Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

“Whenever you want. I’m not leaving the country.”

She bought him four bottles of Black Sheep Ale as a thank-you. Only when she was standing on the doorstep did she realise that it might not be medically appropriate but he just smiled and said, “Don’t tell my mother.”

“Does she live here?”

“It sometimes feels like that. Do you want a cup of tea?”

She said yes and was sent to make it. He remembered enough about her to be flattering — that she and Abby had run away to Sheffield, that she had a signed photograph of Shane McGowan — but not so much as to seem creepy. The milk was slightly off but he was good company. He gave her a Panzer captain from the Afrika Korps together with a magnifying glass so that she could see the details in the face.

She was going to say how much her father would like it, the neatness, the precision, but she didn’t want to think of the two men as having anything in common, because in half an hour Bunny had asked more questions than her father had asked in two months.

He said his mother had put him on a penitential diet about which he could do nothing, so she came back a few days later with a box of chocolates. His doctor would probably not be happy but it would make a change from the broccoli and the Brussels sprouts.

When she was five years old Leah’s mother had taken her to the gravel pit to watch her drown Beauty’s new kittens. It was a long walk and Leah cried the whole way, hearing them mewl and struggle inside the duffel bag. Her mother said it would toughen her up. She laughed as she held the bag underwater, not out loud but quietly to herself as if she were remembering a funny story. She wanted Leah to know what she was capable of. It was so much more efficient than hitting her. After that she could make Leah feel sick inside just by narrowing her eyes.

When they had guests her mother called her “darling.” So how could Leah tell anyone? It was fathers who abused their children. Cruel mothers were the stuff of fairy tales.

Bunny didn’t find her attractive at first. She was oddly shapeless, a skinny girl carrying too much weight. Her hair was flat and there was something sour about the expression into which her face fell when she didn’t think she was being watched. But she woke something which had been going slowly to sleep inside him over the past couple of years. He pictured her naked, moving through the house, perched on the armchair, wiping herself on the toilet, standing at the sink. He could no longer get an erection let alone masturbate so there was no relief from these images and every fantasy left a small bruise on his heart. She was kind and bought him sweet, sticky things. They never talked about his weight and she understood the tyranny of mothers. Five minutes into their second meeting he realised how badly he needed her to keep coming.

The first carer Leah met was a pinched Polish woman who didn’t offer her name and acted as if Leah were not in the room. She treated Bunny like a recalcitrant child with whom she’d been saddled for half an hour. Leah could see him flinching as she dried his hair. The second, Deolinda, was a big woman from Zimbabwe who kept up a steady stream of stories about the latest episode of MasterChef , about her uncle who had been tortured by the police back home, about the proposed landfill site in Totton…Then they were replaced by two different carers who were quickly replaced in their turn, and Leah could see that Bunny would prefer someone dour and ill-tempered if only they stuck around and knew where the shampoo was kept, took care of the models and made him a mug of sugary tea without being asked.

Her father went to the Wainwright and drank a half of Guinness three nights a week. Her father played the Blackbyrds and the Contours. Her father wore a green V-neck sweater or a red V-neck sweater. Her father smoked thirty cigarettes a day standing under the little awning outside the back door. Her father put the big plates on the right and the smaller side plates on the left and insisted that all knives pointed downwards in the cutlery basket. Her father recorded TV travel programmes and watched them at convenient times — the Great Wall of China, the Atacama Desert, the Everglades.

She hadn’t hated him when she was little. If anything she had thought of him as an elder sibling who was keeping a low profile for the same reasons she was. But now, looking back? How could you turn away from your own child? She said, “You never stuck up for me.”

Her father said, “Your mother was a difficult and troubled woman.”

She said, “That’s not the point.”

Her father said, “I think something went wrong after you were born.”

She said, “That’s not the point, either.”

He never understood that she was asking for an apology. Or perhaps he understood but didn’t feel an apology was appropriate. Either way, if you had to ask then it counted for nothing.

One morning Bunny’s mother crouched on the far side of his bed and retrieved a crackly, transparent punnet which had once contained twenty Tesco mini flapjack bites and which Leah must have forgotten to remove the night before. “What in God’s name is this?”

He said, “I’ve got a friend.”

She said, “Do you know how hard I try to keep you healthy?”

After washing up and hoovering she returned to the living room and said, “Who?”

He said nothing. He had leverage for once and wanted to savour it briefly.

“Well?”

“I used to go to school with her.”

“What’s her name?”

He was surprised by how upset his mother was, and worried that she might go to Leah’s house and confront her.

“How often does she come round?”

“Now and then.”

“Every week?”

“I have a friend. She brought me some biscuits. There’s no reason to be upset.”

She punished him by not coming round for five days but found, on her return, that Leah had done the housework in her absence, and marked her territory by leaving four crumpled Cadbury’s Fruit and Nut wrappers on the draining board.

She should have gone to London with Abby and Nisha and Sam straight after college. She’d be living in a flat in Haringey now, taking the Piccadilly Line to an office in Farringdon or Bank, winding down on a Friday evening with Jägerbombs and chicken tikka skewers in the Crypt. She might be married to someone halfway human. She might have children.

There was jubilation on Facebook when she confessed that her marriage was over, perhaps a little more jubilation than she wanted. She didn’t go into detail. Nisha said, “Get your arse down here. You are going to die in that place.”