A Spot of Bother

by Mark Haddon

  “My father and Ray by the way what?”

  “They didn’t have words, did they?”

  “When?” asked Katie.

  “The other day. On the phone.” Mum seemed quite troubled by this possibility.

  Katie racked her brain and came up with nothing.

  “Ray rang to talk to your father. But afterward your father said it had been a wrong number. And I wondered if there’d been a misunderstanding of some kind.”

  A bearded man appeared at the door to ask about the positioning of guy ropes.

  Katie got to her feet. “Mum, look, if it makes you feel better, why don’t you ring some florists. See if anyone can do something at short notice.”

  “OK,” said Mum.

  “But not Buller’s.”

  “OK.”

  “I swore at them,” said Katie.

  “OK.”

  Katie went into the garden with the bearded man. The central pole was up at the far end of the garden and sails of cream canvas were being hoisted into the air by five other men in bottle-green sweatshirts. Jacob was running in and out of the coils of rope and the stacked chairs like a demented puppy, deep in some complex superhero fantasy, and Katie remembered how magical it once was to see an ordinary space transformed like this. A sofa turned upside down. A room full of balloons.

  Then Jacob slipped and knocked a trestle table over and got his finger caught in the hinged legs and screamed a lot and she scooped him up and cuddled him and took him to the bedroom and dug out the Savlon and the Maisie Mouse plasters and Jacob was brave and stopped crying, and Mum came up and said she’d sorted out the flowers.

  The two of them sat next to each other on the bed while Jacob transformed his red robot into a dinosaur and back into a robot again.

  “So, we shall finally get to meet Jamie’s boyfriend,” said Mum, and the pause before she said the word boyfriend was so tiny it was almost imperceptible.

  Katie looked down at her hands and said, “Yup,” and felt very bad for Jamie.

  The day was getting on. She and Jacob drove into town to pick up the cake and drop off the cassette at the register office. She’d wanted to start with a bit of “Royal Fireworks” then segue straight into “I Got You (I Feel Good)” as soon as the knot was tied, but the woman on the phone said rather snootily that they “didn’t do segueing,” and Katie realized it was probably too complicated anyway. Some great-aunt would collapse and they’d be getting her into the recovery position with James Brown yelping like a randy dog. So they decided to go with that Bach double-violin piece from the compilation CD Dad gave her for Christmas.

  They popped into Sandersons and Sticky Fingers to pick up the personalized tankards and the industrial-size Belgian chocolates for Ed and Sarah then drove home, nearly destroying the cake when a group of kids kicked a football in front of the car.

  They sat down for supper, the four of them, Mum, Dad, her and Jacob, and it was good. No arguments. No sulks. No skirting round difficult subjects.

  She put Jacob to bed, helped Mum with the washing up and the heavens opened. Mum fretted, the way parents did about bad weather. But Katie took herself up to the loft and opened the window over the garden and stood there as the marquee cracked and slapped and the wind roared like surf in the black trees.

  She loved storms. Thunder, lightning, driving rain. Something to do with that childhood dream she used to have about living in a castle.

  She remembered the last wedding. Graham getting that weird allergic reaction from her shampoo the day before. Ice packs. Antihistamines. That van taking the wing off Uncle Brian’s Jag. The weird woman with the mental problem who wandered into the reception singing.

  She wondered what was going to go wrong this time, then realized she was being stupid. Like Mum and the rain. The fear of having nothing to complain about.

  She closed the window, wiped the water off the sill with her sleeve and went downstairs to see if there was any wine left in the bottle.

  95

  George realized that Dr. Barghoutian was not so stupid after all.

  The Valium was good. The Valium was very good indeed. He went downstairs, got himself a mug of tea and played a couple of card games with Jacob.

  After Katie went into town he squeezed round the back of the marquee for a look at the studio and realized that, with the end of the garden blocked off, the studio had become a secret place of the kind that children loved and which, to be quite honest, he still rather enjoyed himself. He pulled out the folding chair and sat down for a very pleasurable ten minutes until one of the workmen slipped round the other side of the marquee and began urinating into a flower bed. George decided that coughing to make his presence known was politer than watching someone urinate in silence, so he coughed and the man apologized and vanished, but George felt that his secret space had been violated somewhat and returned to the house.

  He went inside and made himself a ham-and-tomato sandwich and washed it down with milk.

  The only problem with Valium was that it did not encourage rational thought. It was only after supper, when the effects of the two pills he had taken during the afternoon began to wear off, that he did the maths. There were only ten pills in the bottle to start with. If he were to carry on taking them at this rate he would run out before the wedding had begun.

  It began to dawn on him that although Dr. Barghoutian was wise, he had not been generous.

  He was going to have to stop taking the pills now. And he was going to have to avoid taking any tomorrow.

  The label on the little brown bottle cautioned against drinking alcohol while taking them. Bugger that. When he sat down after his speech, he was going to drain the first glass which came to hand. If he passed swiftly into a coma, that was fine by him.

  The difficulty was getting to Saturday.

  He could feel it coming in, even now, as he sat on the sofa with Jacques Loussier playing on the stereo and The Daily Telegraph folded on his lap, the way they saw that storm coming off the sea at St. Ives a few years ago, a gray wall of thickened light half a mile out, the water dark beneath it, everyone just standing and watching, not realizing how fast it was moving until it was too late, then running and yelling as the hail came up the beach horizontally like gunfire.

  His body was starting to rev and churn, all the dials moving steadily toward the red. The fear was coming back. He wanted to scratch his hip. But if there was any cancer left the last thing he wanted was to disturb it.

  It was very tempting to take more Valium.

  God almighty. You could say all you liked about reason and logic and common sense and imagination, but when the chips were down the one skill you needed was the ability to think about absolutely nothing whatsoever.

  He got up and walked into the hallway. There was some wine left from supper. He’d finish the bottle then take a couple of codeine.

  When he entered the kitchen, however, the lights were off, the door to the garden was open and Katie was standing on the threshold watching the driving rain, drinking the remains of the wine straight from the bottle.

  “Don’t drink that,” said George, rather more loudly than he intended.

  “Sorry,” said Katie. “I thought you were in bed. Anyway, I was planning to finish it. So you won’t have to share my bacteria.”

  George could think of no way of saying, “Give me the bottle,” without seeming deranged.

  Katie drank the wine. “God, I love the rain.”

  George stood looking at her. She swigged more wine. After a little while she turned round and saw that he was standing looking at her. He realized that he was acting a little oddly. But he needed company.

  “Scrabble,” he said.

  “What?” asked Katie.

  “I was wondering whether you wanted a game of Scrabble.” Where had that come from?

  Katie wiggled her head slowly from side to side, weighing up the idea. “OK.”

  “Great,” said George. “You go and get the box from the cupboa
rd. I’ve just got to go and get some codeine. For a headache.”

  George was halfway up the stairs when he recalled the last game of Scrabble they had played. It had ground to a halt during a very heated debate over George’s entirely legal use of the word zho, a cross between a cow and a yak.

  Oh well, it would keep his mind occupied.

  96

  It was all a bit wearing.

  For a third of his waking hours Jamie managed not to think about Tony at all. For another third he imagined Tony getting back in time and the two of them being reunited in various melodramatic scenes. The final third was given over to maudlin thoughts of going to Peterborough alone and getting way too much sympathy or none at all and having to remain cheerful for Katie’s sake.

  He was planning to head up early on Friday afternoon to miss the traffic. Thursday evening he ate a Tesco pasta bake and a fruit salad in front of a video of The Blair Witch Project, which was rather scarier than he’d anticipated, so that he had to pause the tape halfway through and close all the downstairs curtains and lock the front door.

  He expected to have nightmares. So it came as something of a surprise to find himself having a sex dream about Tony. He wasn’t complaining. It was boots-on, fresh-out-of-prison stuff. But what was slightly disturbing was that the whole thing was taking place in his parents’ living room during some kind of cocktail party. Tony pushing him facedown on the sofa, shoving three fingers into his mouth and fucking him with no preliminaries whatsoever. All the details far more vivid than they were meant to be in dreams. The bend in Tony’s cock, the paint stains on his fingers, the knotted vine pattern on the cushion covers pressed up against Jamie’s face in extreme close-up, the chatter, the clink of wineglasses. So vivid in fact that on several occasions during the following morning he remembered what had happened and broke into a cold sweat for a fraction of a second before remembering that it wasn’t real.

  97

  Jean didn’t realize how bad it was until she went downstairs and wandered across the lawn through the drizzle in her dressing gown.

  There was standing water in the marquee. Seventy people were meant to be eating in here tomorrow.

  She couldn’t help feeling that if she was still organizing the wedding this wouldn’t have happened, though clearly she had no more control over the weather than Katie and Ray.

  She felt…old. That was what she felt.

  It wasn’t just the rain. It was George, too. He’d seemed fine for a few weeks now. Then, after supper, it all slipped away. He didn’t want to talk. He didn’t want to help out. And she had absolutely no idea why.

  She was meant to be worried, not angry. She knew that. But how could you keep on worrying when you didn’t know what the problem was?

  She wandered back into the kitchen and made herself some toast and coffee.

  Katie and Jacob appeared half an hour later. She told Katie about the marquee and felt almost cross when Katie refused to be panicked.

  Katie didn’t understand. It wasn’t happening in her garden. If people found themselves wading through mud they were going to blame Jean. And it was a selfish thing to think, but it was true.

  She tried to put the thought from her mind. “So, little man…” She ruffled Jacob’s hair. “What can we get you for breakfast?”

  “I want some eggy,” said Jacob.

  “I want some eggy what?” said Katie, who was deep in the paper.

  “I want some eggy, please,” said Jacob.

  “Scrambled, fried or boiled?” Jean asked.

  “What’s fried?” asked Jacob.

  “He wants scrambled,” said Katie absently.

  “Scrambled it is.” Jean kissed the top of his head. At least there was something she could do for someone.

  98

  Mum was right. A wedding without disasters clearly broke some unwritten rule of the universe. Like snow at Christmas. Or pain-free childbirth.

  She rang the marquee people and that was fine. They’d come round with mops and heaters later on in the day.

  Then Auntie Eileen and Uncle Ronnie turned up with their Labrador in tow. Because their dog sitter was in hospital. Unfortunately Jacob hated dogs. So it was shut outside to keep Jacob happy. At which point it began howling and trying to dig its way through the back door.

  Then the caterers rang to say they needed to change the menu after a power failure left a freezer off overnight. Sadie rang to say she’d just got back from New Zealand and found the invitation in the post and could she come. And Brian and Gail rang to say the hotel had lost their reservation and clearly someone else had to solve this problem for them. Like the bride, for example. Or the bride’s parents.

  Katie gave up answering the phone and went upstairs and found Dad locked into the bathroom, possibly hiding from Eileen and Ronnie, so she went up to the top loo, peed and flushed and heard the macerator grinding away and saw the water surge to within a centimeter of the rim of the bowl. At which point some kind of death wish took her over and instead of ringing the phone number on the sticker, she thought, I’ll give it another go, and flushed a second time with predictable results.

  Two seconds later she was kneeling on the floor holding back a pond of diluted wee with a dam of cream towels saying, “Arsing, fucking, shitting,” which was when Jacob appeared behind her and pointed out that she was saying rude words.

  “Jacob, can you fetch Granny, and tell her to bring some bin bags?”

  “It smells yucky.”

  “Jacob, please fetch Granny, or you will never get any pocket money, ever.”

  But the Labrador was back in the house and Jacob was refusing to go anywhere near the ground floor, so she went down herself, and found Mum and Dad in the hallway having some kind of altercation about Dad not pulling his weight but doing it in a fevered whisper, presumably so Eileen and Ronnie didn’t hear. Katie said the loo had overflowed. Mum told Dad to sort it out. Dad declined. And Mum said something very unladylike to Dad which Katie didn’t quite catch because Ray appeared at the other end of the hallway saying, “I hope you don’t mind, your aunt let me in.”

  Mum did a horrified double take and apologized profusely for arguing yet again in Ray’s presence and asked whether she could make him a nice cup of tea and Katie reminded her that the loo was still overflowing and felt extremely pissed off that Ray had spent last night in London organizing some secret thing, and Dad slipped away while everyone’s attention was diverted and Ray bounded up the stairs and Mum said she’d put the kettle on and Katie went to grab some bin bags from the kitchen for ferrying the wee-sodden towels to the washing machine and noticed en route the muddy paw prints on the dining-room carpet and tossed Ronnie a disposable cloth wipe and told him to clean up after his bloody dog, which he had to do because he was a Christian.

  The macerator man said he’d be there in an hour and Eileen and Ronnie took Rover out for a long walk despite the rain and everything was fine until Katie took her dress out of the suitcase to iron it and found half a pint of coconut body wash soaked into the hem and swore so loudly Eileen and Ronnie probably heard it several fields away. So Ray held up his hands and said, “Hit me,” and she did, repeatedly for some considerable time until Ray said, “OK, it’s starting to hurt now.”

  He suggested she go into town to buy another dress and she was about to give him a hard time for thinking all female problems could be solved by shopping, when he said, calmly, “Buy a new dress. Find a café. Sit down with a book and a cup of coffee and come back in a couple of hours and I’ll sort everything out here,” and she kissed him and grabbed her bag and ran.

  99

  George had naïvely assumed that when Katie and Ray said they would arrange everything themselves this meant he would not have to do anything.

  Jean did not understand that if he drove into town to get flowers he might keep going until he reached Aberdeen. She did not understand that he needed to sit somewhere quietly doing very little.

  Then the toilet upstairs ov
erflowed and everything got very hectic indeed, so he went to lie down in the bedroom. But Jean came into the bedroom to get sheets and towels for Ronnie and Eileen and she was quite rude to him. So he shut himself in the bathroom, until Jean turfed him out because people needed to use the toilet. At which point it became rapidly clear to George that these complications were only going to multiply over the coming day, and that he would very soon not be able to cope.

  He had been wildly unrealistic. There was no way he could do small talk with all these people, let alone stand up in front of them and give a speech.

  He did not want to embarrass Katie.

  It was obvious that he could not go to her wedding.

  100

  Jean had been wrong about Ray.

  Within an hour of his arrival everything was back on track. Katie had been sent into town. A man was coming to fix the toilet and Eileen and Ronnie had been sent to pick up the flowers with their blessed dog in tow.

  And, strangely, he did seem to have control over the weather. She was making him a cup of tea just after he arrived when she looked out of the window and saw that the rain had stopped and the sun had come out. Within half an hour the men from the marquee turned up to dry the place out and he was in the garden ordering them around as if he ran the company.

  True, he was a little brash sometimes. Not one of us, if you were going to put it like that. But it was beginning to dawn on her that being “one of us” was not necessarily a good thing. After all, her family were failing rather obviously to organize a wedding. Maybe a little brashness was precisely what was needed.

  She began to see that Katie might be wiser than either she or George had realized.

  Mid-afternoon her brother and his wife dropped in and offered to take her and George out for supper.

  She explained that George was feeling a bit under the weather.

  “Well, if George doesn’t mind, you could come on your own,” said Douglas.

  She was halfway through a polite refusal when Ray said, “You go. We’ll make sure someone keeps an eye on the fort.”