A Spot Of Bother

She remembered Jamie at five. Going off to his room “to be private.” Even now they would be talking sometimes and it was like talking to someone in Spain. You got the basics. The time of day. Directions to the beach. But there was a whole level you were missing because you didn’t speak the language properly.

And it might have been all right if she could just give him a cuddle sometimes. But he wasn’t the cuddling sort. No more than George was.

She walked over to the window and pulled the curtains back and looked down into the darkened garden. There was a tent somewhere in the shadows under the trees at the far end.

The idea of swapping places with Ray seemed suddenly very attractive, being down there in a sleeping bag with Jacob.

Away from the house. Away from her family. Away from everything.

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 Master 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.”