A Spot of Bother

by Mark Haddon

  He was mad again. And there was no hope this time. He thought he had cured himself. But he had failed. There was no one else he could rely on. He was going to remain like this until he died.

  Codeine. He needed the codeine. He couldn’t do anything about the cancer. Or Jean. Or the wedding. The only thing he could do was to dull it all a little.

  Keeping hold of the towel rail he started getting to his feet. But as he straightened himself the soft flesh of his stomach was exposed and he could feel it itching and squirming. He grabbed a towel and wrapped it round his abdomen. He transferred his hands to the rim of the bath and stood up.

  He could do this. It was a simple thing. Take the pills and wait. That was all he had to do.

  He opened the cabinet and took the packet down. He swigged back four tablets with water from the bath tap so as to avoid the mirror above the sink. Was four dangerous? He had no idea and did not care.

  He staggered into the bedroom. He dropped the towel and somehow managed to slip into his clothes, despite his shaking hands. He climbed onto the bed and put the duvet over his head and started reciting nursery rhymes until he realized that this was where it had happened, right here, where his head was lying, and he felt like vomiting and knew he had to do something, anything, to keep himself moving and occupied until the drugs started to work.

  He threw the duvet off and got to his feet and took a string of deep breaths to steady himself before heading downstairs.

  Assuming Jean was busy elsewhere, he planned to grab a bottle of wine and head straight out to the studio. If the codeine did not work he would get drunk. He no longer cared what Jean thought.

  But Jean was not busy elsewhere. He was halfway down the stairs when she appeared round the banisters brandishing the phone receiver saying, exasperatedly, “There you are. I’ve been calling you. Ray would like a chat.”

  George froze, like an animal spotted by a bird of prey, hoping that if he remained motionless he might blend into the background.

  “Are you going to take it or not?” said Jean, waggling the phone at him.

  He watched his hand rise up to take hold of the phone as he walked down the last few steps. Jean was wearing a rubber glove and holding a tea towel. She handed the phone over, shook her head and vanished back into the kitchen.

  George put the phone to his ear.

  The pictures in his head toggled giddily from one grotesque image to another. The tramp’s face on the station platform. Jean’s naked thighs. His own sick skin.

  Ray said, “George. It’s Ray. Katie tells me you wanted a chat.”

  It was like those phone calls that woke you up at night. It was hard remembering what you were meant to do.

  He had absolutely no idea what he had wanted to chat to Ray about.

  Was this really happening, or had he tipped over into some kind of delusional state? Was he still lying on the bed upstairs?

  “George?” said Ray. “Are you there?”

  He tried to say something. A small mewing noise came out of his mouth. He moved the receiver away from his head and looked at it. Ray’s voice was still emerging from the little holes. George did not want this to carry on any longer.

  Carefully, he put the phone back onto the receiver. He turned and walked into the kitchen. Jean was filling the washing machine and he did not have the energy for the argument that would ensue if he walked out of the door with a bottle of wine.

  “That was quick,” said Jean.

  “Wrong number,” said George.

  He was halfway down the garden in his socks before he realized why Jean might not have fallen for this brilliant piece of subterfuge.

  92

  Jamie sat down with a mug of tea and his best pen and some writing paper he’d found in the bottom of the desk drawer. Proper paper, like the stuff he was made to use for thank-you letters when he was a kid.

  He began writing.

  Dear Tony,

  I love you and I want you to come to the wedding.

  I went up to Peterborough last week. Dad was having a nervous breakdown and ended up in hospital after chopping bits off himself with a pair of scissors (I’ll explain later). When I was at the hospital I bumped into the man Mum is having an affair with (I’ll explain that, too). Katie and Mum had a blazing row about the wedding. It was off. But now it’s on again (I’ll explain…

  He tore off the sheet of paper, crumpled it up and began again. Tony had expended a lot of energy getting away from his own family. This wasn’t the moment for Jamie to brag about the shortcomings of his own.

  Dear Tony,

  I love you and I want you to come to the wedding.

  I went up to Peterborough last week and realized that you were my family…

  Too mawkish.

  Dear Tony,

  I love you.

  The wedding was off. Now it’s on again.

  God knows what’s going to happen on the day, but I want you to be there with me

  Christ. Now he was selling it as a spectator event.

  Why was this so bloody difficult?

  He took his tea outside and sat on the bench and lit a cigarette. There were children playing in a nearby garden. Seven, eight years old. It reminded him of being young again. Paddling pools and Olympic hurdles over bamboo canes. Bike races and jumping out of trees. A couple more years and they’d be smoking cigarettes or looking for a can of petrol. But for now it was a good noise. Like the buzz of a mower, or people playing tennis.

  It was so bloody difficult because he couldn’t say it to Tony’s face. You said something to someone’s face, saw how they reacted and adjusted the steering wheel a bit. Like selling a house (“It’s a very cosmopolitan area.” “We noticed that.” “Sorry. Estate-agent speak. Hardwired, I’m afraid”).

  And Tony had changed in his absence. After everything Becky had said. When he pictured Tony now he saw someone less sorted, more vulnerable, someone more like himself.

  Jamie had changed, too.

  Christ, it was like chess.

  No. He was being stupid.

  He was trying to get Tony back. It would be good if he came to the wedding but if he missed it, so what? Sooner or later he’d come back from Greece.

  Come to think of it, if the wedding was a disaster, Tony missing it might be a godsend.

  Solved.

  He stubbed out his cigarette and went inside.

  Dear Tony,

  Please come to the wedding. Talk to Becky. She knows everything.

  I love you.

  Jamie

  xxx

  He put it into the envelope, added one of the photocopied road maps, sealed it, addressed it care of Becky, stamped it and took it to the postbox before he could change his mind.

  93

  In other circumstances George might have committed suicide. For two nights running he had dreamed about the drowning in Peterborough and in his dream the river called to him the way a huge feather bed might call to him, and even in the dream it was scary how much he wanted to let go and sink into the cold and the dark and have everything canceled out for good. But there were now only six days to go before the wedding and it would be ungentlemanly to do something like that to his daughter.

  So, for the moment he had to find a way of getting from day to day until a time when it would be acceptable to do something drastic without it souring the celebratory atmosphere. This would doubtless be sometime after Katie and Ray had returned from their honeymoon.

  He assumed, after examining himself in the mirror, that he was going to suffer some kind of organ failure. It seemed inconceivable that the human body could survive the pressure created by that kind of sustained panic without something rupturing or ceasing to function. And at first this was one more fear to add to his other fears, of the cancer, of going irreparably insane, of collapsing in front of the wedding guests. But after twenty-four hours he was willing it to happen. Stroke. Heart attack. Anything. He really did not care whether he survived or not, so long as it rende
red him unconscious and absolved him of responsibility.

  He could not sleep. As soon as he lay down he could feel his skin mutating beneath his clothing. He lay motionless, waiting until Jean had fallen asleep, then got out of bed, took more codeine and poured himself a whiskey. He watched the strange programs that the television pumped out in the small hours. Open-university documentaries about glaciers. Black-and-white films from the forties. Farming news. He wept and walked in circles on the living-room carpet.

  The following day he went out to the studio and invented pointless tasks to tire himself out and occupy his mind (two men were fitting the new carpet in the house). Sanding window frames. Sweeping the concrete floor. Moving all the spare bricks, one by one, to the other end of the studio. Making a variety of small constructions in the style of Stonehenge.

  He was having a great deal of trouble eating. A couple of mouthfuls and he felt queasy, much as he did on ferries in bad weather. He forced down a little buttered toast to reassure Jean and had to go upstairs to be sick in the toilet.

  He began to lose his mind halfway through the second day. He got up from the dining table at the end of lunch, leaving his dessert untouched, saying that he had to go somewhere. He was unsure, precisely, where it was that he had to go. He remembered leaving the house by the front door. Then he remembered nothing for some considerable time. White noise filled his mind, not unlike the white noise of a television failing to tune in to a particular channel, but louder and a good deal more insistent. It was not comfortable, but it was better than leaning over the toilet bowl while the toast came back, or lying in bed feeling the lesions multiply and coalesce.

  It was possible that he took a bus. Though he had no specific memory of being on a bus.

  When he came round he was standing in the doctor’s surgery, in front of the reception desk. A woman seated at a computer monitor was saying, “Can I help you?” Her tone of voice suggested that she had already said this several times.

  She leant forward and repeated the question, but more slowly and more gently, the way you did when you realized that the person you were addressing was not a time waster but suffering from genuine mental impairment.

  “I want to see Dr. Barghoutian,” said George.

  Yes, now that he was here, that seemed like a good idea. Perhaps that was the reason he had come.

  “Do you have an appointment?”

  “I don’t think so,” said George.

  “I’m afraid Dr. Barghoutian is fully booked today. If it’s urgent you could see another doctor.”

  “I want to see Dr. Barghoutian.”

  “I’m sorry. Dr. Barghoutian is seeing other patients.”

  George could not remember the words you used to politely disagree with someone. “I want to see Dr. Barghoutian.”

  “I’m really sorry, but…”

  The trip to the surgery had clearly used up all of George’s energy (perhaps he had walked). He had no idea what he was planning to say to Dr. Barghoutian, but his entire being seemed to have been focused on getting into that little room. Now that it was impossible, he simply could not conceive of what he might do instead. He felt profoundly lonely and oddly cold (his clothing was wet; perhaps it had been raining outside). He lowered himself to the floor and curled into the angle between the carpet and the wooden panel of the reception desk and cried a little.

  He hugged his knees. He was not going to move again. He was going to stay here forever.

  Someone placed a blanket over him. Either that or he dreamt that someone was placing a blanket over him.

  He remembered reading, somewhere, that shortly before one died of exposure one felt pleasantly warm and comfortable and this was a sign that the end was near.

  Except that the end was not near. And he was not going to stay in this position forever because someone was saying, “Mr. Hall…? Mr. Hall…?” and when he opened his eyes he found himself looking at Dr. Barghoutian who was crouching in front of him, and George had been so far away that it took him several seconds to work out where he was, and why Dr. Barghoutian should be there as well.

  He was helped to his feet and ushered down the corridor and into Dr. Barghoutian’s consulting room where he was eased into a chair.

  He could not speak for several minutes. Dr. Barghoutian did not seem unduly concerned, simply sat back and said, “Whenever you’re ready.”

  George summoned his energy and began to speak. On any other day he would have been disturbed by his inability to form sentences, but he was past caring. He sounded like a man crawling into an oasis in a cartoon. “Got cancer…Dying…Really frightened…Daughter’s wedding…”

  Dr. Barghoutian allowed him to carry on in this manner for some time. The pressure inside George’s head eased a little and his grip on syntax began to return. “I want to go into hospital…I want to go into a psychiatric hospital…Please…I need to be looked after…Somewhere safe…”

  Dr. Barghoutian let him grind to a halt. “This wedding is on Saturday, I presume.”

  George nodded.

  Dr. Barghoutian tapped his pencil on his teeth a couple of times. “Right. Here’s what we’re going to do.”

  George felt better hearing him say the words.

  “You’re going to come back and see me on Monday morning.”

  George felt a good deal worse. “But…”

  Dr. Barghoutian held up his pencil. George paused.

  “I will get you an appointment with a dermatologist. And if you’re still feeling anxious we will see about getting you some more heavyweight psychiatric help.”

  George felt a little better again.

  “In the meantime, I am going to write you out a prescription for some Valium, OK? Take as many as you need, though I suggest you stay off the champagne during the wedding itself. Unless you want to end up under a table.”

  Dr. Barghoutian wrote out the prescription. “Now, I strongly suspect that you are going to find yourself feeling a lot calmer when we next meet. If you’re not, we can do something about it.”

  It was not the solution George had hoped for. But the idea of another meeting on Monday and the promise of more heavyweight psychiatric help was a reassurance.

  He would find some way of avoiding the dermatologist.

  “Now, how do you feel about getting home? Would you like the receptionist to call your wife to come and pick you up?”

  The thought of Jean being telephoned to say that he had collapsed in the doctor’s surgery brought him to his senses more abruptly than anything else. “No. Really. I’ll be fine.”

  He thanked Dr. Barghoutian and stood and realized that he was, indeed, wrapped in a lightweight green blanket.

  “Ten o’clock Monday morning,” said Dr. Barghoutian, handing him the prescription. “I’ll get the receptionist to book you in. And make sure you take this to the chemist’s before you go home.”

  He walked out of the surgery and across the road into Boots, examining the pattern on the tiled floor to avoid eye contact with pamphlets. He did three circuits of the park, picked up his prescription, swallowed two Valium and took a taxi home.

  He had wondered what he could tell Jean to explain his unplanned excursion, but when he went into the house he saw a little Spider-Man rucksack in the hallway and realized that Katie had arrived with Jacob to oversee the final arrangements, and when the three of them came in from the garden Jean seemed unfazed by his news that he had gone out for a long walk and lost track of time.

  Jacob said, “Grandpa, Grandpa, come and chase me.”

  But George was not in the mood for chasing children. He said, “Perhaps we can play a quieter game later on,” and realized that he meant it. The Valium was clearly having some effect. A fact which was confirmed when he went upstairs and fell into a deep sleep on the bed.

  94

  Katie was booked in to have her hair done.

  Quite when this had been arranged she wasn’t sure. There was nothing wrong with her hair that couldn’t be sorted ou
t by a quick trim with the bathroom scissors and a decent conditioner. Clearly she’d been running on automatic when she was time-tabling everything.

  Thank God she hadn’t organized bridesmaids.

  She told Ray she was going to cancel the appointment, he asked why and she said she didn’t fancy getting herself tarted up like something out of a bridal catalog. Ray said, “Go on. Give yourself a treat.” And she thought, Why not? New life. New hair. And went and had most of it removed. Boyish. Ears on show for the first time in seven years.

  And Ray was right. It was more than a treat. The person in the mirror was no longer simply a wife and mother. The person in the mirror was a woman in charge of her own destiny.

  Mum was horrified.

  It wasn’t the hair specifically. It was the combination of the hair and the canceled florists and the decision not to arrive at the register office in a limousine.

  “I’m just worried that—”

  “That what?” asked Katie.

  “I’m just worried that it won’t be…that it won’t be a proper wedding.”

  “Because I don’t have enough hair?”

  “You’re being flippant.”

  True, but Mum was being…strange that there wasn’t a word for it, given how often parents did it. Translating every worry into a worry about something not being done properly. Not eating properly. Not dressing properly. Not behaving properly. As if the world could be set to rights with decorum. “Well, it’s going to be a lot more proper than the last wedding.”

  “So you and Ray…?”

  “We’re getting on better than we’ve ever done.”

  “That’s hardly a ringing endorsement.”

  “We love each other.”

  Mum flinched slightly, then changed the subject, just like Jacob did when that word cropped up. “Your father and Ray, by the way—”