Mark Haddon: A Spot Of Bother

She bent down and kissed him (bending down wasn’t particularly easy either). “We should get you a sailor suit to match.”

“Don’t be hard on the little chap,” said Ray.

Jacob gave her a serious look. “I want to wear my Bob the Builder T-shirt.”

“I’m not sure what Granny is going to think about that,” said Katie.

“But I want to wear my Bob the Builder T-shirt,” said Jacob.

They’d cross that bridge when they came to it.

George sat in thecar outside the surgery, gripping the steering wheel like a man driving down a mountainside.

The lesion felt like a manhole cover of rotted meat under his shirt.

He could see the doctor, or he could drive away. He felt a little calmer just putting it like that. Option A or Option B.

If he saw the doctor he would be told the truth. He did not want to be told the truth, but the truth might not be as bad as he feared. The lesion might be benign or of a treatable size. Dr. Barghoutian, however, was only a GP. George might be referred to a specialist and have to live with the prospect of that meeting for a week, two weeks, a month (it was entirely possible that after seven days without eating or sleeping one went completely insane, in which case matters would be taken out of his hands).

If he drove away, Jean would ask him where he had been. The surgery would ring home to ask why he had missed the appointment. He might not get to the phone first. He would die of cancer. Jean would find out that he had not been to the doctor and be livid that he was dying of cancer and had done nothing about it.

Alternatively, if the lesion was benign or of a treatable size and he drove away, it might subsequently mutate into a malignant and untreatably large cancer and he might be told this and have to live, for however brief a time, with the knowledge that he was dying as a direct result of his own cowardice.

When he finally got out of the car it was because he could no longer bear his own company in such a confined space.

The presence of other people in the surgery calmed him a little. He checked in and found himself a seat.

What could he say about Ray in his speech at the wedding reception? Now there was a puzzle he could get his teeth into.

Ray was good with children. Well, good with Jacob at any rate. He could fix things. Or thought he could. The mower had died a week after he tinkered with it. Either way it was not a sufficient recommendation for marriage. He had money. A sufficient recommendation, certainly, but one which you could add only as an amusing aside once you’d established that you liked the chap.

This was filling his head.

Ray was in love with Katie, and Katie was in love with him.

Was she? His daughter’s mind had always been a mystery to him. Not that she had any qualms about sharing her opinions. About the wallpaper in her bedroom. About men with hairy backs. But her opinions were so violent (could wallpaper matter that much?), so changeable and so clearly not part of a coherent worldview that he wondered, sometimes, during her teens especially, if there were something medically wrong.

No. He had got everything back to front. It was not the job of the bride’s father to like his prospective son-in-law (he could feel sanity returning even as he formed the thought). That was the job of the best man. In which respect, if Ray’s best man improved on the buffoon at her last wedding George’s relief might outweigh his misgiving about the marriage itself (“So I rang all Graham’s previous girlfriends to find out what Katie was in for. And this is what they said…”).

He looked up and saw a poster on the far wall. It consisted of two large photographs. The photograph on the left showed a patch of tanned skin and bore the words HOW DO YOU LIKE MY TAN? The picture on the right bore the words HOW DO YOU LIKE MY SKIN CANCER? and showed what looked like a large boil packed with cigarette ash.

He came very close to being sick and realized that he had steadied himself by gripping the shoulder of a tiny Indian woman to his right.

“Sorry.” He got to his feet.

What in the name of God were they doing putting up a poster like that, in here of all places? He aimed himself at the exit.

“Mr. Hall?”

He was halfway to the door when he heard the receptionist saying it again, more sternly this time. He turned round.

“Dr. Barghoutian can see you now.”

He was too weak to disobey and found himself walking down the corridor to where Dr. Barghoutian stood beside his open door, beaming.

“George,” said Dr. Barghoutian.

They shook hands.

Dr. Barghoutian ushered George inside, closed the door behind him, sat down and reclined with the stub of a pencil jammed like a cigar between the first and second fingers of his right hand.

“So, what can I do for you today?”

There was a cheap plastic model of the Eiffel Tower on a shelf behind Dr. Barghoutian’s head and a framed photograph of his daughter on a swing.

This was it.

“I had a turn,” said George.

“And what kind of turn are we talking about?”

“At lunch. I was finding it very difficult to breathe. I knocked some things over. Rushing to get outside.”

A turn. That was all it was. Why had he got himself so worked up?

“Chest pain?” asked Dr. Barghoutian.

“No.”

“Fall over?”

“No.”

Dr. Barghoutian stared at him and nodded sagely. George did not feel good. It was like that scene near the end of the film, after the Russian assassin and the unexplained office fire and the member of Parliament with the penchant for prostitutes. And it all came down to this, some old Etonian in the library of a London club, who knew everything and could have people wiped out with a single phone call.

“What was it that you were trying to get away from?” asked Dr. Barghoutian.

George could think of no conceivable answer to this.

“Were you frightened of something?”

George nodded. He felt like a five-year-old boy.

“And what were you frightened of?” asked Dr. Barghoutian.

It was all right. It was good to be a five-year-old boy. Five-year-old boys were looked after. Dr. Barghoutian would look after him. All he had to do was hold back the tears.

George lifted his shirt and unzipped his trousers.

With infinite slowness Dr. Barghoutian retrieved his spectacles from the desk, put them on and leaned close to the lesion. “Very interesting.”

Interesting? Jesus. He was going to die of cancer surrounded by medical students and visiting professors of dermatology.

A year seemed to pass.

Dr. Barghoutian removed his spectacles and leant back in his chair. “Discoid eczema, unless I’m very much mistaken. A week of steroid cream should sort that out.” He paused and tapped some imaginary ash from his pencil onto the carpet. “You can tuck yourself back in now.”

George tucked his shirt back in and did up his trousers.

“I’ll print you out a prescription.”

Crossing the reception area he passed through a column of sunlight falling from a high window onto the flecked green carpet. A mother was breast-feeding a small baby. Beside her an elderly man with ruddy cheeks and Wellington boots leant on a walking stick and seemed to gaze, past the baby buggies and the dog-eared magazines, to the rolling fields where he had doubtless spent the greater part of his working life. A phone rang like church bells.

He pushed open the glass double doors and reentered the day.

There was birdsong. Actually, there was no birdsong but it seemed like a morning which deserved birdsong. Above his head, a jet was opening a white zip down the middle of a blue sky, ferrying men and women to Chicago and Sydney, to conferences and colleges, to family reunions and hotel rooms with plump towels and a view of the ocean.