Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

Bunny’s paternal grandfather had been a policeman before the Second World War. He joined the 6th Armoured Division and was burnt to death in his Matilda II tank during the run for Tunis in December 1942. Bunny had a library of books and DVDs about the North Africa Campaign. He read biographies of Alexander and Auchinleck, Rommel and von Arnim. He made ferociously accurate military dioramas, sharing photos and tips and techniques with other enthusiasts around the world on military modelling forums: filters, pre-washing, pin-shading, Tamiya buff dust spray…

He watched porn sometimes. He didn’t like images of lean men with big cocks which served only to make him acutely aware of his own body’s shortcomings. He preferred pictures and videos of solitary women masturbating. He liked to imagine that he had found a hole in the wall of a shower cubicle or a dormitory.

He had thrush in the folds between his gut and his thighs. His joints were sore, which might or might not have been the beginnings of arthritis. His ankles were swollen by lymphoedema. He had diabetes for which he took Metformin every morning. God alone knew what his blood pressure was. He ate Rennies steadily throughout the day to counteract his stomach reflux. Moving from room to room made him breathless. He had fallen badly climbing the stairs a while back, dislocating his knee and giving himself a black eye on the newel post so he slept now on a fold-out sofa in what had previously been the dining room, and used the toilet beside the kitchen. Carers came in to give him a bed bath twice a week.

Sometimes the kids on the estate threw stones at his windows or put dog shit through the letter box. For a period of several weeks one of them with some kind of developmental problem stood with his face pressed to the glass. Bunny would shut the curtains and open them half an hour later only to find that the boy was still standing there.

He played Rome Total War and Halo . He watched daytime television— The Real Housewives of Orange County, Kojak, Homes Under the Hammer …He spent a great deal of time simply looking out of the window. He couldn’t see much — the backs of the houses on Erskine Close, mainly, and the top corner of next door’s Carioca motorhome. But in between, on clear days, there was a triangle of moorland. If the weather was good he watched the shadows of cloud moving across the grass and gorse and heather and imagined that he was one of the buzzards who sometimes came off the hills and drifted over the edge of town.

On the mantelpiece there were photos of Kate’s children, his niece and nephew, Debbie and Raylan, blonde, washed-out, borderline albino, in generic grey-blue cardboard frames with thin gold borders and fold-out stands at the back. He hadn’t seen them in seven years and did not expect to see them again for a long time. Next to the photos was a small wooden donkey with two baskets of tiny oranges slung across its back, a memento of his only foreign holiday, in Puerto de Sóller, when he was nineteen.

Mostly he was tired. Hunger and disappointment were, in their own way, as painful as pancreatitis and he would have willingly swapped the former for the latter. And while his mother thought she could save his life, there were days when he wondered whether it was worth saving.

Then Leah came.

It was meant to be a temporary arrangement. She would live with her father until she got back on her feet and had sufficient money in the bank to feel safe. Gavin had pushed her out of the front door with nothing, not even her wallet. In Barclays she discovered that the joint account was overdrawn. Too ashamed to put in a reverse-charge call home she spent the first night walking around the centre of Manchester, sitting at bus stops when she grew too tired to stand, kept awake by the fear that she would be preyed upon in some way. She rang her father the following morning but he took too long to arrange the money transfer. It was a further twenty-four hours before she could pick up her train fare from the building society, so she spent the second night in the women’s hostel to which the police had directed her. It was not an experience she wanted to repeat.

Leaving the estate had been the first part of the grand plan. But you never did leave the estate, not really. You carried a little bit of it inside you wherever you went, something grubby and broken and windswept. You never trusted anyone who was kind. You married a man who made you feel ugly and weak and scared just like your mother once did, because deep down there was a comfort in being hurt in the old, familiar ways. So in the end the two miscarriages seemed almost a blessing, because they would have been Gavin’s children, just like it had been Gavin’s house and Gavin’s car and Gavin’s money. He would have let her do all the hard work then rolled up one day, lifted them out of the playpen and taken them away like he’d done with everything else.

So here she was, working as a dental receptionist and returning each evening to the front room where she’d spent her childhood, sitting on the dove-grey leatherette sofa which stuck to the back of her legs in hot weather, filling the dishwasher in precisely the way her father said it had to be filled, having tea at six forty-five every day and never, ever moving the speakers off the masking tape rectangles on the carpet despite the fact that her father only played R&B and soul from the sixties and seventies which was music about dancing and sex and not giving a fuck about whether the mugs were on the top or the bottom rack of the dishwasher, because her father was coping with retirement and loneliness and ageing in the same way he had coped with her mother, in the same way he had coped with being a parent, by looking the other way and concentrating very hard on something of no importance whatsoever.

She met Bunny while scouring the neighbourhood for a strimmer. Her father’s was broken and chores which took her out of the house were becoming increasingly attractive. She rang the doorbell twice because she could hear the television and after forty strimmerless houses it was becoming a challenge. She’d given up and was walking back down the path when the door opened behind her. “Leah Curtis.” She was too shocked by the size and shape of him to hear what he was saying. The liquid waddle, the waist which touched both sides of the doorway. “You were at St. Jude’s. You won’t remember me.”

He was right. She had no memory whatsoever. “You haven’t got a strimmer, have you?”

“Come in.” He rotated then rocked from side to side as he made his way back towards the front room.

There was a yeasty, unwashed smell in the hallway so she left the front door open.

He bent his knees and rolled backwards onto a large, mustard-yellow sofa bed. Storage Hunters was on the TV. The wallpaper must have gone up circa 1975, psychedelic bamboo shoots in red and orange, peeling a little at the edges. On the table beside the sofa was a tiny model battlefield — soldiers, sand dunes, an armoured car — and beside the battlefield, a neatly organised collection of paint tubs, aerosols, brushes, folded rags and scalpels, the tips of their blades pushed into corks.

“I get out of breath,” he said. “Have a look in the utility room. Kitchen. Turn right. Bunny Wallis. I was in the year above.”

There was a garden chair, a bin liner of unwanted clothing and a broken bedside lamp. Maybe she did remember. “Chubby Checker” they called him. She hadn’t talked to him once in five years. She wondered if this was all their fault in some obscure way. She grabbed the orange cord snaking out from under the ironing board and pulled. She said she’d bring it back as soon as she’d finished.