A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon [49]
He got up, made his way back to the aisle and found a seat in the center of the front row where the picture would be larger and clearer and no one could accuse him of anything untoward.
The film was rather good.
Some forty minutes in, however, the camera lingered on the face of Christopher Lee who was playing the evil Saruman and George noticed a small area of darkness on his cheek. He might have thought nothing of it except that he remembered reading a newspaper article about Christopher Lee having died recently. What had he died of? George couldn’t remember. It was unlikely to have been skin cancer. But it could have been. And if it was skin cancer then he was watching Christopher Lee dying in front of his eyes.
Or perhaps it was Anthony Quinn he was thinking about.
He racked his brain, trying to recall the obituaries he had been reading over the past few months. Auberon Waugh, Donald Bradman, Dame Ninette de Valois, Robert Ludlum, Harry Secombe, Perry Como…He could see them, lined up like the warring minions in the film itself, the disposable foot soldiers in some vast war between elemental forces utterly beyond their control, every one of them being pushed unstoppably toward the edge of a mighty ravine in a cruel cosmic game of shove ha’penny, wave after wave disappearing over the edge and falling screaming into the abyss.
When he looked at the screen again he found himself watching close-up after close-up of grotesquely magnified faces, every one of them bearing some peculiar growth or region of abnormal pigmentation, each one of them a melanoma in the making.
He did not feel well.
Then the Orcs reappeared, and he could see them now for what they were, subhuman creatures from whose heads the skin had been peeled back so that they no longer had lips or nostrils, their faces composed entirely of raw, live meat. And whether it was because their appearance seemed like the effect of some malignant skin disease, or whether it was because they were skinless and therefore immune from skin cancer, or whether this made them unnaturally prone to it and, like albino children in the Sahara, they were dying of cancer from the moment they entered the world, he did not know, but it was more than he could stomach.
No longer caring what the other members of the audience thought of him, he stood up and steered a zigzag path back up the sloping aisle to the doorway, burst into the shockingly bright and empty foyer, staggered through the big swinging doors and found himself in the relative darkness of the street.
38
Jean was settling down with a glass of wine to watch the evening news when Brian called to say that George hadn’t arrived. They agreed that he was probably sitting in a siding near Exeter cursing Virgin Trains. Jean put the phone down and forgot the conversation.
She dug a turkey burger out of the freezer, put the steamer on to boil and began peeling carrots.
She ate supper watching some romantic nonsense with Tom Hanks. The credits were rolling when Brian rang again to say that George had still not arrived. He said he would ring back in an hour if he hadn’t heard anything.
The house seemed suddenly very empty indeed.
She opened another bottle of wine and drank a glass rather too quickly.
She was being silly. Accidents didn’t happen to people like George. And if they did (like when he got that piece of glass in his eye in Norwich) he rang home immediately. If he ended up in hospital there would be a sheet of paper in his jacket pocket with Brian’s phone number on it with directions to the cottage and very possibly a hand-drawn map.
Why was she even thinking about such things? Too many years spent worrying about teenage children going to parties and taking drugs. Too many years spent remembering birthdays and unplugging