Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

She comes to a halt a little way away, not wanting to wake her mother abruptly. “Mum…?”

Her mother turns and narrows her eyes. “You’ve always hated me.”

“Mum, it’s Carol.”

“I know exactly who you are.” It is a voice Carol has not heard before. “But I look at you and all I see is your father.”

Her mother is tiny and cold and she is wearing a thick skirt and a heavy jumper which would become rapidly waterlogged. How long would it take? And who would know? The thought passes through her mind and is gone.

Her mother’s glare holds firm for several seconds then her face crumples and she begins to cry. Carol takes her hand. “Let’s get you home.”

The registrar says they are keeping her in overnight. Carol leaves a message for Robyn. On the ward her mother is unconscious so she drinks a styrofoam cup of bitter coffee in the hospital café, doing the quick crossword in The Times to distract herself from something gathering at the edge of her imagination. Whales cruising in the dark, right now, just round the corner of the world. The sheer size of the ocean, crashed planes and sunken ships lost until the earth’s end. Serpentine vents where everything began. Images from a magazine article she’d read years ago of the Trieste six miles down in the Mariana Trench, steel crying under the pressure, a ton of water on every postage stamp of metal.

Robyn sits down opposite her.

“She walked out of the house in the middle of the night.”

“Sweet Jesus, Carol. You’ve only been here two days.”

She stops herself saying, “It wasn’t my fault,” because it probably is, isn’t it? She can see that now.

“You’re just like Dad. You think everyone else is an idiot.”

“She’s going to be OK.”

“Really?”

“She had a shock. She’s exhausted.”

“You can’t just decide how you want things to be, Carol. That’s not how the world works.” She sounds more exasperated than angry, as if Carol is a tiresome child. “Some people’s minds are very fragile.”

The doctor is plump and keen and seems more like a schoolboy prodigy than a medical professional. “Dr. Ahluwalia.” He shakes their hands in turn. “I will try to be quick and painless.” He takes a pencil from his pocket and asks Carol’s mother if she knows what it is.

She looks at Carol and Robyn as if she suspects the doctor of being out of his mind.

“Humour me,” says Dr. Ahluwalia.

“It’s a pencil,” says her mother.

“That is excellent.” He repockets the pencil. “I’m going to say three words. I want you to repeat them after me and to remember them.”

“OK.”

“Apple. Car. Fork.”

“Apple. Car. Fork.”

“Seven times nine?”

“My goodness, I was never any good at mental arithmetic.”

“Fair enough,” says Dr. Ahluwalia, laughing gently along with her.

Carol can see her mother warming to this man and is suddenly worried that she can’t see the trap which is being laid for her. Her mother tells the doctor the date and her address. “But you’ll have to ask my daughter for the phone number. I don’t ring myself very often.”

Dr. Ahluwalia asks her mother if she can repeat the phrase “Do as you would be done by.”

“Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby.” Her mother smiles, the way she smiled in the bath. “I haven’t heard that name for a long time.” She drifts away with the memory.

“Mum…?”

Dr. Ahluwalia glances at Carol and raises an eyebrow, the mildest of rebukes.

“Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby,” says her mother, “and Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid.”

Dr. Ahluwalia asks her mother if she can make up a sentence. “About anything.”

“It’s from The Water Babies ,” says her mother. “We read it at school. Ellie is very well-to-do and Tom is a chimney sweep.” She closes her eyes. “ ‘Meanwhile, do you learn your lessons, and thank God that you have plenty of cold water to wash in; and wash in it too, like a true Englishman.’ ” She is happy, the bright pupil who had pleased a favourite teacher.

“Excellent.” Dr. Ahluwalia takes a notepad from his pocket and draws a pentagon on the top sheet. He tears it off and hands it to her mother. Every page is inscribed with the words Wellbutrin — First Line Treatment of Depression . “I wonder if you could copy that shape for me.”

She seems unaware of how little resemblance her battered star bears to its original but Dr. Ahluwalia says, “Lovely,” using the same bright tone. “Now, I wonder if you can tell me those three objects whose names I asked you to remember.”

Her mother closes her eyes for a second time and says, slowly and confidently, “Fire…clock…candle…”

The empty house scares her. Carol tries reading but her eyes keep sliding off the page. She needs something trashy and moreish on the television but she can’t bring herself to sit in a room surrounded by so much crap so she starts cleaning and tidying and it is the sedative of physical work that finally comforts her. She ties the old newspapers in bundles and puts them outside the front door. She stands the mattress against a radiator in the hall to air and dry. She puts the cushion covers on a wool cycle and dusts and hoovers. She cleans the windows. She rehangs the Constable poster and puts a new bulb into the standard lamp.

She finishes her work long after midnight then goes upstairs and falls into a long blank sleep which is broken by a phone call from Robyn at ten the following morning saying that she and John will bring their mother home from hospital later in the day.

She digs her trainers from the bottom of her suitcase and puts on the rest of her running gear. She drives out to Henshall, parks by the Bellmakers Arms and runs out of the village onto the old sheep road where their father sometimes took them to fly the kite when they were little. It’s good to be outside under a big sky in clear, bright air away from that godforsaken estate, the effort and the rhythm hammering her thoughts into something small and simple. Twenty minutes later she is standing in the centre of the stone circle, just like she and Robyn did when they were girls, hoping desperately for a sign of some kind. And this time something happens. It may be nothing more than a dimming in the light, but she feels suddenly exposed and vulnerable. It’s not real, she knows that, just some trait selected thousands of years ago, the memory of being prey coded into the genome, but she runs back fast, a sense of something malign at her heels the whole way, and she doesn’t feel safe until she gets into the car and turns the radio on.

She paces the living room, a knot tightening in the base of her stomach. She dreads her mother coming home in need of constant care and Robyn saying, “You’ve made your bed, now lie in it.” She dreads her mother coming home in full possession of her senses and ordering her to leave. She dreads the car not turning up at all and afternoon turning to evening and evening turning to night. And then there is no more time to think because her mother is standing in the doorway saying, “This is not my house.”