Mark Haddon - A Spot Of Bother

He was ill at ease with Jacob, which made Katie feel rather superior. Then he said his wife had been through four cycles of IVF. So Katie felt crap instead.

When Sarah turned up she just rubbed her hands and said, “Right, then. This is my competition,” and Katie knocked back a glass of wine straight off, just in case.

The wine was a wise move.

Ed was charming and rather old-fashioned. This did not endear him to Sarah. She told him about the dentist who’d stitched her gum to his assistant’s rubber glove. He told her about the solicitor who had poisoned his aunt’s dog. The chicken was not good. Ed and Sarah disagreed about Gypsies. Specifically whether or not to round them up and put them in camps. Sarah wanted Ed put in a camp. Ed, who saw women’s opinions as largely decorative, decided that Sarah was a “foxy lady.”

Ray tried to move the subject onto safer ground by reminiscing about their rugby days, and the two of them began a string of supposedly hilarious stories, all of which involved heavy drinking, minor vandalism and the removal of someone’s trousers.

Katie drank another two glasses of wine.

Ed said he was going to begin his speech by saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, this job is rather like being asked to have sex with the Queen. It’s an honor, obviously, but not a task one looks forward to with relish.”

Ray found this very funny indeed. Katie wondered whether she should be marrying someone else, and Sarah, who never liked men hogging the limelight, told them how she got so drunk at Katrina’s wedding that she passed out and wet herself in the foyer of a hotel in Derby.

An hour later, Katie and Ray lay next to each other in bed watching the ceiling spin slowly, listening to Ed wrestle incompetently with the sofa bed on the far side of the wall.

Ray took hold of her hand. “Sorry about that.”

“About what?”

“Downstairs.”

“I thought you were enjoying yourself,” said Katie.

“I was. Sort of.”

Neither of them said anything.

“I think he was a bit nervous,” said Ray. “I think we were all a bit nervous. Well, apart from Sarah. I don’t reckon she gets nervous.”

There was a little yelp from next door as Ed trapped some part of himself in the mechanism.

“I’ll have a word with Ed,” said Ray. “About the speech.”

“I’ll have a word with Sarah,” said Katie.

It blew up onSaturday morning.

Tony woke early and headed to the kitchen to make breakfast. When Jamie ambled down twenty minutes later Tony was sitting at the table emanating bad vibes.

Jamie had clearly done something wrong. “What’s up?”

Tony chewed his cheek and drummed the table with a teaspoon. “This wedding,” said Tony.

“Look,” said Jamie, “I don’t particularly want to go myself.” He glanced at the clock. Tony had to leave in twenty minutes. Jamie realized that he should have stayed in bed.

“But you’re going to go,” said Tony.

“I don’t really have much choice.”

“So, why don’t you want me to come with you?”

“Because you’ll have a shit time,” said Jamie, “and I’ll have a shit time. And it doesn’t matter that I’m having a shit time because they’re my family, for better or worse. So every now and then I have to grit my teeth and put up with having a shit time for the greater good. But I’d rather not be responsible for you having a shit time on top of everything else.”

“It’s only a fucking wedding,” said Tony. “It’s not transatlantic yachting. How shit can it be?”

“It’s not just a fucking wedding,” said Jamie. “It’s my sister marrying the wrong person. For the second time in her life. Except this time we know it in advance. It’s hardly a cause for celebration.”

“I don’t give a fuck who she’s marrying,” said Tony.

“Well, I do,” said Jamie.

“Who she’s marrying is not the point,” said Tony.

Jamie called Tony an unsympathetic shit. Tony called Jamie a self-centered cunt. Jamie refused to discuss the subject any further. Tony stormed out.

Jamie smoked three cigarettes and fried himself two slices of eggy bread and realized he wasn’t going to get anything constructive done so he might as well drive up to Peterborough and hear the wedding story firsthand from Mum and Dad.

George was fittingthe window frames. There were six courses above the sill on either side. Enough brickwork to hold them firm. He spread the mortar and slotted the first one into place.

In truth it wasn’t just the flying. Holidays themselves were not much further up George’s list of favorite occupations. Visiting amphitheaters, walking the Pembrokeshire coast path, learning to ski. He could see the rationale behind these activities. One grim fortnight in Sicily had been made almost worthwhile by the mosaics at Piazza Armerina. What he failed to comprehend was packing oneself off to a foreign country to lounge by pools and eat plain food and cheap wine made somehow glorious by a view of a fountain and a waiter with a poor command of English.

They knew what they were doing in the Middle Ages. Holy days. Pilgrimages. Canterbury and Santiago de Compostela. Twenty hard miles a day, simple inns and something to aim for.

Norway might have been OK. Mountains, tundra, rugged shorelines. But it had to be Rhodes or Corsica. And in summer to boot, so that freckled Englishmen had to sit under awnings reading last week’s Sunday Times while the sweat ran down their backs.

Now that he thought about it, he had been suffering from heat stroke during the visit to Piazza Armerina and most of what he recalled about the mosaics was from the stack of postcards he’d bought in the shop before retiring to the hire car with a bottle of water and a pack of ibuprofen.

The human mind was not designed for sunbathing and light novels. Not on consecutive days at any rate. The human mind was designed for doing stuff. Making spears, hunting antelope…

The Dordogne in 1984 was the nadir. Diarrhea, moths like flying hamsters, the blowtorch heat. Awake at three in the morning on a damp and lumpy mattress. Then the storm. Like someone hammering sheets of tin. Lightning so bright it came through the pillow. In the morning sixty, seventy dead frogs turning slowly in the pool. And at the far end something larger and furrier, a cat perhaps, or the Franzettis’ dog, which Katie was poking with a snorkel.

He needed a drink. He walked back across the lawn and was removing his dirty boots when he saw Jamie in the kitchen, dumping his bag and putting the kettle on.

He stopped and watched, the way he might stop and watch if there was a deer in the garden, which there was occasionally.

Jamie was a bit of a secretive creature himself. Not that he hid things. But he was reserved. Rather old-fashioned now that George came to think about it. Different clothes and hairstyle and you could see him lighting a cigarette in a Berlin alleyway, or obscured by steam on a station platform.

Unlike Katie, who didn’t know the meaning of the word reserved . The only person he knew who could bring up the subject of menstruation over lunch. And you still knew she was hiding things, things that were going to be dropped on you at random intervals. Like the wedding. Next week she would doubtless announce that she was pregnant.

Dear God. The wedding. Jamie must have come about the wedding.

He could do it. If Jamie wanted a double bed he would say the spare room was being used by someone else, and book him into an upmarket bed-and-breakfast somewhere. Just so long as George didn’t have to use the word boyfriend .

He came round from his reverie and realized that Jamie was waving from inside the kitchen and looking a little troubled by George’s lack of response.