A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon [147]
Maybe it was good to be something you didn’t know the name for.
They talked to Mona about the perils of shagging one’s boss (which she had done, inadvisedly). They talked to Ray’s parents who were weirdly unperturbed by the unorthodox nature of the reception (Ray’s brother was in prison, apparently, which Katie had failed to mention, and Barbara’s ex-husband was once discovered by the police sleeping in a skip). They talked to Craig, Jenny’s gay caregiver, who was technically not meant to be talking to people on his own account while he was on duty but, sod it, Jenny was pissed and getting along famously with the spectacularly boring guy from Ray’s office.
Half an hour or so later his mother came into the marquee. And it was a bit like the Queen coming into the room, everyone suddenly stopping dancing, going quiet and panicking slightly about how they were meant to behave. Except that the man from Top Sounds didn’t know what had happened earlier so Kylie Minogue carried on singing “Locomotion” very loudly.
Jamie was going to jump out of his seat and run over and save her from all this unwanted attention, but Ursula (who had been doing a surprisingly athletic Locomotion with a group of Katie and Ray’s friends) went over and hugged her and Jamie didn’t want to trump her a second time. And within a few seconds Douglas and Maureen had joined her and his mother was soon sitting at a corner table being taken care of.
Consequently when his father entered the marquee a few minutes later he created slightly less of a stir. Again, Jamie wondered whether he should go and look after him. But his father headed straight to Katie and Ray and presumably made some kind of direct apology for his earlier behavior which must have gone down reasonably well because the encounter ended in a hug, after which his father was similarly led to a table by Ed with whom he seemed to strike up a firm intergenerational friendship (Jamie later found out that Ed had suffered a breakdown some years earlier and not left the house for several months). And it was a bit odd, his parents sitting at different tables. But it would have been odder to see them standing together, which they’d never done at any kind of gathering, so Jamie decided to postpone worrying about them till the following day.
And when Jamie and Tony stepped outside a little while later, the light was fading and someone had lit multicolored flares on bamboo canes around the lawn which was rather magical. And the day finally felt as if it had been mended as well as it could be mended.
They played hide-and-seek with Jacob and found Judy looking miserable in the kitchen because Kenneth was comatose in the downstairs loo. So they found a screwdriver and undid the lock and arranged him in the recovery position on the sofa in the living room with a blanket over him and a bucket on the carpet nearby, before dragging Judy back outside and onto the dance floor.
And then it was Jacob’s bedtime, so Jamie read him Pumpkin Soup and Curious George Takes a Train and came downstairs and danced with Tony, and Lionel Richie’s “Three Times a Lady” came on and Jamie laughed and Tony asked why and Jamie just pulled him close and snogged him in the middle of the dance floor for the whole three minutes and three whole minutes of Tony’s cock pressed against him was more than he could actually bear and he was drunk enough by now, so he pulled Tony upstairs and told him not to make any noise or he’d kill him and they went into his old bedroom and Tony fucked him in full view of Big Giraffe and the boxed set of Doctor Dolittle.
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Katie was relieved that Jacob was sitting in her lap when it happened.
Ray, Jamie and Tony seemed to be handling everything and all she had to do was to hug Jacob and hope that he wasn’t too upset by what he was witnessing.
In the event, he seemed strangely unshocked. He’d never seen two adults