The Red House Read online

  White skin and loads of black hair, said Melissa. Like, on their back as well. That is definitely the grossest.

  Big muscles. Daisy laughed. Or tattoos. I hate tattoos.

  I’ve got a bluebird on my arse. Melissa paused. They were on the edge of the enchanted forest, kings and their judgement far away. I’ll show you later if you promise not to tell. And drop the liquor of it in her eyes.

  Well, I guess I’ll have to make an exception in your case. Daisy wondered if the church was a bluebird tattoo. Doubt, that canker in the heart.

  Prince Albert had a ring through his penis so he could tie it to his leg. Must have been a monster. Melissa laughed and everyone turned and wondered what they could be talking about.

  OK. You win. That is definitely the grossest.

  So … Melissa touched Daisy’s arm, to show her she wasn’t mocking her. Tell me about the religion thing. It wasn’t envy. More a kind of zoological fascination. And that steeliness … Maybe there was a little envy there.

  Daisy paused. She had imagined this moment many times over the past few days but now that it was here … How did she say this without dispersing the nameless thing that hung in the air between them? Don’t you sometimes wonder if everything is pointless or whether it has some bigger meaning? The Alpha line. She wished she could have been more original.

  Sometimes, I guess.

  Shakespeare, the pyramids, human beings … She looked at Benjy playing his Nintendo and really did think it was astonishing. It can’t be an accident, can it? I mean … How could she express all that wonder? You look up into the sky at night and it’s beautiful but it’s terrifying, too. Don’t you think that?

  Sort of. But did she? Her fears lurked nearby with their feet on the ground.

  What if you couldn’t stop thinking about it?

  I guess I’d take some really strong antidepressants. Melissa laughed. It was precisely what she would do.

  I feel invisible sometimes. I look at myself and there’s nothing there.

  Melissa felt a shiver of recognition. Alex’s attention drifting away. But she wasn’t ready to cross this river.

  I used to act, said Daisy. As in, you know, drama, plays … And when I was someone else, then I knew who I was. She’d never said this before.

  You should act now.

  What?

  It’s an exercise we did at school. You pretend to be someone else for the whole day. Blind person, deaf person, someone with a limp, someone who can’t speak English. In truth she had never really stopped playing the game.

  So what would I be?

  Melissa smiled. I think you should be a real bitch.

  Was it possible to be someone else? The forest, that faerie magic. My mistress with a monster is in love.

  She would never be unfaithful to him. Foolish, perhaps, misguided, but never unfaithful, never dishonest. How odd that her revelation should make Richard certain of this. She wanted people to be happy. Was that the problem, pleasing other men, doling out her favours so prodigally? He wondered if he was simply the first half-decent man who had come along. He was disturbed, too, by the thought that these men had been, what? more adventurous? rougher? more masculine? and that she accepted his shortcomings in return for his reliability, his respectability, his money.

  Jennifer’s affair had precipitated the end of their marriage, not because of the betrayal or her failure to hide it, but because he cared so little. He couldn’t imagine her giving herself or being taken. He thought of her as passionate at first. He had never quite known what women wanted, and he was both aroused and relieved to find someone who was so explicit about her needs, but there was always something mechanical about their coupling and he came to realise that the passion was at root an anger whose source he never fathomed.

  Did the drinking excuse Louisa’s behaviour or compound it? Perhaps everyone possessed a darker self kept at bay by circumstance. Who knows what life his mother might have led if his father hadn’t died so unexpectedly? Airport novels shelved according to their height. The green melamine bowls.

  They had crossed the top of the dyke and were walking into a chill wind rising out of the valley. He zipped the front of his orange waterproof. Misty rain, wisps of cloud trailing up the valley like ragged white curtains.

  They’d reached the gravel track above the house. You OK? Dominic was calling. I’m fine. Angela paused before heaving herself over the stile. She needed a hot bath and Savlon and the sheepskin slippers she hadn’t packed. She looked up. English Oak. Quercus robur. She’d done a biology degree in a previous life. Pedunculate, not sessile, because of the stalks under the acorns. She parcelled the knowledge and gifted it to children who forgot it straight after their exams. Or before. Mitochondria and ribosomes, the carbon cycle, Banting and Best. Nature with a capital N. How strange that she disliked it en masse. Walks on the heath and the occasional safari park with Benjy. Penguins and fruit bats. That was her limit, really. She’d been passionate once, collecting moths with a torch and a muslin net. Blair’s Shoulder-knot, Magpie, Goat, Codling. It all faded. Hard to feel passionate about anything now. She thought about her mother. It was physiological, of course. Myelin breakdown, neural tangles. But you couldn’t help wonder. Being bored of life, wanting to let go.

  Something moved in the distance. Was it …? She had to stop this. If she talked to someone, maybe. A ticking clock and a box of tissues on the pine coffee table. She’d never asked Richard about Jennifer, why they were together, why they weren’t any more. Dominic was right. She thought of herself as someone who cared, but she spent all of that concern at school. She put her foot on the little wooden step and lifted her aching leg.

  We push an introductory needle into the femoral artery.

  Is that in the groin? asked Benjy.

  It is indeed. Richard reached over and picked up the jigsaw piece with the picture of the man being hanged. Bingo. He handed it to Angela.

  Louisa was watching from the window seat. He wasn’t even thinking about it, was he? At least Craig blew up and cleared the air. Had she made a monumental mistake? The degrees, the books, the music.

  This, said Melissa, staring at the jigsaw, must surely be the most boring activity in the universe. But the edge was gone.

  I think I’ll save jigsaws until I’m in an old people’s home, said Daisy. The two girls. Their little freemasonry.

  I’ll be in there soon enough, said Angela. Sherry at five and drama students coming in to do hits from the seventies. Except there wouldn’t be sherry, would there, given that Richard wouldn’t be paying this time round. Some council place. Dettol and the TV at Guantánamo volume.

  Melissa found the man playing the lute.

  X-rays are pretty harmless, said Richard. Pilot. That’s the job to avoid. Lots of breast cancer among female cabin crew.

  Is this subject entirely appropriate? said Angela.

  Alex came and sat beside Louisa. There. He handed her a glass of wine. He was flirting, wasn’t he? She hotched a centimetre closer so that their shoulders were touching. Richard glanced over. She clinked Alex’s glass. Cheers.

  Dominic sliced the florets off the head of broccoli and placed them in the steamer then opened the oven briefly to check on the sweet potatoes. How odd that it was such a manly profession now. Marco Pierre White, Gordon Ramsay. I wouldn’t give that risotto to my fucking dog. He folded back the waxed wrapper, sliced a little pyramid of butter from the corner of the block and dropped it into the pan. Exile on Main Street in the background. Best double album in the history of popular music. Unless Blonde on Blonde was a double. Maybe second best, then. Recorded in that chateau the Gestapo had used. ‘Tumbling Dice’. Keith Richards falling asleep with a syringe still stuck in his arse. All corporate hospitality now and VW sponsorship deals. Bob Dylan doing adverts for ladies’ underwear. He dropped the sliced onion into the fizzy butter. He’d been vegetarian himself when he was a student. Animal fats in everything before BSE. Biscuits, ice cream. Shopping down the kosher
aisle in the Stamford Hill Safeway with the Hasidic housewives and their fifties wigs. He washed the spinach in the colander and pressed it onto the onion. How odd to feel this contentment at the expense of Angela’s failings. He was going to end the Amy thing when he got home. Couldn’t see the point now. It was all about self-worth, wasn’t it, trying to make himself feel better. He didn’t need it any longer. The spinach darkened and shrank. Karen, the daughter he never had, blessing him from beyond the grave. Pint of full-fat in the microwave. But this thing with Daisy and Melissa. I kind of like her, actually. Unquote. That clumsy teenage eyes-down embarrassment he hadn’t seen for so long. He’d help Angela get back on track, make the family work again, be a real father. He poured a little cone of flour onto the buttery spinach and stirred it in. He could take some private pupils again. Earn a little extra money. That honeyed scent of the sweet potatoes roasting. Everything was going to be all right. Physical Graffiti. That was a double album, too, wasn’t it? Maybe Exile was third best.

  Look. Melissa paused and glanced both ways down the landing. She lifted her skirt and pulled down her knickers and there it was, a little bluebird on her buttock where the tan faded to moony white. And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes. Daisy wanted to say something complimentary but it seemed indecent. Did it hurt? Melissa was letting her look for too long and Daisy was finding it hard to turn away. He was cute so I didn’t mind too much. She pulled her knickers up. If you tell anyone … But why would she? It felt like her own transgression, not Melissa’s.

  Angela enjoyed anything with a Latin flavour, Orchestra Baobab, Buena Vista Social Club (she’d sat through so many assemblies that English lyrics were always accompanied in her mind by a little white dot bouncing along the words). Alex liked Razorlight, Kasabian, music you listened to on open roads with the window down, whereas Daisy loved the rich sweep of choral music so that the portable keyboard at church gave her a guilty longing to be in St Catherine’s on Christmas Eve, candles and holly-crackle, a church organ and boys like angels. But it was Benjy who listened more intently than any of them, ever since that night when he’d been sick and stayed up watching Guys and Dolls with Mum. Singing, dancing, everything squeezed into one vast sticky sugary cake. My Fair Lady. Calamity Jane. Why couldn’t you have an orchestra in real life? Sometimes he sang ‘The Deadwood Stage’ or ‘The Surrey with the Fringe on Top’ when no one was watching, and when he was walking down the street clicking his fingers, doing wobbly little pirouettes only four people in the world knew he was doing the dance from the opening scene of West Side Story.

  But now there was Monteverdi in the background. The roasting tin, battered and discoloured like Elizabethan armour. Wolf Blass Cabernet Sauvignon. Angela sees a tiny brown mouse run along the polished wainscot. Something storybook about it here, not like a mouse in the dining room at home. She decides not to mention it. Let me guess, said Richard. The Vespers? There was something under-powered about him tonight, thought Dominic. Perhaps he and Louisa really did have an argument at Llanthony. Now that he thought about it, yes, Louisa seemed a little flat, too. And when they sat down Dominic seemed to have inherited his seat at the head of the table, along with some kind of paterfamilias role. Indeed everyone’s roles seemed to have been reassigned because Louisa was sitting next to Benjy, which wasn’t the place she would have chosen, but she asked him what subjects he liked at school, he told her how much he hated maths and she showed him how to do long division on a napkin. Daisy and Melissa were huddling and Angela and Alex were remembering the disastrous holiday in Barmouth, the food poisoning, those people cut off by the tide and screaming for help. Dominic’s pie was good. He’d sculpted a little dog from the spare puff pastry in the centre of the glazed crust which Benjy was allowed to eat. And afterwards, over coffee, while Daisy and Alex washed up, Angela found herself next to Richard and decided on the spur of the moment to tell him about Karen. An exorcism of a kind. Because she had never even told him she was pregnant, and afterwards it had seemed too fragile a fact to share with someone who was almost a stranger. But she swerved at the last minute and heard herself saying, What do they do with dead bodies in hospital?

  They’re refrigerated, said Richard, then they’re released to funeral directors after any autopsy is done. Why do you want to know?

  What about a stillborn baby? said Angela. The seconds rocked back and forth like water against a dock wall.

  Depending on the length of gestation and the wishes of the parents it might be released to the funeral directors and given a funeral of some kind. He was holding a sugar cube so that it just touched the surface of his coffee, like Benjy did in cafés.

  And if not?

  It would be taken to a medical waste incinerator and burnt. He dropped the cube into the coffee. But this is a rather grisly subject.

  If he’d asked the question she would have told him everything, but he didn’t know what question to ask.

  Hang on to your horses, yelled the shrunken head. It’s going to be a bumpy ride. And the bus shot off into the night.

  Benjy was insistent and all the other suggestions were too violent or too scary or contained romance which Benjy vetoed strenuously, so they bowed to his choice and, loath as some of them were to admit it, there was a pears-and-custard cosiness to it. Spells and potions, the Care of Magical Creatures. Because, ultimately, the place itself is immaterial, Combray, Meryton, St Petersburg, so long as it’s over the hills and far away, the journey we once took with just a click of the fingers but which grows longer and steeper with the years.

  Hey, Tiger, said Dominic. Benjy had curled up with his head on his father’s lap. He was watching the film at an angle of ninety degrees, but he knew it so well he hardly needed to watch at all. You should go to bed.

  If only he could sleep here, like he did when he was little, the dance and crackle of the fire, familiar voices, the beasts at bay.

  Melissa turned the page and pressed it flat.

  The bullet entered Tapp’s chest, lifting him upwards and backwards. So many intense impressions were compressed into those two or three seconds that they felt like minutes. Tapp looked as if he were performing some kind of modern ballet. I remember with exquisite clarity, looking down and seeing a great tongue of red liquid arcing over the white tablecloth, thinking at first that it was Tapp’s blood, then realising that it was the raspberry sorbet which had been knocked out of Jocelyn’s hands.

  The effort has, however, done him good. He was never so resolute, never so strong, never so full of volcanic energy … But Daisy couldn’t read, didn’t want to read, didn’t want to be anywhere but here. She hadn’t felt this eagerness for life in a long time. She’d meant to bring Melissa into the fold. I get so fucking lonely. The harvest of souls. But she didn’t want to break the spell. Was it so wrong to have found a friend?

  Louisa washed her face and patted it dry with the blue towel. She opened the mirrored cabinet and when she closed it again he was standing in the doorway behind her.

  I’m really sorry.

  Sorry was cheap, as Mum used to say. Buyer’s remorse, soiled goods and all that. Well, I’m sorry, too. Now both of them had said it and had not meant it.

  Why didn’t you tell me before?

  She took her toothpaste out of the cupboard. And given you the chance to back out?

  I wouldn’t have backed out. Was this a lie?

  She brushed her teeth. Briefly he was another man looking at her. Other men. He felt dizzy. He closed his eyes. I feel like a little boy sometimes.

  But she didn’t want to be married to a little boy.

  Marja, Helmand. The sniper far back enough from the window to stop sun flaring on the rifle sight. Crack and kickback. A marine stumbles under the weight of his red buttonhole. Dawn light on wild horses in the Khentii Mountains. Huddersfield, brown sugar bubbling in a tarnished spoon. Turtles drown in oil. The purr of binary, a trillion ones and zeros. The swill of bonds and futures. Reckitt Benckiser, Smith and Nephew. Rifts and magma
chambers. Eyjafjallajökull smoking like a witch’s cauldron. Sleep shuffling the day’s events like a pack of cards. Cups and coins, the Juggler, the Traitor. Spearheads and farthingales smashed and scattered in the cities of the dead. The planet warming. Cadmium, arsenic, benzene. Baby, please. A ranch burns on the prairie. Brando and Hepburn pace their silver cages, over and over. Every mind at the centre of space and time. The fierce little star of now. Sparrows flying through the banqueting hall where you sit in the winter months to dine with your thanes and counsellors. A brief passage of warmth and light between darkness and darkness. The stepfather’s hand over the child’s mouth. Mein Irisch Kind, wo weilest du? A blue whale cruises the abyssal cold. Viperfish, fangtooth, gulper eel. A Burlington Northern pulls out of Fort Benton hauling hoppers of grain. Intercloud lightning over Budapest. The tide turning in the Thames. Arklow Surf to White Mountain, Cymbeline to Ford Jetty, vast Christmas trees of light above the black water. Vultures on a Tower of Silence. Creech Air Force Base, Nevada. A boy of twenty-three presses a button. Seven thousand miles away a Hellfire missile fizzes from the underside of a Predator drone. Three houses of stone and packed earth. A girl wakes and has no time to remember the dream about the birds.

  * * *

  Angela is standing in the kitchen. Moonblue dark. A shuddery jingle as the fridge motor cuts in. What woke her? Whose kitchen is this? The fear that has haunted her ever since her mother became ill, that she would go the same way. Names refusing to come. Lost objects. Keys, wallet. The mind’s ordinary stumbles magnified perhaps. But sometimes … this utter blankness. Terrified of the simplest questions. What year is this? What are your children’s names? She touches her own face but cannot remember what it looks like.

  Then Nebuchadnezzar the king was astonished, and rose up in haste, and spake, and said unto his counsellors, Did not we cast three men bound into the midst of the fire? They answered and said unto the king, True, O king.

  He answered and said, Lo, I see four men loose, walking in the midst of the fire, and they have no hurt; and the form of the fourth is like the Son of God.