The Red House (17 page)

I can add you in later
, said Alex.
Like the reserve goalkeeper
. She had no idea what he was talking about, but she ran a quick mental check of her outfit. Ugg boots, patterned tights under denim shorts, lumberjack shirt … She didn’t know whether to be flattered or disgusted but it seemed like the wrong time to piss off yet another person.
Smile
. Click.
Turn toward the house
. Click. She knew she looked good. Her only worry sometimes was that she didn’t look different enough, that people mistook her for part of a crowd. She’d see a girl in patterned Doc Martens or with a dyed red pixie cut and wish she had the balls. Click.
Now sit on the wall
. Like some sleazy old guy. Click. You should be a model, love. Give us some arse.
I think we’re finished now
.

Cheers
, said Alex.
That’s great
.

Except he probably wouldn’t wank over the photo because he was becoming aware of a nastiness in Melissa that clung to her even in his sexual fantasies, though it didn’t matter now because he fancied Louisa instead, and he was proud of the fact that his taste was maturing.

It’s not far
. Richard leans over the Ordnance Survey as if he is planning an aerial assault on northern France.
A couple of miles at most
.

Louisa brushes toast crumbs from her sweater.
Those little brown lines are very close together
.

Daisy is sitting in the window seat reading
Dracula (We need have no secrets amongst us. Working together and with absolute trust, we can surely be stronger than if some of us were in the dark)
.

Angela appears in the kitchen doorway.
Any more sandwich orders? I’ve got mozzarella and tomato, cheddar and pickle, jam, ham …

Can you bring those pears and bananas?

Benjy enters, absentmindedly singing “Whip-Crack-Away!”

Did you flush the toilet?

He turns sullenly and retraces his steps.

Angela hasn’t walked more than a mile in the last ten years but she doesn’t want to abandon ship for a second day running and she is determined to prove Dominic wrong, to be a real part of the family.

Alex is reading
The Observer
sports section
(Bowyer received a gift of a cross inside the ten-yard box but headed it wide)
.

Distantly, the toilet flushes.

Where’s Melissa?
Richard finds himself worrying about her in a way that he hasn’t done before. These vague thoughts of fatherhood, perhaps.
She hasn’t made a second bid for freedom, has she?

She’s upstairs
, says Alex.
Beautifying herself
. It’s something his father might say.

Louisa thinks about going into the kitchen to help out but she is still uneasy around Angela. She still can’t picture her as a teacher. She had expected more warmth, more openness.

Daisy turns the page
(When the terrible story of Lucy’s death, and all that followed, was done, I lay back in my chair powerless)
.

Dominic looks at Benjy’s feet.
You are not walking up that hill in sandals
.

Click. Everyone briefly gathered and posed and smiling at their future selves. Beaches and cathedrals, bumper cars and birthday parties, glasses raised around a dining table. Each picture a little pause between events. No tantrums, no illness, no bad news, all the big stuff happening before and after and in between. The true magic happening only when the lesser magic fails, the ghost daughter who moved during the exposure, her face unreadable but more alive than all her frozen family. Double exposures, as if a little strip of time had been folded back on itself. Scratches and sun flares. Photos torn postdivorce, faces scratched out or Biroed over. The camera telling the truth only when something slips through its silver fingers.

If we could rest for a bit longer
. Angela’s lack of fitness scared her. Luminous protozoa swam in her eyes.

Richard clicked his phone off and shook his head wearily.
You’d think at twenty-five you could arrange for someone to cover for you when you were on holiday. Actual human lives in their hands. I despair sometimes
.

Can we have a snack?
asked Benjy.

You can have a banana
.

But that’s only fruit
.

Monkeys like them
.

Monkeys eat fleas
.

Cool gray air. Angela looked back down the hill toward the shrunken house. So much effort to get, what, a hundred feet up? Two hundred? It made you realize that we lived on the surface of a planet, moving backward and forward and round in circles, but forever trapped between earth and sky. She pictured the view as a papier-mâché model in the school hall. Gold Book for Seacole Class. She thought of the kids who’d never actually seen the countryside. Kaylee, Milo. Mikela’s dad found the whole countryside thing utterly perplexing.
“Let’s go for a nice walk,” it should be written on the Union Jack
. Though the only time she and
Dominic had stayed in a National Trust cottage it had slave-trade prints on the walls. Black men in chains being canoed out to a waiting ship.

Daisy sat herself down beside Melissa and offered her the second half of her coffee.
Sorry about yesterday
. She wanted to tell Melissa about Lauren, but it was too long a story and she didn’t want to give her any leverage. Melissa was saying nothing. Daisy got to her feet. Forgiven or not, she felt lighter for having apologized.

Do you have lots of friends?

Daisy wondered if Melissa was being sarcastic.

You know, like, other Christians?

We are allowed to have friends who aren’t Christians
.

Sorry, that was stupid
.

Though Dad was right, her old friends had indeed drifted away, and what had seemed at first a kind of cleansing left a hole more painful than she’d expected. She knew it had been there all the time, that her friends had been a bandage over a wound she was now able to heal, but still she couldn’t bring herself to answer the question, so she flipped it round.
You must have loads of friends
.

Melissa just laughed.
I fucking hate all of them
. She took a deep breath and turned to Daisy.
Sorry about all the swearing
.

We’re allowed to swear, too
. Though Tim had told her off for saying
Shit
.

I get so fucking lonely
. A brief pause in the turning of the world.
There I go again. Fuck-fuck-fuckity-fuck
. She squeezed her eyes shut but couldn’t stop the tears.

OK, people
, said Dominic,
let’s saddle up and move out
.

Daisy gazed at the ground between her feet. A little archipelago of yellow moss on a speckled gray stone.

Are you coming or not?
shouted Dominic.

Melissa’s got a splinter. We’ll catch you up
. She watched her mother get to her feet and realized that she was in some pain.

Thanks
, said Melissa quietly.

New Leaves split from the Vineyard church in 1999. Tim and Lesley Canning were feeling increasingly alienated by the direction the church was taking. Rock music, the Toronto Blessing, speaking in tongues. They held meetings in their kitchen, spreading out to other prayerhouses as the membership grew, then taking out a lease on a hall vacated by a judo club. They were near the university and provided a safe harbor for young people who were often a very long way from home. Singapore, Uganda, the Philippines. They had a stall at the Freshers’ Fair and ran weekly Frisbee and doughnut afternoons during the summer. Most church members went out onto Lever Street for a couple of hours every week as part of the Healing Project. Tim had always disliked banner-waving street evangelism, for surely the Lord saved souls not crowds, so they struck up conversations with people who seemed lonely or broken in some way, many of whom were desperate for help. They formed a circle and prayed and often you could feel the presence of Jesus wheeling around that ring of hands like electricity. One man’s cancer went into remission. A man possessed by demons was exorcised and no longer heard voices in his head.

Daisy found it preposterous at first, but the preposterousness would later become part of the appeal, the sheer distance between the church and the world which had served her so poorly. She accepted the invitation to that first service as proof of her own broad-mindedness and needed a great deal of it to get through the sixty minutes. Embarrassment, mostly, at the way these people spoke and sang like overexcited children, and mild disgust when everyone was invited to hug their neighbor and she found herself briefly in the arms of a man who, frankly, smelled. Which would have been her remaining impression had not her beeline to the door been intercepted by a tiny Indian woman with bangles and a surprisingly red dress and a smile which seemed to Daisy to be the only genuine thing she had experienced since her arrival. She held out her hand.
Anushka. You must be Daisy
.

I’ve done bad things
. They were sitting apart from the others, far enough away to feel private but near enough to prevent Richard shouting or storming off. That bell-jar feeling, everything muffled far off. She really did think she might vomit.

Are we talking about a criminal record of some kind?
He laughed, not hearing the crack in her voice.

No, not that
.

He heard it now, but didn’t think of Louisa as someone who had done anything of great significance, either good or bad, rather as someone who had put herself at the service of others so that they could do things of significance.
Tell me
.

She closed her eyes. There was no way back.
After Craig and I split up I slept with a lot of men
.

How many?
The doctor talking.