A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon [26]
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