By the time George got home he was feeling a good deal calmer.
The car was parked outside. Consequently he was surprised and a little disappointed to find the house empty. On the other hand, being in his own hallway was a comfort. The pig-shaped notepad on the phone table. The faint scent of toast. That piney stuff Jean used to clean the carpets. He put his rucksack down and walked into the kitchen.
He was putting the kettle on when he noticed that one of the chairs was lying on the floor. He bent down and set it back on its feet.
He found himself thinking briefly of ghost ships, everything precisely as it was when disaster struck, half-eaten meals, unfinished diary entries.
Then he stopped himself. It was just a chair. He filled the kettle, plugged it in, placed his hands flat on the Formica work surface, exhaled slowly and let the crazy thoughts slip away.
And this was when he heard the noise, from somewhere above his head, like someone moving heavy furniture. He assumed it was Jean at first. But it was a sound he had never heard in the house before, a rhythmic bumping, almost mechanical.
He very nearly called out. Then he decided not to. He wanted to know what was happening before he announced his presence. He might need the element of surprise.
He walked into the hallway and began climbing the stairs. When he reached the top he realized that the noise was coming from one of the bedrooms.
He walked down the landing. The door of Katie’s old room was closed, but his and Jean’s door was standing slightly ajar. This was where the noise was coming from.
Glancing down he saw the four large marble eggs in the fruit bowl on the chest. He took the black one and cradled it in his hand. It wasn’t much of a weapon but it was extremely dense and he felt safer holding it. He tossed it a couple of times, letting it fall heavily back into the palm of his hand.
It was highly possible that he was about to confront a drug addict rifling through their drawers. He should have been scared, but the morning’s activities seemed to have emptied that particular tank.
He stepped up to the door and pushed it gently open.
Two people were having sexual intercourse on the bed.
He had never seen two people having sexual intercourse before, not in real life. It did not look attractive. His first impulse was to step swiftly away to save embarrassment. Then he remembered that it was his room. And his bed.
He was about to ask the two of them loudly what in God’s name they thought they were playing at when he noticed that they were old people. Then the woman made the noise he had heard from downstairs. And it wasn’t just a woman. It was Jean.
The man was raping her.
He raised the fist containing the marble egg and stepped forward again, but she said, “Yes, yes, yes, yes,” and he could see now that the naked man between her legs was David Symmonds.
Without warning the house tilted to one side. He stepped backward and put his hand on the door frame to prevent himself falling over.
Time passed. Precisely how much time passed it was difficult to say. Something between five seconds and two minutes.
He did not feel very well.
He pulled the door back to its original position and steadied himself on the banisters. He silently repositioned the marble egg in the bowl and waited for the house to return to its normal angle, like a big ship in a long swell.
When it had done so he made his way down the stairs, picked up his rucksack, stepped through the front door and pulled it shut behind him.
There was a sound in his head like the sound he might have heard if he were lying on a railway line and an express train were passing over him.
He began walking. Walking was good. Walking cleared the head.
A blue station wagon drove past.
This time it was the pavement which was tilting to one side. He came to a halt, bent over and was sick at the foot of a lamppost.
Maintaining his position to avoid messing his trousers, he fished an elderly tissue from his pocket and wiped his mouth. It seemed wrong, somehow, to dump the tissue in the street and he was about to put it back in his pocket when the weight of his rucksack shifted unexpectedly, he put his hand out to grab the lamppost, missed and rolled into a hedge.
He was buying a cottage pie and a fruit salad in Knutsford Services on the M6 when he was woken by the sound of a dog barking and opened his eyes to find himself staring at a large area of overcast sky fringed by leaves and twigs.
He gazed at the overcast sky for a while.
There was a strong smell of vomit.
It became slowly clear that he was lying in a hedge. There was a rucksack on his back. He remembered now. He had been sick in the street and his wife was having sexual intercourse with another man a couple of hundred yards away.
He did not want to be seen lying in a hedge.
It took him several seconds to remember precisely how one commanded one’s limbs. When he did, he removed a branch from his hair, slipped his arms free of the rucksack and got gingerly to his feet.
A woman was standing on the far side of the street watching him with mild interest, as if he were an animal in a safari park. He counted to five, took a deep breath and hoisted the rucksack onto his shoulders.
He took a tentative step.
He took another, slightly less tentative step.
He could do it.
He began walking toward the main road.
34
Katie was going to have to apologize on Monday.
She was standing in the middle of Toddler One with Jacob swinging on her scarf while Ellen tried to tell her about World Awareness Day the following week. But there was so much Ray-related crap in Katie’s head that she wasn’t taking anything in. And the picture that kept coming to mind was one from that zombie film, Ellen’s head being hacked off with a plank and the blood squirting out of her severed neck.
When they got onto the bus she tried to put Ray out of her head by asking Jacob what he’d been doing at nursery. But he was too tired to talk. He stuck a thumb into his mouth and slid a hand inside her jacket to massage the fleecy lining.
The bus driver was trying to break some kind of land speed record. It was raining and she could smell the sweat of the woman sitting to her right.
She wanted to break something. Or hurt someone.
She put her arm round Jacob and tried to absorb some of his calm.
Jesus, she could have taken Graham to the nearest hotel and shagged the living daylights out of him, for all the shit she was getting.
The bus stopped. Violently.
They got off. As they did so Katie told the bus driver he was a nob-head. Unfortunately Jacob was picking up an interesting piece of mud at the time so Katie tripped over him, which diminished the effect somewhat.
When they opened the front door Ray was already there. She could tell. The hall lights were off but there was something sullen and crackly in the air, like going into a cave and knowing the ogre was round the corner chewing on a shinbone.
They went into the kitchen. Ray was sitting at the table.
