A Spot of Bother

  Jean stopped filling the washing machine. “You’ve only just got here.”

  “I know. I should have phoned, really. I just wanted to know what Katie had said. I’d better be heading off.”

  And he was gone.

  Jean turned to George. “Why do you always have to rub him up the wrong way?”

  George bit his tongue. Again.

  “Jamie?” Jean headed into the hallway.

  George recalled only too well how much he had hated his own father. A friendly ogre who found coins in your ear and made origami squirrels and who shrank slowly over the years into an angry, drunken little man who thought praising children made them weak and never admitted that his own brother was schizophrenic, and who kept on shrinking so that by the time George and Judy and Brian were old enough to hold him to account he had performed the most impressive trick of all by turning into a self-pitying arthritic figure too insubstantial to be the butt of anyone’s anger.

  Perhaps the best you could hope for was not to do the same thing to your own children.

  Jamie was a good lad. Not the most robust of chaps. But they got on well enough.

  Jean returned to the kitchen. “He’s gone. What was that all about?”

  “Lord alone knows.” George stood up and dropped his empty mug into the sink. “The mystery of one’s children is never-ending.”

  19

  Jamie pulled into a layby at the edge of the village.

  I think you should bring someone.

  Christ. You avoided the subject for twenty years then it flashed past at eighty and vanished in a cloud of exhaust.

  Had he been wrong about his father all along? Was it possible that he could’ve come out at sixteen and got no shit whatsoever? Totally understand. Chap at school. Keen on other chaps. Ended up playing cricket for Leicestershire.

  Jamie was angry. Though it was hard to put a finger on precisely who he was angry with. Or why.

  It was the same feeling he got every time he visited Peterborough. Every time he saw photographs of himself as a child. Every time he smelt plasticine or tasted fish fingers. He was nine again. Or twelve. Or fifteen. And it wasn’t about his feelings for Ivan Dunne. Or his lack of feelings for Charlie’s Angels. It was the sickening realization that he’d landed on the wrong planet. Or in the wrong family. Or in the wrong body. The realization that he had no choice but to bide his time until he could get away and build a little world of his own in which he felt safe.

  It was Katie who pulled him through. Telling him to ignore Greg Pattershall’s gang. Saying graffiti only counted if it was spelt correctly. And she was right. They really did end up leading shitty little lives injecting heroin on some estate in Walton.

  He was probably the only boy at school who’d learnt self-defense from his sister. He’d tried it once, on Mark Rice, who slumped into a bush and bled horribly, scaring Jamie so much he never hit anyone again.

  Now he’d lost his sister. And no one understood. Not even Katie.

  He wanted to sit in her kitchen and pull faces for Jacob and drink tea and eat too much Marks and Spencer date-and-walnut cake and…not even talk. Not even need to talk.

  Fuck it. If he said the word home he was going to cry.

  Maybe if he’d been better at staying in touch. Maybe if he’d eaten a little more date-and-walnut cake. If he’d invited her and Jacob over more often. If he’d lent her money…

  This was pointless.

  He turned the ignition on, pulled out of the layby and was nearly killed by a green Transit van.

  20

  Rain was coursing down the living-room window. Jean had gone into town an hour ago and George was about to head down the garden when a mass of black cloud hoved into view from the direction of Stamford and turned the lawn into a pond.

  No matter. He would do some drawing.

  It was not part of the plan. The plan was to finish the studio, then resurrect his dormant artistic skills. But there was no harm getting in a little practice beforehand.

  He dug around in Jamie’s bedroom cupboard and unearthed a pad of watercolor paper from beneath the broken exercise bike. He found two serviceable pencils in the kitchen drawer and sharpened them in a rudimentary fashion with the steak knife.

  He made a mug of tea, settled himself down at the dining table and wondered, instantly, why he had put this off for so long. The scent of shaved wood, the beaten-bronze texture of the cream paper. He remembered sitting in the corner of his bedroom at seven or eight with a pad on his knee, drawing convoluted Gothic castles with secret passages and mechanisms for pouring boiling oil over invaders. He could see the vines on the wallpaper and remember the beating he got for coloring them in with a ballpoint pen. He could feel the little patch of corduroy on his green trousers which he’d rubbed smooth and which his fingers still hunted for in stressful meetings twenty, thirty years later.

  He began by drawing great black loops on the first sheet. “Loosening up the hands,” Mr. Gledhill had called it.

  How often did he feel it now, this gorgeous, furtive seclusion? In the bath sometimes, maybe. Though Jean failed to understand his need for periodic isolation and regularly dragged him back to earth mid-soak by hammering on the locked door in search of bleach or dental floss.

  He began to draw the rubber plant.

  Odd to think that this was once what he wanted to do with his life. Not rubber plants, as such. But art in general. Townscapes. Bowls of fruit. Naked women. Those big white studios with the skylights and the stools. Laughable now, of course. Though at the time it possessed all the power of a world to which his father had no key.

  It was not a very good drawing of a rubber plant. It was, in truth, a child’s drawing of a rubber plant. Something about the almost-but-not-quite parallel lines of the slightly tapering stalks had foxed him.

  He turned over another sheet and began sketching the television.

  His father was right, of course. Painting was not a sensible profession. Not if you wanted a decent salary and a trouble-free marriage. Even the successful ones, the ones you read about in the weekend papers, drank like fish and were involved in the most unseemly kind of relationships.

  Drawing the television posed precisely the opposite problem. The lines were all straight. Draw any curve and you could probably find it somewhere on a rubber plant. Draw any straight line and…to be frank, several of his lines would have been more at home in the drawing of the rubber plant. Was it acceptable to use a ruler? Well, Mr. Gledhill was long dead. Perhaps if he ruled the lines faintly then drew over them to add character.

  He could use the edge of the Radio Times.

  His mother thought he was Rembrandt and regularly gave him cheap sketchpads which she had bought with the housekeeping, on condition that he did not tell his father. George had drawn him once, when he was asleep in an armchair after Sunday lunch. He had woken up unexpectedly, grabbed the piece of paper, examined it, torn it into pieces and thrown it on the fire.

  At least he and Brian had escaped. But poor Judy. Their father dies and six months later she marries another bad-tempered, small-minded alcoholic.

  Who would have to be invited to the wedding. He had forgotten that. Oh well. With any luck, the infamous Kenneth would pass rapidly into a coma, as he did the first time round, and they could dump him in the box room with a bucket.

  The knobs on the television were wrong. It had been a mistake to attempt the knurling on the sides. Too many lines in too small a space. The entire cabinet, in fact, had a slightly drunken feel to it, stemming, possibly, from his poor memory of the rules of perspective and the flexibility of the Radio Times.

  At which point a lesser man might have allowed negative thoughts to enter his head, given that he was spending eight thousand pounds constructing a building in which he planned to draw and paint objects far more complex than either rubber plants or televisions. But that was the point. To educate himself. To keep his mind alive. And the Gold C gliding badge was really not his thing.

>   He looked up and gazed through the window onto the garden. The bubble popped and he realized that, in his absence, the rain had ceased, the sun had come out and the world had been washed clean.

  He removed his drawing from the pad, tore it carefully into small pieces and pushed them to the bottom of the kitchen bin. He stacked the pad and pencils out of sight on top of the dresser, put on his boots and headed outside.

  21

  Jean met Ursula in the coffee shop in Marks and Spencer.

  Ursula snapped the little biscuit over her cappuccino to stop the crumbs falling on the table. “I’m really not meant to know about this.”

  “I know,” said Jean, “but you do know about it. And I need some advice.”

  She didn’t really need advice. Not from Ursula. Ursula only did Yes and No (she’d gone round the Picasso Museum saying exactly that, “Yes…No…No…Yes,” as if she was deciding which ones to get for the living room). But Jean had to talk to someone.

  “Go on, then,” said Ursula, eating half her biscuit.

  “David is coming to supper. George invited him. We bumped into him at Bob Green’s funeral. David couldn’t really refuse.”

  “Well…” Ursula spread her hands on the table, as if she was flattening a big map.

  And this was what Jean liked about Ursula. Nothing fazed her. She’d smoked a marijuana cigarette with her daughter (“I felt seasick, then threw up”). And, in actual fact, a man did try to mug them in Paris. Ursula shooed him away as if he were a bad dog, and he retreated at speed. Though, when Jean thought about it later, it was possible that he was simply begging or asking for directions.

  “I don’t really see the problem,” said Ursula.

  “Oh, come on,” said Jean.

  “You’re not planning to be lovey-dovey with each other, are you?” Ursula ate the second half of her biscuit. “Obviously you’ll feel uncomfortable. But, frankly, if you can’t live with a bit of discomfort you really shouldn’t embark on that kind of adventure.”

  Ursula was right. But Jean returned to the car feeling troubled. Of course the dinner would be fine. They’d survived far more uncomfortable dinners. That dreadful evening with the Fergusons, for example, when she found George in the toilet listening to cricket on the radio.

  What Jean didn’t like was the way everything was becoming looser and messier, and moving slowly beyond her control.

  She pulled up round the corner from David’s house knowing that she had to apologize to him for George’s invitation, or tell him off for accepting it, or do some third thing she couldn’t quite put her finger on.

  But David had just been phoning his daughter.

  His grandson was going into hospital for an operation. David wanted to go up to Manchester to help out. But Mina had got in first. So the kindest thing he could do was to keep his distance. Which Mina would doubtless chalk up as further proof of his failure as a father.

  And Jean realized that everybody had a messy life. Except Ursula, maybe. And George. And if you were going to have any kind of adventure it was going to be uncomfortable now and then.

  So she put her arms around David and they held each other, and she realized that this was the third thing she couldn’t quite put her finger on. This was the thing which made it all right.

  22

  “The Derby Hotel story,” said Katie. “It’s not actually true, is it?”

  “Of course not,” said Sarah. “Though I was so sick it came out of my nose. Which I seriously do not recommend.”

  “Ray’s not usually like that,” said Katie.

  “Glad to hear it.”

  “Come on.” Katie was a little peeved that Sarah wasn’t showing the requisite sisterly support. “You’re not usually like that either…Hang on a second.” Katie got up and went over to the toy box to resolve a dispute between Jacob and another child over a one-legged Action Man.

  She came back and sat down again.

  “Sorry,” said Sarah. “That was out of order.” She licked her teaspoon. “And this is probably out of order, too. But, sod it, I’m going to ask anyway…This is the real thing, right? Not just a rebound relationship?”

  “Jesus, Sarah, you’re meant to be my best woman, not my mum.”

  “So your mum doesn’t like him,” said Sarah.

  “Nope.”

  “Well, he’s not the consultant pediatrician with the Daimler.”

  “Oh, I think they gave up on that long ago,” said Katie.

  Sarah tried to balance her teaspoon on the rim of her mug.

  “He’s a good person,” said Katie. “Jacob loves him. And I love him.” That was the wrong way round, somehow. But changing it would have made her seem defensive. “He’s also made Ed promise to show him the speech beforehand.”

  “I’m glad,” said Sarah.

  “About Ray? Or Ed?” asked Katie.

  “About Ray,” said Sarah, “and you.”

  She put her teaspoon down and they waited for the atmosphere to warm up again.

  “Incidentally,” said Sarah. “How’s your little brother doing these days? I haven’t seen him in yonks.”

  “Fine. Bought himself a place in Hornsey. Haven’t seen him much myself to be honest. Proper boyfriend, too. I mean, like, an actual pleasant well-adjusted human being. Of course, you’ll meet them at the wedding.”

  They sat for a few moments watching Jacob direct some kind of aerial combat between the disabled Action Man and an octopus made of blue felt.

  “I’m doing the right thing,” said Katie.

  “Good,” said Sarah.

  23

  Jean came back at four. Her extended lunch with Ursula had worked its usual magic. The Jamie debacle was forgotten and George was grateful for a supper of Irish stew over which they were able to commiserate amiably with each other about the forthcoming union.

  “Does anyone like their children’s spouses?” He ran a triangle of crust around the bowl to mop up the remaining liquid.

  “Jane Riley’s husband seemed nice.”

  Jane Riley? George was repeatedly amazed by the ability of women to remember people. They walked into a crowded room and drank it down. Names. Faces. Children. Jobs.

  “John and Marilyn’s party,” said Jean. “The tall chap who’d lost his finger in some kind of machine.”

  “Oh yes.” It came fuzzily back. Perhaps it was the retrieval system men were missing. “The accountant.”

  “Surveyor.”

  After doing the washing up he retired to the living room with Sharpe’s Enemy and read the last twenty pages (“Two bodies marked this winter. The one whose hair had been spread on the snows of the Gateway of God, and now this one. Obadiah Hakeswill, being lifted into his coffin, dead…”). He was tempted to start another of his still-unread Christmas presents. But you had to let the atmosphere of one novel seep away before launching into the next, so he turned the television on and found himself midway through a medical documentary about the last year in the life of a man dying from some kind of abdominal cancer.

  Jean made some caustic comment about his ghoulish taste and retired elsewhere to write letters.

  He might have chosen a different program if one were available. But a documentary left you edified at least. And anything was better than some tawdry melodrama in a hair salon.

  On-screen the chap pottered round his garden, smoked cigarettes and spent a great deal of time under a tartan rug on the sofa wired up to various tubes. If anything, it was slightly tedious. A rather reassuring message if one thought about it.

  The chap went outside and had some trouble bending down to feed his chickens.

  Jean was squeamish, that was the truth of the matter. How We Die might not be everyone’s choice of bedtime reading. But Jean read books by people who had been kidnapped in Beirut or survived for eight weeks on a life raft. And whilst everyone died sooner or later very few people needed to know how to repel sharks.

  Most men of George’s age thought they were going to live forev
er. The way Bob had driven, it was clear that he had had no concept of what might happen in five seconds’ time, let alone five years.

  The chap on television was taken to the seaside. He sat on the shingle in a deck chair until he got too cold and had to return to the camper van.

  Obviously it would be nice to go quietly in one’s sleep. But going quietly in one’s sleep was an idea cooked up by parents to make the deaths of grandparents and hamsters less traumatic. And doubtless some people did go quietly in their sleep but most did so only after many wounding rounds with the Grim Reaper.

  His own preferred exits were rapid and decisive. Others might want time to bury the hatchet with estranged children and tell their wives where the stopcock was. Personally, he wanted the lights to go out with no warning and the minimum attendant mess. Dying was bad enough without having to make it easier for everyone else.

  He popped to the kitchen during the ad break and returned with a cup of coffee to find the chap entering his last couple of weeks, marooned almost permanently on his sofa and weeping a little in the small hours. And if George had turned the television off at this point the evening might have continued in a pleasantly uneventful manner.

  But he did not turn the television off, and when the man’s cat climbed onto the tartan rug in his lap to be stroked someone unscrewed a panel in the side of George’s head, reached in and tore out a handful of very important wiring.

  He felt violently ill. Sweat was pouring from beneath his hair and from the backs of his hands.

  He was going to die.

  Maybe not this month. Maybe not this year. But somehow, at some time, in a manner and at a speed very much not of his choosing.

  The floor seemed to have vanished to reveal a vast open shaft beneath the living room.

  With blinding clarity he realized that everyone was frolicking in a summer meadow surrounded by a dark and impenetrable forest, waiting for that grim day on which they were dragged into the dark beyond the trees and individually butchered.

  How in God’s name had he not noticed this before? And how did others not notice? Why did one not find them curled on the pavement howling? How did they saunter through their days unaware of this indigestible fact? And how, once the truth dawned, was it possible to forget?