Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

On the morning of his fiftieth birthday his mother will call and say that she needs to see him. She will seem calm and give no explanation and despite the fact that there is a large party planned for the afternoon he will get into the car and drive straight to Leicester only to find that the ambulance has already taken her body away. Talking to his father the following day he will realise that he received the phone call half an hour after the stroke which killed her.

Today will be different, not simply shocking but one of those moments when time itself seems to fork and fracture and you look back and realise that if things had happened only slightly differently you would be leading one of those other ghost lives speeding away into the dark.

Sean is not a friend as such but they play together because they are in the same class at school. Sean’s family live on the top floor of Orchard Tower whereas Daniel’s family live in a semi-detached house on the approach road. Daniel’s mother says that Sean’s family are a bad influence but she also says that television will damage your eyes if you sit too close and that you will die if you swim in the canal. In any case Daniel likes their volume, their expansiveness, their unpredictability, the china greyhounds on either side of the gas fire, Mr. Cobb’s green BMW which he polishes and T-Cuts lovingly on Saturday mornings. Sean’s older brother, Dylan, works as a plasterer and carpenter and they have a balcony which looks over the ring road to the woods and the car plant and the radio mast at Bargave, a view which moves Daniel more than anything he saw from the plane window between Luton and Palma because there is no glass and when you lean over and look down you feel a thrilling shiver in the backs of your knees.

He steps out of the lift and sees Sean’s mother leaving the flat, which is another thing that makes Daniel envious, because when his own mother goes to the shops he and Paul and Helen have to accompany her. Try and keep him out of trouble . Mrs. Cobb ruffles his hair and sweeps onwards. She is lighting a cigarette as the silver doors close over her.

Sean’s jumbled silhouette assembles itself in the patterned glass of the front door and it swings open. I’ve got something to show you .

What?

He beckons Daniel into Dylan’s bedroom. You have to keep this a total secret .

Daniel has never been in here before. Dylan has explicitly forbidden it and Dylan can bench-press 180 pounds. Daniel steps off the avocado lino of the hall onto the swirly red carpet of the bedroom. The smell of cigarettes and Brut aftershave. It feels like the bedroom of a dead person in a film, every object heavy with significance. Posters of Monty Python and The French Connection. Jimmy Doyle Is the Toughest . A motorbike cylinder head sits on a folded copy of the Daily Express , the leaking oil turning the newsprint waxy and transparent. There is a portable record player on the bedside table, the lid of the red leatherette box propped open and the cream plastic arm crooked around the silvered rod in the centre of the turntable. Machine Head. Thick as a Brick. Ziggy Stardust .

You have to promise.

I promise.

Because this is serious.

I said.

Sean tugs at the pine handle of the wardrobe and the flimsy door comes free of the magnetic catch with a woody clang. On tiptoe Sean takes down a powder-blue shoe box from the top shelf and lays it on the khaki blanket before easing off the lid. The gun lies in the white tissue paper that must have come with the shoes. Sean lifts it from its rustling nest and Daniel can see how light it is. Scuffed pigeon-grey metal. The words REMINGTON RAND stamped into the flank. Two cambered grips are screwed to either side of the handle, chocolate brown and cross-cut like snakeskin for a better grip.

Sean raises the gun at the end of his straightened arm and rotates slowly so that the barrel is pointing directly into Daniel’s face. Bang , he says softly. Bang .

Daniel’s father works at the local pool, sometimes as a lifeguard, more often on reception. Daniel used to be proud of the fact that everyone knew who his father was but he is now embarrassed by his visibility. His mother works part-time as a secretary for the county council. His father reads crime novels, his mother does jigsaws which are stored between two sheets of plywood when the dining table is needed. Later in life when he is describing his parents to friends and acquaintances he will never find quite the right word. They aspired always to be average, to be unremarkable, to avoid making too much noise or taking up too much space. They disliked arguments and had little interest in the wider world. And if he is often bored in their company during his regular visits he will never use the word boring to describe them because he is genuinely envious of their rare ability to take real joy in small pleasures, and hugely grateful that they are not demonstrating any of the high-maintenance eccentricities of many of his friends’ retired and ageing parents.

They walk across the living room and Sean turns the key before shunting the big glass door to one side. They step into heat and traffic noise. There is a faint brown smog, as if the sky needs cleaning. Daniel can feel sweat running down the small of his back.

Sean fixes the pistol on a Volvo travelling in one direction then follows an Alfa Romeo going the other way. We could kill someone and they’d never find out who did it . Daniel explains that the police would use the hole in the windscreen and the hole in the driver’s body to work out exactly where the shot came from. Elementary, my dear Watson , says Sean.

Let’s go to the woods.

Is the gun loaded?

Course it’s loaded , says Sean.

The woods rise up on the other side of the ring road, a swathe of no-man’s-land between town proper and country proper. People park their cars at the picnic area by Pennington on the far side of the hill and walk their dogs among the oak and ash and rowan, but the roar of the dual carriageway and the syringes and the crushed lager cans dissuade most of them from coming down its northern flank.

They wait on the grass verge, the warm shock waves of passing lorries thumping them and sucking at their clothes. Go , shouts Sean and they sprint to the central reservation, vaulting the scratchy S-shaped barrier, pausing on the ribbon of balding grass then running across the second carriageway to the gritty lay-by with its moraine of shattered furniture and black bags of rubbish ripped open by rats and foxes. All that bacteria breeding in the sun. There is an upturned pram. They unhook the clanky gate where the rutted track begins. Sean has the gun in a yellow Gola bag thrown over his shoulder.

They pass the scrapyard with its corrugated-iron castellations. They pass the Roberts’ house. A horsebox with a flat tyre, a floodlight roped to a telegraph pole. Robert Hales and Robert Hales and Robert Hales, grandfather, father and son, all bearing the same name and all living under the same roof. The youngest Robert Hales is two years above them at school. He has a biscuity unwashed smell and bones that look slightly too big for his skin. He used to come in with small animals in a cake tin. Stag beetle, mouse, wren, grass snake. Donnie Farr grabbed the last of these and used it to chase other children round the playground before whipping its head against one of the goalposts. Robert pushed Donnie to the ground, took hold of the fingers of his left hand and bent them backwards until two of them snapped.