Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

They take a taxi to Richmond where she slips off her shoes and socks and unbuttons her jeans and says, “I suppose you’ll want to fuck me now.” She seems ten years younger suddenly, her earlier confidence gone entirely. He doesn’t know if it is a piece of play-acting, or whether she is wearily bowing to the inevitable, offering him the use of her body in return for something she hasn’t yet spelled out. He’s several drinks beyond all but the most rudimentary moral judgement and she’s naked now, scrawny with big breasts, not a million miles from Emmy, or indeed Kirstin, if the clock were wound back and they’d led rougher lives. There is a big bruise on her left thigh.

He takes the path of least resistance and they fuck on the sofa. He is inside her for a minute at most, no condom, no thought for her pleasure. Afterwards she wraps herself in the baby-blue cashmere rug he bought for Emmy’s birthday and smokes a cigarette. No one has ever smoked in the house but he says nothing and of all the day’s events it is this which most clearly marks the point past which he gives in to the momentum of the fall.

He opens a bottle of Château Puy-Blanquet. They watch Shutter Island and say very little to one another, though whether this is because of a shared shame or a wordless bond he doesn’t know. They are conspirators now and don’t need to ask or answer such questions.

In the middle of the night she takes hold of his hand, puts it between her legs and rubs herself with his fingers until she comes. She is crying as she does this. He pretends to be only half awake so that he does not have to ask what’s wrong. He falls back to sleep and dreams vividly about his son: playing chicken-in-the-waves in Half Moon Bay, the velociraptor cake Kirstin baked for his seventh birthday, reading Zagazoo together, reading Bear Hunt together. He hasn’t thought about his son this much in years. He dreams about the shouting competition the two of them had in the Malvern Hills and how neither of them could speak for two days afterwards. He knows, somehow, that he is asleep, and that when he wakes he will enter a day of harrowing loneliness. But how does one remain inside a dream?

Then suddenly his eyes are open and he can smell cigarette smoke and hear loud music coming from downstairs.

When Leo reads about his brother in the paper what he feels is schadenfreude mostly. He still blames Gavin for the problems which have plagued Anya and interrupted her schooling since Christmas — the headaches, the fatigue, the stomach pains — and for the arguments he and Sofie have about how to deal with them. Nevertheless he tries to contact Gavin in order to put his mother’s mind at rest, and it is only when he gets no response to his emails and phone calls that he becomes genuinely worried.

He contacts Kirstin and Emmy and Tony but the last reliable sighting is seven weeks old and he is haunted by the image of his brother twisting on a makeshift noose while the rest of them feel smug about his comeuppance. He should ask Sarah to go to London — she is nearer and richer — but he is not immune to the sibling rivalry he usually pretends to rise above, so he pays a king’s ransom and takes a five-hour train journey to London at the crack of dawn one Saturday in early May.

There is no answer to his knock at the door so he reads four chapters of God’s Traitors by Jessie Childs over a panini in Costa. An hour later there still is no answer and he is angry with himself for having conceived such a simplistic plan when his brother could be in Bali for all they know. He walks to Kew Gardens and back brooding on the string of insults, spoken and unspoken, which peppered his childhood in the shadow of the golden boy — the second-hand duffel coat, the afternoon he was pushed out of the tree house, the shelves his father hand-built for Gavin’s bedroom whose true purpose had nothing to do with the books and toys they were too weak to support. He receives no answer to his third and final knocking but leans over the thorny anti-burglar hedge before leaving so that he can look through the side window, half hoping now to discover, if not a body, then some demeaning squalor at the very least. What he sees instead is a woman staring back at him, wearing a Clash T-shirt which is too big for her, drinking from a racing-green mug and smoking a cigarette. She must be in her late twenties, greasy blonde hair, a sleazy, car-crash aura, the kind of person he has only ever encountered in films or TV documentaries. She does not react and he realises that she is looking at her own reflection. He backs away slowly, telling himself as he walks to the station that his brother’s life is falling apart but unable to suppress the thought that he is living out a sexual fantasy of a kind that was never available, and will never be available, to his younger, less adventurous brother.

Gavin gets out of bed and heads down to the living room intending to tell Amber that she must leave, but he can’t bring himself to do it. In spite of the music and the smoking and the knowledge that she is accelerating his descent towards some as yet undefined crash, there is sufficient consolation in Amber’s presence to make it preferable to the empty house with the menacing pile of unopened mail and the phone that rings and stops and rings and stops and the framed photographs which he has hidden in drawers.

The two of them come and go and after a couple of days Gavin realises that she has got her own key cut. He can’t remember her asking if she could do this but his memory of the recent past is increasingly fogged by alcohol and the hangovers he keeps failing to alleviate with painkillers and willpower despite the repeated promises he makes to himself.

Amber has been in residence for nearly a week when he returns from Tesco one lunchtime to find her arguing with a tracksuited man in the kitchen. He has a sinewy, underfed air and Gavin can smell both his deodorant and the sweat it is failing to disguise.

“What are you doing in my house?”

“Amber and I are talking.” The man doesn’t even turn his head.

“Amber…?”

She says, “I’m so sorry, Gavin.”

The man laughs. “She’s not fucking sorry. You’re never fucking sorry, are you, babe?”

Gavin tells himself he is protecting Amber’s honour but his anger is overwhelming and undirected and his main intention is to wipe out his shame at having allowed this whole sorry situation to happen.

He is a big man and still strong despite having done little exercise for the past three months but his smaller opponent has clearly been in fights before. They grapple briefly, falling together onto a chair which shatters beneath them. Then the man breaks Gavin’s nose with a headbutt. The shock loosens Gavin’s grip, the man gets to his feet, kicks Gavin hard in the small of the back and drags Amber from the house. Gavin does not care what might happen to her. He is not even greatly concerned with the damage to his face. Mostly he is frightened by the fact that he is now alone.

He walks to A&E where he is both relieved and distressed that no one recognises him. He returns five hours later with a bandage over his nose to find that the iPhone and wallet he left on the hall table have been stolen along with the TV, the hi-fi, his MacBook Air and his passport. He rings the bank to cancel the card but the current account has already been emptied of three thousand pounds. He rings a locksmith then has to ring back and cancel the visit when he remembers that he has no way of paying the man. He drinks half a bottle of whisky, lies down on the sofa, loses consciousness and wakes up an hour later, face down in his own vomit.