Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

She told him that she had trouble sleeping. He said she could move in upstairs if she wanted, and tried very hard not to show how pleased he was when she accepted the offer.

She took Bunny’s old bedroom. He hadn’t been upstairs for a long time. The rusted hot tap in the sink no longer turned and there was velvety green fungus in the corners of the bathroom window. On the dusty sill sat a pair of rusty nail clippers, a dog-eared box of sticking plasters and a little brown tub of diazepam tablets with a water-blurred label.

The first night she drank whisky in warm milk to get herself to sleep but was woken a couple of hours later by Bunny’s snoring. She lay motionless in the half-dark. The gaps between his snores were growing longer and she could tell that something was not right. She went downstairs and pushed the living-room door open. Bunny now slept on an adjustable bed which had replaced the yellow sofa bed. The smell was rank and cloistered. She drew the curtain back and opened the smaller window.

He was lying on his back, his skin unnaturally white, his arms swimming as if he were underwater and struggling to reach the surface. His breathing stopped for three, four, five seconds then restarted like an old motor. She wondered if she should do something. His breathing stopped again. And started. And stopped. Suddenly he was awake, wide-eyed and fighting for breath.

“Bunny?” She took his hand. “It’s Leah. I’m here.”

It was the fat around his throat, the doctor said, the sheer weight of his chest, the weakness of his muscles. If he carried on sleeping on his back he would suffocate. He had to remain propped up twenty-four hours a day.

Towards the end of the second week she returned from work to find that he had soiled himself. That morning’s carer had not turned up and he could hold on no longer. She smelt it as soon as she came in. She considered quietly reclosing the door and going back to her father’s empty house. Then Bunny called out, “Leah?”

She stepped into the living room.

He said, “I’m so sorry.”

She filled a plastic bowl with hot water. Soap, flannels, toilet rolls, a towel from upstairs. She helped Bunny roll onto his side. His flesh was raw and spotty and covered in large port-wine blotches. Some of the shit was on the sheet, some of it was wedged into the crack between his buttocks. She used wads of toilet paper to scrape most of it off, dumping the shit and the used paper in a plastic bag. She unhooked the corners of the cotton sheet and the plastic mattress protector beneath it and bunched them up, using the material to wipe him clean as she did so. She put the sheet in the washing machine and the protector into a second plastic bag.

It wasn’t as bad as she had expected. This was what she would have done for her children if life had turned out differently.

She dipped the flannels in the soapy water and wiped him, lifting the flesh to get into the folds. She towelled him dry and left him to lie on his side exposed to the air for a while. She put the flannels and the towel into the washing machine with the sheet. She bleached the plastic bowl. She remade the bed with a clean sheet and a new mattress protector from the cupboard in the kitchen. She dusted him with anti-fungal powder then let him roll back into his usual position.

He said, “You are the kindest person I have ever met.”

She found a letter from the council lying on her father’s doormat saying that the tenancy had come to an end with her father’s death and unless representations were made the house would have to be vacated by the end of the month.

She took the records to the Oxfam shop in town. “Higher and Higher” by Jackie Wilson, “Up, Up and Away” by the Fifth Dimension, “Nothing Can Stop Me” by Gene Chandler…She brought a small cardboard box home from the Co-op and filled it with the only possessions that seemed worth keeping, objects she remembered from her childhood, mostly — an owl made of yellow glass, a box of tarnished apostle spoons on faded purple plush, a decorative wall plate with a view of Robin Hood’s Bay. She locked the door and posted the keys through the letter box. She stowed the cardboard box under the bed at Bunny’s house.

It was a Friday after work. She’d just come out of Boots and was passing Kenyons en route to the bus station. The two women were sitting at a table in the window. She could see immediately that they were from out of town by the way they held themselves, the way they owned the space around them. The woman facing her had sunglasses pushed up into an auburn crop, tanned shoulders and a canary-yellow dress to show them off. Leah felt a little stab of something between envy and affront. The woman caught her eye. Leah walked away in embarrassment and five steps farther down the street realised that she had been looking at Abby and Nisha. She was about to break into a run when Nisha emerged from the doors of the restaurant. She blocked Leah’s path, looked her up and down theatrically and said, “What the fuck happened to you, girl?”

Leah had forgotten how it worked, the spiky repartee that bound them together and kept outsiders away. She looked down at her grey tights and elderly trainers. “I’ve just come from work.”

“Inside,” said Nisha, nodding towards the door of the restaurant as if it were a cell Leah was being returned to.

The two of them were back for Abby’s brother’s wedding. “Number Four. I can’t even remember her name. Albanian? Slovenian? She looks like those pictures in the papers of women who’ve killed their kids.” Abby and Vince were now living in Muswell Hill. “The Great White Highlands.” And Sam was pregnant for a second time. “Ten months. He practically fucked her in the delivery suite.”

The waiter materialised with his little flip pad. Leah tried to make her excuses but Abby held her eye. “I don’t know what you’ve got planned for this evening but I know for a fact that it will be shit compared to this.”

She ate grilled tuna with a salad of cannellini beans, roasted red peppers, olives, anchovies and rocket followed by lemon tart and crème frâiche. They drank two bottles of Montepulciano d’Abruzzo between them. A bill for a hundred and ten pounds and a fifteen-pound tip. They smoked in the little garden at the back, next to one of the patio heaters.

“How’s your dad?” asked Nisha.

“He died,” said Leah.

Nisha looked at her long and hard. No condolence, no consolation. “We’ve got a sofa bed. If you haven’t found a job and a room in a shared house by the end of the month I’ll stick you on the bus back up here.”

“I’m sorry,” said Leah. “I can’t do it.”

Nisha shrugged. “It’s your funeral.”

Two of the toes on Bunny’s left foot went black. They kept the window open all day because of the smell. There was nothing to be done, the doctor said. Leah should keep them tightly bandaged until they fell off, then wash the wounds in salt water twice a day until they healed. Ten days later she found them in the bed while Bunny was sleeping. She flicked them onto a newspaper as if they were dead bees, carried them outside and dropped them into the bin.