A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon [79]
He would leave it and invent some story for Jean when she got back from Sainsbury’s.
Was she at Sainsbury’s? It was all a little hazy.
He decided to put his clothes on instead.
This, too, he realized, was not going to be easy. He was wearing a pair of blood-soaked underpants. There were clean pairs of underpants in the chest of drawers in the bedroom, but they were on the far side of ten yards of cream carpet, and there was a considerable volume of blood running down his leg.
He could have planned this better.
He pressed the towel a little more firmly against the wound and wiped the blood from the floor by standing on top of the other two towels and shuffling slowly around the bathroom for a couple of minutes. He tried to bend down to pick up the two towels prior to tossing them into the bathtub, but his body was no keener on being bent than it was on being stretched.
He decided to cut his losses. He staggered into the bedroom and dialed 999.
When he looked back to the doorway, however, he saw that he had left footprints on the cream carpet. Jean was going to be very unhappy.
“Police, fire or ambulance?”
“Police,” said George, not thinking. “No. Wait. Ambulance.”
“Just connecting you…”
“You’re through to the ambulance service. Can I take your number, caller?”
What was his phone number? It seemed to have slipped his mind. He used it so rarely.
“Hello, caller?” asked the woman on the other end of the line.
“I’m sorry,” said George. “I can’t remember the number.”
“That’s OK. Go ahead.”
“Right, yes. I seem to have cut myself. With a large chisel. There is quite a lot of blood.”
Katie’s number, for example. He could remember that with no trouble whatsoever. Or could he? To be honest, that number seemed to have slipped his mind as well.
The woman on the other end of the line said, “Can you tell me your address?”
This, too, took some effort to recall.
After putting the phone down he realized, of course, that he had forgotten to find the chisel before getting into the bath. Jean was going to be cross enough already. If she discovered that he had made the mess while cutting the cancer off with her special scissors she would be incandescent.
The chisel, however, was in the cellar, and the cellar was a long way away.
He wondered whether he had remembered to put the phone down.
Then he wondered whether he had got around to remembering his address before putting the phone down. Assuming he had indeed put the phone down.
They could trace calls.
At least they could in films.
But in films you could make someone pass out by squeezing their shoulder.
He caught sight of himself in the hall mirror and wondered why a crazy, old, naked, bleeding man was standing next to their phone table.
The cellar steps were really very difficult.
Before he and Jean got much older it might be an idea to put in a new staircase with a shallower rake. A handrail might not go amiss, either.
Crossing the cellar he put his foot on something which felt very like one of those small Lego bricks Jacob sometimes left lying around the house, the ones with the single nobble. He stumbled and dropped the towel. He picked the towel up again. It was covered in sawdust and a variety of dead insects. He wondered why he was holding a towel. He put it on the lid of the freezer. For some reason the towel appeared to be soaked in blood. He would have to tell someone about that.
The chisel.
He reached into the little green basket and retrieved it from beneath the claw hammer and the retractable tape measure.
He turned to leave, his knees buckled softly beneath him and he rolled sideways into the paddling pool which they kept semi-inflated to prevent mold forming on the inner surfaces.
He was looking at a picture of a fish from very close up. There was a spout of water coming from the top of the fish’s head, which suggested that it was a whale. But it was also red, which suggested that it might be another kind of fish altogether.
He could smell rubber and hear the