A Spot Of Bother

retiring does funny things to you. All that time on your hands…”

George began to stir round about teatime. She made him some cocoa and some toast and he seemed a little more human. She tried to get him to talk, but he made no more sense than he’d done first thing that morning. She could see that he found it painful discussing the subject so after a while she let it drop.

She told him to stay where he was and got him his favorite books and music. He seemed tired, mostly. An hour or so later she made their supper and brought it through so they could eat it together on the coffee table in front of the television. He ate everything and asked for another codeine and they watched a David Attenborough program about monkeys.

Her panic began to recede.

It was like turning the clock back thirty years. Jamie with his glandular fever. Katie with her broken ankle. Tomato soup and toast soldiers. Watching Crown Court together. Doctor Dolittle and The Swiss Family Robinson.

The next day George announced that he was going to retire to the bedroom. He took the television upstairs and installed himself in bed, and to tell the truth Jean was a bit sad.

She popped in every half an hour or so to check that he was OK, but he seemed quite self-sufficient. Which was one of the things that she’d always admired about him. He never moaned about being ill. Never thought he should be the center of attention. Just retreated to his basket, like a poorly dog, and curled up until he was ready to chase sticks again.

By the evening he told her that he would be fine on his own so she went into town the following morning and sold books for four hours and met Ursula for lunch. She started telling her what was happening, then realized that she couldn’t really explain without talking about the cancer and the eczema and the fear of dying and the alcohol and cut on the head, and she didn’t want to make him seem crazy, so she said he’d canceled the Cornwall trip on account of a nasty tummy bug, and Ursula told her all about the joys of staying in Dublin with your daughter and her four children while her builder husband was ripping out the bathroom.

49

Obviously, it was a surprise to find that one was insane. But what surprised George most was how painful it was.

It had never occurred to him before. His uncle, those unwashed people who shouted at buses, Alex Bamford that Christmas…Crazy was the word he had always used. As in crazy paving, or crazy golf. Everything jumbled and out of order and rather amusing.

It seemed less amusing now. Indeed, when he thought about his uncle stuck in St. Edward’s for ten years without a visit from his family, or that disheveled man who tap-danced for small change in Church Street, he could feel the corners of his eyes pricking.

If he were given the choice he would rather someone had broken his leg. You did not have to explain what was wrong with a broken leg. Nor were you expected to mend it by force of will.

The terror came and went in waves. When a wave washed over him he felt much as he did several years ago when he watched a small boy run into the road outside Jacksons, narrowly missing the hood of a braking car.

Between the waves he gathered his strength for the next one and tried desperately not to think about it in case this brought it on more quickly.

What he felt mostly was a relentless, grinding dread which rumbled and thundered and made the world dark, like those spaceships in science-fiction films whose battle-scorched fuselages slid onto the screen and kept on sliding onto the screen because they were, in fact, several thousand times larger than you expected when all you could see was the nose cone.

The idea of genuinely having cancer was beginning to seem almost a relief, the idea of going into hospital, having tubes put into his arm, being told what to do by doctors and nurses, no longer having to grapple with the problem of getting through the next five minutes.

He had given up trying to talk to Jean. She tried hard, but he seemed unable to make her understand.

It was not her fault. If someone had come to him with similar problems a year ago, he would have reacted in the same way.

Part of the problem was that Jean did not get depressed. She worried. She got angry. She got sad. And she felt all of these things more strongly than he ever did (when he cleared out the cellar, for example, and put that old birdhouse on the bonfire she actually punched him). But they always blew over in a day or two.

She kept him company, however, cooked his meals and washed his clothes and he was very thankful for all of these things.

He was also thankful for the codeine. The box was nearly full. Once he had shaken off the horror of waking up he could fix his mind on those two tablets at lunchtime knowing they would wrap him in a soft haze till he could open a bottle of wine at supper.

He had tried to spend that first night on the sofa, but it was uncomfortable and Jean was of the opinion that crazy behavior encouraged crazy ideas. So he relocated upstairs. In the event it was not as bad as he had expected, being in the bed where he had seen that thing happening. When one thought about it, bad things had happened pretty much everywhere: murders, rapes, fatal accidents. He knew, for example, that an elderly lady had burnt to death in the Farmers’ house in 1952, but it was not something you could sense when you went round there for drinks.

He soon realized that being upstairs had its benefits. One did not have to answer the door if one was in bed, there were no unexpected visitors and one could close the curtains without starting an argument. So he moved the television and the video player into the bedroom and battened down the hatches.

After a few days he girded his loins and ventured to the shop to rent some videos.

And if he woke at night and the Orcs with the boiled, skinless faces were waiting in their silent hundreds in the moonlit gardens he found that he could gain some temporary respite by going into the bathroom, wedging himself between the toilet and the bath and singing very quietly to himself the songs he remembered singing when he was a small child.

50

Katie and Jacob staggered in through the door and dumped their bags.

Mum kissed them both and said, “Your father’s in bed. Bit under the weather.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I’m not sure, to be honest. I think it might be all in the mind.” She winced slightly when she said the words “all in the mind,” as if she had just opened a tub of something that had gone off.

“So, he’s not actually ill?” asked Katie.

“He has eczema.”

“Can I watch my Bob the Builder video?” asked Jacob.

“I’m sorry but Grandpa’s got the video player upstairs,” said Mum.

“You don’t have to go to bed because you’ve got eczema,” said Katie. She had that feeling she often got with her parents, that something was being kept from her, a feeling which only got more sinister as they aged.

“Can I watch my video with Grandpa?” asked Jacob, tugging at Katie’s trousers.

“Let me finish talking to Granny,” said Katie.

“He says he’s worried about dying,” said Mum, in a stage whisper.

“But I want to watch it now,” said Jacob.

“Two minutes,” said Katie.

“You know what he’s like,” said Mum. “I have no idea what is going through that head of his.”

“Is Grandpa dying?” asked Jacob.