Mark Haddon - A Spot Of Bother

He crossed the ring road, skirted the industrial estates and found himself striding, at last, between green fields.

For a while he felt invigorated by the cold air and the open sky and it seemed that he was getting all the benefits of a stout walk along the Helford, but without Brian’s company and six hours on a train.

Then an elderly factory loomed into view on his left-hand side. Rusted chimneys. Box ducts. Stained hoppers. It was not a thing of beauty. Nor was the broken fridge dumped in the layby up ahead.

The grayness of the sky and the unrelenting flatness of the surrounding fields began to weigh on him.

He wanted to be working on the studio.

He realized that he would no longer be able to work on the studio.

He would have to embark on some other project. A smaller project. A cheaper project. Gliding came to mind unbidden and had to be rapidly chased away.

Chess. Jogging. Swimming. Charity work.

He could still draw, of course. And drawing could be done anywhere with little expense.

It occurred to him that Jean might want to leave the house. To live somewhere else. With David. In which case he would still be able to work on the studio.

And this was the cheering thought which enabled him to turn round and begin walking energetically back into town.

By the time he reached the center it was growing dark. But it did not yet seem late enough for him to return to the hotel and take dinner in the restaurant. Luckily, he was passing a cinema and realized that he had not watched a film on the big screen for a good many years.

Training Day seemed to be a sleazy police thriller. Spy Kids was clearly for younger viewers and A Beautiful Mind, he recalled, was about someone going insane and was therefore probably best avoided.

He bought a ticket for Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring . The reviews had been favorable and he remembered enjoying the book at some time in the dim and distant past. He had his ticket clipped and found himself a seat in the center of the auditorium.

A teenage girl sitting with a group of other teenagers in the row in front turned to see who had sat behind them. George glanced around and realized that he was a solitary and somewhat elderly man sitting in a cinema full of young people. It was not quite the same as lingering near a playground, but it made him feel uncomfortable.

He got up, made his way back to the aisle and found a seat in the center of the front row where the picture would be larger and clearer and no one could accuse him of anything untoward.

The film was rather good.

Some forty minutes in, however, the camera lingered on the face of Christopher Lee who was playing the evil Saruman and George noticed a small area of darkness on his cheek. He might have thought nothing of it except that he remembered reading a newspaper article about Christopher Lee having died recently. What had he died of? George couldn’t remember. It was unlikely to have been skin cancer. But it could have been. And if it was skin cancer then he was watching Christopher Lee dying in front of his eyes.

Or perhaps it was Anthony Quinn he was thinking about.

He racked his brain, trying to recall the obituaries he had been reading over the past few months. Auberon Waugh, Donald Bradman, Dame Ninette de Valois, Robert Ludlum, Harry Secombe, Perry Como…He could see them, lined up like the warring minions in the film itself, the disposable foot soldiers in some vast war between elemental forces utterly beyond their control, every one of them being pushed unstoppably toward the edge of a mighty ravine in a cruel cosmic game of shove ha’penny, wave after wave disappearing over the edge and falling screaming into the abyss.

When he looked at the screen again he found himself watching close-up after close-up of grotesquely magnified faces, every one of them bearing some peculiar growth or region of abnormal pigmentation, each one of them a melanoma in the making.

He did not feel well.

Then the Orcs reappeared, and he could see them now for what they were, subhuman creatures from whose heads the skin had been peeled back so that they no longer had lips or nostrils, their faces composed entirely of raw, live meat. And whether it was because their appearance seemed like the effect of some malignant skin disease, or whether it was because they were skinless and therefore immune from skin cancer, or whether this made them unnaturally prone to it and, like albino children in the Sahara, they were dying of cancer from the moment they entered the world, he did not know, but it was more than he could stomach.

No longer caring what the other members of the audience thought of him, he stood up and steered a zigzag path back up the sloping aisle to the doorway, burst into the shockingly bright and empty foyer, staggered through the big swinging doors and found himself in the relative darkness of the street.

Jean was settling downwith a glass of wine to watch the evening news when Brian called to say that George hadn’t arrived. They agreed that he was probably sitting in a siding near Exeter cursing Virgin Trains. Jean put the phone down and forgot the conversation.

She dug a turkey burger out of the freezer, put the steamer on to boil and began peeling carrots.

She ate supper watching some romantic nonsense with Tom Hanks. The credits were rolling when Brian rang again to say that George had still not arrived. He said he would ring back in an hour if he hadn’t heard anything.

The house seemed suddenly very empty indeed.

She opened another bottle of wine and drank a glass rather too quickly.

She was being silly. Accidents didn’t happen to people like George. And if they did (like when he got that piece of glass in his eye in Norwich) he rang home immediately. If he ended up in hospital there would be a sheet of paper in his jacket pocket with Brian’s phone number on it with directions to the cottage and very possibly a hand-drawn map.

Why was she even thinking about such things? Too many years spent worrying about teenage children going to parties and taking drugs. Too many years spent remembering birthdays and unplugging hot curling tongs left on bedroom carpets.

She poured another glass of wine and tried to watch more television, but she couldn’t sit still. She washed up. Then she emptied the fridge. She cleaned the gunk from the little drainage outlet at the back, washed the racks in hot, soapy water, swabbed the sides down and dried them with the tea towel.

She tied the top of the rubbish bag and took it into the garden. Standing beside the bin she heard the whack-whack-whack of a police helicopter. She looked up and saw the black silhouette sitting at the top of a long cone of searchlight in the dirty orange sky above the town center. And she couldn’t suppress the stupid idea that they were looking for George.

She went inside and locked the door and realized that if she heard nothing in the next hour she was going to have to ring the police.

Jamie staggered throughthe next few days like a zombie and lost a mansion in Dartmouth Park to John D. Wood by having self-pitying daydreams about Tony instead of sucking up to the elderly owners.

On the third day he made himself a laughingstock in the office by doing some lazy cutting and pasting and advertising a third-floor studio flat with a swimming pool on Primelocation.com.

At which point he decided to pull himself up by his bootstraps. He found a Clash CD in the glove compartment of the car, put it on loud and made a mental list of all the things about Tony which drove him up the wall (smoking in bed, lack of culinary skills, unashamed farting, the spoon-tapping thing, the ability to talk for half an hour about the complexities of installing a Velux window…).