Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

Gavin and Emmy spend the evening of Christmas Day on hard plastic chairs in the A&E department of the West Middlesex Hospital, waiting for an X-ray. “Last Christmas” by Wham! comes round seven times on the PA before Gavin gives up counting.

On Boxing Day Gavin asks a friend at the BBC to dig up any information about a rumoured shooting in his parents’ village. A blank is drawn and he puts the matter from his mind.

Emmy suffers occasional post-traumatic flashbacks over the next few weeks (the glutinous line of blood across the cheese plate, the gurgling noise…) but Gavin seems untroubled and this calms her. She wonders, sometimes, if it really happened and is reassured by her uncertainty, a sign that the event is rolling into the long grass at the edges of her memory.

One night in late January, however, Gavin is woken by a gunshot. He opens his eyes and sees a ragged splash of fresh gore on the ceiling above the bed, little stalactites of blood turning, one by one, into drops which fall in slow motion towards the bed. He puts his hand to his chest and feels…absolutely nothing, lungs, heart, stomach, all gone. Something moves in the corner of his eye. The stranger is standing in the doorway, same camouflage trousers, same brass buttons, same insolent smile, preposterous steampunk weapon smoking. An eagle turns on the wind coming off the mountains. Smoke and dung.

“Gavin?” Emmy is shaking him. “You’re safe. Please. Stop shouting.”

This is how the unravelling begins.

He remains awake for the rest of the night. He reads more of The Silk Road: A New History by Valerie Hansen. He googles locations in and around Kashgar. He sacks the graphic designer who has failed to come up with a decent identity for the production company he and Tony Weisz are setting up. The following morning he drives to the Standedge Tunnel near Huddersfield where they are filming the second season of Isambard’s Kingdom . He manages not to think about his nocturnal hallucination until the middle of the afternoon when Annie, the director, sits beside him and says, casually, “You look exhausted. On camera. Which is not good.” She affects a swagger he would accept in a man but finds grating in a woman. She is very possibly a lesbian though they are unlikely to have the kind of tête-à-tête in which such intimacies are shared. She is certainly immune to his charm in a way that puzzles and irritates him. He counts to three in his head, the way Tony has advised him to do. “I broke two ribs at Christmas. I’m still in some pain. I didn’t sleep well last night.”

Nor does he sleep the following night at the hotel, despite Hellboy on the Mac, two Paracodol and three whiskies from the minibar. He stares into the grainy, monochrome dark, listening to the low, irregular timpani of the heating pipes, unable to let go of the world. He knows that if he falls asleep the stranger will enter the room and slaughter him. It is more than simple fear, however. He has never really thought of himself as possessing an unconscious. He has seldom looked inwards and has seen little on those rare occasions. He loves busyness, company, tasks, exercise. Belatedly he is realising that there is a vital part of the mind which can go badly wrong but which cannot be easily accessed. He is forty-one years old and only now becoming aware of a problem his less confident contemporaries were grappling with on the windswept edge of the playground at St. Aloysius Primary School.

The following afternoon Veronique, the executive producer from Palomar, pitches up and makes polite enquiries into Gavin’s health. He forgets to count to three and uses the phrase “the fucking matriarchy.” He is told to take four days off while the crew shoot background footage in Manchester and Edinburgh. “Yoga, sex, pills, whatever. Get some rest. You look like the walking dead.”

Tony’s advice was intended to apply only to work situations, but when Emmy tells him to go to the doctor Gavin yet again fails to count to three, the upside being that Emmy moves into Pastor Manders’s guest room in Chiswick for a week “to make sure two careers don’t go down the tube,” and he is able to jam chairs under the handle of the bedroom door, sleep with the light on and leave Radio 4 chattering through the small hours.

After four days he returns to Huddersfield and maybe he isn’t as sharp or as energetic as he was before but Annie says nothing and he makes it through the rest of the filming without medical assistance, which seems to him to be the most important thing of all, to have been his own saviour.

But the week Emmy intends to spend sleeping elsewhere so that she arrives fresh onstage every night becomes two, then four. In week number six the much-delayed Fog finally opens. It is a low-budget Mike Singer film, shot the previous spring on the north Norfolk coast, in which Emmy plays the mother of a profoundly handicapped boy who might or might not be possessed by the Devil. Technically horror, it is hugely affecting and very beautiful and the reviews for Emmy’s performance in particular are ecstatic. In week number ten she is offered one of the female co-leads in Lockdown , a new crime seven-parter for ITV alongside Gemma Arterton and Matt Smith.

When she meets Gavin for lunch at Honey & Co. on Warren Street the following day he seems unimpressed by her news which, in other circumstances, might offend her except that it is clearly part of some deeper problem with which he is wrestling. If only he were to ask for help, in however coded a fashion, she would find it impossible to refuse. But he doesn’t reach out, and if she has learnt one thing in their three years not-quite-together it is to say nothing which presupposes weakness on his part. So she leaves the last few forkfuls of her chestnut and rum cake, kisses him on the cheek and walks out knowing, even as she does so, that this is the unexpected minor cadence of their marriage ending.

He gets an email from Sarah. She writes, “I would have preferred not to be in contact at all,” and it is this phrase which strikes Gavin with more force than the news that their father has slipped on an icy kerb en route to the newsagent and broken the top of his right femur. He should drive up to Leicester but he cannot bring himself to obey a summons, least of all from his sister. So he rings his mother, says that he’s filming, and asks her to send his father good wishes for a speedy recovery.

Tony is having trouble finding a broadcaster for the Silk Road series. There are rumours about Gavin’s temperament but that shouldn’t matter. Viewing figures for Isambard’s Kingdom were consistently high and commissioners rarely care about interpersonal friction on set if it stays out of the papers. Two of the commissioners are new, however, and eager to personalise their fiefdoms and consequently disinclined to favour projects with which their predecessors had been toying.

“It’s the wrong part of the cycle,” says Tony. “We hunker down, stay busy, give it twelve months, repackage…”

“And that’s it?” says Gavin. “That’s your answer?”

Tony pauses and says, “Gavin. You can fuck other people off, up to a point, but you do it to me and it’s curtains.”