A Spot of Bother - Mark Haddon [84]
When he got home, however, there was a message on the machine.
He pressed PLAY and took off his jacket.
He thought, at first, that it was a prank call. Or a lunatic dialing a wrong number. A woman was hyperventilating into the phone.
Then the woman was saying his name, “Jamie…? Jamie…?” and he realized that it was his mother and he had to sit down very quickly on the arm of the sofa.
“Jamie…? Are you there…? Something dreadful has happened to your father. Jamie…? Oh, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn.”
The message clicked off.
Everything was very quiet and very still. Then he threw himself across the room, knocking the phone to the carpet.
His parents’ number. What the fuck was their number? Jesus, he must have dialed it seven thousand times. Zero one seven three three…Two four two…? Two two four…? Two four four…? Christ.
He was halfway through ringing Directory Inquiries when the number came back to him. He rang it. He counted the rings. Forty. No answer.
He rang Katie.
Answerphone.
“Katie. This is Jamie. Shit. You’re not in. Bugger. Listen. I’ve just had this scary call from Mum. Ring me, OK? No. Don’t ring me. I’m going up to Peterborough. Actually, maybe you’re there already. I’ll talk to you later. I’m going now.”
Something dreadful? Why were old people always so fucking vague?
He ran upstairs and grabbed the car keys and ran down again and had to lean against the wall in the hallway for a few seconds to stop himself passing out, and it occurred to him that in some obscure way he had caused this, by not ringing Katie back, by standing Ryan up, by not loving Tony, by not telling Stuart the whole truth.
By the time he crossed the M25, however, he was feeling surprisingly good.
He had always rather liked emergencies. Other people’s, at any rate. They put your own problems into perspective. It was like being on a ferry. You didn’t have to think about what you had to do or where you had to go for the next few hours. It was all laid out for you.
Like they said. No one committed suicide in wartime.
He was going to talk to his father. Properly. About everything.
Jamie had always blamed him for their lack of communication. Always thought of his father as a dried-up old stick. It was cowardice. He could see that now. And laziness. Just wanting his own prejudices confirmed.
Baldock, Biggleswade, Sandy…
Another forty minutes and he’d be there.
65
Katie and Ray were standing in front of a sculpture called Lightning with Stag in Its Glare. Basically, a girder sticking out of the wall with this jagged black metal spike dangling from it, and some pieces of junk on the floor nearby, which were meant to represent the stag and a goat and some “primitive creatures,” though they could have represented the Crucifixion or the recipe for Welsh rarebit from where Katie was standing.
The aluminum stag was originally made from an ironing board. She knew this because she’d read the little cardboard explanatory note in some detail. She’d read quite a lot of the little cardboard explanatory notes, and stared out of a lot of windows and imagined the possible private lives of many of their fellow visitors because Ray was spending a lot of time examining the art. And it was pissing her off.
She’d come here for all the wrong reasons. She’d wanted to be in her element, but she wasn’t. And she’d wanted him to be out of his element, but he wasn’t.
You could say what you liked about Ray but you could drop him in the middle of Turkmenistan and he’d be in the nearest village by nightfall eating horse and smoking whatever they smoked out there.
He was winning. And it wasn’t a competition. It was childish to think it was a competition. But he was still winning. And she was meant to be winning.
They finally reached the café.
He was holding a cube of sugar so that the bottom corner was just touching the surface of his tea and a brown tide line was slowly making its way up the cube. He was saying, “Obviously most of it’s rubbish. But…it’s like old churches and stuff. It makes you slow down and look…What’s up, kiddo?”
“Nothing.