Mark Haddon - A Spot Of Bother

After Jacob had gone to bed she made herself a gin and tonic and sort of looked at the latest Margaret Atwood without actually reading it.

They took up so much space. That was the problem with men. It wasn’t just the leg sprawl and the clumping down stairs. It was the constant demand for attention. Sit in a room with another woman and you could think. Men had that little flashing light on top of their heads. Hello. It’s me. I’m still here .

What if Ray never came back?

She seemed to be standing to one side, watching her life pan out. As if it was happening to someone else.

Perhaps it was age. At twenty life was like wrestling an octopus. Every moment mattered. At thirty it was a walk in the country. Most of the time your mind was somewhere else. By the time you got to seventy it was probably like watching snooker on the telly.

Friday came and went with no sign of Ray.

Jacob said he wanted to go and see Granny, and it seemed as good a plan as any. She could put her feet up while Mum did a bit of child care. Dad and Jacob could do some man stuff at the aerodrome. Mum would ask about Ray but in Katie’s experience she never liked to spend long on the subject.

She rang home and Mum seemed unnaturally excited by the prospect. “Besides, we’ve got to make some decisions about the menu and the seating plan. We’ve only got six weeks to go.”

Katie’s heart sank.

At least Jacob would be happy.

Jean rang Brian.She said George hadn’t been feeling well and had come home. He asked whether it was serious. She said she thought not. And he was so relieved he didn’t ask any questions, for which she was very grateful indeed.

He’d been fast asleep on the sofa for the last five hours.

Was it serious? She had absolutely no idea what to think.

He’d turned up at nine thirty that morning with a gash on his head looking like he’d slept in a ditch.

She assumed something terrible had happened to him. But the only explanation he offered was that he’d stayed in a hotel. She asked why he hadn’t rung to stop her worrying but he wouldn’t answer. He’d obviously been drinking. She could smell the alcohol on him. She got quite cross at this point.

Then he said that he was dying and she realized he wasn’t well.

He explained that he had cancer. Except it wasn’t cancer. It was eczema. He insisted on showing her a rash on his hip. She actually started to wonder whether he was going mad.

She wanted to ring the doctor, but he was adamant that she do nothing of the kind. He explained that he had already been to the doctor. There was nothing more the doctor could say.

She rang Ottakar’s and the school office and said she’d be off work for a few days.

She rang David from the phone upstairs. He listened to the whole story and said, “Maybe it’s not so strange. Don’t you think about dying sometimes? Those nights when you wake up at three and can’t get back to sleep? And retiring does funny things to you. All that time on your hands…”

George began to stir round about teatime. She made him some cocoa and some toast and he seemed a little more human. She tried to get him to talk, but he made no more sense than he’d done first thing that morning. She could see that he found it painful discussing the subject so after a while she let it drop.

She told him to stay where he was and got him his favorite books and music. He seemed tired, mostly. An hour or so later she made their supper and brought it through so they could eat it together on the coffee table in front of the television. He ate everything and asked for another codeine and they watched a David Attenborough program about monkeys.

Her panic began to recede.

It was like turning the clock back thirty years. Jamie with his glandular fever. Katie with her broken ankle. Tomato soup and toast soldiers. Watching Crown Court together. Doctor Dolittle and The Swiss Family Robinson .

The next day George announced that he was going to retire to the bedroom. He took the television upstairs and installed himself in bed, and to tell the truth Jean was a bit sad.

She popped in every half an hour or so to check that he was OK, but he seemed quite self-sufficient. Which was one of the things that she’d always admired about him. He never moaned about being ill. Never thought he should be the center of attention. Just retreated to his basket, like a poorly dog, and curled up until he was ready to chase sticks again.

By the evening he told her that he would be fine on his own so she went into town the following morning and sold books for four hours and met Ursula for lunch. She started telling her what was happening, then realized that she couldn’t really explain without talking about the cancer and the eczema and the fear of dying and the alcohol and cut on the head, and she didn’t want to make him seem crazy, so she said he’d canceled the Cornwall trip on account of a nasty tummy bug, and Ursula told her all about the joys of staying in Dublin with your daughter and her four children while her builder husband was ripping out the bathroom.

Obviously, it wasa surprise to find that one was insane. But what surprised George most was how painful it was.

It had never occurred to him before. His uncle, those unwashed people who shouted at buses, Alex Bamford that Christmas… Crazy was the word he had always used. As in crazy paving, or crazy golf . Everything jumbled and out of order and rather amusing.

It seemed less amusing now. Indeed, when he thought about his uncle stuck in St. Edward’s for ten years without a visit from his family, or that disheveled man who tap-danced for small change in Church Street, he could feel the corners of his eyes pricking.

If he were given the choice he would rather someone had broken his leg. You did not have to explain what was wrong with a broken leg. Nor were you expected to mend it by force of will.

The terror came and went in waves. When a wave washed over him he felt much as he did several years ago when he watched a small boy run into the road outside Jacksons, narrowly missing the hood of a braking car.

Between the waves he gathered his strength for the next one and tried desperately not to think about it in case this brought it on more quickly.

What he felt mostly was a relentless, grinding dread which rumbled and thundered and made the world dark, like those spaceships in science-fiction films whose battle-scorched fuselages slid onto the screen and kept on sliding onto the screen because they were, in fact, several thousand times larger than you expected when all you could see was the nose cone.

The idea of genuinely having cancer was beginning to seem almost a relief, the idea of going into hospital, having tubes put into his arm, being told what to do by doctors and nurses, no longer having to grapple with the problem of getting through the next five minutes.

He had given up trying to talk to Jean. She tried hard, but he seemed unable to make her understand.

It was not her fault. If someone had come to him with similar problems a year ago, he would have reacted in the same way.

Part of the problem was that Jean did not get depressed. She worried. She got angry. She got sad. And she felt all of these things more strongly than he ever did (when he cleared out the cellar, for example, and put that old birdhouse on the bonfire she actually punched him). But they always blew over in a day or two.

She kept him company, however, cooked his meals and washed his clothes and he was very thankful for all of these things.

He was also thankful for the codeine. The box was nearly full. Once he had shaken off the horror of waking up he could fix his mind on those two tablets at lunchtime knowing they would wrap him in a soft haze till he could open a bottle of wine at supper.