A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon [152]
He could start swimming at the local pool a couple of times a week. That seemed like a sensible idea. It would keep him fit and help him sleep.
Now that he came to think of it, perhaps Jean would like to join him. It might help cheer her up a little. She had always been rather fond of pools on family holidays. Obviously it had been a good few years now, and she might feel self-conscious about wearing a swimming costume in public. Women, he knew, worried about these things more than men. But he would run the idea past her and see what she thought.
Or a long weekend in Bruges. That was another possibility. He had read something about it in the newspaper recently. It was in Belgium, if his memory served him correctly, which meant that they could get there without leaving the ground.
He shivered. It was cold and getting dark. So he packed the building materials neatly away and headed back into the house. He changed into clean clothes and came back down to the kitchen.
Jean was preparing lasagna. He made himself a mug of coffee, sat at the table and began browsing through the TV Guide.
“Could you give me the aluminum saucepan from the drawer?” asked Jean.
George leant backward, retrieved the saucepan and handed it to her. As he did so, he caught a faint whiff of that flowery perfume Jean used. Or perhaps it was the orange shampoo from Sainsbury’s. It was quite pleasant.
She thanked him and he glanced down at the TV Guide. He found himself looking at a photograph of two young women who were joined at the head. It was not a pleasant picture and it did not make him feel very good. He began reading. The women were going to be featured in a documentary on Channel Four. The documentary would end with footage of an operation in which they were surgically separated. The operation was risky, apparently, and one or both of the girls might die as a result. The article did not reveal the outcome of the operation.
The kitchen floor tilted very slightly.
“What would you like with your lasagna?” asked Jean. “Peas or broccoli?”
“Sorry?” said George.
“Peas or broccoli?” asked Jean.
“Broccoli,” said George. “And perhaps we should open a bottle of wine.”
“Broccoli and wine it is,” said Jean.
George looked down at the TV Guide.
It was time to stop all this nonsense.
He turned the page and stood up to find a corkscrew.
Also by Mark Haddon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
The Talking Horse and the Sad Girl and the Village Under the Sea: Poems
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, AUGUST 2007
Copyright © 2006 by Mark Haddon
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2006.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Haddon, Mark.
A Spot of Bother / Mark Haddon.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Middle-aged men—Fiction. 2. Mortality—Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PR6058.A2666 2006
823'.914—dc22
2006016578
www.vintagebooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-38769-1
v3.0