The Red House (14 page)

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 it because that’s what you did on holiday, bought stuff you didn’t need. Love spoons 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 an 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 realized 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 farther 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 meters 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 onto places he would rather be but onto 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 organize. 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 backseat 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 each other’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 Angela and Richard look up and Melissa and Daisy are visibly
together
which catches everyone by surprise and Melissa is clearly not planning to apologize or explain if she can possibly help it, and Angela realizes the whole thing is one long performance. Melissa says,
I’m going to freshen up
and sweeps stairward, 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 color of margarine and waxy under his fingers. It makes him think of wood lice and Play-Doh and paper planes.
En garde
. Benjy dies four times, Dominic five. Afterward they lie on
the damp grass looking at the featureless gray 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 anymore, 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
.

Benjy 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 ape-shit, punching Cally, pulling her hair. So it’s knives out and Cally sends the picture to Uncle Tom Cobbley and all
.

I’m not surprised she 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 toward the house.

Everything in the garden became suddenly vivid as if some general membrane had been peeled away. The boot scraper, 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.

Ian’s been offered four hundred thousand for the business
, said Louisa.

So he’d be an idiot not to take it
.