A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon [50]
She poured another glass of wine and tried to watch more television, but she couldn’t sit still. She washed up. Then she emptied the fridge. She cleaned the gunk from the little drainage outlet at the back, washed the racks in hot, soapy water, swabbed the sides down and dried them with the tea towel.
She tied the top of the rubbish bag and took it into the garden. Standing beside the bin she heard the whack-whack-whack of a police helicopter. She looked up and saw the black silhouette sitting at the top of a long cone of searchlight in the dirty orange sky above the town center. And she couldn’t suppress the stupid idea that they were looking for George.
She went inside and locked the door and realized that if she heard nothing in the next hour she was going to have to ring the police.
39
Jamie staggered through the next few days like a zombie and lost a mansion in Dartmouth Park to John D. Wood by having self-pitying daydreams about Tony instead of sucking up to the elderly owners.
On the third day he made himself a laughingstock in the office by doing some lazy cutting and pasting and advertising a third-floor studio flat with a swimming pool on Primelocation.com.
At which point he decided to pull himself up by his bootstraps. He found a Clash CD in the glove compartment of the car, put it on loud and made a mental list of all the things about Tony which drove him up the wall (smoking in bed, lack of culinary skills, unashamed farting, the spoon-tapping thing, the ability to talk for half an hour about the complexities of installing a Velux window…).
Back at home, he ritually broke the CD in half and threw it in the bin.
If Tony wanted to come back he could make the first move. Jamie wasn’t going to crawl. He was going to be single. And he was going to enjoy it.
40
The atmosphere in the town center was becoming noticeably more rowdy as young people began gathering for a night of heavy drinking. So George made his way down Bridge Street to the river for some peace and quiet and an explanation for the hovering helicopter.
When he reached the quayside he realized that whatever was happening was both more serious and more interesting than he had imagined. An ambulance was parked on the road and a police car was pulled up behind, its blue light revolving in the cold air.
Ordinarily he would have walked away, not wanting to be thought ghoulish. But nothing was ordinary today.
The helicopter was so low that he could feel the noise as a vibration in his head and shoulders. He stood by the little chain-link fence next to the Chinese restaurant, warming his hands in his trouser pockets. A searchlight from the base of the helicopter was moving in zigzags over the surface of the water.
Someone had fallen into the river.
A gust of wind blew a brief crackle of walkie-talkie noise toward him then whisked it away again.
In its own macabre way it was rather wonderful. Like a film. The way life rarely was. The little yellow oblong of the ambulance window, the sliding clouds, the water choppy under the downdraft from the helicopter, everything brighter and more intense than usual.
Farther down the river two paramedics in fluorescent yellow jackets were walking methodically down the towpath, shining torches into the water and poking submerged objects with a long pole. Looking for a body, presumably.
A siren whooped and was immediately turned off. A car door slammed.
He glanced down at the water in front of him.
He had never really looked at the river this closely before. Not at night. Not when the level was up. He had always assumed that he would have no problems if he fell into any water. He was a decent swimmer. Forty lengths every morning whenever they stayed in a hotel with a pool. And when John Zinewski’s Fireball capsized he had been scared, briefly, but it had never occurred to him that he might drown.
This was different. It did not even look like water. It was moving too swiftly, coiling and eddying and rolling over on itself like a large animal. Upstream