Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

She does not hear her husband. She hears a doctor talking. She stops screaming, gets automatically to her feet, walks into the kitchen and takes the foil pack from the shortbread tin behind the chutney. She pops out three 2mg tablets and swallows them with a glass of milk. She wonders if she has woken from a particularly vivid nightmare. She will sit and wait for someone to come and find her and tell her what is going on.

In the living room Gavin groans, rolls onto his side and contracts slowly into a foetal curl, nursing what will turn out to be two broken ribs. Emmy kneels beside him and rubs his shoulder, alternating between relief that her husband is still alive and horror at his having shot someone.

“Dad?” Leo pushes the abandoned gun to the skirting board with the tip of his right shoe. “You’re a doctor. You need to do something.”

Martin is looking down at his older son. His older son has killed someone.

“Not for Gavin,” says Leo. “For him.” He points at the stranger but can’t look at the body directly.

Martin walks over to the stranger. He stands beside what remains of the man, hands in the pockets of his racing-green cardigan. The man’s chest cavity has been hollowed out and is now a rough bowl of red mush, torn membranes and the jagged ends of shattered bone. Martin hasn’t seen anything like this since he was a junior doctor, perhaps not even then. He remembers a motorcyclist who’d gone under a lorry but that was just a crushed pelvis and a missing leg. What was the point of showing anyone in this state to a doctor?

“Can’t you do CPR?” asks Leo.

“No C, no P,” says Martin. “Which makes the R impossible.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” says Leo.

“No heart, no lungs,” says Martin. “Cardiopulmonary. CP.”

Emmy vomits into her cupped hands. Leo hands her a napkin and she runs to the toilet in the hallway.

Gavin puts the flat of his hand on the floor and pushes himself slowly up into a sitting position. He rubs his eyes with the thumb and forefinger of his free hand. He has the fuzzy, pained look of someone waking to a heavy-duty hangover. He looks over at the stranger’s body. He says, “It just went off.”

“You killed him,” says Sarah. “You’ve fucking killed him.”

“That’s not going to help anyone,” says Martin.

“I’m not thinking about helping anyone,” says Sarah. “The only person who needs help is fucking dead. I’m just getting it off my chest that my fucking brother acted like an arrogant fuckwit, as per usual, except this time he actually ended up murdering someone.”

Robert touches her arm. “Hey, hey, come on.”

“Get the fuck off me,” says Sarah. “I’m right. He knows I’m right. Everyone knows I’m right. So don’t you dare try and shut me up.”

Robert makes the universal gesture of surrender and sits back in his chair.

Sofie is trying to hustle David out of the room but he is refusing to go, shaking her hand off his shoulder. He is pretty sure now that the man was not one of Emmy’s friends. He feels sick and frightened but he wants to be able to say, “My sister ran away, but I didn’t.”

“He was an intruder,” says Gavin slowly. “He had a gun. We got into a fight. The gun went off.”

“Shut the fuck up, Gavin,” says Sarah. “You picked up the gun. You were told to put it down. You refused to put it down. You shoved it into his chest. You shot him.”

“It was a mistake,” says Gavin.

“Oh well, that’s fine then,” says Sarah.

Martin sits down and rubs his face. He would so much rather be buried in a car overnight.

Emmy appears in the doorway, drying her ashen face with the little purple towel from the handrail by the sink, remaining just beyond the threshold like a member of the public behind the crime-scene tape.

Upstairs, in the little loft above her grandparents’ bedroom, Anya cannot stop herself shaking from the cold. She is not afraid. The possibility that her entire family may now be dead has induced a terrible calm. Slowly but steadily her core temperature falls.

Her mother is not worried about where her daughter is. Her daughter has not crossed her mind. At the moment, for Sofie, the world beyond this room simply does not exist.

“I’m calling the police,” says Sarah. She walks towards the door. Emmy steps back to let her through.

“Wait,” says her father.

She stops in her tracks. It’s one of the things which angers her most about her father, the hotline he has to some primitive part of her brain, the way she has to override her knee-jerk subservience.

“I think you’re very probably right,” says her father carefully, because he, in turn, has had to learn how to override his own automatic response to his daughter’s periodic outbursts, “but perhaps we should consider the consequences of irreversible actions.”

“Are you seriously suggesting that we don’t call the police?” says Sarah. She does the words-fail-me face where she blows up her cheeks and shakes her head. “His insides are all over the fucking ceiling.”

The last time he told his daughter to calm down she threw a dinner plate at him. He says, “Give me two minutes.”

“One,” says Sarah.

“Your brother could go to prison for a very long time.”

Gavin shakes his head. “That is not going to happen.”

His sister says, “I don’t want to fucking hear from you right now.”

He clenches his teeth and presses his hand to his pained ribs to excuse his failure to think of a decent reply.

She turns to her father. “Fifty seconds.”

“He was an intruder—”

“He was a guest.”

“With a gun.”

“Which he wasn’t even holding.”

If Martin were a lawyer he might be able to see a way out of this particularly impenetrable thicket but God alone knows what form it might take.

David wonders if he can take his phone out and get a photo of the corpse. He does not know if it would be considered more than usually insensitive because of it being a dead person or whether the extraordinariness of the situation would give him some moral wiggle room.

“You’re asking nine people to lie,” says Sarah. “And you’re asking them to tell exactly the same lie, down to the last detail, for the rest of their lives. How is that going to work exactly?”

His daughter should have been a lawyer, thinks Martin. And his son is going to prison. What a bizarre and wholly unexpected turn of events. His job will be to minimise the effect this has on Madeleine. It will be a difficult job and not one he relishes. He will start by sealing off this room and getting it cleaned and redecorated.

“Any other objections?” Sarah revolves slowly, making eye contact with all the adults in turn. They know she is right. They are also mightily relieved that she is the one who is planning to set the inevitable process in motion. But Sarah does not call the police, because the silence is broken by a loud, sucking gurgle coming from the stranger’s body. Emmy screams and does a little dance, running on the spot and flapping her hands in front of her face, which would be very funny in almost any other context.

“Emmy…?” says Martin. “Emmy?” He waits for her to calm down a little. “It’s trapped gases being released.” Also, very possibly, the man’s bowels emptying beneath him, though it seems unnecessary to add this clarification. He wonders how Madeleine is doing in the kitchen. Perhaps he ought to go and check on her.

The stranger sits up and opens his eyes.

Emmy sits down, slumps forward, headbutts her coffee cup then rolls sideways off her chair, too swiftly for Robert to catch her. Gavin makes a noise that can only be described as a dog-whimper. David is bedazzled. It is, by a country mile, the most amazing thing he has ever seen. Perhaps it was a magic trick after all.