A Spot of Bother (20 page)

61

Katie was going
to save her marriage.

She rang the office at eight. She was planning to leave a message and was caught on the hop when Aidan answered the phone (if he didn’t sound so bloody perky she might have suspected him of sleeping in the office; she couldn’t imagine him doing extra work if other people weren’t watching).

“Let me guess,” said Aidan, wearily. “You’re sick.”

It would have been simpler to say yes, but it was a day for being honest. And, in any case, she’d never liked agreeing with Aidan. About anything. “I’m fine, actually. But I need the day off.”

“No can do.”

There was a gurgling noise in the background. Was it possible that he was urinating while talking on the cordless phone? “You can live without me for a day.”

“The Henley had the fire officer round. Their license for the ballroom has been revoked. So, we have some work to do.”

“Aidan?” she said, in that growly snap you used to make bad children stop what they were doing right now.

“What?” he said, in that slightly quivery voice bad children used when you did the growly snap.

“I’m staying at home. I’ll explain later. I’ll find you a new venue tomorrow.”

Aidan reasserted himself. “Katie, if you’re not here by ten o’clock—”

She put the phone down. It was entirely possible that she no longer had a job. It didn’t seem terribly important.

Ray turned up just after nine, having dropped Jacob at nursery. He rang the office and talked to a few people to make sure everything didn’t crash and burn in his absence. Then he said, “What now?”

Katie threw him his coat. “We take a tube into London. You get to choose what we do this morning. I get to choose what we do this afternoon.”

“OK,” said Ray.

They were going to start all over again. But this time she wouldn’t be single and desperate. She’d find out whether she liked him instead of just needing him.

They could deal with his anger-management issues later. Besides, if the wedding was off, it was someone else’s job.

Ray wanted to go on the Millennium Wheel. They bought a pair of advance tickets then ate ice creams sitting on a bench watching a big tide heading for the North Sea.

“Remember wafers?” said Katie. “You’d get this little brick of ice cream sandwiched between these crisscross-patterned biscuits. Maybe you can still get them…”

Ray wasn’t really listening. “It’s like being on holiday.”

“Good,” said Katie.

“Only problem with holidays,” said Ray, “you have to go home afterward.”

“Apparently, going on holiday is the fourth most stressful thing you can do,” said Katie. “After death of a spouse and changing your job. And moving house. If I remember correctly.”

“Fourth?” Ray said, staring at the water. “What about if your kid dies?”

“OK. Maybe not the fourth.”

“Wife dies. Kid with disability,” said Ray.

“Terminal disease,” said Katie. “Loss of limb. Car crash.”

“House burning down,” said Ray.

“Declaration of war,” said Katie.

“Seeing a dog run over.”

“Seeing a person run over.”

“Actually running a person over,” said Ray.

“Actually running a dog over.”

“Running an entire family over.”

They were laughing again.

Ray was disappointed by the wheel. Too well engineered, he said. He wanted the wind in his hair and a rusty handrail and the faint possibility that the whole structure might collapse.

Katie was thinking she should have included a height rule in her plan for the day. She felt ill. Marble Arch, Battersea Power Station, the Gherkin tower, some green hills over there which looked like they were in bloody Nepal. She stared down at the blond wood of the central oval bench and tried to imagine she was in a sauna.

Ray said, “When we were kids we had these cousins who lived in this old farmhouse. You could get out of the bedroom window and climb up onto the roof. I mean, if Mum and Dad had known they’d have gone ballistic. But I can still remember it, even now, that feeling of being above everything. Roofs, fields, cars…Like being God.”

“How long have we got to go?” asked Katie.

Ray seemed amused. He glanced at his watch. “Ooh, about another fifteen minutes.”

62

Except that it wasn’t
a swimming pool because her lime-green bottom (her name was Marianna, he recalled) slid sideways to the right and there was this rhythmic banging which was the sound of oars striking water because he was watching the Boat Race on television (on second thought it might have been Marlena), but maybe not on television because he was leaning on a sturdy granite balustrade, though he could also feel carpet pressed against the side of his face, which suggested that he might, after all, be indoors, and the commentator was saying something about the kitchen, and one way of drawing a rubber plant would be to photograph it and then project a slide onto a large piece of paper masking-taped to a wall and trace it, which some people might think of as cheating, though Rembrandt used lenses, or so they said in that article in
The Sunday Times
magazine, or perhaps it was Leonardo da Vinci, and no one accused them of cheating because it was what the picture looked like which mattered, and they were dressed in white and they were lifting him up into the air and it wasn’t a circle of light, more an upright rectangle at the top of a flight of steps, though now he came to think about it he may have thrown the slide projector out in 1985 along with the plastic bath, and someone was saying “George…? George…? George…?” and then he went into the rectangle of bright light and something was placed over his mouth and the doors closed and he was ascending now in a kind of crystal lift shaft directly above the house, and when he looked down he could see the unfinished studio and the blocked guttering above the bathroom window that he really should have got around to clearing, and a steam train on the Nene Valley Railway and the three lakes of the country park and the bedspread of fields and that little restaurant in Agrigento and the butterflies in the Pyrenees and the crisscrossing contrails of jets and the blue of the sky turning slowly to black and the hard little fires of the stars.

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.

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.