Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

Apart from the fact that he is missing most of his internal organs, the stranger seems in better condition than Gavin. He strokes his bloody beard back into shape and gets to his feet as if he had merely stumbled in the street. He walks across the room and as he does so everyone can hear the soles of his boots alternately sticking to and becoming unstuck from the bloody floor. He retrieves his sawn-off shotgun. He walks over to Gavin and stands looking down at him. Gavin’s whimper becomes a low keening. The stranger smiles. He has the contented look of a man who has downed a good meal in fine company.

Gavin is certain that these are the last few seconds of his life and he wishes he were able to act in a more manly fashion but the pain of his broken ribs and the emotional roller coaster of the last twenty minutes have left him too drained to do anything but close his eyes and wait for the lights to go out.

The lights do not go out. The stranger says, “I will see you next Christmas.” He slips the gun into his poacher’s pocket and buttons his greatcoat over the carnage of his chest. “Then it will be my turn.” He straightens his back and turns so that he can address his last words to everyone in the room. “I bid you all good night and a merry Christmas.”

He strides to the French windows, swings them open and walks through the resulting gust of flakes into the dark.

Gavin sits with his head in his hands, staring into the woodgrain of the kitchen tabletop, waiting for his mother’s codeine to take effect. Sarah has made a pot of tea and put out a plate of biscuits and most of them seem comforted in some small degree by a custard cream and a hot mug they can wrap their hands around. Emmy has a livid bruise on her temple.

David is finally beginning to understand the enormity of the situation. For a while he rang with excitement like a beaten gong, having sailed through a test of manhood the like of which his friends would never undertake. Disappointed that he had failed to get a photograph of the dead man, however, he sneaked into the off-limits dining room with his phone. The bloodstains themselves did not affect him, but his photograph of the bloodstains looked undeniably like the photograph of a murder scene, sad and sordid and profoundly unglamorous, and he realised for the first time that he had just watched his uncle kill someone. This fact was made no more acceptable by having watched the dead man get up afterwards and announce that he would kill his uncle next year.

Upstairs, Sofie moves from room to room in a rising panic. “Anya…?” Is it possible that her daughter was so frightened that she left the house and ran into the night? In the little loft her daughter is unconscious and unable to hear her mother calling. Eventually Sofie returns to the kitchen. “I can’t find Anya.”

“She can’t have gone far,” says Leo.

“No,” says Sofie. “Listen to me. Anya is not here.”

It takes a long moment for the penny to drop. “She ran out of the room.”

“She ran out of the house,” says Sofie.

“Oh fuck.” Leo is on his feet. “Dad. Find me a torch.”

Leo and Robert scour the garden. They check inside the shed and behind the climbing roses which cover the long wooden trellis. They look in the compost bin. They take bamboo canes from the pot beside the kitchen door and push them into drifts. Leo tries not to think that if he finds his daughter using this method then she will almost certainly be dead.

Ten minutes later, sitting in the kitchen, David says, casually, “There’s a place you can hide. In the top bathroom. There’s a kind of hatch in the wall.”

Sofie runs upstairs. At her lowest point, in a couple of years’ time, she will slap her son viciously across the face and call him an “evil little shit” for not revealing this information earlier. And when her marriage to Leo falls apart she will know, deep down, that it was her son’s fault for sitting eating biscuits, untroubled by the fact that his sister was dying upstairs.

She kicks open the bathroom door, tears the panel from the wall and pulls her daughter out through the hatch. Anya’s limbs are limp, her face grey, her flesh cold and damp. Sofie carries her daughter along the corridor to the bedroom. Martin takes charge. They undress Anya and put her into her dry rabbit onesie and lie her under the duvet. Sarah is made to sit with the hairdryer feeding hot air into the space around her shaking body. Emmy fetches her a bobble hat.

Sofie says, “She needs to be in a hospital.”

“And how would she get there?” says Martin. “This is what they would do for her in a hospital.”

Sofie says, “Will she be all right?”

Martin says, “I honestly don’t know,” and this is what Sofie will remember, not that her father-in-law helped saved her daughter’s life but his cool acceptance of the fact that he might not be able to.

Madeleine arrives with a mug of hot sweet tea in one of the spouted beakers she has saved from when the grandchildren were small. Sofie works it between Anya’s lips and says, “Come on, darling, drink.”

They call Leo and Robert. Leo returns, relieved that his daughter is alive then terrified all over again when he sees how unresponsive she is, the distance in her eyes. He leans down and kisses her. “Hey, little one.”

It is a small bedroom and filling it with useless people is no help to anyone, so Sarah and Emmy retreat downstairs and wash up while Robert does what can be done in the dining room. He wipes down the clock. He rolls and bags the blood-soaked rug and puts it in the garden. He removes the map of Bedfordshire from its soiled frame and lays it in a drawer so that the frame and the glass can be soaped clean. He sponges bodily matter from pitted wallpaper. He takes down the curtains and leaves them to soak in a bucket of water. He turns off the light, closes the door and puts a symbolic chair in front of it.

Throughout all of this Gavin sits at the kitchen table saying very little. He is not greatly troubled by the pain. There is a rough-and-tumble, tree-climbing, small-boy part of him which enjoys physical discomfort. Nor is he troubled by what has happened and what might be happening to Anya. He has always possessed the ability to ignore things to which he is not immediately connected. What troubles him is that he cannot see a way in which these events might be turned to his advantage, and this is a situation he has not been in before.

Emmy hovers nearby, drying pans and casserole dishes. She longs to be back in London, stepping out of her mundane self every night and into that pretend sitting room with its view of the rainy fjord to greet Pastor Manders—“How good of you to come so early. We can get our business done before supper…” Because it was Gavin’s invulnerability, above everything else, which drew her to him and counterbalanced the arrogance and insensitivity. She knows now that he can be broken and she cannot shake the suspicion that she has climbed into the wrong lifeboat.

Only Madeleine sleeps, and she does so only until 4 a.m. when the bloody images begin to sharpen in the clearing diazepam fog. Leo tells Sofie to take a rest but she can’t until she sees Anya up and walking and, in truth, he feels the same way. Sarah is too angry to sleep and Robert’s job is clearly to remain awake in order to absorb, defuse and deflect some of his wife’s anger so that she doesn’t complicate an already difficult situation.