A Spot Of Bother

6

Lunch went rather well, right up until dessert.

There was a minor hiccup when George was changing out of his work clothes. He was about to remove his shirt and trousers when he remembered what they were hiding, and felt that horror-film lurch you got when the mirrored door of the wardrobe swung shut to reveal the zombie with the scythe standing behind the hero.

He turned off the lights, pulled down the blinds and showered in darkness singing “ Jerusalem.”

As a result he walked downstairs feeling not only clean but proud of having taken such rapid and effective action. When he reached the dining room there was wine and conversation and Jacob pretending to be a helicopter and George was finally able to loosen his grip a little.

His fear that Jean, being Jean, would make some well-meant but inappropriate comment, that Katie, being Katie, would rise to the bait and that the two of them would proceed to fight like cats proved unfounded. Katie talked about Barcelona (it was in Spain, of course, he remembered now), Ray was complimentary about the food (“Cracking soup, Mrs. Hall”) and Jacob made a runway out of cutlery so his bus could take off and got quite heated when George said that buses did not fly.

They were halfway through the blackberry crumble, however, when the lesion began to itch like athlete’s foot. The word tumor came to mind and it was an ugly word which he did not want to be entertaining, but he was unable to remove it from his head.

He could feel it growing as he sat at the table, too slowly perhaps for the naked eye to see, but growing nevertheless, like the bread mold he once kept in a jam jar on the windowsill in his bedroom as a boy.

They were discussing wedding arrangements: caterers, photographers, invitations…This part of the conversation George understood. Then they began discussing whether to book a hotel (Katie and Ray’s preferred option) or hire a tent for the garden (the preferred option for Jacob who was very excited by the whole tent concept). At this point George began to lose focus.

Katie turned to him and said something like, “When will the studio be finished?” but she could have been speaking Hungarian. He could see her mouth moving but was unable to process the noise coming out of it.

The accelerator was being pressed to the floor inside his head. The engine was screaming, the wheels were spinning and smoke was pouring off the tires, but he was going nowhere.

He was unsure what happened next, but it was not elegant, it involved damage to crockery and ended up with him exiting rapidly through the back door.