The Red House Page 9

  Dominic wondered if he could tell Richard about Amy, but he didn’t know whether clinical detachment would win out over fraternal loyalty.

  Plus, Richard laughed, she was a very determined woman who was used to getting what she wanted.

  Dominic had met Jennifer only twice, she had no small talk and she watched the children the way a snake might watch a cat. Yet if she had given him her undivided attention? If she had wanted him …? Benjy appeared out of nowhere and tugged at his sleeve. Can we go now?

  Do you remember that scary German woman? said Daisy. Or maybe she was Dutch. The one who used to throw her son into the water and shout, ‘Schwim! Schwim!’

  You and Alex had a race.

  And I won.

  And he never swam again. Men. Honestly. Angela laughed. What was it? The carnival release of holiday? Being out of habit’s gravity? Why could they not do this at home?

  They had this amazing toaster. At the hotel.

  I’m not sure I remember the actual buffet details.

  Benjy was totally in love with it. You put the bread on this conveyor belt and it came out the other side toasted. He called it the Wallace and Gromit toaster. He must have had, like, ten slices every morning.

  She glanced over Daisy’s shoulder … Bandits at nine o’clock. Daisy turned round. Melissa, in the window seat of the café on the far side of the road, something hunched and beaten about her.

  Daisy said, I’m going to talk to her.

  What? Now? Had Daisy not noticed? Their two lives were changing course right now.

  Perhaps you should give Louisa a ring, said Daisy, setting off across the road because her mother had become simply her mother again, the person you came back to after the adventure.

  Please? said Benjy, holding up a short wooden sword with a handguard of plaited rope.

  Benjy. Dominic rubbed his eyes. You’ve already got six of them.

  I’ve got five and they’re different. He had two broadswords, a katana, a cutlass and a dagger, whereas this was a gladius for stabbing in close combat with a groove down the centre of the blade to let air into the wound so you could easily pull it out without a sucky vacuum holding it in.

  It’s the acquisition, isn’t it? Richard was holding a hardback book about the castle. Don’t you remember? He had slipped into a more casual register as if the Jennifer conversation had made them friends. The football cards which came with chewing gum? A part of you knew it was going to be another Peter Shilton, but that didn’t matter.

  You promised, said Benjy. You said I’d get £10 holiday money.

  I know, but … Ten pounds was a lot of money. Why don’t you wait for a few days and then decide what you want to spend it on?

  On the far side of the window Louisa was examining the ground in front of her feet and hugging her coat tight around her.

  But we won’t come back here again. Ever. Benjy was desperate now.

  He wanted to say that no means no, but you couldn’t say that these days. You had to be friends with your children. He squatted. You know what always happens. You’ll go into another gift shop tomorrow or the day after …

  I’ll get it for you, said Richard. My holiday present.

  Dominic’s phone went off. The first ten bars of ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee’. He fished it out of his pocket. Richard was handing the sword to the woman behind the till. Hello?

  Panic over. It was Angela. We found Melissa in a café.

  He felt a vague disappointment. If she’d been murdered they could all go home. I’ll pass on the good news. Though when he did this Richard simply said Excellent, showing neither surprise nor relief so that Dominic wondered for a moment if you could shape the future by predicting things with sufficient confidence.

  Thank you, Uncle Richard, said Benjy.

  You’re welcome.

  And he was off, through the glass door and out into the sunlight of the car park, thrusting and parrying. Oof …! Yah …!

  Melissa was listening to Cally’s phone ring at the far end when she saw Daisy come in. She was annoyed and relieved at the same time. She hung up.

  Daisy sauntered over. I’m going to get a coffee. Do you want anything to eat or a drink? Super casual, like they were still back at the house. She should have left more theatrically, shouldn’t she? A flapjack would be good. She’d babysat a mug of cold tea for the last hour. And a black coffee.

  She watched Daisy walk over to the counter. The steely thing made her uneasy. She had absolutely no idea what Daisy was thinking or feeling or planning. There were Christians at school but they kept their heads down, whereas Daisy … She wasn’t a moose either, she hadn’t got a big arse or a weird face. She knew it, too, something about the way she carried herself, deliberately choosing to make herself look shit, a provocation, almost.

  Daisy returned to the table with two black coffees and two flapjacks. They always put the napkin under the food. Which misses the point, don’t you think? Like she was thirty-five. How are you doing?

  I’m dandy. Just dandy.

  And how’s Ian McEwan?

  Melissa thought Daisy was talking about a real person until she remembered the closed novel lying under her hand. It’s OK. They were playing a game, but it was against the rules to say so. We’re doing it at school.

  I’m reading about vampires.

  Melissa took a swig of coffee and relaxed a little. Twilight?

  Daisy took Dracula out of her bag. Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to do some work for a mysterious count and it all kind of goes downhill from then on.

  OK, said Melissa, carefully.

  Except that Daisy wasn’t playing a game. This was serious. Usually she became tongue-tied and foolish when she wanted someone to like her, but with Melissa … Was this a kind of acting, too? Putting on your best self and coming thrillingly alive? Was this the Holy Spirit? God be in my mouth, and in my speaking. Sorry about Alex.

  Sorry in what way?

  The slobbering.

  Oh, I think I can handle Alex. Melissa wondered if she could make Daisy a sidekick for a few days. That would throw Mum and Richard. Her phone vibrated. CALLY. They watched it tango across the table. She looked at Daisy. What was her weak point? It wasn’t the religion, was it. But that first night, the way Angela reached across to stop her saying grace … Your mum thinks you’re stupid, doesn’t she?

  We don’t exactly see eye to eye.

  Your dad seems OK, but your mum … Is she, like, really unhappy or something?

  That’s exactly it. Because Melissa was right, and no one else said it, did they? She doesn’t enjoy things, she doesn’t get excited. She bit off a piece of flapjack. Your mum seems pretty happy.

  I’ll give it two years.

  Yeh?

  Tell me one thing they’ve got in common.

  Daisy laughed. No one said this either. So … are you still running away, or are you coming back?

  Melissa looked at her. Crazy hazy Daisy.

  Daisy felt as if she was in a film. Something hypnotic about that gaze. The snake in The Jungle Book.

  What do you think I should do? asked Melissa.

  I think you should come back.

  Then I shall come back.

  Angela finished her second Twix and put the scrunched wrapper into her pocket. Little canvases of dancing naked women, sheep made of welded nails. She wanted to buy the big bowl with ducks on because that’s what you did on holiday, bought stuff you didn’t need. Lovespoons and wall plates. Except they couldn’t afford it now. They’d stopped talking about money. He was sane again. Don’t look a gift horse. Five years of mortgage left, assuming they caught up with the payments. Then she could buy sheep made of welded nails. She tilted her head, as if taste were simply a matter of angle, but all she could think was, I like the ducks.

  The china tramp. The Pineapple. She’d got it completely wrong. It wasn’t her house, was it? Like stepping out of a plane. It was Juliette’s house. She walked to the little wall and sat down beside a
n elderly couple eating cornets. She felt light-headed and shaky. It was Juliette’s dad who played Oscar Peterson. She tried to remember what music her father played, tried to remember her own bedroom. She realised for the first time that her parents had died taking secrets with them. Where was Juliette now? New Zealand? Dead? The pennies, the train to Sheffield, that was home, yes. But the doorway from which her father was always vanishing, what was in there? If only she could get closer and see into the dark.

  She needed to tell someone, she needed to tell Daisy, and in her untethered state of mind it seemed entirely natural that the thought itself should conjure her daughter into being fifty yards further up the high street, but she was shoulder to shoulder with Melissa and they were laughing and Angela felt as if she had been slapped.

  Benjy loves being in the countryside, not so much the actual contents thereof, horses, windmills, big sticks, panoramas, more the absence of those things which press upon him so insistently at home. He occupies, still, a little circle of attention, no more than eight metres in diameter at most. If stuff happens beyond this perimeter he simply doesn’t notice unless it involves explosions or his name being yelled angrily. At home, in school, on the streets between and around the two, the world is constantly catching him by surprise, teachers, older boys, drunk people on the street all suddenly appearing in front of him so that his most-used facial expression is one of puzzled shock. But in the countryside things are less important and happen more slowly and you know pretty much exactly who might or might not appear in front of you. And his hunger for this calm is so strong that he keeps a little row of postcards along his shelf at home. Buttermere, Loch Ness, Dartmoor. Not so much windows on to places he would rather be but on to ways he would like to feel.

  Those first five years with Dominic were the first sustained happiness she had ever experienced. She worked in a travel agency, he played in two jazz groups and taught piano to private pupils. She can recall very little of what they did together, no romantic weeks in Seville, no snowed-in Christmases, finds it hard now to picture them doing anything together that isn’t recorded in a photo album somewhere, but that was the point, the ease of it, finally not needing to notice everything. Twenty-four years old and she was off duty at long bloody last. And nowadays when she thinks about her marriage, this is what depresses her, that she is back on duty again. Has Dominic changed? Or is his blankness precisely what she once found so consoling? She doesn’t mind the lack of love, doesn’t mind the lack of physical affection, doesn’t even mind the arguments. She wants simply to let go for once, wants not to have to think and plan and remember and organise. Cows like toy cows on the far hill. When she imagines the future, when she imagines the children leaving home, the truth is that she’s on her own. That dusty pink house sitting up there squeezed into the edge of the wood, for example, a little dilapidated. She can imagine living there, she can imagine it so vividly that it is like a taste in her mouth. Butterscotch. Marmalade. Job at a village school somewhere nearby. Tidy house, little garden, one day blissfully identical to the next and only herself to please.

  Daisy and Melissa are sitting in the back seat of the bus talking about Juno and Pete Doherty and Justin Bieber and the kid on crutches at Daisy’s school. Angela sits five rows forward feeling abandoned and petty for feeling abandoned, trying to read an article about the possibility of a coalition but being led astray by an interview with Gemma Arterton (they made a Lego figure of me).

  The walk from the bus stop is twenty-five minutes and the girls chat the whole way, or seem content in one another’s silent company while Angela trails behind. She catches herself thinking Melissa is Karen. She wonders what Karen is like now, what Karen might be like now. Another Daisy but with Melissa’s confidence, perhaps, her physical ease. She remembers that line from the Year 12 poetry project. When I look ahead up the white road there is always another who walks beside you. Or something like that. Phantoms and guardian angels, like those people in the Twin Towers, trapped in a smoke-filled stairwell. Someone takes their hand and says, Don’t be afraid, and they walk through the flames and find themselves alone and safe.

  She forgets completely about Melissa’s disappearance until they walk into the dining room and Alex and Louisa and Richard look up and Melissa and Daisy are visibly together which catches everyone by surprise and Melissa is clearly not planning to apologise or explain if she can possibly help it, and Angela realises the whole thing is one long performance. Melissa says, I’m going to freshen up and sweeps stairwards, bag over her shoulder and Angela can see Richard biting his tongue very hard.

  Dominic and Benjy go outside and sit together on the rusted roller beside the woodshed and Benjy uses Dominic’s Leatherman to whittle a stick. The knife is unwieldy and Benjy is ham-fisted but it’s a good stick because Benjy is an expert in these matters (Dominic will let him have his own penknife next birthday), neither too green so that the shaft is whippy nor too rotten so the wood crumbles. Dominic lets him do it without offering to take over, because he’s not a bad father. Indeed he’s able to enter Benjy’s world in a way that no one else in the family can, perhaps because the adult world holds him in a weaker grip, perhaps because there is a part of him which has never really grown up. And now Benjy has finished making the sword, stripping the bark and sharpening the point. There you are. Dominic takes it. The naked wood is the colour of margarine and waxy under his fingers. It makes him think of woodlice and Play-Doh and paper planes. En garde. Benjy dies four times, Dominic five. Afterwards they lie on the damp grass looking at the featureless grey sky because this is how Benjy likes to talk sometimes. I’ve been thinking about Granny.

  In what way have you been thinking about Granny?

  Because you said it was a good thing she died.

  She wasn’t really Granny any more, was she?

  She called him the little boy, but he liked Mum explaining who he was each time. He also liked the photo of the cocker spaniel and the cogs of the carriage clock moving silently in their glass box and the biscuits the nurses brought round on a trolley at four o’clock. I see her at night sometimes.

  You dream about her?

  Yes, it was a dream, Benjy supposed. But she’s standing in my room.

  Are you worried that she might not be dead?

  Is that possible?

  No, it’s not possible.

  He thought about Mum and Dad dying and being looked after by strangers and it was like someone standing on his chest. He rubbed the cuff of Dad’s shirt but it wasn’t the special shirt. Then they heard Melissa shouting, Fuck off, which was the second rudest thing you could say, so it made him laugh and Dad got up and said, Hang on, Captain.

  Melissa patted the bench beside her.

  Daisy sat, obediently. You were telling me about Michelle.

  She’s a drama queen is what actually happened.

  Daisy had accepted a glass of wine so as not to seem like a prude and the world was a little fuzzed already. But still.

  We were at this party. It was a relief telling someone who would vanish in five days. Michelle disappears upstairs with this skanky guy none of us have seen before.

  That kind of party had always scared Daisy, the smell on your clothes the next day and something else that couldn’t be washed off.

  We go into the bedroom and she’s sucking this guy off. She paused to gauge Daisy’s reaction, but it was hard to read. He looks at us and smiles. You know, come in, why not, like he’s making a sandwich. I take a picture and Michelle doesn’t even notice because she’s, like, way too busy down there.

  Daisy was thinking about the giant cockroach at Benjy’s animal party, how the hard little segments of its body glowed like burnished antique wood.

  There’s some stupid argument a couple of days later and Cally grabs my phone and waves the picture in Michelle’s face. Michelle goes apeshit, punching Cally, pulling her hair. So it’s knives out and Cally sends the picture to Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

  I’m not surprised s
he tried to kill herself. Daisy felt soiled just hearing the story.

  Had Melissa heard right?

  That was a really horrible thing to do.

  Whoa there. Was this what she got in return for her friendship? She stood up. Well, you can fuck off, then, Miss Goody Two-Shoes. She flounced grandly towards the house.

  Everything in the garden became suddenly vivid as if some general membrane had been peeled away. The bootscraper, the ivy. Then Dad rose from behind the wall. Trouble at mill?

  Daisy felt as if she were broadcasting the story wordlessly. Like he’s making a sandwich.

  He sat down and put his arm around her. Hey.

  She’s a nasty person.

  Read all about it, said Dad. Do we need to take retaliatory action?

  No. She was returning slowly to herself. I think being Melissa is punishment enough.

  Benjy, you crouch down at the front, said Alex, like you’re holding the football.

  Perhaps you should take the apron off, said Louisa, but Richard liked the idea of being a modern man. The all-round provider. Where’s Melissa?

  Don’t worry, said Dominic. Alex can Photoshop her in later. Little square in the top right hand corner. Like the reserve goalkeeper.

  Which was good, thought Alex, because then he would have to take a picture of her on her own and you couldn’t wank over a photo that contained your parents. Hold still.

  People assumed Melissa was vegetarian out of cussedness, or maybe as an outlet for the empathy she didn’t expend on human beings, but it was sloppy thinking she hated. She cared little for the suffering of cattle or sheep but why eat them and not dogs? It wasn’t so much a belief as the obvious thing to do. She hated injustice without feeling much sympathy for those who had been treated unjustly. She thought that all drugs should be legal and that giving money to charity was pointless. And she liked the fact that these opinions made her distinctive and intelligent. In many respects she was like her father. Not the dirt under his nails, not the prickly pride in his under-education but the way his sense of self depended so much on other people being in the wrong.