A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon [72]
“Feeling better?” asked Mike.
“Uh-huh.”
With his free hand, Mike offered Jamie the joint. They took a drag each and Mike put it back down on the saucer.
“Suck me,” said Mike.
And it was at this point that Mike’s eyes did something entirely different. He let go of Jamie’s cock and seemed to be staring at an object several miles behind Jamie’s head.
“Shit,” said Mike.
“What?” asked Jamie.
“My eyes.”
“What’s wrong with your eyes?”
“I can’t…” Mike shook his head. He was starting to sweat, little beads of perspiration standing out on his forehead, on his arms. “Shit. I can’t see anything properly.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I can’t see anything properly.” Mike staggered sideways and slumped onto a chair.
Katie was right. It was just going to happen a different way. It was Mike who was going to have the seizure. An ambulance would come. He wouldn’t have a clue about Mike’s name or address…
Christ. The joint. Was it OK to bury a joint in the garden while someone was having a seizure? What if Mike choked on his tongue while Jamie was outside?
Mike doubled over. “I’ve gone blind. Jesus. My stomach.”
His stomach?
“Those bloody prawns.”
“What?” asked Jamie, who was beginning to wonder, for the second time that evening, whether Mike had some kind of mental problem.
“It’s OK,” said Mike. “It’s happened before.”
“What has?”
“Get me a bowl.”
Jamie’s brain was so full he took a couple of seconds working out what kind of bowl Mike meant. By the time he’d worked it out, Mike had vomited onto the floor in front of his chair.
“Oh crap,” said Mike.
Jamie saw himself, standing in his own kitchen looking down at a big omelet of sick with his penis sticking over the waistband of his boxer shorts, and he suddenly felt very bad for having left the café before Ryan arrived, even if Ryan had a horrible rucksack and thinning hair, and he knew that this was his punishment. And being uptight and controlling was bad, obviously it was bad, but it was also good, too, because if he’d been a little more uptight and controlling this wouldn’t have happened.
He tucked himself back in.
“I’m really sorry,” said Mike.
Jamie opened the drawer and handed him the tea towel with the London bus pattern that he’d never liked much.
Mike wiped his face. “I need to go to the toilet.”
“Top of the stairs,” said Jamie.
“Where are the stairs?” asked Mike.
Dear God, the man was unable to see.
Jamie helped Mike up the stairs then returned to the kitchen so that he didn’t have to smell or hear what was about to happen in the bathroom.
He wanted Mike out of the house. But he also needed to be a better person. And being a better person meant not wanting Mike out of the house. Being a better person meant looking after Mike. Because when shit happened to nice people they could say that it was an accident, or bad luck, or just the way the world worked. But when shit happened to horrible people they knew it was their fault and that made the shit so much worse.
He put on the washing-up gloves from under the sink. He got two Tesco bags from the cupboard and put one of them inside the other. He got the cake slice from the thingumajig drawer and knelt down and began scraping the sick off the floor and dolloping it into the bags. It was not a pleasant task (there would doubtless be worse upstairs). But it was good having an unpleasant task to do.
Penitence. That was the word he was looking for.
Oh Jesus. Sick was going down the cracks between the boards.
He wiped the floor with a couple of squares of kitchen roll and threw them into the Tesco bags. He filled a jug with soapy water, scrubbed the cracks with the vegetable brush, then threw the vegetable brush into the Tesco bags.
There was a bad noise from the toilet.
He poured some bleach onto the floor, rubbed it over the whole area with a cloth wipe, then disposed of it in the bags along with the vegetable brush. He wiped the cake slice