The Red House (12 page)

Melissa walked for twenty minutes, then her bag started to feel really heavy and there was no way she was turning back so she stuck her thumb out hoping an actual human being stopped and not some weird inbred rapist farmer. A tractor came past, a post office van, a removals lorry, a rusty Datsun, then a polished black Alfa Romeo slowed down and pulled over.
Where are you going?
The woman was wearing leather trousers and spoke with a Spanish accent, which was totally not what Melissa was expecting.

I’ll go anywhere
, said Melissa, as if she were in a film.

Throw your bag into the backseat
.

Stuck on the dashboard there was a toy camel with rubber legs which wobbled when the car went round corners. There was a diamanté cat collar in the footwell.
So …
The woman lit a cigarette.
Are you running away from home?

But when we were as far away as a man can shout, pushing rapidly onward, the Sirens saw our speeding ship and sang their high songs: “Come here, famous Odysseus, great glory of the Achaeans, tie up your ship and listen to our voices, for no one has ever rowed past this island in his black ship without listening to our honeyed mouths …”

Angela walked into the kitchen and found Louisa making coffee and toast. A sudden memory of the shared house at college. Dahl and joss sticks, Carol getting scabies at the hostel.
Are you all right?

Of course
, said Louisa.
Why?

Last night. Richard and Melissa
.

It was nothing
.

No fun stuck in the middle
.

Really, it was nothing
.

Neither of them were on their best behavior though
. On what planet was this a good thing to say?

Louisa turned and held Angela’s eye.
Richard is a good man
.

I wasn’t saying that
. But she was saying precisely that, wasn’t she.

Louisa fitted the plunger into the mouth of the jug.
Melissa is a good person, too
.

I know she is
. Another lie.

There are two slices in the toaster if you want
. Louisa picked up the cafetière and swept out.

Was it jealousy, perhaps, this childish desire to drive a little wedge
between the two of them, the knowledge that they possessed something she and Dominic had let slip through their fingers?

A sudden memory of 92 Hensham Lane. Donny getting drunk one night and cutting the lawn with a pair of scissors for a bet. That German girl putting a padlock on her room. Angela remembered the day she and Dominic moved into their own flat. There were earwigs in the bread bin and someone was playing
London Calling
at stadium volume upstairs, but it was theirs, and she could feel the relief even now, nearly thirty years later.

Dominic ate a spoonful of Shreddies.
“We believe this to be a tragic case of mistaken identity. We are calling on everyone in the local community to come forward with any information.”
Crack and genocide, then you turned the page and it was cloned sheep and solar power, everything going to hell in a handcart, and heaven just around the corner. It all leveled out in the end. People stopped smoking and got fat. Polio was cured and AIDS killed millions in Africa. When was the Golden Age, anyway? Child prostitution, gin epidemics, the Crusades … Alex sat down beside him with a bowl of Sugar Puffs and a mug of tea.
How was the run?

Good. Yeh, it was good
.

Don’t you ever just want to lie in bed?

Of course. But you can’t, can you
.

He hadn’t crashed the car or got a girl pregnant, for which they should be thankful, but there was a distance. He thought at first it was genetic, the same self-containment he saw in Richard. But maybe it was just part of being a teenager.
Your job is to be completely and utterly in the wrong
. They didn’t need you in the end, generations like leaves, the young taking over a world you no longer really cared for.

All those photographs of Andrew in Amy’s house. Hospitalized seven times with asthma and chest infections. He was moved, at first, by the care with which Amy looked after him, and it was only gradually that he came to resent the way that this young man whom he’d
never met intruded upon their most private moments and began to suspect that Andrew’s continual fallings-out with bosses, flatmates and girlfriends were not a symptom of his medical condition but scenes in a long drama of interdependence beside which Dominic was only a sideshow.

Incidentally
, said Alex,
I think I saw Melissa hitting the road
.

Richard’s father had died of testicular cancer at the age of forty. Richard was eight, Angela nine. It was 1972. Hewlett-Packard was making the first pocket calculator and Eugene Cernan was making the last moonwalk. His father was working for the police firearms unit at the time and Richard believed for some years that he had been killed during a shoot-out, though whether this was a lie his mother had concocted or one he had concocted himself and which his mother did not contradict, he never knew.

He still has his scrapbook of news clippings from that year,
1972
in silver foil on the front cover. Vietnam, Baader-Meinhof, Watergate. His father’s death goes unrecorded. Not even a pause in the weekly entries, because it was not his father’s death which divided his childhood in two, not directly.

His parents drank regularly, at home, in restaurants, at the squash club, so perhaps it didn’t seem unusual at first, but by the time he was ten he knew that other children’s mothers did not open a bottle of sherry in the afternoon and finish it before bedtime. He and Angela never discussed it. What they discussed was the cleaning and the washing up and the household bills that fell increasingly to them to sort out. Within a couple of years he was signing his mother’s name perfectly on checks, and even now when he loses the car keys he finds himself looking in the places where he hid them from his mother thirty years ago, the washing machine, the sugar jar. He was nervous of inviting friends to his house and equally nervous at their houses, wondering what might be happening at home, so that school rapidly became the refuge where the tasks were straight-forward and the rewards immediate. Geometrical diagrams. The House of Hanover. He regularly
cooked for his mother, put her to bed, bathed her sometimes and the more intimate the task, the more she resented the intrusion. At least when she lashed out she was drunk and uncoordinated and he was able to avoid the second blow.

Melissa’s gone
. It was Louisa, standing behind his shoulder.

What do you mean, gone?

She’s taken her bag with all her stuff. Alex thinks he saw her walking down the road
.

So she hasn’t been abducted
.

I’m being serious
.

So am I
. Professional habit. Consider all possibilities. He stood up.
Let’s go inside and gather some information
.

Alex came downstairs waving Louisa’s mobile as they stepped through the front door.
You can get a couple of bars on Vodafone in our room when the wind’s in the right direction
. He handed it back.
I left a message
.

Everyone had gathered in the dining room. The scene struck Richard as a little overdramatic.
She vanishes once a week at home
.

But we’re in the middle of nowhere
, said Louisa.

Which is a lot safer than a city center on a Friday night
. Richard’s voice was noticeably slower and softer than usual.
She’ll be sitting in a café somewhere, enjoying the fact that we’re panicking. If we ring the police they’ll laugh and tell us to call back tomorrow
. Louisa seemed short of breath. He rubbed her arm.
She’ll let us worry for a while, then she’ll get in touch
.

Angela was thinking,
It’s your fault
, and trying hard not to say so, but Dominic was impressed. How did Richard reassure everyone despite knowing nothing? Did all doctors do this?

If we haven’t heard anything
, said Richard,
we’ll ring her from Raglan
.

OK
, said Louisa,
OK
.

Except that she wasn’t OK, thought Angela, she was simply obeying orders, like a dog with a stern owner.

Benjy stood on the flagstones of the utility space between the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom. It contained a chest freezer, a dishwasher and a deep china sink set into a long wooden draining board as thick as an old Bible. The chest freezer was made by Indesit. He picked up a battered octagonal tin from the windowsill. On the lid it said
DISHWASHER TABLETS
in Dymo tape and bore an orange sticker reading
IF INGESTED SEEK MEDICAL ATTENTION
. The tin rattled as he turned it over. On the bottom the label said
PRALINE CLUSTER
and
COFFEE CREAM
and
TURKISH DELIGHT
.

Angela announced that she’d skip the castle and take the bus into Hay.
There’s a bus?
Richard had said incredulously.
Possibly pulled by cows
, she’d replied, a little too tartly and there was a sudden chill in the room. Daisy said, softly,
I’ll go with Mum
, because she wasn’t any keener on Richard’s company than Mum was, which meant that Dominic had to go to Raglan to accompany Benjy who never knowingly turned down a castle.

So Angela and Daisy found themselves walking down the hill to the little stone bridge, just the scuff of their boots and the rustle of their waterproofs. A dirty white horse observed them from behind a gate. Angela was angry with Daisy for hijacking her solitary expedition and simultaneously relieved that she wasn’t going on her own. So much of one’s self depended on the green vase and the rotary washing line that turned in the wind and she was slipping her moorings a little. Daisy liked silence but Angela was used to the clatter and echo of four hundred children in one building. Richard’s Mercedes passed them en route to Raglan, Dominic, Alex and Benjy waving like passengers on a steam train.

Where do you think Melissa is?
asked Daisy.

But Angela had forgotten about Melissa completely.

Melissa stood on the corner, paralyzed. Where the fuck was she going to go? Dad wasn’t going to fork out for a plane ticket to France
without an explanation. Donna in Stirling? She looked around. A shop selling wind chimes. A shop selling green Wellingtons and crappy silk scarves like the queen wore when she took the corgis out for a shit. Scabby public toilets. People from London pretending to enjoy the countryside. She checked her wallet: £22.68 and a debit card that might very well get swallowed by the machine on the far side of the road. God, she was hungry.

Do you think Benjy’s OK?
asked Daisy.

I think Benjy’s fine
, said Angela.

He seems lonely
.

He’s good at being on his own
, said Angela. The little bus growled up a steep and sudden incline. A tiny church with a garden shed for a tower. A woman hosing a Land Rover down in a muddy yard.
If you can’t be alone you join a gang, you drink instead of going home, you marry the first person who comes along because you’re scared of going back to an empty house
.

Daisy thought of her mother as stupid. What other reason could there be for the constant friction? Then she said something like this and Daisy remembered that she was a good teacher, and what Daisy felt wasn’t admiration or guilt but fear, because if her mother was in the right then she was in the wrong.

The bus idled while a red Transit reversed into a driveway for them to squeeze past. Farmhouses with roses and swing seats. Farmhouses with chained-up dogs and rusted cars. A hunchbacked woman at the front of the bus, so old and ragged she must surely have come from a gingerbread cottage up in the hills.