A Spot of Bother (24 page)

77

When George came round
they’d gone. Jean, Katie, Jamie, Jacob, Ray. He was rather relieved, to be honest. He was exceedingly tired, and his family could be hard work. Especially en masse.

He was beginning to think that he could do with a spot of reading, and wondering how he might be able to get his hands on a decent magazine, when the curtains were opened by a large man in a battered canvas jacket. He was entirely bald and carrying a clipboard.

“Mr. Hall?” He rotated a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles up onto his very shiny head.

“Yes.”

“Joel Forman. Psychiatrist.”

“I thought you chaps went home at five o’clock,” said George.

“That would be lovely, wouldn’t it.” He flicked through some papers on the clipboard. “Sadly, people only get crazier as the day wears on, in my experience. Self-medication, usually. Though I’m sure that doesn’t apply to you.”

“Certainly not,” said George. “Though I’ve been taking some antidepressants.” He decided not to mention the codeine and the whiskey.

“What flavor?”

“Flavor?”

“What are they called?”

“Lustral,” said George. “They make me feel absolutely terrible, to be honest.”

Dr. Forman was one of those men who did humor without smiling. He looked like a villain from a James Bond film. It was disconcerting.

“Weeping, sleeplessness and anxiety,” said Dr. Forman. “Always makes me laugh when I read that under possible side effects. I’d chuck them, frankly.”

“OK,” said George.

“You were doing some amateur surgery, I hear.”

George explained, slowly and carefully, in a measured voice with a little self-deprecating humor thrown in, how he had ended up in hospital.

“Scissors. The practical approach,” said Dr. Forman. “And how are you now?”

“I feel better than I have done in quite a long time,” said George.

“Good,” said Dr. Forman. “But you’ll still be seeing the psychologist at your GP’s surgery, won’t you.” This was not phrased as a question.

“I will.”

“Good,” said Dr. Forman again, jabbing the paper on the clipboard with the end of his pen in a little rounding-off flourish. “Good.”

George relaxed a little. His examination was over, and unless he was very much mistaken, he had passed. “Only a week ago I was thinking I could do with a stay in some kind of institution. Rest from the world. That kind of thing.”

Dr. Forman did not react at first and George wondered whether he had given away a piece of information which was going to change Dr. Forman’s assessment. Like reversing over the examiner’s foot after a driving test.

Dr. Forman put the clipboard back under his arm. “I’d stay away from psychiatric hospitals if I were you.” He clicked his heels together. It was part changing of the guard, part Wizard of Oz. George wondered if Dr. Forman was himself a little unhinged. “Talk to your psychologist. Eat properly. Get to bed early. Do some regular exercise.”

“Which reminds me,” said George. “Do you know where I can get hold of something to read?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” said Dr. Forman, and before George could specify the kind of reading material he might like, the psychiatrist had shaken George’s hand and vanished through the curtain.

Half an hour later a porter came to take him to a ward. George felt a little insulted by the wheelchair until he attempted to stand. It wasn’t pain per se, but the sensation of something being very wrong in his abdominal region and the suspicion that if he stood up his insides might exit through the hole he had made earlier in the day. When he sat down again, sweat was pouring from his face and arms.

“You going to behave now?” said the porter.

Two nurses appeared and he was hoisted into the chair.

He was wheeled to an empty bed on an open ward. A tiny leathery Oriental man was sleeping in the bed to his left in a cat’s cradle of tubes and wires. To his right a teenage boy was listening to music through headphones. His leg was in traction and he had brought most of his possessions into hospital: a stack of CDs, a camera, a bottle of HP Sauce, a small robot, some books, a large inflatable hammer…

George lay on the bed staring at the ceiling. He would have given anything for a cup of tea and a biscuit.

He was on the verge of catching the attention of the teenage boy to find out whether there was any conceivable overlap in their literary tastes when Dr. Forman materialized at the foot of the bed. He handed George two paperbacks and said, “Leave them with the nurses when you’ve finished, OK? Or I will hunt you down like a dog.” He gave a brief smile then turned and walked away, exchanging a few words with one of the nurses in a language which was neither English nor any other language that George recognized.

George turned the books over.
Treason’s Harbour
and
The Nutmeg of Consolation,
by Patrick O’Brian.

The aptness of the choice was almost creepy. George had read
Mas
ter and Commander
last year and had been meaning to try some of the others. He wondered whether he might have said something while unconscious.

He read eighty or so pages of
Treason’s Harbour,
ate a limp institutional supper of beef stew, boiled vegetables, peaches and custard, then slipped into a dreamless sleep, interrupted only by a long and complex visit to the toilet at 3:00 a.m.

In the morning he was given a bowl of cornflakes, a mug of tea and a brief lecture about wound care. The charge nurse asked whether he possessed a ground-floor toilet and a wife who could move him around the house. He was presented with a wheelchair, told to return it when he could walk unaided, and given his demob papers.

He rang Jean and said he could come home. She seemed under-whelmed by the news, and he felt a little tetchy about this until he remembered what he had done to the carpet.

He asked if she could bring some clothes.

She said they would try to pick him up as soon as possible.

He sat back and read another seventy pages of
Treason’s Harbour
.

Captain Aubrey was writing a letter home about Byrne’s lucky snuffbox when George looked up and saw Ray walking down the ward. His first thought was that something dreadful had happened to the rest of his family. And, indeed, Ray’s usual hail-fellow-well-met demeanor had given way to something rather dour.

“George.”

“Ray.”

“Is everything all right?” asked George.

Ray dumped a holdall on the bed. “Your clothes.”

“I’m just surprised to see you, that’s all. I mean, as opposed to Jean. Or Jamie. I don’t mean to be rude. I just feel a little embarrassed that they’ve made you do this.” He tried to sit up. It hurt. A lot.

Ray offered his hand and gently pulled George upright so that he was sitting on the side of the bed.

“Everything is all right, isn’t it?” said George.

Ray let out a world-weary sigh.
“All right?”
he said. “I wouldn’t go that far.
A bloody mess.
That’s probably nearer the mark.”

Could Ray be drunk? At ten in the morning? George could not smell any alcohol, but Ray did not seem completely in control of himself. And this was the man who was driving him home.

“You know what?” asked Ray, sitting down on the edge of the bed beside George.

“What?” said George quietly, not really wanting to know the answer.

“I think you might be the sanest member of the family,” said Ray. “Apart from Jamie. He seems to have his head screwed on properly. And he’s a homosexual.”

The little Oriental man was staring at them. George crossed his fingers and hoped his English was not good.

“Has something happened at home?” asked George, tentatively.

“Jean and Katie were yelling at each other over the breakfast table. I suggested that everyone calm down a little and was told to
quote
fuck off
unquote
.”

“By Jean?” asked George, not quite able to believe this.

“By Katie,” said Ray.

“And what was this argument about?” asked George. He was beginning to regret having passed Dr. Forman’s test. A few more days in hospital seemed suddenly rather inviting.

“Katie doesn’t want to get married,” said Ray. “Which will probably be a relief to you.”

George had no clue how to answer this. He toyed with the idea of falling off the bed so that someone else would come and rescue him, but decided against it.

“So I said I’d pick you up. Seemed a lot easier than staying at the house.” Ray took a deep breath. “Sorry. Shouldn’t be taking it out on you. Been a bit stressful recently.”

The two of them sat side by side for a few moments, like a pair of elderly gentlemen on a park bench.

“Anyway,” said Ray. “We’d better get you home, or they’ll wonder where we’ve got to.” He stood up. “You going to need any help getting into those clothes?”

For a fraction of a second George thought Ray was about to start removing his hospital pajamas and the prospect was so unnerving that George found himself emitting an audible squeak. But Ray simply pulled the curtains around George’s bed and went off to fetch a nurse.

78

Katie felt wrung out.

You expected crises to resolve stuff, to put it into perspective. But they didn’t. When they’d got to Peterborough she’d imagined staying for a few days, a week maybe, just her and Jacob. Keep an eye on Dad and make sure he wasn’t planning to hack something else off. Give Mum a hand. Be a better daughter and atone for the guilt about disappearing last time.

But when Dad got back with Ray and told everyone they could go home, she was relieved. Another day in that house and they were going to kill each other.

The wheelchair was a shock, but Dad seemed strangely buoyant. Even Mum seemed keener on looking after him on her own than sharing the house with her children.

As they were leaving, Katie steeled herself and apologized.

Mum said, “Let’s just forget about it, shall we.”

And Dad overcompensated by saying, “Thank you for coming. It was lovely to see you,” despite the fact that this was the first time he had actually been awake in her presence.

Which reminded Jacob that he hadn’t given Grandpa his chocolate buttons. So Ray went outside and retrieved the packet from the glove compartment and Dad made a show of opening it and eating a couple and declaring that they were delicious despite the fact that the car heater seemed to have fused them into a kind of brown porridge.

They drifted to their cars and drove away and Ray and Jacob played I Spy for half an hour and Katie found that she was actually looking forward to getting back to the house she’d been so desperate to get away from only the day before.

When they arrived Ray and Jacob put the train set together on the living-room floor while she made supper. She bathed Jacob and Ray put him to bed.

Neither of them had the energy to argue and they spent the next few days playing the role of dutiful parents so as not to trouble Jacob. And she could see them turning slowly into the people they were pretending to be, the problem they were meant to solve drifting slowly into the background, the two of them turning into a team whose job it was to bring up a child and run a household despite the fact that they had nothing in common, having conversations about what was needed from Tesco and what they were going to do at the weekend, going to bed and putting out the light and rolling away from each other and trying not to dream about the lives they could have led.

79

Jean canceled work.

She really hadn’t known what to expect when George came out of hospital. In the event he seemed surprisingly normal. He apologized for all the upset he had caused and said he was feeling a good deal better than he had done for some time.

She asked whether he wanted to talk about what had happened, but he told her there was no need to worry. She said he should tell her if he ever started feeling the same way again and he reassured her that he wasn’t going to feel the same way again. Pretty soon it became clear that Dr. Parris had got things out of proportion and that her more paranoid imaginings had been unfounded.

He was still in a lot of pain, clearly. But he was determined not to use the wheelchair. So she spent most of that week helping him out of bed and in and out of his salt bath and holding his hand as he made his way downstairs, then driving him back and forth to the surgery to have his dressing changed.

After three or four days he was moving around on his own, and by the beginning of the second week he was able to drive the car, so she went back into work, telling him that he could call her at any time if he needed help.

She rang the florists and the caterers and the car hire company and canceled them. The florists were downright rude, so she found herself telling the caterers and the car people that her daughter had been taken seriously ill and they were so understanding it made her feel worse than being shouted at.

She couldn’t face ringing guests and telling them the wedding was off, so she decided to leave it for a few days.

And it was good. Obviously it was good. Only days ago she thought their lives were falling to pieces. And now they were getting slowly back to normal. She couldn’t have asked for any more.

But she sat at the kitchen table some evenings and thought about the washing and the cooking and the cleaning and she could feel something dark and heavy weighing on her, and just getting up to put the kettle on was like wading through deep water.

She was depressed. And it was not something she was used to feeling. She worried. She coped. She got cross. But she was never down for more than a few hours at a time.

It was uncharitable, but she couldn’t help wishing there was more wrong with George. That he needed her more. But in no time at all he was back out in the studio, laying bricks and sawing wood.

She felt as if she was lost at sea. George was on his island over there. And David was on another island. And Katie. And Jamie. All of them with solid ground under their feet. And she was drifting between them, the tide slowly dragging her farther and farther away.

She drove over to David’s house the following week and parked round the corner. She was about to get out of the car when she realized she couldn’t do it. When they’d first got together it seemed like the beginning of a new life, something different and exciting, an escape. But she could see it now for what it was, an affair, like any other affair, tawdry and cheap, a selfish compensation for the mess her real life had become.

She imagined sitting in the staff room at St. John’s, drinking tea and eating Garibaldi biscuits with Sally and Bea and Miss Cottingham and felt, for the first time, as if she bore some kind of stain, that they would be able to look at her and see what she had been doing.

She was being silly. She knew that. They were no different from other people. She knew, for a fact, that Bea’s son was in some kind of trouble with drugs. But it seemed wrong that she should be making love with David one afternoon and teaching children to read the following morning. And if she had to make the choice between the two she would have chosen David without hesitation, but that seemed even worse.

She drove away and rang David later that evening to apologize. He was charming and sympathetic and said he understood what she must be going through. But he didn’t. She could hear it in his voice.