A Spot of Bother

by Mark Haddon

  When everyone returned home, Jamie took Ray aside and said his father was looking a little wobbly. He asked if Ray could keep a weather eye open overnight and not mention anything to Katie. Ray said it would be no problem.

  Then he got into his car and drove to the bed-and-breakfast in Yarwell, where the locked door was answered by a large, caftaned person of indeterminate gender who was rather tetchy about Jamie not having rung to say he would be arriving so late.

  108

  The following morning Jean woke up, did her ablutions and pottered back to the bedroom.

  George was sitting on the edge of the bed wearing the hangdog expression he’d been wearing for the last few days. She did her best to ignore him. If she said anything she was going to lose her temper.

  Maybe she was insensitive, maybe she was old-fashioned, but it seemed to her that there was nothing so burdensome you couldn’t put it aside for the day of your daughter’s wedding.

  She was stepping into her slip when he said, “I’m sorry,” and she turned round and she could see that he really meant it.

  “I’m so sorry, Jean.”

  She wasn’t sure what to say. That it was all right? Because it wasn’t all right. She could see that.

  She sat down and took his hand and held it. Maybe that was all you could do.

  She remembered the children, when they were little, teaching them to say sorry when they’d hit each other or broken something. And it was just a word to them. A way of papering over the cracks. Then you heard someone say sorry properly and you realized how powerful it was. The magic word that opened the door of the cave.

  “What can I do?” she asked.

  “I don’t think there is anything you can do,” said George.

  She sat beside him on the bed and put her arms around him. He didn’t move.

  She said, “We’ll get you through this.”

  Seconds later Katie was knocking on the door. “Mum…? Any chance of a helping hand?”

  “Give me a minute.” She pulled the rest of her clothes on and kissed George and said, “It’s going to be all right. I promise.”

  Then she went to look after the rest of her family.

  109

  Jamie got out of bed and wandered into the loo.

  There were knitted baby blue covers on the spare loo rolls and a set of hand-painted wall plates from the Costa Brava.

  He’d woken up several times during the night, disturbed by a series of dreams in which he failed to stop grisly things happening to his father. In one of them Jamie looked down from an upstairs window to see his father, shrunk to about half his normal size and bleeding heavily, being dragged up the garden by a wolf. Consequently Jamie was rather tired and when he imagined the kind of breakfast that might be waiting for him downstairs (warm bacon with little knuckles of white gristle, stewy tea with full-fat milk…) it seemed more than he could bear.

  He’d sleep on the sofa at his parents’ house tonight. Or in the marquee.

  He packed his bags, checked the coast was clear, then tiptoed down the stairs. He was opening the door when the portly man-woman loomed out of the kitchen doorway, saying, “Would you like some breakfast?” and Jamie just ran.

  110

  Katie was lying in a deck chair on the roof terrace. She was looking down over Barcelona. But the terrace was the terrace outside their room in that hotel in San Gimignano. And she could see the ocean which you couldn’t in San Gimignano. The air smelt of something halfway between sun lotion and really good vanilla custard. Jacob was asleep, or staying with Mum and Dad in England, or just generally absent in a way that didn’t make her anxious. And actually it was a hammock not a deck chair.

  Then Ray trod on the Playmobil knight and yelled, and Jacob yelled because Ray had broken the Playmobil knight and Katie was awake and she was getting married today and it was probably a moment you had to stop and savor, but savoring wasn’t really possible because by the time she’d brushed her teeth and washed her face the caterers were downstairs wondering how much of the kitchen they could colonize, so she had to jump-start Mum, and then Jacob was upset because Ronnie had finished the Bran Flakes and instead of apologizing or offering to go out and get some more from the village shop he was giving Jacob a sermonette on not always being able to have what you want, though the problem had been caused by Ronnie doing precisely that. Then Ed turned up and trod in the monumental pile of crap their bloody dog had left in the middle of the path and it was clearly going to carry on in this fashion pretty much till the end of the day.

  111

  Jamie drove away so fast he produced a tire squeal exiting the cul-de-sac.

  He carried on feeling embarrassed by his behavior till he reached the main road when he slowed down and reminded himself that it was a genuinely crap bed-and-breakfast, that the owner was rude as well as strange (female to male transsexual was Jamie’s bet, but it wouldn’t be a very big bet), and Jamie was only staying there because he’d been ignominiously turfed out of his own bedroom (he had forgotten to pay, hadn’t he; sod it, he’d sort that out later). So he stopped feeling ashamed and felt indignant, which was healthier.

  Then he imagined telling Katie the whole story (complete with the knitted loo roll covers and tire squeals) and wondering aloud precisely which guidebooks his mother had consulted in the library, and the indignation turned into amusement, which was healthier still.

  By the time he pulled up outside his parents’ house he was feeling rather pleased with himself. Running away was not something he did. He tidied hotel rooms and sat through bad films and occasionally pretended to other people that Tony was just a very good friend. Which wasn’t good for the soul.

  He used to hate it when Tony complained in restaurants or held Jamie’s hand ostentatiously in public places. But now Tony wasn’t around Jamie could see how important it was. And it occurred to him that there were two parts to being a better person. One part was thinking about other people. The other part was not giving a toss about what other people thought. Sending stale naan bread back to the kitchen. Kissing with tongues on Blackfriars Bridge.

  A train of thought which came to a crescendo as he entered the kitchen where, fittingly, Eileen and Ronnie were eating breakfast. At which point he felt Tony beside him, in spirit if not in body, and Jamie realized that whatever Eileen and Ronnie might think (that he needed saving, or castrating, or putting behind bars), deep down they were petrified of him. Which made him feel a bit like Batman, who looked evil, though he was actually good.

  So he said, “Hullo, Eileen. Hullo, Ronnie,” and gave them a broad smile. “I hope you slept well.”

  Then he patted them both on the shoulder and spun round, and the air in the kitchen filled with his black cloak and he swept majestically across the dining room in his matching leather boots and codpiece, through the hallway into the downstairs loo.

  Which seemed to act like a short-range time machine because when he flushed the toilet and stepped back out into the hallway it was like the concourse at Euston, Eileen going one way, his sister and mother going the other, Jacob being a fighter plane, the Christian hound yowling and two startlingly redheaded women he didn’t recognize standing in the kitchen doorway wearing white uniforms.

  Katie said, “Hi, Jamie,” and vanished.

  Ray walked downstairs and came over and whispered, “Not a peep out of your dad last night.”

  “Thanks,” said Jamie. “I’ll pop up and say hello.”

  “How was the bed-and-breakfast?” asked Ray.

  “Not good,” said Jamie.

  “Katie told me about your room being nicked by the happy clappers,” said Ray. “I think they might have been exorcising it.”

  Jamie got to the landing and realized he’d been a bit distracted and hadn’t responded to Ray’s joke, which probably came over as rude. Never mind. His father was more important right now.

  He knocked on the bedroom door.

  “Come in,” said his father. He sounded reassuringly buo
yant.

  Jamie went in and found him sitting fully dressed on the side of the bed.

  “You’re here,” said his father. “Good.” He slapped his hands onto his knees in a ready-for-action kind of way.

  “How are you?” asked Jamie.

  “Changed my mind,” said his father.

  “About what?”

  “Really can’t come to the wedding.”

  “Hang on a minute,” said Jamie.

  “Now, I could go to a hotel,” said his father. “But, to be honest with you, I’ve had my fill of hotels recently.”

  Jamie was not sure how to respond to this. His father looked and sounded completely sane. Except that he was clearly not.

  “Obviously I can’t take the car because your mother is going to need that to get to the register office. And if I simply start walking from here I’m bound to be seen by someone who recognizes me.” His father slipped an Ordnance Survey map out from under the mattress. “But you have a car.” He unfolded the map and pointed to Folksworth. “If you were able to drop me somewhere round about here I could walk on footpaths for ten, fifteen miles without crossing a major road.”

  “Right,” said Jamie.

  “If you could put my big waterproof and a thermos of tea in the boot, that would be helpful.” His father refolded the Ordnance Survey map and slipped it back under the mattress. “Some biscuits would be good, too, if that were possible.”

  “Some biscuits,” said Jamie.

  “Something plain. Digestives. That kind of thing. Nothing too chocolatey.”

  “Digestives.”

  His father took hold of Jamie’s hand and held it. “Thank you. This makes me feel a lot better.”

  “Good,” said Jamie.

  “You’d better get downstairs and mingle,” said his father. “Don’t want anyone else getting wind of this, do we.”

  “No,” said Jamie.

  He stood up and went over to the door. He turned round briefly. His father was staring out of the window, rocking from one foot to the other.

  Jamie went out onto the landing, closed the door behind him, ran downstairs, grabbed his mobile, shut himself in the toilet for a second time and rang the doctor’s surgery. He was put through to some kind of central weekend control room. He explained that his father was losing his mind. He explained about the scissors and the wedding and the escape plan and the weeping. They said a doctor would be at the house in the next forty-five minutes.

  112

  Jean found Ray in the marquee where he was supervising some last-minute rearrangements to the seating plan (one of their friends had tripped and broken his front teeth on a basin that morning).

  “Ray?” she asked.

  “What can I do you for?”

  “I’m sorry to trouble you,” said Jean, “but I don’t know who else I can ask.”

  “Go on,” said Ray.

  “It’s George. I’m worried about him. He spoke to me about it this morning. He really didn’t seem himself.”

  “I know,” said Ray.

  “You know?”

  “Jamie said he was off-color yesterday. Asked me to keep an eye on him.”

  “He didn’t say anything to me.”

  “Probably didn’t want to worry you,” said Ray. “Anyway, Jamie had a word with George this morning. Just to check.”

  She could feel the relief spread through her body. “That’s very good of you.”

  “Jamie’s the one you should thank.”

  “You’re right,” said Jean. “I’ll do that.”

  She got her opportunity several minutes later when she bumped into Jamie in the hallway as he emerged from the downstairs loo.

  “You’re welcome,” said Jamie.

  He seemed rather distracted.

  113

  George hung on to the rim of the toilet and moaned.

  Jamie had been gone for twenty minutes now. Which was more than enough time to do tea and biscuits.

  It began to dawn on George that his son was not going to help him.

  He was swaying back and forth like the polar bears in that zoo they went to with the children once. Amsterdam. Or Madrid, maybe.

  Was he scaring people away? He had tried to talk to Jean that morning but she had run off to iron a pair of trousers, or wipe someone’s bottom.

  He bit his forearm hard, just above the wrist. The skin was surprisingly tough. He bit harder. His teeth went through the skin and through something else as well. He wasn’t quite sure what. It made a sound like celery.

  He got to his feet.

  He was going to have to do this himself.

  114

  The ginger twins had banished them from the kitchen so Katie and Sarah were standing in the marquee porch, Sarah turning to blow her cigarette smoke into the garden to avoid poisoning the bridal atmosphere.

  A teenage boy was sweeping the dried-out floorboards. Bouquets were being stood in vases in curly cast-iron stands. A man was crouching down to check the alignment of the tables, as if he were preparing for a particularly difficult snooker shot.

  “And Ray?” asked Sarah.

  “He’s being brilliant, actually,” said Katie.

  A woman was taking cutlery from a plastic crate and holding it up to the light before laying it.

  “I’m sorry,” said Sarah.

  “What for?”

  “For thinking you might be making a mistake.”

  “So you thought I was making a mistake?” said Katie.

  “Fuck off. I feel bad enough already. You’re my friend. I just wanted to make sure. Now I’ve made sure.” Sarah paused. “He’s a nice man.”

  “He is.”

  “I think even Ed might be a nice man.” She turned to look across the lawn. “Well, maybe not nice nice. But all right. Better than the drunken pillock I met at your house.”

  Katie turned, too, and saw Ed playing airplanes with Jacob, swinging him round by his arms.

  “Look,” shouted Jacob. “Look.”

  “Ed,” shouted Katie, “be careful.”

  Ed looked over at her and panicked slightly and loosened his grip and let go of Jacob’s left hand and Jacob slid onto the wet grass in his Rupert Bear wedding trousers.

  “Sorry,” shouted Ed, hoisting Jacob off the ground by one wrist like a shot rabbit.

  Jacob squealed and Ed attempted to stand him on his feet.

  “Bloody hell,” muttered Katie, walking over and wondering whether the ginger twins would allow them to use the washing machine.

  At which point she glanced up and saw her father doing jumping jacks in the bathroom, which was odd.

  115

  Ideally, Jamie would have been sitting in the bedroom with his father. But you couldn’t see the road from the bedroom. And Jamie didn’t want the doctor arriving unannounced.

  If the doctor could sort his father out, then maybe they could get through this without giving everyone else the heebie-jeebies.

  So Jamie leant against the windowsill in the living room pretending to read the Telegraph magazine. And it was only as he was doing this that he started to wonder whether his father might end up being sectioned, which was not something he had thought about when he made the phone call.

  Christ, he should have told someone else about this before deciding to solve the problem on his own.

  Except you couldn’t be sectioned unless you tried to kill yourself, could you. Or unless you tried to kill someone else. To be honest, Jamie’s knowledge of these things came almost entirely from TV dramas.

  It was entirely possible that the doctor wouldn’t be able to do anything at all.

  Many doctors were useless, of course. Nothing like spending three years with medical students to undermine your faith in the profession. That Markowicz guy, for example. Plaster-casted up to the neck, then choking on his own vomit.

  A man got out of a blue Range Rover. Little black bag. Shit.

  Jamie leapt off the sofa, slalomed through the hallway and out of the front do
or to intercept him before he made a grand entrance.

  “Are you the doctor?” Jamie felt like someone in a crappy film. Fetch the hot towels!

  “Dr. Anderson.” The man held out his hand. He was one of those long, stringy men who smelled of soap.

  “It’s my father,” said Jamie.

  “OK,” said Dr. Anderson.

  “He’s having some kind of breakdown.”

  “Perhaps we should go and have a chat with him.”

  Dr. Anderson turned to walk across the road. Jamie stopped him. “Before we go in there’s something I should explain. My sister’s getting married today.”

  Dr. Anderson tapped his nose and said, “Mum’s the word.”

  Jamie wasn’t wholly reassured by this.

  They went up to his parents’ bedroom. Unfortunately his father wasn’t in his parents’ bedroom. Jamie told the doctor to sit on the bed and wait.

  Jamie was checking the living room when he realized that his mother might walk into her bedroom to find a strange man sitting on her bed. He should really have locked Dr. Anderson in the downstairs loo.

  His father wasn’t in the house. He asked Eileen. He asked the catering women. He asked the best man, whose name he’d forgotten. He checked behind the marquee and when he emerged he realized that he had now checked everywhere, which meant his father had run away, which was really, really not good and he sprinted back across the lawn saying, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck” quite loudly to himself, and bumped into Katie en route and didn’t want to worry her so he laughed and said the first thing which came to mind, which happened to be, “The pigeon has flown,” a line which Tony used on occasions and which Jamie had never really understood, and which Katie wouldn’t understand either, but Jamie was halfway up the stairs by this time. And he burst through the bedroom door and Dr. Anderson leapt off the bed and adopted a slightly special-forces defensive posture.

  “He’s gone,” said Jamie. “I can’t find him anywhere.” And then he had to sit down on the bed and put his head between his knees because he felt a bit dizzy.