Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

Your mum rang , says Mrs. Cobb. Wondering where you were .

Right . He doesn’t move.

Because it has nothing to do with the gun, does it? Right now, this is the moment when time fractures and forks. If he speaks, if he asks to stay, everything will be different from this point on. But he doesn’t speak. Mrs. Cobb says, Go on. Hop it, or your mum will worry. And however many times he turns her words over in his mind he will never be able to work out whether she was being kind to his mother or cruel to him. He doesn’t say goodbye. He doesn’t want to risk hearing the lack of interest in their voices. He walks out of the front door, closes it quietly behind him and goes down via the stairs so that he doesn’t have to see the blood.

Forty years later he will go to his mother’s funeral. Afterwards, not wanting to seem callous by heading off to a hotel, he will sleep in his old bedroom. It will make him profoundly uncomfortable, and when his father says that he wants things back to normal as soon as possible, he takes the hint with considerable relief and leaves his father to the comfort of his routine. The morning walk, the Daily Mail , pork chops on Wednesdays.

There are roadworks on the way out of town and by chance he finds himself diverted along the stretch of ring road between the flats and the woods. It comes back so vividly that he nearly brakes for the two boys running across the carriageway pushing the pram. He slows and pulls into the lay-by, grit crunching under the tyres. A rusted oil drum half full of rainwater, a pink sofa with wedges of soiled yellow foam poking from slashes in the arms and the back. He gets out of the car and stands in the same thumping draught that comes off the lorries. Freakishly the gate is still held shut by a loop of green twine. It scares him a little. He steps through and shuts it behind him.

The scrapyard is still there, as is the Roberts’ house. The curtains are closed. He wonders if they have been closed all these years, Robert Hales and Robert Hales and Robert Hales, the same person, growing old and dying and being reborn in the stink and the half-light.

That cathedral silence before the first shot. The stag beetle. Planks of butter-yellow light stacked among the trees.

He stoops and picks up a jagged lump of broken tarmac. He imagines throwing it through the front window, the glass crazing and falling. The loose rattle of scattering birds. Light flooding in.

A stick cracks directly behind him. He doesn’t turn. It’s the deer. He knows it’s the deer, come again.

He can’t resist. He turns slowly and finds himself looking at an old man wearing Robert’s face. His father? Maybe it’s Robert himself. What year is it?

The man says, Who are you? and for three or four seconds Daniel has absolutely no idea.

Every time she wakes she is convinced for a couple of seconds that when she opens her eyes she will be looking up at the mobile of wooden animals which hung over her bed in the house in Gloucester where she spent the first seven years of her life — hippo, lion, monkey, snake, eagle. Then she opens her eyes and she sees the air vent with its halo of beige stain and the four cables running across the ceiling which Mikal has duct-taped to the panels. The air smells faintly of sweat and hot plastic and human waste. In the wall space she can hear the water pumps ticking over.

Day 219. She sits up and rubs her eyes. Her back is sore. She lowers herself to the floor and sits against the bed with outstretched legs. She holds her right foot with her left hand for ten seconds then holds her left foot with her right hand for ten seconds. She sits back and feels the knotted muscles loosen. She listens until she is certain that it’s unoccupied then she steps into the corridor and goes to the toilet. She comes back to the room, takes off her pants and vest and rubs herself down with the damp orange cloth. She gets back into her pants and vest, massages Epaderm into her heels and elbows, takes her testosterone and brushes her teeth. Then she zips herself into her green worksuit and heads over to North 2 to get breakfast.

Suki and Arvind are sitting at the table eating granola, drinking coffee and staring at tablets. Arvind looks up. “Good morning, Clare.”

She has never found Arvind attractive but he has skin so smooth and flawless it looks like suede and sometimes she wants to reach out and stroke the back of his neck. She asks what the news is from home.

“Baby girl.” Arvind rotates the screen to show a picture of his sister holding a tiny, damp person in a crocheted yellow blanket. “Leyla.”

“Uncle Arvind. Congratulations.”

“Thank you, though it required very little effort on my part.” He looks at his niece. “Nine pounds six ounces.”

“Is that big?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

“That’s pretty much a Thanksgiving turkey,” says Suki without looking up. They are all small but Suki is the smallest by some margin, and moves so lightly on her feet that Clare sometimes catches her out of the corner of her eye and thinks there is a teenage girl here with them, which spooks her every time. Suki has black belts in judo and karate. Clare guesses that she is still in the middle of Angels & Demons .

“Also, there’s been a coup in Guatemala,” says Arvind, “and Brad Pitt is dead.”

“Are you serious?”

“I’m serious.”

“Overdose?”

“Cancer.”

“Were we expecting this?”

“The world was, I think, unprepared,” says Arvind. “Though I am not always on top of celebrity gossip.”

“We should have a memorial night,” says Suki, again without looking up. “ Ocean’s Eleven, Fight Club, Twelve Monkeys .”

“ Happy Feet Two ,” says Arvind. “He voiced Will the Krill according to a very comprehensive obituary I have been reading.” He is looking at the little girl he will never be able to hold in his arms. He puts his hand across his mouth, riding out a lump in his throat perhaps. He turns the screen off and Leyla vanishes.

Suki finally looks up. “Have you seen Jon, by the way?”

“I’ve only just got up,” says Clare. “Is there a problem?”

“He must be having a lie-in.” Suki returns to her Dan Brown. “I’ll prod him later.”

Clare pours water onto some powdered apple and spreads cream cheese onto a rye cracker. She sits and stares through the scratched porthole at five thousand acres of pink rock under a washed-out, gull-grey sky. There are five or six dust devils in the distance, twenty, thirty metres tall. The Endurance impact crater, Margaritifer Sinus quadrangle. She thinks, every time, how ironic it is that they chose to name the place after Shackleton’s ship, abandoned and crushed by pack ice in the Weddell Sea.

In truth she misses being en route, sealed inside a tiny metal bead on the longest string in the world, slipping through the great tide of radiation at two hundred degrees below zero. It was her reason for coming, those childhood fantasies of being at sea with Magellan or Frobisher, hunting the Northwest Passage, anchored off the Celebes, hunkering below decks while the hull rolled, a hundred cold fathoms below and nothing from the crow’s nest, the way it made her feel, the belonging of not belonging, so that she was not afraid when Suki’s epilepsy started, or the port-forward adjuster blew and set them spinning for two weeks, because that was the cost of stepping over the edge of the known world, and if you didn’t embrace it then why were you here?