George froze, like an animal spotted by a bird of prey, hoping that if he remained motionless he might blend into the background.

“Are you going to take it or not?” said Jean, waggling the phone at him.

He watched his hand rise up to take hold of the phone as he walked down the last few steps. Jean was wearing a rubber glove and holding a tea towel. She handed the phone over, shook her head and vanished back into the kitchen.

George put the phone to his ear.

The pictures in his head toggled giddily from one grotesque image to another. The tramp’s face on the station platform. Jean’s naked thighs. His own sick skin.

Ray said, “George. It’s Ray. Katie tells me you wanted a chat.”

It was like those phone calls that woke you up at night. It was hard remembering what you were meant to do.

He had absolutely no idea what he had wanted to chat to Ray about.

Was this really happening, or had he tipped over into some kind of delusional state? Was he still lying on the bed upstairs?

“George?” said Ray. “Are you there?”

He tried to say something. A small mewing noise came out of his mouth. He moved the receiver away from his head and looked at it. Ray’s voice was still emerging from the little holes. George did not want this to carry on any longer.

Carefully, he put the phone back onto the receiver. He turned and walked into the kitchen. Jean was filling the washing machine and he did not have the energy for the argument that would ensue if he walked out of the door with a bottle of wine.

“That was quick,” said Jean.

“Wrong number,” said George.

He was halfway down the garden in his socks before he realized why Jean might not have fallen for this brilliant piece of subterfuge.

92

Jamie sat down with a mug of tea and his best pen and some writing paper he’d found in the bottom of the desk drawer. Proper paper, like the stuff he was made to use for thank-you letters when he was a kid.

He began writing.

Dear Tony,

I love you and I want you to come to the wedding.

I went up to Peterborough last week. Dad was having a nervous breakdown and ended up in hospital after chopping bits off himself with a pair of scissors (I’ll explain later). When I was at the hospital I bumped into the man Mum is having an affair with (I’ll explain that, too). Katie and Mum had a blazing row about the wedding. It was off. But now it’s on again (I’ll explain…

He tore off the sheet of paper, crumpled it up and began again. Tony had expended a lot of energy getting away from his own family. This wasn’t the moment for Jamie to brag about the shortcomings of his own.

Dear Tony,

I love you and I want you to come to the wedding.

I went up to Peterborough last week and realized that you were my family…

Too mawkish.

Dear Tony,

I love you.

The wedding was off. Now it’s on again.

God knows what’s going to happen on the day, but I want you to be there with me

Christ. Now he was selling it as a spectator event.

Why was this so bloody difficult?

He took his tea outside and sat on the bench and lit a cigarette. There were children playing in a nearby garden. Seven, eight years old. It reminded him of being young again. Paddling pools and Olympic hurdles over bamboo canes. Bike races and jumping out of trees. A couple more years and they’d be smoking cigarettes or looking for a can of petrol. But for now it was a good noise. Like the buzz of a mower, or people playing tennis.

It was so bloody difficult because he couldn’t say it to Tony’s face. You said something to someone’s face, saw how they reacted and adjusted the steering wheel a bit. Like selling a house (“It’s a very cosmopolitan area.” “We noticed that.” “Sorry. Estate-agent speak. Hardwired, I’m afraid”).

And Tony had changed in his absence. After everything Becky had said. When he pictured Tony now he saw someone less sorted, more vulnerable, someone more like himself.

Jamie had changed, too.

Christ, it was like chess.

No. He was being stupid.

He was trying to get Tony back. It would be good if he came to the wedding but if he missed it, so what? Sooner or later he’d come back from Greece.

Come to think of it, if the wedding was a disaster, Tony missing it might be a godsend.

Solved.

He stubbed out his cigarette and went inside.

Dear Tony,

Please come to the wedding. Talk to Becky. She knows everything.

I love you.

Jamie

xxx

He put it into the envelope, added one of the photocopied road maps, sealed it, addressed it care of Becky, stamped it and took it to the postbox before he could change his mind.

93

In other circumstances George might have committed suicide. For two nights running he had dreamed about the drowning in Peterborough and in his dream the river called to him the way a huge feather bed might call to him, and even in the dream it was scary how much he wanted to let go and sink into the cold and the dark and have everything canceled out for good. But there were now only six days to go before the wedding and it would be ungentlemanly to do something like that to his daughter.

So, for the moment he had to find a way of getting from day to day until a time when it would be acceptable to do something drastic without it souring the celebratory atmosphere. This would doubtless be sometime after Katie and Ray had returned from their honeymoon.

He assumed, after examining himself in the mirror, that he was going to suffer some kind of organ failure. It seemed inconceivable that the human body could survive the pressure created by that kind of sustained panic without something rupturing or ceasing to function. And at first this was one more fear to add to his other fears, of the cancer, of going irreparably insane, of collapsing in front of the wedding guests. But after twenty-four hours he was willing it to happen. Stroke. Heart attack. Anything. He really did not care whether he survived or not, so long as it rendered him unconscious and absolved him of responsibility.

He could not sleep. As soon as he lay down he could feel his skin mutating beneath his clothing. He lay motionless, waiting until Jean had fallen asleep, then got out of bed, took more codeine and poured himself a whiskey. He watched the strange programs that the television pumped out in the small hours. Open-university documentaries about glaciers. Black-and-white films from the forties. Farming news. He wept and walked in circles on the living-room carpet.

The following day he went out to the studio and invented pointless tasks to tire himself out and occupy his mind (two men were fitting the new carpet in the house). Sanding window frames. Sweeping the concrete floor. Moving all the spare bricks, one by one, to the other end of the studio. Making a variety of small constructions in the style of Stonehenge.

He was having a great deal of trouble eating. A couple of mouthfuls and he felt queasy, much as he did on ferries in bad weather. He forced down a little buttered toast to reassure Jean and had to go upstairs to be sick in the toilet.

He began to lose his mind halfway through the second day. He got up from the dining table at the end of lunch, leaving his dessert untouched, saying that he had to go somewhere. He was unsure, precisely, where it was that he had to go. He remembered leaving the house by the front door. Then he remembered nothing for some considerable time. White noise filled his mind, not unlike the white noise of a television failing to tune in to a particular channel, but louder and a good deal more insistent. It was not comfortable, but it was better than leaning over the toilet bowl while the toast came back, or lying in bed feeling the lesions multiply and coalesce.