Mark Haddon - The Pier Falls - And Other Stories

Leo dies. He is fifteen. Fran takes to her basket and is dead within the month. She, too, is fifteen. Liver cancer, the vet says, though he knows it’s heartbreak. They’ve had good, long lives. And in any case he has arthritis in both hips and walking them had become increasingly difficult.

He says, “I feel lonely.”

“Yeh?” She sips her tea.

He says, “I’m getting old.”

She says, “I guess you are.”

He says, “I’m frightened of dying,” though just saying it out loud like that takes some of the sting out of it.

She says, “I’ll come to your funeral.”

He says, “They’ll wonder who you are.”

She says, “I’m sure they will.”

He pictures her among the trees, twenty yards back from the mourners, his solid little recording angel.

He still dreams of the river, the thunder of the weir, the currents unfurling downstream. May blossom and cirrus clouds. He is no longer drowning. No one is drowning. Though they will all go down into the dark eventually. Him, Maria, Kelly, Timothy…And the last few minutes will be horrible but that’s OK, it really is, because nothing is wasted and the river will keep on flowing and there will be dandelions in spring and the buzzard will still be circling above the wasteland.

With thanks to Clare Alexander, Quinn Bailey, Suzanne Dean, Sos Eltis, Paul Farley, William Fiennes, Kevin Foster, Dan Franklin, Kathy Fry, Sunetra Gupta, Alissa Land, Kevin Leahy, Toby Moorcroft, Debbie Pinfold, Simon Stephens, Bill Thomas, the Jericho Café, and Modern Art Oxford.

“The Island” was published in Ox-Tales Fire (Oxfam/Profile Books, 2009). “The Gun” was published in the “Britain” issue of Granta magazine in 2012. It was also short-listed for the 2013 Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award and won an O. Henry Prize in 2014. “The Pier Falls” was published in the New Statesman in 2014 and was long-listed for the Sunday Times EFG Short Story Award in 2015. “Bunny” was the runner-up for the BBC National Short Story Award in 2015. “The Weir” was published in The New Yorker in 2015.

Mark Haddon is the author of the bestselling novels The Red House and A Spot of Bother . His novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction and is the basis for the Tony Award — winning play. He is the author of a collection of poetry, The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea , has written and illustrated numerous children’s books, and has won awards for both his radio dramas and his television screenplays. He teaches creative writing for the Arvon Foundation and lives in Oxford, England.