Mark Haddon - A Spot Of Bother

The other thing he noticed when he looked down was that he had failed to sever completely the flesh around the lesion. On the contrary, it was flapping from his hip like a small and very raw steak.

He took hold of it again, reopened the scissors and attempted to make a second incision. But the blood made gripping difficult and the fat seemed tougher this time.

He leant over, put the scissors on the end of the bath and picked up the carving knife.

When he stood upright, however, a swarm of tiny white lights drifted across his field of vision and his body seemed farther away than it was meant to be. He put his hand out to steady himself on the tiled wall. Unfortunately, it was still wrapped around the carving knife. He let go of the carving knife and pressed his hand against the wall. The knife fell into the bath and came to land with its point embedded in the top of George’s foot.

At this moment the entire room began to rotate. The ceiling swung into view, he got a vivid close-up of that little avocado-green magnet contraption which held the soap, then the hot tap struck him in the back of the head.

He lay on his side staring down the length of the bath. It looked as if someone had killed a pig in it.

The lesion was still attached to his body.

Holy mother of God. The traumatized cancer cells were doubtless flowing through the isthmus of flesh between flap and hip, setting up little colonies in his lungs, his bone marrow, his brain…

He knew, now, that he did not have the strength to remove it.

He had to get to hospital. They would cut it off for him. Perhaps they would cut it off for him in the ambulance if he explained the situation carefully enough.

He got very slowly onto his hands and knees.

His endorphins were not working terribly well.

He was going to have to negotiate the stairs.

Damn.

He should have done the whole thing in the kitchen. He could have stood in that old plastic bath the kids used in summer. Or was that one of the items he removed from the back of the garage in 1985?

Very possibly.

He leant over the side of the bath and grabbed one of the towels.

He paused. Did he really want to press towel fluff into an open wound?

He got carefully to his feet. The little white lights came and went again.

He glanced down. It was difficult to make out what was what in the general area of the wound, and looking at it made him feel a little sick. He turned his head away and rested his eyes briefly on the spattered tiling.

Breathe in. Hold. Breathe out. Three. Two. One.

He glanced down again. He picked up the severed flap by its outer side and pressed it back into place. It did not fit very well. Indeed, the moment he let go it slid out of the wound and swung unpleasantly on its damp red hinge.

Something was actually pulsing in the wound. It was not a reassuring sight.

He took hold of the flesh again, held it in place, then pressed the towel on top of it.

He waited for a minute then got to his feet.

If he rang an ambulance straightaway they might come too soon. He would do a little tidying first, then ring.

First of all he had to clean the shower.

When he reached up to take hold of the showerhead, however, it seemed higher than he remembered and his torso was not keen on being stretched.

He would leave it and invent some story for Jean when she got back from Sainsbury’s.

Was she at Sainsbury’s? It was all a little hazy.

He decided to put his clothes on instead.

This, too, he realized, was not going to be easy. He was wearing a pair of blood-soaked underpants. There were clean pairs of underpants in the chest of drawers in the bedroom, but they were on the far side of ten yards of cream carpet, and there was a considerable volume of blood running down his leg.

He could have planned this better.

He pressed the towel a little more firmly against the wound and wiped the blood from the floor by standing on top of the other two towels and shuffling slowly around the bathroom for a couple of minutes. He tried to bend down to pick up the two towels prior to tossing them into the bathtub, but his body was no keener on being bent than it was on being stretched.

He decided to cut his losses. He staggered into the bedroom and dialed 999.

When he looked back to the doorway, however, he saw that he had left footprints on the cream carpet. Jean was going to be very unhappy.

“Police, fire or ambulance?”

“Police,” said George, not thinking. “No. Wait. Ambulance.”

“Just connecting you…”

“You’re through to the ambulance service. Can I take your number, caller?”

What was his phone number? It seemed to have slipped his mind. He used it so rarely.

“Hello, caller?” asked the woman on the other end of the line.

“I’m sorry,” said George. “I can’t remember the number.”

“That’s OK. Go ahead.”

“Right, yes. I seem to have cut myself. With a large chisel. There is quite a lot of blood.”

Katie’s number, for example. He could remember that with no trouble whatsoever. Or could he? To be honest, that number seemed to have slipped his mind as well.

The woman on the other end of the line said, “Can you tell me your address?”

This, too, took some effort to recall.

After putting the phone down he realized, of course, that he had forgotten to find the chisel before getting into the bath. Jean was going to be cross enough already. If she discovered that he had made the mess while cutting the cancer off with her special scissors she would be incandescent.

The chisel, however, was in the cellar, and the cellar was a long way away.

He wondered whether he had remembered to put the phone down.

Then he wondered whether he had got around to remembering his address before putting the phone down. Assuming he had indeed put the phone down.

They could trace calls.

At least they could in films.

But in films you could make someone pass out by squeezing their shoulder.

He caught sight of himself in the hall mirror and wondered why a crazy, old, naked, bleeding man was standing next to their phone table.

The cellar steps were really very difficult.

Before he and Jean got much older it might be an idea to put in a new staircase with a shallower rake. A handrail might not go amiss, either.

Crossing the cellar he put his foot on something which felt very like one of those small Lego bricks Jacob sometimes left lying around the house, the ones with the single nobble. He stumbled and dropped the towel. He picked the towel up again. It was covered in sawdust and a variety of dead insects. He wondered why he was holding a towel. He put it on the lid of the freezer. For some reason the towel appeared to be soaked in blood. He would have to tell someone about that.

The chisel.

He reached into the little green basket and retrieved it from beneath the claw hammer and the retractable tape measure.

He turned to leave, his knees buckled softly beneath him and he rolled sideways into the paddling pool which they kept semi-inflated to prevent mold forming on the inner surfaces.

He was looking at a picture of a fish from very close up. There was a spout of water coming from the top of the fish’s head, which suggested that it was a whale. But it was also red, which suggested that it might be another kind of fish altogether.

He could smell rubber and hear the splash of water and see little scallop shapes of sun sparkle dancing in front of him, and that rather attractive young woman from the hotel in Portugal in her lime-green bikini.

If his memory served him correctly, that was the place where they served the poisonous dessert in the scooped-out pineapples.

He seemed to be in a great deal of pain, though it was hard to say precisely why.