by Mark Haddon
He thinks what hard work she must be, and wonders how many times she’s tried something like this.
“I don’t want to be here.” She’s crying again.
He assumes at first that she is referring to his house and he’s relieved. Then he realises what she means and he’s scared of what she might do. Fran is out of the armchair, both dogs pacing now, the way they do during storms. He says, “I need a hot drink,” and leaves the room, to give himself space to think.
He puts the kettle on and leans against the sink. The garden is a mess. A plank is missing from the fence that separates him from the angry Turkish couple next door. Three footballs of unknown provenance are dying slowly in the spring grass which is already too long to mow. He should gravel the whole thing over, get a couple of hardy plants in big tubs, but he hasn’t got round to it, the way he hasn’t got round to so many things.
“Why are we still married?” Maria had asked.
Companionship? The comfort of sharing your life with someone who knew you better than anyone else in the world?
“I’m afraid of being alone,” she’d said. “Isn’t that a terrible reason for staying with someone?”
It seemed like a pretty good reason to him.
He’s still freezing on the inside. He squats with his back against the radiator. Now he is out of her presence he can see things more clearly. He should have listened to the voice of reason and taken her straight to hospital. He quietly retrieves the cordless from the hall table, closes the kitchen door and dials 999. Ten minutes, the woman says. He feels warmer suddenly. In a quarter of an hour he can put something in the microwave, bring the duvet down, dig out a box set.
He makes the coffee and returns to the living room. She’s hugging the green seashell cushion. “You were a long time.”
“Sorry.”
She looks at him, hard. “Did you ring someone?”
Does he answer too quickly or too slowly?
“Fucking hell. Who did you ring?”
“Look…” He puts the coffee down and sits on the arm of Fran’s chair.
“You rang for a fucking ambulance, didn’t you? You rang for a fucking ambulance. Jesus. All that being-interested bollocks. Fuck you.”
He grabs her arm as she pushes past. “Get your fucking hands off me.”
She’s in the hall.
“Wait. You need shoes.”
She fumbles with the lock, the door opens and she runs out. He sees the car before she does. The driver hits the brakes hard, the bonnet goes down and the tail rises. A squeal of hard rubber on gritty tarmac that will leave two black marks for weeks afterwards. She turns towards the car, holding up her hands like Moses parting the Red Sea, and it comes to a halt only inches from her legs, aslant, tyres smoking, like she’s a superhero and this is her power. Then she’s gone, down Asham Way in his socks.
The driver gets out. “What the fuck are you playing at? What did you do to her?”
The man doesn’t seem real enough to warrant a reply. Nothing seems real. He goes back inside where the dogs are waiting for him and reaches the sofa just before his knees go weak with the shock and he is forced to sit down. Both coffees have been knocked over and are soaking into the carpet. The heat from the bar fire stings his lower legs. Leo slides his drooly jaw over the arm of the chair and he lays his hand flat along the dog’s warm flank to calm himself.
He stares at the tatty rainbow of VCR cases, the twelve-year-old Banbury half-marathon medal, the framed photo of Timothy at Wicksteed Park, his rare smile making up for the sun flare bleaching the right-hand side of the picture. A row of dog-eared postcards stand along the mantelpiece—the beach at Barmouth, King Kong on the Empire State Building, the Bruegel painting with the hunters. There is still a gap where Maria’s porcelain chimney sweep used to sit.
He forgets about the ambulance. The male paramedic seems vaguely pissed off by the wasted journey and not quite convinced by his story. He shows them the pile of wet clothes on the kitchen floor. “I saved someone’s life.”
“Hey, buddy, we’re all having a tough day.” The man looks not much older than a student.
The woman gives him a tight little smile which might or might not be an embarrassed apology on her sour colleague’s behalf. She is plump and ginger, her eyebrows almost white.
The man radios in a description of the woman. “Nope. Nothing as helpful as a name.”
Perhaps he’s asking too much. They save lives every day. How often does anyone thank them?
They leave and he returns to the sofa. His body does not feel cold as such, just restless and wrong and unwell. He picks up the seashell cushion and hugs it. He can hear the deep, dull sluice of his blood in his ears and behind it, far away, that faint high whine, not really a noise at all, the background radiation of the mind.
You have to let him find his own way. When he hits the buffers he’ll know where to come.
Or maybe he’ll just break into a hundred pieces.
He sits and listens.
I’m a stone, I’m a stone, I’m a stone.
He pictures her heading straight back to the river. He checks the newspapers, wanting reassurance that his failure wasn’t catastrophic. He looks forward to being congratulated at the office for his heroics then realises that it will work only if someone else tells the story and he downplays his involvement. Anyone would have done the same thing. In any case, the heroics aren’t important. Something else happened which he can’t articulate, and which he might not risk sharing if he could.
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.
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.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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.
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