A Spot of Bother (21 page)

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The aluminum stag was originally made from an ironing board.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.

The 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.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Jamie.

The man took a step backward. “They’re in cubicle 4. Look…it’s probably best if I slipped away. Now that you’re here to look after your mother.” The man was clasping his hands together like a vicar. There were ironed creases down the front of his canvas trousers.

Someone had tried to murder Jamie’s father.

The man continued: “Send her my very best wishes. And tell her I’m thinking of her.”

“OK.”

The man stood to one side and Jamie walked to cubicle 4. He paused outside the curtain and braced himself for what he was about to see.

When he pushed the curtain aside, however, his parents were laughing. Well, his mother was laughing and his father was looking amused. It was something he hadn’t seen in a long time.

His father had no visible wounds and when the two of them turned to look at Jamie he got the surreal impression that he was intruding on a rare romantic moment.

“Dad?” said Jamie.

“Hello, Jamie,” said his father.

“I’m sorry about the phone message,” said his mother. “Your father had an accident.”

“With a chisel,” his father explained.

“A chisel?” asked Jamie. Was the man in the waiting room a lunatic?

His father laughed gingerly. “I’m afraid I made rather a mess at home. Trying to clean up.”

“But everything’s all right now,” said his mother.

Jamie got the impression that he could apologize for intruding and walk away and no one would be offended or puzzled in the slightest. He asked his father how he was feeling.

“A little sore,” said his father.

Jamie couldn’t think of any reply to this, so he turned to his mother and said, “There was some guy in the waiting area. Told me he drove you here.”

He was going to explain about the best wishes but his mother shot to her feet with a startled look on her face and said, “Oh. Is he still there?”

“He was heading off. Now you didn’t need him anymore.”

“I’ll see if I can catch him,” she said, and disappeared toward the waiting area.

Jamie moved into the chair beside his father’s bed and as he sat down he remembered who David Symmonds was. And what Katie had said in her phone message. And the image came to mind of his mother sprinting through the waiting area, out of the hospital and into the passenger seat of a little red sports car, the door slamming, the engine being gunned and the pair of them vanishing in a cloud of exhaust.

So when his father said, “Actually, it wasn’t an accident,” Jamie thought his father was referring to the affair and came close to saying something very stupid indeed.

“I have cancer,” said his father.

“I’m sorry?” said Jamie because he really didn’t believe what he’d just heard.

“Or at least I did,” said his father.

“Cancer?” asked Jamie.

“Dr. Barghoutian said it was eczema,” continued his father. “But I wasn’t sure.”

Who was Dr. Barghoutian?

“So I cut it off,” said his father.

“With a chisel?” Jamie realized that Katie had been right. About everything. There was something seriously wrong with his father.

“No, with a pair of scissors.” His father seemed unfazed by what he was saying. “It seemed to make sense at the time.” His father paused. “In fact, to be honest, I didn’t manage to cut it off completely. Much more difficult than I’d imagined. Thought for a while they were going to stitch the damn thing back on. But it’s better to chuck it away and let the wound granulate from the bottom up, apparently. This nice young lady doctor explained. Indian, I think.” He paused again. “Probably best not to tell your mother.”

“OK,” said Jamie, not entirely sure what he was agreeing to.

“So,” said his father, “how are you?”

“I’m fine,” said Jamie.

They sat in silence for a few moments.

Then his father said, “I’ve been having a spot of bother recently.”

“Katie told me,” said Jamie.

“It’s all sorted out now, though.” His father’s eyes were starting to close. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to have a little nap. It’s been a tiring day.”

Jamie had a moment of panic when he thought his father might be dying unexpectedly in front of him. He had never seen someone dying and wasn’t sure of the signs. But when he examined his father’s face it looked exactly as it did when he was dozing on the sofa at home.

Within seconds his father was snoring.

Jamie took hold of his father’s hand. It seemed like the right thing to do. Then it felt like rather an odd thing to do, so he let it go again.

A woman was groaning in a nearby cubicle, as if she was in labor. Though surely that would happen somewhere else, wouldn’t it?

Which part of his body had his father tried to cut off?

Did it matter? There wasn’t going to be an answer to that question, which made it seem normal.

Jesus. It was his father who had done this. The alphabeticizer of books and winder-up of clocks.

Perhaps it was the beginning of dementia.

Jamie hoped to God his mother hadn’t done a runner. Or he and Katie might be left looking after their father as he began his slow descent toward a horrid little residential home somewhere.

It was an uncharitable thought.

He was trying very hard to give up uncharitable thoughts.

Perhaps that was what he needed. Something to come along and smash his life to pieces. Go back to the village. Look after his father. Learn to be properly human again. A sort of spiritual thing.

His mother reappeared with a swish of curtain. “Sorry about that. I just caught him as he was leaving. Someone from work. David. He gave me a lift.”

“Dad’s asleep,” said Jamie, though that was pretty obvious from the snoring.

Were she and that man having sex? It was a day of revelations.

His mother sat down.

Jamie took a deep breath. “Dad said he had cancer.”

“Oh, yes, that,” said his mother.

“So he didn’t have cancer?”

“Not according to Dr. Barghoutian.”

“Right.”

Jamie wanted to tell her about the scissors. But when he formed the sentence in his head it seemed too bizarre to say out loud. A sick daydream he would regret sharing quite so eagerly.

His mother said, “I’m sorry, I should have told you before you got here.”

Once again, Jamie was not entirely sure what she was referring to.

She said, “Your father has not been terribly well recently.”

“I know.”

“We’re hoping it will sort itself out in time,” said his mother.

So she wasn’t running away with the man. Not in the immediate future.

Jamie said, “God. Everything happens at once, doesn’t it.”

“Meaning?” His mother had a worried look on her face.

Jamie said, “What with the wedding being off and everything.”

His mother’s expression changed from one kind of worried to a different kind of worried and Jamie realized, instantly, that she didn’t know about the wedding being off, and that he’d fucked things up, and Katie was going to kill him, and his mother wasn’t going to be very chuffed either, and he really should have returned Katie’s call straightaway.

“What do you mean, the wedding’s off?” asked his mother.

“Well…” Jamie trod carefully. “She mentioned something on the phone…She left a message…I haven’t spoken to her since she left it…It is possible that some wires got crossed.”

His mother shook her head sadly and let out a long sigh. “Well, I guess that’s one less thing we have to worry about.”

67

Katie and Ray
came back via the nursery.

Jacob was unnaturally interested in why the two of them were picking him up together. He could sense that something wasn’t right. But she successfully distracted him by saying they’d seen a grand piano hanging from the ceiling (
Concert for Anarchy,
1990, by Rebecca Horn; Christ, she could probably get a job at the place) and Jacob and Ray were soon talking about how Australia was upside down, but only sort of, and how cavemen came after dinosaurs but before horse-drawn carriages.

When they got back home she checked the answerphone and heard a freakish voice saying that something dreadful had happened to her father. So freakish she assumed the father in question was someone else’s. Then the woman said she was going to ring Jamie, and Katie realized it was Mum and it scared the crap out of her. So she replayed the message. And it was the same second time around. And then she really started to panic.

But there was another message. From Jamie.

“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.”

Jamie didn’t say what was wrong with Dad, either.

Shit.

She told Ray she was taking the car. Ray said he’d drive her to Peterborough. She said he had to stay behind to look after Jacob. Ray said they’d take Jacob with them. Katie told him not to be ridiculous. Ray said he wasn’t going to let her drive while she was this upset.

Jacob heard the last part of this exchange.

Ray squatted down in front of him and said, “Grandpa’s ill. So, what do you say we have an adventure and drive up and see him to make sure he’s all right?”

“Will he want some chocolate?” asked Jacob.

“Possibly,” said Ray.

“He can have the rest of my chocolate buttons.”

“I’ll get the chocolate buttons,” said Ray. “You go and find your pajamas and toothbrush and some clean pants for tomorrow, all right?”

“All right.” Jacob pottered off upstairs.

Dad had tried to commit suicide. She could think of no other explanation.

Ray said, “Get your stuff together. I’ll do me and Jacob.”

What else could have happened to him stuck in that bedroom? Pills? Razor blades? Rope? She needed to know, if only to stop the pictures in her head.

Maybe he’d wandered out of the house and been hit by a car.

It was her fault. He’d asked for help and she’d passed the buck to Mum, knowing she was totally out of her depth.

Shit, shit, shit.

She grabbed a jumper from the drawer and the little rucksack from the wardrobe.

Was he even alive?

If only she’d talked to him for a bit longer. If only she’d cut work and spent the week with her parents. If only she’d pressed Mum a little harder. Christ, she didn’t even know whether he’d been to the doctor. For the last couple of days she hadn’t even thought about him. Not once.

It was a little easier in the car. And Ray was right. She’d have rammed someone by now. They struggled northward through the tail end of the rush hour, jam after jam, red light after red light, Ray and Jacob going through several thousand verses of “The Wheels on the Bus.”

By the time they reached Peterborough Jacob was asleep.

Ray pulled up outside the house and said, “Stay there,” and got out.

She wanted to protest. She wasn’t a child. And it was
her
father. But she was exhausted, and glad that someone else was making the decisions.

Ray knocked on the door and waited for a long time. There was no answer. He went round the back.

At the end of the street, three kids were taking turns to ride a bike over a little ramp made of a plank and a wooden crate, like she and Juliet used to do when they were nine.

Ray was taking a very long time. She got out of the car and was halfway down the path beside the house when he reappeared.

He held up his hand. “No. Don’t go back there.”

“Why?”

“There’s no one in.”

“How do you know?” she asked.

“I broke in through a window at the back.” He turned her round and marched her toward the car.

“You what?”

“We’ll sort it out later on. I need to ring the hospital.”

“Why can’t I look inside the house?” asked Katie.

Ray took hold of both her shoulders and looked into her face. “Trust me.”

He opened the driver’s door, retrieved his mobile from the glove compartment and dialed.

“George Hall,” said Ray. “That’s right.”

They waited.

“Thank you,” said Ray into the phone.

“Well?” asked Katie.

“He’s at the hospital,” said Ray. “Get in.”

“And what did they say about him?”

“They didn’t.”

“Why not?” asked Katie.

“I didn’t ask.”

“Jesus, Ray.”

“They don’t tell you anything if you’re not family.”

“I’m bloody family,” said Katie.

“I’m sorry,” said Ray. “But please, get into the car.”

She got into the car and Ray pulled away.

“Why wouldn’t you let me see in the house?” asked Katie. “What was in there?”

“There was a lot of blood,” said Ray, very quietly.