Mark Haddon - A Spot Of Bother

Jean found Rayin the marquee where he was supervising some last-minute rearrangements to the seating plan (one of their friends had tripped and broken his front teeth on a basin that morning).

“Ray?” she asked.

“What can I do you for?”

“I’m sorry to trouble you,” said Jean, “but I don’t know who else I can ask.”

“Go on,” said Ray.

“It’s George. I’m worried about him. He spoke to me about it this morning. He really didn’t seem himself.”

“I know,” said Ray.

“You know?”

“Jamie said he was off-color yesterday. Asked me to keep an eye on him.”

“He didn’t say anything to me.”

“Probably didn’t want to worry you,” said Ray. “Anyway, Jamie had a word with George this morning. Just to check.”

She could feel the relief spread through her body. “That’s very good of you.”

“Jamie’s the one you should thank.”

“You’re right,” said Jean. “I’ll do that.”

She got her opportunity several minutes later when she bumped into Jamie in the hallway as he emerged from the downstairs loo.

“You’re welcome,” said Jamie.

He seemed rather distracted.

George hung onto the rim of the toilet and moaned.

Jamie had been gone for twenty minutes now. Which was more than enough time to do tea and biscuits.

It began to dawn on George that his son was not going to help him.

He was swaying back and forth like the polar bears in that zoo they went to with the children once. Amsterdam. Or Madrid, maybe.

Was he scaring people away? He had tried to talk to Jean that morning but she had run off to iron a pair of trousers, or wipe someone’s bottom.

He bit his forearm hard, just above the wrist. The skin was surprisingly tough. He bit harder. His teeth went through the skin and through something else as well. He wasn’t quite sure what. It made a sound like celery.

He got to his feet.

He was going to have to do this himself.

The ginger twinshad banished them from the kitchen so Katie and Sarah were standing in the marquee porch, Sarah turning to blow her cigarette smoke into the garden to avoid poisoning the bridal atmosphere.

A teenage boy was sweeping the dried-out floorboards. Bouquets were being stood in vases in curly cast-iron stands. A man was crouching down to check the alignment of the tables, as if he were preparing for a particularly difficult snooker shot.

“And Ray?” asked Sarah.

“He’s being brilliant, actually,” said Katie.

A woman was taking cutlery from a plastic crate and holding it up to the light before laying it.

“I’m sorry,” said Sarah.

“What for?”

“For thinking you might be making a mistake.”

“So you thought I was making a mistake?” said Katie.

“Fuck off. I feel bad enough already. You’re my friend. I just wanted to make sure. Now I’ve made sure.” Sarah paused. “He’s a nice man.”

“He is.”

“I think even Ed might be a nice man.” She turned to look across the lawn. “Well, maybe not nice nice. But all right. Better than the drunken pillock I met at your house.”

Katie turned, too, and saw Ed playing airplanes with Jacob, swinging him round by his arms.

“Look,” shouted Jacob. “Look.”

“Ed,” shouted Katie, “be careful.”

Ed looked over at her and panicked slightly and loosened his grip and let go of Jacob’s left hand and Jacob slid onto the wet grass in his Rupert Bear wedding trousers.

“Sorry,” shouted Ed, hoisting Jacob off the ground by one wrist like a shot rabbit.

Jacob squealed and Ed attempted to stand him on his feet.

“Bloody hell,” muttered Katie, walking over and wondering whether the ginger twins would allow them to use the washing machine.

At which point she glanced up and saw her father doing jumping jacks in the bathroom, which was odd.

Ideally, Jamie wouldhave been sitting in the bedroom with his father. But you couldn’t see the road from the bedroom. And Jamie didn’t want the doctor arriving unannounced.

If the doctor could sort his father out, then maybe they could get through this without giving everyone else the heebie-jeebies.

So Jamie leant against the windowsill in the living room pretending to read the Telegraph magazine. And it was only as he was doing this that he started to wonder whether his father might end up being sectioned, which was not something he had thought about when he made the phone call.

Christ, he should have told someone else about this before deciding to solve the problem on his own.

Except you couldn’t be sectioned unless you tried to kill yourself, could you. Or unless you tried to kill someone else. To be honest, Jamie’s knowledge of these things came almost entirely from TV dramas.

It was entirely possible that the doctor wouldn’t be able to do anything at all.

Many doctors were useless, of course. Nothing like spending three years with medical students to undermine your faith in the profession. That Markowicz guy, for example. Plaster-casted up to the neck, then choking on his own vomit.

A man got out of a blue Range Rover. Little black bag. Shit.

Jamie leapt off the sofa, slalomed through the hallway and out of the front door to intercept him before he made a grand entrance.

“Are you the doctor?” Jamie felt like someone in a crappy film. Fetch the hot towels!

“Dr. Anderson.” The man held out his hand. He was one of those long, stringy men who smelled of soap.

“It’s my father,” said Jamie.

“OK,” said Dr. Anderson.

“He’s having some kind of breakdown.”

“Perhaps we should go and have a chat with him.”

Dr. Anderson turned to walk across the road. Jamie stopped him. “Before we go in there’s something I should explain. My sister’s getting married today.”

Dr. Anderson tapped his nose and said, “Mum’s the word.”

Jamie wasn’t wholly reassured by this.

They went up to his parents’ bedroom. Unfortunately his father wasn’t in his parents’ bedroom. Jamie told the doctor to sit on the bed and wait.

Jamie was checking the living room when he realized that his mother might walk into her bedroom to find a strange man sitting on her bed. He should really have locked Dr. Anderson in the downstairs loo.

His father wasn’t in the house. He asked Eileen. He asked the catering women. He asked the best man, whose name he’d forgotten. He checked behind the marquee and when he emerged he realized that he had now checked everywhere, which meant his father had run away, which was really, really not good and he sprinted back across the lawn saying, “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck” quite loudly to himself, and bumped into Katie en route and didn’t want to worry her so he laughed and said the first thing which came to mind, which happened to be, “The pigeon has flown,” a line which Tony used on occasions and which Jamie had never really understood, and which Katie wouldn’t understand either, but Jamie was halfway up the stairs by this time. And he burst through the bedroom door and Dr. Anderson leapt off the bed and adopted a slightly special-forces defensive posture.

“He’s gone,” said Jamie. “I can’t find him anywhere.” And then he had to sit down on the bed and put his head between his knees because he felt a bit dizzy.

“OK,” said Dr. Anderson.

“He wanted me to drive him into the country,” said Jamie. “So he didn’t have to go to the wedding.” He sat up, felt wobbly, and put his head between his knees again. Glancing sideways, he saw a sliver of pink card under the mattress. He reached over and extracted the Ordnance Survey map. His father had gone without it.