Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

Maria comes round to remove more of her belongings. He doesn’t tell her about the incident. She is buoyant, or acts buoyancy with complete conviction. She says, “I’m worried about you,” though how — or even whether — this is meant to help he’s not sure.

It’s true that the house is getting messier and dirtier but he can’t be bothered to hoover and sweep and sponge and tidy. Who, in any case, does he need to impress? He senses the beginning of a slippery slope beneath his feet but the tingle of fear is not enough to goad him into action.

It becomes obvious not just that he is depressed but that he has been depressed for a long time, his low mood so constant that it remained invisible, like a lobster in a boiling pot, claws scrabbling at the metal rim.

He wakes in the middle of the night gasping for air. That cloudy green water. Sometimes it is the woman sinking into the darkness below him, sometimes it is Timothy. Sometimes he is crossing the gantry himself with a rucksack full of stones when he trips and falls into the foam while Maria stands on the bank with the dogs and does nothing. Occasionally he lets himself fall willingly and feels a moment of easeful bliss mid-air before he realises what is going to happen to him under the water, and this is the most frightening dream of all.

She turns up at the front door on a Saturday afternoon three weeks later. He doesn’t realise who she is at first. She’s dressed for the office. Cream blouse, charcoal jacket and trousers, hair scraped back.

“I came to get my clothes.” It is the surliness he recognises first. “If you’ve still got them.”

He can’t conceal his joy. “I’m glad you’re OK.”

She nods carefully as if she can think of no reason why she shouldn’t be OK. Maybe trying to take your own life is not something you want reminding of. She waits outside the door while he fetches the bag.

“You washed them. Wow.”

“As opposed to leaving them wet all this time.”

“I guess.” There is no mention of his own sweatshirt and tracksuit trousers and socks. “Cheers anyway.”

“You never told me your name.” He doesn’t want her to leave, not yet.

She pauses and says, “Kelly,” with just enough wariness for him to wonder whether she has pulled it out of thin air.

He had forgotten about the voices. “Do you want a cup of coffee?”

“That’s kind of weird.”

“Not here. In a café, maybe.” As if she really would be at risk coming into the house.

“I’ve got to get going.”

“I have a son.” He doesn’t talk about Timothy to anyone. “I haven’t heard from him for three years. I haven’t seen him for seven.”

“And…?” Her expression doesn’t change.

“I don’t know if he’s alive or dead.”

She clearly has a silent discussion with herself for a few seconds then nods. “Ten minutes, all right? But don’t go all strange on me.”

She is prickly company on the walk to Starbucks and not much easier over a cup of tea and a Danish pastry. He tells her about Maria leaving. She tells him how she works for the Parking and Permits Office at the council. He tells her about Timothy. She tells him about her father going into the John Radcliffe. Neither of them mentions what happened in the river. Ten minutes becomes half an hour. Reluctantly she gives him her mobile number before she leaves but, to his surprise, it is she who sends him a text the following week saying, “I suppose you want a coffee.”

“Friends” is the wrong word. She’s twenty-four, he’s fifty-three. Maybe there isn’t a right word. On a couple of occasions they are seen by acquaintances or colleagues who look away as if he is engaged in some kind of moral turpitude. She finds it funny so he decides to find it funny.

She never does thank him for saving her, and slowly he realises that thanks is not what he wants or needs. She tells him about her family, for which her own description, “fucked up,” is something of an understatement, her antagonistic relationship with the medical profession, her patchy employment record, the law degree she never finished, the crappy boyfriends she chose because their low opinion of her chimed with her own opinion of herself, the kind boyfriends whose sympathy and patience made them insufferable. She talks about the voices and the changing drug regimes which keep them at bay for a while. She tells him how they torment her but how flat the world seems when she can’t hear them.

Twelve years. Once a fortnight or thereabouts. He tells her about the divorce and Maria’s remarriage to a man nine years her junior, about a series of internet dates which range from the bizarre to the slightly sordid to the very nearly but not quite right. He tells her about the melanoma on his back which he discovers late and which scares the living daylights out of him for the best part of six months.

She never passes judgement or tries to cheer him up. It irritates him at first but he begins to understand that both of these things are ways of steering someone away from the stuff you don’t want to hear. She listens better than anyone he knows. Or maybe it’s just that she doesn’t interrupt. And maybe that’s enough.

She rotates between Danish pastry, almond croissant and millionaire’s shortbread. The tea is a constant. Him paying ditto. For a couple of months they have to relocate to the café at the Warneford Hospital when she’s going through what she refers to as “a particularly shitty patch.” Sometimes she is unforthcoming and ill-tempered. Sometimes they simply sit in one another’s company like an old married couple or two cows in a pasture. Companionship, though not in a way he’d pictured it. There are periods when she feels suicidal, though she seems calmer for having discussed her plans in gruesome detail and she always gets back in touch after a week or two.

He still wonders sometimes if Kelly is her real name.

Four years after he fishes her from the river Timothy comes home, older and thinner and bearded, with everything he owns squeezed into a single kitbag. His relief rapidly gives way to the disappointed realisation that his son is not greatly different from the young man who went away all those years ago, and he has returned not to heal wounds and build bridges but because there has been a fire at a house he was sitting over the winter for a wealthy couple in Majorca, the details of which are clearly more complicated than his version of the story suggests. He is alternately distant and manipulative and, unexpectedly, it is Maria who suffers most, feeding him and buying him new clothes and letting him stay in their spare room until her new husband delivers the inevitable ultimatum. She loans him a thousand pounds for a deposit on a flat and the first month’s rent and three days later he’s gone.

“Wow,” says Kelly.

“All those years, I imagined this Hollywood homecoming. Him being sorry, us being overjoyed. And now I know it’s never going to happen.”

“And that feels…?”

“Like being kicked in the stomach every time I think about it.”

They sit quietly.

He says, “I’m going to do the garden. I’m sick of looking out onto a piece of wasteland.”

He does the garden. He cuts the grass. He lays gravel over black plastic. Tubs, a couple of New Zealand ferns, a bench. He mends the fence and creosotes it. He buys a bird table and puts out seeds and crusts and little chunks of fat. And when he thinks about Timothy it doesn’t hurt so much.