A Spot of Bother Read Free

front of him trying desperately to pretend that he was sitting in the living room at home. But every few minutes he would hear a sinister chime and see a little red light flashing in the bulkhead to his right, secretly informing the cabin crew that the pilot was wrestling with some fatal malfunction in the cockpit.
    It was not that he could not speak, more that speaking was something which happened in another world of which he had only the vaguest memory.
    At some point Jamie looked out of the window and said, “I think the wing’s coming off.” Jean hissed, “For God’s sake, grow up,” and George actually felt the rivets blowing and the fuselage dropping like a ton of hardcore.
    For several weeks afterward he was unable to see a plane overhead without feeling angry.
    It was a natural reaction. Human beings were not meant to be sealed into tins and fired through the sky by fan-assisted rockets.
    He laid a brick at the opposite corner then stretched a line between the tops of the two bricks to keep the course straight.
    Of course he felt appalling. That was what anxiety did, persuaded you to get out of dangerous situations fast. Leopards, big spiders, strange men coming across the river with spears. If anything it was other people who had the problem, sitting there reading the
Daily Express
and sucking boiled sweets as if they were on a large bus.
    But Jean liked sun. And driving to the south of France would wreck a holiday before it had begun. So he needed a strategy to prevent the horror taking hold in May and spiraling toward some kind of seizure at Heathrow in July. Squash, long walks, cinema, Tony Bennett at full volume, the first glass of red wine at six, a new
Flashman
novel.
    He heard voices and looked up. Jean, Katie and Ray were standing on the patio like dignitaries waiting for him to dock at some foreign quay.
    “George…?”
    “Coming.” He removed the excess mortar from around the newly laid brick, scraped the remainder back into the bucket and replaced the lid. He stood up and walked down the lawn, cleaning his hands on a rag.
    “Katie has some news,” said Jean, in the voice she used when she was ignoring the arthritis in her knee. “But she didn’t want to tell me until you were here.”
    “Ray and I are getting married,” said Katie.
    George had a brief out-of-body experience. He was looking down from fifteen feet above the patio, watching himself as he kissed Katie and shook Ray’s hand. It was like falling off that stepladder. The way time slowed down. The way your body knew instinctively how to protect your head with your arms.
    “I’ll put some champagne into the freezer,” Jean said, trotting back into the house.
    George reentered his body.
    “End of September,” said Ray. “Thought we’d keep it simple. Not put you folks to too much trouble.”
    “Right,” said George. “Right.”
    He would have to make a speech at the reception, a speech that said nice things about Ray. Jamie would refuse to come to the wedding. Jean would refuse to allow Jamie to refuse to come to the wedding. Ray was going to be a member of the family. They would see him all the time. Until they died. Or emigrated.
    What was Katie doing? You could not control children, he knew that. Making them eat vegetables was hard enough. But marrying Ray? She had a 2:1 in philosophy. And that chap who had climbed into her car in Leeds. She had given the police a part of his ear.
    Jacob appeared in the doorway wielding a bread knife. “I’m an effelant and I’m going to catch the train and…and…and…and this is my tusks.”
    Katie raised her eyebrows. “I’m not sure that’s an entirely good idea.”
    Jacob ran back into the kitchen squealing with joy. Katie stepped into the doorway after him. “Come here, monkey biscuits.”
    And George was alone with Ray.
    Ray’s brother was in jail.
    Ray worked for an engineering company which made high-spec camshaft milling machines. George had absolutely no idea what