give away your coffee table. You just had to see things from other people’s point of view. Remember they were human.
Like Giles fucking Mynott didn’t.
Jamie needed a pee.
He got off his stool and turned round and bumped into Josh who was carrying a cup of startlingly hot coffee back to his desk.
Jamie heard himself saying, very loudly, “You. Total. Fucking. Moron.”
The office went very quiet.
Stuart walked over. It was like watching the headmaster coming across the playground after he’d torn Sharon Parker’s blazer.
“Are you all right, Jamie?”
“I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
Stuart was doing his Mr. Spock impression, giving absolutely no indication of what he was thinking.
“My sister has just canceled her wedding,” said Jamie. “My father’s having a nervous breakdown and my mother’s leaving him for someone else.”
Stuart softened. “Perhaps you should take the rest of the afternoon off.”
“Yes. Thank you. I will. Thanks. Sorry.”
He sat on the tube knowing he was going to hell. The only way to reduce the hot forks when he got there was to ring Katie and Mum as soon as he got home.
An old man with a withered hand was sitting opposite him. He was wearing a yellow mac and carrying a greasy satchel of papers and looking directly at Jamie and muttering to himself. Jamie was very relieved when he got off at Swiss Cottage.
Ringing Mum was going to be tricky. Was he meant to know about her leaving Dad? Was Katie even meant to know? She could have overheard a conversation and jumped to conclusions. Which she was prone to do
He’d ring Katie first.
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.”
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
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 cafe.
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.”
She could see now. The dustbin-throwing wasn’t the problem. It was the not winning.
She liked the fact that she was more intelligent than Ray. She liked the fact that she could speak French and he couldn’t. She liked the fact that she had opinions about factory farming and he didn’t.
But it counted for nothing. He was a better person than she was. In every way that mattered. Except the dustbin-throwing. And, in truth, she might have thrown a few dustbins in her time if she’d been a little stronger.
Ten minutes later they were sitting on the big slope looking back down into the vast space of the turbine hall.
Ray said, “I know you’re trying really hard, love.”
Katie said nothing.
Ray said, “You don’t have to do this.” He paused. “You don’t have to marry me because of Jacob and the house and money and everything. I’m not going to throw you out onto the street. Whatever you want to do, I’ll try and make it work.”
