by Mark Haddon
63
Jean had always found her sister hard work. Even before she was born-again. To be honest, it was slightly better after she was born-again. Because then there was a reason for Eileen being hard work. You knew you’d never get on because she was going to heaven and you weren’t, so you could give up trying.
But, God, the woman could make you feel greedy and self-centered just by the way she wore a shapeless faun cardigan.
She was sorely tempted, over lunch, to mention David. Just so she could see her sister’s face. But Eileen would probably consider it her moral duty to share the information with George.
It didn’t matter now. The ordeal was over for another year.
By the time she got home she was looking forward to a conversation with George. About anything.
She was juggling her keys, however, when she realized something was wrong. She could see, through the little square of frosted glass, that the phone table was at an angle. And there was something dark lying at the foot of the stairs. The dark thing had arms. She hoped to God it was a coat.
She opened the door.
It was a coat.
Then she saw the blood. On the stairs. On the hall carpet. There was a bloody handprint on the wall beside the living-room door.
She shouted George’s name, but there was no answer.
She wanted to turn and run and phone the police from a neighbor’s house. Then she imagined the conversation on the phone. Not being able to say where he was, or what had happened to him. She had to be the first to see him.
She stepped inside, every tiny hair on her body standing on end. She left the door ajar. To keep that connection. To the sky. To the air. To the ordinary world.
The living room was exactly as she had left it that morning.
She went into the kitchen. There was blood all over the lino. He had been in the middle of doing some washing. The door of the machine was open and a box of detergent tablets was sitting on the work surface above it.
The cellar door was open. She walked slowly down the steps. More blood. Great smears of it all over the inside of the paddling pool, and lines of it running down the side of the freezer cabinet. But no body.
She was trying very, very hard not to think about what had happened here.
She went into the dining room. She went upstairs. She went into the bedrooms. Then she went into the bathroom.
This was where they had done it. In the shower. She saw the knife and looked away. She staggered backward and slumped onto the chair in the hallway and let the sobs take her over.
They had taken him somewhere afterward.
She had to call someone. She got to her feet and stumbled along the landing to the bedroom. She picked up the phone. It seemed suddenly unfamiliar. As if she’d never seen one before. The two pieces that came apart. The little noise it made. The buttons with black numbers on them.
She didn’t want to ring the police. She didn’t want to talk to strangers. Not yet.
She rang Jamie at work. He was out of the office. She rang his home number and left a message.
She rang Katie. She wasn’t in. She left a message.
She couldn’t remember their mobile phone numbers.
She rang David. He said he’d be there in fifteen minutes.
It was unbearably cold in the house and she was shaking.
She went downstairs and grabbed her winter coat and sat on the garden wall.
64
Jamie stopped at an all-night petrol station on the way home from Tony’s flat and bought a packet of Silk Cut, a Twix, a Cadbury’s Boost and a Yorkie. By the time he fell asleep he’d eaten all the chocolate and smoked eleven of the cigarettes.
When he woke the following morning someone had folded a wire coat hanger into the space between his brain and his skull. He was late, too, and had no time for a shower. He dressed, threw back an instant coffee with two ibuprofens, then ran for the tube.
He was sitting on the tube when he remembered that he hadn’t rung Katie back. When he got out at the far end he took his mobile out of his pocket but couldn’t quite face it. He would ring this evening.
He got into the office and realized he should have made the call.
This couldn’t go on.
It was bigger than Tony. He was at a crossroads. What he did over the next few days would set the course for the rest of his life.
He wanted people to like him. And people did like him. Or they used to. But it wasn’t so easy anymore. It wasn’t automatic. He was beginning to lose the benefit of everyone’s doubt. His own included.
If he wasn’t careful he’d turn into one of those men who cared more about furniture than human beings. He’d end up living with someone else who cared more about furniture than human beings and they’d lead a life which looked perfectly normal from the outside but was, in truth, a kind of living death that left your heart looking like a raisin.
Or worse, he’d lurch from one sordid liaison to the next, grow hugely fat because no one gave a shit about what he looked like, then get some hideous disease as a result of being fat and die a long, lingering death in a hospital ward full of senile old men who smelled of urine and cabbage and howled in the night.
He got stuck into typing up the particulars for Jack Riley’s three new builds in West Hampstead. Doubtless including some typing error or a mislabeled photograph so that Riley could storm into the office asking for someone’s arse to be kicked.
Last time round Jamie had added the phrase “property guaranteed to depreciate between signing and closing,” printed the details out to amuse Shona, then had to snatch it back when he saw Riley standing in reception talking to Stuart.
Bedroom One. 4.88m (16´0˝) max x 3.40m (11´2˝) max. Two sliding-sash windows to front. Stripped wooden floor. Telephone point…
He wondered sometimes why in God’s name he did this job.
He rubbed his eyes.
He had to stop moaning. He was going to be a good person. And good people didn’t moan. Children were dying in Africa. Jack Riley didn’t matter in the greater scheme of things. Some people didn’t even have a job.
Just knuckle down.
He pasted in the photographs of the interior.
Giles was doing the pen thing over on the facing desk. Bouncing it between his thumb and forefinger then throwing it up into the air and letting it twirl an even number of times before catching it by the handle end. Like Jamie used to do with penknives. When he was nine.
And maybe if it was someone else, Josh, or Shona, or Michael, it wouldn’t have mattered. But it was Giles. Who wore a cravat. And took the foil off a Penguin, folded it in half, then rewrapped the bottom of the bar in the now-double-thickness foil forming a kind of silver paper cornet to prevent his fingers getting chocolatey so that you wanted to put a bullet through his head. And he was making the noise, too, every time the pen fell back into his hand. That little clop noise with his tongue. Like when you were doing a horse for children. But only one clop at a time.
Jamie filled in a couple of Terms of Business and printed out three Property Fact Finds.
He didn’t blame Tony. Christ, he’d made a total arse of himself. Tony was right to slam the door in his face.
How the hell could you ask someone to love you when you didn’t even like yourself?
He typed up the accompanying letters, put everything into envelopes and returned a string of phone calls from the previous day.
At half past twelve he went out and got a sandwich for lunch and ate it sitting in the park in the rain under Karen’s umbrella, thankful for the relative peace and quiet.
His head was still aching. Back at the office he cadged two ibuprofen from Shona then spent a large part of the afternoon mesmerized by the way the clouds moved very interestingly past the little window on the stairs, wanting desperately to be on the sofa at home with a large mug of proper tea and a packet of biscuits.
Giles started doing the pen thing again at 2:39 and was still doing it at 2:47.<
br />
Did Tony have someone with him? Well, Jamie couldn’t really complain. Only the poisoned prawns stopped him shagging Mike. Why the hell shouldn’t Tony have someone there?
That was what it meant, didn’t it. Being good. You didn’t have to sink wells in Burkina Faso. You didn’t have to give away your coffee table. You just had to see things from other people’s point of view. Remember they were human.
Like Giles fucking Mynott didn’t.
Clop. Clop. Clop.
Jamie needed a pee.
He got off his stool and turned round and bumped into Josh who was carrying a cup of startlingly hot coffee back to his desk.
Jamie heard himself saying, very loudly, “You. Total. Fucking. Moron.”
The office went very quiet.
Stuart walked over. It was like watching the headmaster coming across the playground after he’d torn Sharon Parker’s blazer.
“Are you all right, Jamie?”
“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
Stuart was doing his Mr. Spock impression, giving absolutely no indication of what he was thinking.
“My sister has just canceled her wedding,” said Jamie. “My father’s having a nervous breakdown and my mother’s leaving him for someone else.”
Stuart softened. “Perhaps you should take the rest of the afternoon off.”
“Yes. Thank you. I will. Thanks. Sorry.”
He sat on the tube knowing he was going to hell. The only way to reduce the hot forks when he got there was to ring Katie and Mum as soon as he got home.
An old man with a withered hand was sitting opposite him. He was wearing a yellow mac and carrying a greasy satchel of papers and looking directly at Jamie and muttering to himself. Jamie was very relieved when he got off at Swiss Cottage.
Ringing Mum was going to be tricky. Was he meant to know about her leaving Dad? Was Katie even meant to know? She could have overheard a conversation and jumped to conclusions. Which she was prone to do
He’d ring Katie first.
When he got home, however, there was a message on the machine.
He pressed PLAY and took off his jacket.
He thought, at first, that it was a prank call. Or a lunatic dialing a wrong number. A woman was hyperventilating into the phone.
Then the woman was saying his name, “Jamie…? Jamie…?” and he realized that it was his mother and he had to sit down very quickly on the arm of the sofa.
“Jamie…? Are you there…? Something dreadful has happened to your father. Jamie…? Oh, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.”
The message clicked off.
Everything was very quiet and very still. Then he threw himself across the room, knocking the phone to the carpet.
His parents’ number. What the fuck was their number? Jesus, he must have dialed it seven thousand times. Zero one seven three three…Two four two…? Two two four…? Two four four…? Christ.
He was halfway through ringing Directory Inquiries when the number came back to him. He rang it. He counted the rings. Forty. No answer.
He rang Katie.
Answerphone.
“Katie. This is Jamie. Shit. You’re not in. Bugger. Listen. I’ve just had this scary call from Mum. Ring me, OK? No. Don’t ring me. I’m going up to Peterborough. Actually, maybe you’re there already. I’ll talk to you later. I’m going now.”
Something dreadful? Why were old people always so fucking vague?
He ran upstairs and grabbed the car keys and ran down again and had to lean against the wall in the hallway for a few seconds to stop himself passing out, and it occurred to him that in some obscure way he had caused this, by not ringing Katie back, by standing Ryan up, by not loving Tony, by not telling Stuart the whole truth.
By the time he crossed the M25, however, he was feeling surprisingly good.
He had always rather liked emergencies. Other people’s, at any rate. They put your own problems into perspective. It was like being on a ferry. You didn’t have to think about what you had to do or where you had to go for the next few hours. It was all laid out for you.
Like they said. No one committed suicide in wartime.
He was going to talk to his father. Properly. About everything.
Jamie had always blamed him for their lack of communication. Always thought of his father as a dried-up old stick. It was cowardice. He could see that now. And laziness. Just wanting his own prejudices confirmed.
Baldock, Biggleswade, Sandy…
Another forty minutes and he’d be there.
65
Katie and Ray were standing in front of a sculpture called Lightning with Stag in Its Glare. Basically, a girder sticking out of the wall with this jagged black metal spike dangling from it, and some pieces of junk on the floor nearby, which were meant to represent the stag and a goat and some “primitive creatures,” though they could have represented the Crucifixion or the recipe for Welsh rarebit from where Katie was standing.
The aluminum stag was originally made from an ironing board. She knew this because she’d read the little cardboard explanatory note in some detail. She’d read quite a lot of the little cardboard explanatory notes, and stared out of a lot of windows and imagined the possible private lives of many of their fellow visitors because Ray was spending a lot of time examining the art. And it was pissing her off.
She’d come here for all the wrong reasons. She’d wanted to be in her element, but she wasn’t. And she’d wanted him to be out of his element, but he wasn’t.
You could say what you liked about Ray but you could drop him in the middle of Turkmenistan and he’d be in the nearest village by nightfall eating horse and smoking whatever they smoked out there.
He was winning. And it wasn’t a competition. It was childish to think it was a competition. But he was still winning. And she was meant to be winning.
They finally reached the café.
He was holding a cube of sugar so that the bottom corner was just touching the surface of his tea and a brown tide line was slowly making its way up the cube. He was saying, “Obviously most of it’s rubbish. But…it’s like old churches and stuff. It makes you slow down and look…What’s up, kiddo?”
“Nothing.”
She could see now. The dustbin-throwing wasn’t the problem. It was the not winning.
She liked the fact that she was more intelligent than Ray. She liked the fact that she could speak French and he couldn’t. She liked the fact that she had opinions about factory farming and he didn’t.
But it counted for nothing. He was a better person than she was. In every way that mattered. Except the dustbin-throwing. And, in truth, she might have thrown a few dustbins in her time if she’d been a little stronger.
Ten minutes later they were sitting on the big slope looking back down into the vast space of the turbine hall.
Ray said, “I know you’re trying really hard, love.”
Katie said nothing.
Ray said, “You don’t have to do this.” He paused. “You don’t have to marry me because of Jacob and the house and money and everything. I’m not going to throw you out onto the street. Whatever you want to do, I’ll try and make it work.”
66
Jamie was crossing the waiting room when a dapper man in his late sixties sprung off one of the orange plastic chairs and blocked Jamie’s path in a slightly disturbing manner.
“Jamie?”
“Yes?”
The man was wearing a linen jacket and a charcoal roll-neck sweater. He did not look like a doctor.
“David Symmonds. I’m a friend of your mother’s. I know her from the bookshop where she works. In town.”
“OK.”
“I drove her here,” the man explained. “She rang me.”
Jamie wasn’t sure what he was meant to do. Thank the man? Pay him? “I think I should go and find my mother.” There was something disconcertingly familiar about the man. He looked like a newsreader, or someone from a TV advert.
Th
e man said, “Your mother got home and found that your father had been taken to hospital. We think someone broke into the house.”
Jamie wasn’t listening. After his panicked phone calls standing in front of the locked house back at the village he wasn’t in the mood for interruptions.
The man continued: “And we think your father disturbed them. But it’s OK…Sorry. That’s a ridiculous word. He’s alive at any rate.”
Jamie felt suddenly very weak.
“There was a great deal of blood,” said the man.
“What?”
“In the kitchen. In the cellar. In the bathroom.”