Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

As for Martin it is the stranger’s resurrection which keeps him awake. The man was dead, then the man was not dead. They have been the victims of an extraordinarily sophisticated trick. But how was it done? By whom? And for what reason?

David cannot sleep because when he went upstairs to see how his sister was doing his mother hissed at him to stay away, a note of unmistakable hatred in her voice. His father came out into the corridor and said that Mummy was feeling very tense, but an apology on someone else’s behalf wasn’t a real apology. Everyone knew that.

He forgot about Anya’s hiding place. Then he remembered. Why is he not being congratulated? The answer is the same as it has always been. Because Anya was premature, the fairy child, the blessed one, who only just made it into the world. And sometimes he does wish she were dead, because everyone tells you to be good and look after yourself and not make a fuss and remember how lucky you are because Mummy and Daddy have a lot on their plate right now, so you are good and you look after yourself and don’t make a fuss and your reward is to be ignored.

He dreams sometimes of having a terrible disease. He dreams of being crippled in a car accident. Sometimes he leans a little too far out of windows. Sometimes he pushes the tip of a penknife into his wrist till blood comes out. Sometime he googles fatal doses.

And here he is again, standing in the wings of “The Anya Show.”

Gavin lies under the duvet for the latter half of the night, so as to rest if not to sleep. The daylight, when it comes, restores some of his self-belief and lends the events of the previous day an otherworldly cast which allows him to frame and neuter them. He asks Emmy to fetch him more codeine, strong coffee and toast, and when the analgesia kicks in he showers slowly and carefully, comes downstairs and suggests a preprandial family walk.

Sarah is speechless. How is it possible for him to ignore what happened in the next room? And why is everyone else colluding in this act of communal amnesia? She wants it talked about. She wants justice done. At the very least she wants her brother to admit that he did a dreadful, dreadful thing.

It is one of the reasons many people are attracted to Gavin and many people find Sarah difficult, one of the reasons why the universe so often bends unfairly to his will and throws obstacles in her way. He is all momentum and confidence. He is entertained by the new and the interesting and bored by the old and the difficult. And he makes this choice seem noble and right.

Madeleine’s hip is not good so Sofie stays behind to help with lunch. Anya, up and mobile now, is scared of what lies outside the house but decides to throw in her lot with the larger crowd for safety’s sake and they don Wellingtons and gloves and set off towards the church. Other villagers halloo them like fellow Eskimos across the snowy waste. A golden retriever bounces in and out of the deepest drifts, appearing and disappearing like a furred yellow dolphin.

Robert sees David trailing at the rear and senses something off-kilter, an echo from his own childhood perhaps, when he was shunted between international schools. Worthless superficial glamour and loneliness in fourteen languages.

“How’s it going, buddy?”

David stares at him with the utter contempt of the young, and the image that comes to Robert is that of a child who has fallen down a well, so that any conversation they muster is pointless because the shaft is deep and there is no ladder. It is a moment that will haunt Robert over the coming years when he hears, periodically, about the successive downward steps of David’s long descent. And deep snow will always come overlaid with this faint image of his nephew’s sour little face and the parents who didn’t realise which of their children was in danger.

Exercised and de-booted, everyone arranges themselves around the kitchen table for a stripped-down Christmas lunch to suit the less-than-festive mood, the younger and more limber perching on stools or sitting on the washing machine and eating on their laps. The turkey is good, and only Martin complains about the absence of swede and Brussels. The mincemeat tart and custard are even better and everyone is quietly pleased to finish the meal without feeling bloated for once, and while no one wishes to tempt fate by referring, even indirectly, to the reason why they are eating in this unorthodox manner it is tacitly admitted by the majority of the family that it is a very nice Christmas lunch.

Gavin raises his glass of Malbec. “God bless you one and all.”

After lunch gifts are handed out and what is sometimes a rather tense affair goes off without a hitch (last year Gavin’s present to his father of two walking poles was considered insulting and unsubtle). David gets the latest edition of FIFA . Martin gets a box set of the complete Beethoven sonatas for piano and violin by Isabelle Faust and Alexander Melnikov. Sarah attempts yet again to broaden her mother’s cultural horizons by buying her a contemporary novel by a woman which will be shelved, unread, along with the others in what Gavin refers to as “the Black Lesbian Fiction Section” behind the gramophone. Leo and Sofie, in contrast, have brought many jars of blackberry jam from their allotment, ornately hand-labelled by Anya, which seem parsimonious at the time but are consumed more completely and with more enjoyment than any of the other gifts (Martin never reaches disc four of the Beethoven).

The wrapping paper is cleared away and cake served. In other circumstances they might watch Skyfall but the television is anchored to the aerial socket in the dining room. Consequently the events of the previous evening begin to rise up in the absence of commensurable distraction. While the others play Monopoly Leo and Robert escape the house to retrieve Emmy and Gavin’s suitcase and discover that their car is parked on a road which has, miraculously, been snow-ploughed and gritted. Within the hour, Monopoly has been abandoned and Gavin and Emmy are heading south on the M1, Emmy at the wheel, Gavin reclined and semi-conscious in the passenger seat.

Her brother gone, Sarah expresses her feelings about him loudly and at length. Her father asks why she has saved her anger precisely for the people who do not deserve it. This does not go down well and she exits in high dudgeon shortly thereafter taking Robert with her so that, come eight in the evening, Leo, Sofie and the children are the only remaining guests, and when Anya says that she won’t be able to sleep in the house Leo and Sofie seize the opportunity with poorly disguised relief, and set off on a night drive to Durham.

By ten o’clock Martin and Madeleine are alone and about to experience a night of such profound ill-ease that they will spend the next seven days in a damp little holiday cottage in Shropshire, Martin arranging from afar for Andrezj, the Polish builder who did the conservatory after the alder fell on it, to return the dining room to the condition it was in before “a very troubled ex-patient forced his way into the house and tried to take his own life.”