Mark Haddon - A Spot Of Bother

Her opinion of people like Ray, however, had shifted over the preceding twenty-four hours, and she was rather enjoying Douglas ’s company tonight.

She’d already had a couple of glasses of wine when Maureen asked what was wrong with George, so she thought To hell with it and told them he was suffering from stress.

To which Maureen replied, “Doug went through that a couple of years ago.”

Douglas finished his prawn cocktail and lit a cigarette and put his arm round Maureen and let her talk for him.

“Had a blackout driving the transit just north of Edinburgh. Came round scraping down the crash barrier on the central reservation doing seventy. Brain scans. Blood tests. Doctor said it was tension.”

“So we sold one of the artics and buggered off to Portugal for three weeks,” said Douglas. “Left Simon to run the office. Knowing when to let go of the reins. That’s the thing.”

Jean was going to say, “I didn’t know.” But they knew she didn’t know. And they all knew why. Because she’d never been interested. And she felt bad about this. She said, “I’m really sorry. I should have asked you to stay at the house.”

“With Eileen?” asked Maureen, raising her eyebrows.

“Instead,” said Jean.

“I hope she’s not bringing that bloody dog to the wedding,” said Douglas, and they all laughed.

And Jean wondered briefly whether she could tell them about the scissors, before deciding that was taking things a bit far.

Jamie had never babysatbefore. Not properly.

He’d looked after Jacob a couple of times when he was tiny. For an hour or two. While he was asleep, mostly. He’d even changed a nappy. It didn’t actually need changing. He’d got the smells wrong and when he took it off it was empty. He just couldn’t bring himself to reattach something containing urine.

But he was not going to be babysitting again. Not until Jacob was twelve at least.

This realization came to him fairly rapidly when Jacob called him into the bathroom, having finished his poo, and Jamie watched him slide off the toilet seat a little too early, dragging the final section across the seat and leaving it hanging from the rim like a wet chocolate stalactite.

Not baby poo. But actual human feces. With a hint of dog.

Jamie armed himself with a rudimentary oven glove of toilet paper and held his nose.

And obviously there were worse jobs in the world (rat catcher, astronaut…) but Jamie had never realized quite how far down the table parenting came.

Jacob was inordinately proud of his achievement, and the rest of the evening’s activities (scrambled egg on toast, Mr. Gumpy’s Outing, a very, very soapy bath) were punctuated by Jacob retelling his toilet adventure on at least twenty occasions.

Jamie never did get the chance to talk to his mother about his father’s state of mind. And maybe it was better that way. One less person worrying. When he headed off tonight he could ask Ray to keep watch.

His father spent the rest of the evening in the bedroom.

After Jacob finally went to bed Jamie put his feet up in front of Mission: Impossible (there was a stockpile of action videos under the television for some unaccountable reason).

Halfway through the film Jamie paused the tape and went to pee and check up on his father. His father was not in the bedroom. Or the bathroom. His father was not in any of the rooms, upstairs or downstairs. Jamie went back and checked in cupboards and under beds, petrified that his father had done something stupid.

He was on the verge of ringing the police when he glanced into the darkened garden and saw his father standing in the center of the lawn. He opened the door and stepped outside. His father was swaying a little.

Jamie walked over and stood beside him. “How’s things?”

His father looked up at the sky. “Incredible to think it’s all going to end.”

He’d been drinking. Jamie could smell it. Wine? Whiskey? It was hard to tell.

“Music. Books. Science. Everyone talks about progress, but…” His father was still looking upward.

Jamie put a hand on his father’s arm to prevent him toppling backward.

“A few million years and all this will be a big empty rock. No evidence we even existed. No one to even notice that there’s no evidence. No one looking for evidence. Just…space. And some other big rocks. Whirling around.”

Jamie hadn’t heard someone talk like this since getting massively stoned with Scunny in college. “Perhaps we should get you back inside.”

“Don’t know whether it’s terrifying or reassuring,” said his father. “You know, everyone being forgotten. You. Me. Hitler. Mozart. Your mother.” He looked down and rubbed his hands. “What’s the time, by the way?”

Jamie checked his watch. “Ten twenty.”

“Better head back inside.”

Jamie guided his father gently toward the light of the kitchen door.

He paused on the threshold and turned to Jamie. “Thank you.”

“What for?”

“For listening. Don’t think I could cope otherwise.”

“You’re welcome,” said Jamie, locking the door as his father made his way toward the stairs.

When everyone returned home, Jamie took Ray aside and said his father was looking a little wobbly. He asked if Ray could keep a weather eye open overnight and not mention anything to Katie. Ray said it would be no problem.

Then he got into his car and drove to the bed-and-breakfast in Yarwell, where the locked door was answered by a large, caftaned person of indeterminate gender who was rather tetchy about Jamie not having rung to say he would be arriving so late.

The following morningJean woke up, did her ablutions and pottered back to the bedroom.

George was sitting on the edge of the bed wearing the hangdog expression he’d been wearing for the last few days. She did her best to ignore him. If she said anything she was going to lose her temper.

Maybe she was insensitive, maybe she was old-fashioned, but it seemed to her that there was nothing so burdensome you couldn’t put it aside for the day of your daughter’s wedding.

She was stepping into her slip when he said, “I’m sorry,” and she turned round and she could see that he really meant it.

“I’m so sorry, Jean.”

She wasn’t sure what to say. That it was all right? Because it wasn’t all right. She could see that.

She sat down and took his hand and held it. Maybe that was all you could do.

She remembered the children, when they were little, teaching them to say sorry when they’d hit each other or broken something. And it was just a word to them. A way of papering over the cracks. Then you heard someone say sorry properly and you realized how powerful it was. The magic word that opened the door of the cave.

“What can I do?” she asked.

“I don’t think there is anything you can do,” said George.

She sat beside him on the bed and put her arms around him. He didn’t move.

She said, “We’ll get you through this.”

Seconds later Katie was knocking on the door. “Mum…? Any chance of a helping hand?”

“Give me a minute.” She pulled the rest of her clothes on and kissed George and said, “It’s going to be all right. I promise.”

Then she went to look after the rest of her family.

Jamie got outof bed and wandered into the loo.

There were knitted baby blue covers on the spare loo rolls and a set of hand-painted wall plates from the Costa Brava.

He’d woken up several times during the night, disturbed by a series of dreams in which he failed to stop grisly things happening to his father. In one of them Jamie looked down from an upstairs window to see his father, shrunk to about half his normal size and bleeding heavily, being dragged up the garden by a wolf. Consequently Jamie was rather tired and when he imagined the kind of breakfast that might be waiting for him downstairs (warm bacon with little knuckles of white gristle, stewy tea with full-fat milk…) it seemed more than he could bear.