Mark Haddon - A Spot Of Bother

“So you and Ray…?”

“We’re getting on better than we’ve ever done.”

“That’s hardly a ringing endorsement.”

“We love each other.”

Mum flinched slightly, then changed the subject, just like Jacob did when that word cropped up. “Your father and Ray, by the way-”

“My father and Ray by the way what?”

“They didn’t have words, did they?”

“When?” asked Katie.

“The other day. On the phone.” Mum seemed quite troubled by this possibility.

Katie racked her brain and came up with nothing.

“Ray rang to talk to your father. But afterward your father said it had been a wrong number. And I wondered if there’d been a misunderstanding of some kind.”

A bearded man appeared at the door to ask about the positioning of guy ropes.

Katie got to her feet. “Mum, look, if it makes you feel better, why don’t you ring some florists. See if anyone can do something at short notice.”

“OK,” said Mum.

“But not Buller’s.”

“OK.”

“I swore at them,” said Katie.

“OK.”

Katie went into the garden with the bearded man. The central pole was up at the far end of the garden and sails of cream canvas were being hoisted into the air by five other men in bottle-green sweatshirts. Jacob was running in and out of the coils of rope and the stacked chairs like a demented puppy, deep in some complex superhero fantasy, and Katie remembered how magical it once was to see an ordinary space transformed like this. A sofa turned upside down. A room full of balloons.

Then Jacob slipped and knocked a trestle table over and got his finger caught in the hinged legs and screamed a lot and she scooped him up and cuddled him and took him to the bedroom and dug out the Savlon and the Maisie Mouse plasters and Jacob was brave and stopped crying, and Mum came up and said she’d sorted out the flowers.

The two of them sat next to each other on the bed while Jacob transformed his red robot into a dinosaur and back into a robot again.

“So, we shall finally get to meet Jamie’s boyfriend,” said Mum, and the pause before she said the word boyfriend was so tiny it was almost imperceptible.

Katie looked down at her hands and said, “Yup,” and felt very bad for Jamie.

The day was getting on. She and Jacob drove into town to pick up the cake and drop off the cassette at the register office. She’d wanted to start with a bit of “Royal Fireworks” then segue straight into “I Got You (I Feel Good)” as soon as the knot was tied, but the woman on the phone said rather snootily that they “didn’t do segueing,” and Katie realized it was probably too complicated anyway. Some great-aunt would collapse and they’d be getting her into the recovery position with James Brown yelping like a randy dog. So they decided to go with that Bach double-violin piece from the compilation CD Dad gave her for Christmas.

They popped into Sandersons and Sticky Fingers to pick up the personalized tankards and the industrial-size Belgian chocolates for Ed and Sarah then drove home, nearly destroying the cake when a group of kids kicked a football in front of the car.

They sat down for supper, the four of them, Mum, Dad, her and Jacob, and it was good. No arguments. No sulks. No skirting round difficult subjects.

She put Jacob to bed, helped Mum with the washing up and the heavens opened. Mum fretted, the way parents did about bad weather. But Katie took herself up to the loft and opened the window over the garden and stood there as the marquee cracked and slapped and the wind roared like surf in the black trees.

She loved storms. Thunder, lightning, driving rain. Something to do with that childhood dream she used to have about living in a castle.

She remembered the last wedding. Graham getting that weird allergic reaction from her shampoo the day before. Ice packs. Antihistamines. That van taking the wing off Uncle Brian’s Jag. The weird woman with the mental problem who wandered into the reception singing.

She wondered what was going to go wrong this time, then realized she was being stupid. Like Mum and the rain. The fear of having nothing to complain about.

She closed the window, wiped the water off the sill with her sleeve and went downstairs to see if there was any wine left in the bottle.

George realized thatDr. Barghoutian was not so stupid after all.

The Valium was good. The Valium was very good indeed. He went downstairs, got himself a mug of tea and played a couple of card games with Jacob.

After Katie went into town he squeezed round the back of the marquee for a look at the studio and realized that, with the end of the garden blocked off, the studio had become a secret place of the kind that children loved and which, to be quite honest, he still rather enjoyed himself. He pulled out the folding chair and sat down for a very pleasurable ten minutes until one of the workmen slipped round the other side of the marquee and began urinating into a flower bed. George decided that coughing to make his presence known was politer than watching someone urinate in silence, so he coughed and the man apologized and vanished, but George felt that his secret space had been violated somewhat and returned to the house.

He went inside and made himself a ham-and-tomato sandwich and washed it down with milk.

The only problem with Valium was that it did not encourage rational thought. It was only after supper, when the effects of the two pills he had taken during the afternoon began to wear off, that he did the maths. There were only ten pills in the bottle to start with. If he were to carry on taking them at this rate he would run out before the wedding had begun.

It began to dawn on him that although Dr. Barghoutian was wise, he had not been generous.

He was going to have to stop taking the pills now. And he was going to have to avoid taking any tomorrow.

The label on the little brown bottle cautioned against drinking alcohol while taking them. Bugger that. When he sat down after his speech, he was going to drain the first glass which came to hand. If he passed swiftly into a coma, that was fine by him.

The difficulty was getting to Saturday.

He could feel it coming in, even now, as he sat on the sofa with Jacques Loussier playing on the stereo and The Daily Telegraph folded on his lap, the way they saw that storm coming off the sea at St. Ives a few years ago, a gray wall of thickened light half a mile out, the water dark beneath it, everyone just standing and watching, not realizing how fast it was moving until it was too late, then running and yelling as the hail came up the beach horizontally like gunfire.

His body was starting to rev and churn, all the dials moving steadily toward the red. The fear was coming back. He wanted to scratch his hip. But if there was any cancer left the last thing he wanted was to disturb it.

It was very tempting to take more Valium.

God almighty. You could say all you liked about reason and logic and common sense and imagination, but when the chips were down the one skill you needed was the ability to think about absolutely nothing whatsoever.

He got up and walked into the hallway. There was some wine left from supper. He’d finish the bottle then take a couple of codeine.

When he entered the kitchen, however, the lights were off, the door to the garden was open and Katie was standing on the threshold watching the driving rain, drinking the remains of the wine straight from the bottle.

“Don’t drink that,” said George, rather more loudly than he intended.

“Sorry,” said Katie. “I thought you were in bed. Anyway, I was planning to finish it. So you won’t have to share my bacteria.”