A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon [110]
He was taking the tablets and rather looking forward to the wedding. With Katie and Ray running the show there was very little for him to do. Making a brief speech seemed a very simple contribution to the proceedings.
The mirror was foolish bravado in part, a celebration of the fact that he had put his problems behind him and was not going to let them restrict his behavior any longer.
Not that the reason mattered much now.
He got out of the bath, toweled himself dry, sucked his stomach in, pulled his shoulders back and stood to attention in front of the sink.
It was the cloud of red dots on his bicep which caught his attention first, the ones he had seen in the hotel room and managed to forget about. They seemed larger and more numerous than he remembered.
He felt sick.
The obvious thing to do was to back swiftly away from the mirror, get dressed, take a couple of codeine and open a bottle of wine. But he was unable to stop himself.
He began examining his skin in detail. On his arms. On his chest. On his stomach. Turning round and looking over his shoulder so that he could see his back.
It was not a good thing to do. It was like looking at a petri dish in a laboratory. Every square inch held some new terror. Dark brown moles, wrinkled like sultanas; freckles clumped into archipelagos of chocolate-colored islands; bland flesh-colored bumps, some slack, some full of fluid.
His skin had become a zoo of alien life forms. If he looked closely enough he would be able to see them moving and growing. He tried not to look closely.
He should have gone back to Dr. Barghoutian. Or to another, better doctor.
He had arrogantly thought he could solve his problems with long walks and crosswords. And all the time, the disease had laughed and spread and tightened its hold and given birth to other diseases.
He stopped looking into the mirror only when his vision blurred and his knees buckled, pitching him onto the bathroom floor.
At which point the picture of his own naked skin, still vivid in his mind’s eye, mutated into the skin of that man’s buttocks going up and down between Jean’s legs in the bedroom.
He could hear them again. The animal noises. The wrinkled flesh being wobbled and swung. The things he had not seen but could imagine only too clearly. That man’s organ going in and out of Jean. The sucking and the sliding. The pink folds.
In this house. In his own bed.
He could actually smell it. The toilet scent. Intimate and unwashed.
He was dying. And no one knew.
His wife was having sex with another man.
And he had to give a speech at his daughter’s wedding.
He was clinging to the bottom rung of the heated towel rail, like a man trying not to be swept away by a flood.
It was like before. But worse. There was no floor beneath him. The bathroom, the house, the village, Peterborough…it had all peeled back and shredded and blown away, leaving nothing but infinite space, just him and a towel rail. As if he had stepped outside the spaceship and found the earth gone.
He was mad again. And there was no hope this time. He thought he had cured himself. But he had failed. There was no one else he could rely on. He was going to remain like this until he died.
Codeine. He needed the codeine. He couldn’t do anything about the cancer. Or Jean. Or the wedding. The only thing he could do was to dull it all a little.
Keeping hold of the towel rail he started getting to his feet. But as he straightened himself the soft flesh of his stomach was exposed and he could feel it itching and squirming. He grabbed a towel and wrapped it round his abdomen. He transferred his hands to the rim of the bath and stood up.
He could do this. It was a simple thing. Take the pills and wait. That was all he had to do.
He opened the cabinet and took the packet down. He swigged back four tablets with water from the bath tap so as to avoid the mirror above the sink. Was four dangerous? He had