Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

He teaches history at Durham. When he was a small boy he wondered regularly whether he had been adopted and the suspicion has never entirely gone away. Family gatherings of all kinds are purgatorial, leaving him longing for a solitary walking holiday in some remote corner of the earth. In truth he is like his mother, or like the person his mother might have been if she were not warped by the deforming gravity of the husband around whom she has orbited for nearly all her life. He listens more than he talks. In most rooms he has a good sense of what other people are feeling, and if any of them are uneasy he cannot help but share that unease. A family Christmas is a guaranteed generator of unease.

Sofie translates from Icelandic and her native Danish, mostly business, a bit of crime writing over the last couple of years. She feels no closer to Leo’s family than he does but she keeps her distance by pretending to be more foreign and less intelligent than she is, misusing words and faking bafflement at quirky native customs, and is both insulted and relieved that none of them see through the blatant subterfuge.

Anya is going through a period of ferocious conformity that both Leo and Sofie find deeply dispiriting (Sims, Frozen , One Direction) though not as dispiriting as David’s rank oddity which Leo, in particular, fears may be an expression of the same car-crash genes which have yo-yoed Sofie’s uncle in and out of a psychiatric hospital in Augustenborg for his whole adult life. All the books Leo has read on the subject suggest that psychosis only rears its ugly head in the late teens for boys, which is some reassurance. Still, it’s hard not to be disturbed by the collection of dead animals (crow, mouse, stag beetle, toad) that he keeps wrapped in tissue paper in a line of cardboard boxes on his bedroom bookshelf like so many little coffins, and by the incomprehensible language in which he talks to himself sometimes, which he claims to be Tagalog but isn’t because Leo has checked.

They take their luggage from the boot. Anya has a yellow, black and white rucksack in the shape of one of the Minions from Despicable Me . David has an antique leather satchel given to him by his Danish grandfather which he dubbins regularly and which gives him the air of a tiny Renaissance clerk.

Leo stops and looks around at all this crystal, blue-black darkness and listens to…absolutely nothing. Apart from his son and daughter arguing about who knocked the bagged-up duvet into the snow the silence is fathomless. He forgets it every year until some detail brings it back (the eggshell glass of a broken bauble, a Salvation Army brass band playing “I Saw Three Ships,” thick snowfall…), how extraordinary Christmas once was, how extraordinary everything once was all year round, each individual moment a thing to be swallowed or solved or suffered. But now…? So much coasting, so many blanks, as if there was an infinite supply of time and those same seconds could be brushed from the table like spilt salt.

“I know you’d like to spend all night standing out here.” Sofie touches his arm. “But it really is very cold.”

They trudge up the drive into the sudden glare of the intruder light. By the time they reach the porch Sarah is opening the door with its two stained-glass panels (a shepherd on the left, three sheep on the right). “Hey, little brother.” It is a thing she does in one way or another every time they meet, gently but firmly asserting her superior place in the pecking order, but with enough warmth to make a complaint seem churlish.

Deep breath. Ten seconds down, thirty-six hours to go. “No Gavin yet?” says Leo. “I didn’t see the car.”

“With any luck they’ll be spending Christmas in a Travelodge on the M1.”

Sofie stamps the snow off her boots while Sarah gives the children mock-regal handshakes. “Anya…David…”

“I greet you in the name of the seven kingdoms,” says David. “I feared that we would not make it through the mountains.”

But Sofie is looking over the top of his head. “You spoke too soon.”

They turn as one to see Gavin and Emmy walking up the drive and even in the dark it is possible to tell from her weary, Scott/Shackleton gait that they have been forced to leave the car some distance away.

“Ahoy there,” shouts Gavin. “I hope you have a blazing log fire and large whiskies waiting.”

Gavin is an extravagantly gifted man whose critical shortcoming, aside from his monstrous ego, is that he has never been struck by a passionate interest which will direct his manifold talents and offer him the prospect of achieving something which matters more than achievement itself.

Leo’s theory is that since his preternatural growth spurt at twelve a natural magnetism has made him, always, the centre of a group of people who want to be in his presence and he has never been sufficiently free of their noise to hear what is going on inside his own mind, nor bored enough to discover what genuinely pleases him.

Deep down Gavin believes that he should now be head of the family — Sarah’s gender disqualifies her so completely that he never thinks of her as his older sister — and he resents the fact that his father has not ceded his position by dying or slackening his mental grip on the world. The simple fact of driving to his parents’ house at Christmas is an act of obeisance which he finds demeaning and which the inclement weather has only made more irksome.

Eighteen years ago he got a rugby Blue at Cambridge, played briefly for the Harlequins, had his jaw shattered in his seventh game and experienced a rare moment of revelation lying in St. Thomas’ Hospital, to the effect that he would never get an international cap and should therefore take the job Ove Arup had offered him four months previously. He got back in touch and, being a man into whose lap so many things simply fell, it seemed only natural that the woman who had taken the job he spurned had been killed in a light-plane crash on Namibia’s Skeleton Coast only the week before and that his prospective departmental boss was a rugby fan who bore no grudge for Gavin’s initial rejection.

The company, which had worked on the Chinese National Aquatics Centre for the Olympics and the new Terminal 5 at JFK, however, assigned him to the A8 Belfast to Larne dual carriageway and he was soon champing at the bit. Thankfully the benign fates arranged a meeting with an old friend from Peterhouse which led to him doing a few slots of commentary and interviewing for Sky. He was articulate, quick-witted and wholly at ease looking into a camera through which three million people might be looking back at him. He expanded sideways from rugby into athletics and cycling but soon became bored, again, with what he saw as the unchallenging nature of the job, and hungry for more prestige, at which point those same benign fates came to his aid for a third time and placed him and the head of factual programming for BBC4 at adjacent urinals after the Royal Television Society Awards, which led, by a somewhat drunken and circuitous route, to a heated argument about the respective merits of the wealthy, self-promoting Brunel and the lower-class, self-effacing Stephenson and from there, by a less drunken but equally circuitous route, to Gavin presenting a TV series about ten outstanding feats of British engineering (the Thrust SSC racing car, the East Hill funicular in Hastings, Pitstone Windmill…). He wrote the accompanying book without the help of a ghost and began a regular technology column for The Times , the guiding principle of which was that he would write about nothing that had either a keyboard or a screen. He took lucrative speaking engagements and, while filming a further series about great bridges of the world, met and married Kirstin Gomez. She was not, it’s fair to say, the sharpest knife in the box. If she were she might not have married Gavin. But she was cartoon-sexy and one of very few people who were genuinely rude to him. They bought a house in Richmond and had a son, Thom, now eleven years old. He was a surprisingly good husband and father, certainly better than many of those who knew him predicted he would be, until yet again he became bored with what he saw as the unchallenging nature of the job which, in truth, he had only ever done part-time, and Thom now lived with his mother ten thousand miles away within sight of the bridge whose 503-metre arch span had been the cause of their parents’ meeting.