams sitting on a bench watching a big tide heading for the North Sea.

  “Remember wafers?” said Katie. “You’d get this little brick of ice cream sandwiched between these crisscross-patterned biscuits. Maybe you can still get them…”

  Ray wasn’t really listening. “It’s like being on holiday.”

  “Good,” sai
d Katie.

  “Only problem with holidays,” said Ray, “you have to go home afterward.”

  “Apparently, going on holiday is the fourth most stressful thing you can do,” said Katie. “After death of a spouse and changing your job. And moving house. If I remember correctly.”

  “Fourth?” Ray said, staring at the water. “What about if your kid dies?”

  “OK. Maybe not the fourth.”

  “Wife dies. Kid with disability,” said Ray.

  “Terminal disease,” said Katie. “Loss of limb. Car crash.”

  “House burning down,” said Ray.

  “Declaration of war,” said Katie.

  “Seeing a dog run over.”

  “Seeing a person run over.”

  “Actually running a person over,” said Ray.

  “Actually running a dog over.”

  “Running an entire family over.”

  They were laughing again.

  Ray was disappointed by the wheel. Too well engineered, he said. He wanted the wind in his hair and a rusty handrail and the faint possibility that the whole structure might collapse.

  Katie was thinking she should have included a height rule in her plan for the day. She felt ill. Marble Arch, Battersea Power Station, the Gherkin tower, some green hills over there which looked like they were in bloody Nepal. She stared down at the blond wood of the central oval bench and tried to imagine she was in a sauna.

  Ray said, “When we were kids we had these cousins who lived in this old farmhouse. You could get out of the bedroom window and climb up onto the roof. I mean, if Mum and Dad had known they’d have gone ballistic. But I can still remember it, even now, that feeling of being above everything. Roofs, fields, cars…Like being God.”

  “How long have we got to go?” asked Katie.

  Ray seemed amused. He glanced at his watch. “Ooh, about another fifteen minutes.”

  62

  Except that it wasn’t a swimming pool because her lime-green bottom (her name was Marianna, he recalled) slid sideways to the right and there was this rhythmic banging which was the sound of oars striking water because he was watching the Boat Race on television (on second thought it might have been Marlena), but maybe not on television because he was leaning on a sturdy granite balustrade, though he could also feel carpet pressed against the side of his face, which suggested that he might, after all, be indoors, and the commentator was saying something about the kitchen, and one way of drawing a rubber plant would be to photograph it and then project a slide onto a large piece of paper masking-taped to a wall and trace it, which some people might think of as cheating, though Rembrandt used lenses, or so they said in that article in The Sunday Times magazine, or perhaps it was Leonardo da Vinci, and no one accused them of cheating because it was what the picture looked like which mattered, and they were dressed in white and they were lifting him up into the air and it wasn’t a circle of light, more an upright rectangle at the top of a flight of steps, though now he came to think about it he may have thrown the slide projector out in 1985 along with the plastic bath, and someone was saying “George…? George…? George…?” and then he went into the rectangle of bright light and something was placed over his mouth and the doors closed and he was ascending now in a kind of crystal lift shaft directly above the house, and when he looked down he could see the unfinished studio and the blocked guttering above the bathroom window that he really should have got around to clearing, and a steam train on the Nene Valley Railway and the three lakes of the country park and the bedspread of fields and that little restaurant in Agrigento and the butterflies in the Pyrenees and the crisscrossing contrails of jets and the blue of the sky turning slowly to black and the hard little fires of the stars.