The Red House (2 page)

Richard had remarried six months ago, acquiring a stepdaughter into the bargain. Angela hadn’t gone to the wedding. Edinburgh was a long way, it was term time and they’d never felt like brother and sister, just two people who spoke briefly on the phone every few weeks or so to manage the stages of their mother’s decline. She’d met Louisa and Melissa for the first time at the funeral. They looked as if they had been purchased from an exclusive catalog at some exorbitant price, flawless skin and matching black leather boots. The girl stared at her and didn’t look away when Angela caught her eye. Bobbed chestnut hair, black denim skirt almost but not quite too short for a funeral. So much sheen and sneer at sixteen.
Melissa’s directing a play at school. Midsummer Night’s Dream
.

Something slightly footballer’s wife about Louisa. Angela couldn’t picture her going to the theater or reading a serious book, couldn’t imagine the conversations she and Richard might have when they were alone. But his judgment of other people had always been a little wobbly. Ten years married to the Ginger Witch. The presents he bought for the kids when he last visited, so much effort aimed in the wrong direction. Benjy’s football annual, Daisy’s bracelet. She wondered if he was making a new version of the same mistake, whether she was simply not-Jennifer, and he was another rung on the social ladder.

I’m going to the loo
. Benjy stood up.
My bladder is so awesomely full
.

Don’t get lost
. She touched his sleeve.

You can’t get lost on a train
.

A sick pervert could strangle you
, said Alex,
and throw your body out of a window
.

I’ll punch him in the crutch
.

Crotch
, said Alex.

Critch, crotch, cratch …
sang Benjy as he made his way up the carriage.

Eventually we find that we no longer need silence. We no longer need solitude. We no longer even need words. We can make all our actions holy. We can cook a meal for our family and it becomes prayer. We can go for a walk in the park and it becomes prayer
.

Alex photographed a herd of cows. What was the point of being black and white, evolutionarily? He hated real violence. He could still hear the snap of Callum’s leg that night in Crouch End. He felt sick when he saw footage from Iraq or Afghanistan. He didn’t tell anyone about this. But Andy McNab tamed it by turning it into a cartoon. And now he was thinking about Melissa unzipping that black denim skirt. The word
unzipping
gave him an erection which he covered with the novel. But was it OK fancying your uncle’s stepdaughter? Some people married their cousins and that was acceptable, unless you both had recessive genes for something bad and your babies came out really fucked up. But girls who went to private school were secretly gagging for it, with their tans and their white knickers that smelt of fabric conditioner. Except she probably wouldn’t speak to him, would she, because girls only spoke to twats with floppy hair and skinny jeans. On the other hand, normal service was kind of suspended on holiday and maybe they’d be sharing a bathroom and he’d go in and open the shower cubicle door and squeeze her soapy tits so she moaned.

A man is trapped in a hot flat above the shipyard, caring for a wife who will live out her days in this bed, watching this television. Twin sisters are separated at seven weeks and know nothing of one another, only an absence that walks beside them always on the road. A girl is raped by her mother’s boyfriend. A child dies and doesn’t die.
Family
, that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.

And then there was her fourth child, the child no one else could see. Karen, her loved and secret ghost, stillborn all those years ago. Holoprosencephaly. Hox genes failing along the midline of the head. Her little monster, features melted into the center of her face. They’d told her not to look but she’d looked and screamed at them to take the thing away. Then in the small hours, while Dominic slept and the ward was still, she wanted that tiny damaged body in her arms again, because she could learn to love her, she really could, but the points had switched and Karen had swerved away into the parallel world she glimpsed sometimes from cars and trains, the spiderweb sheds and the Gypsy camps, the sidings and the breakers’ yards, the world she visited in dreams, stumbling through dog shit and nettles, the air treacly with heat, lured by a girl’s voice and the flash of a summer dress. And this coming Thursday would be Karen’s eighteenth birthday. Which was what she hated about the countryside, no distraction from the dirty messed-up workings of the heart.
You’ll love it
, Dominic had said.
Inbred locals surrounding the house at night with pitchforks and flaming brands
. Not understanding, in the way that he failed to understand so many things these days.

Dominic wiped the sandwich crumbs from his lip and looked over at Daisy, who smiled briefly before returning to her book. She was so much calmer these days, none of the unpredictable tears which spilled out of her last year making him feel clumsy and useless. It was bollocks, of course, the Jesus stuff, and some of the church people made his flesh crawl. Bad clothes and false cheer. But he was oddly proud, the strength of her conviction, the way she swam so doggedly against the current. If only her real friends hadn’t drifted away. But Alex wouldn’t look up however long you stared. If he was reading he was reading, if he was running he was running. He’d expected more from having a son. That Oedipal rage between two and four.
Stop hugging Mummy
. Then, from seven to ten, a golden time, filling a buried cashbox with baby teeth and Pokémon cards, camping
in the New Forest, that night the pony opened the zip of their tent and stole their biscuits. He taught Alex how to play the piano, theme tunes arranged in C major with a single finger in the left hand.
Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark
. But he grew bored of the piano and gave Benjy the key to the cashbox and went camping with his friends. Devon, the Peak District.

He wondered sometimes if he loved Daisy not because of the strength of her belief but because of her loneliness, the mess she was making of her life, the way it rhymed with his own.

Behind everything there is a house. Behind everything there is always a house, compared to which every other house is larger or colder or more luxurious. Cladding over thirties brick, a broken greenhouse, rhubarb and rusted cans of Castrol for the mower. At the far end you can peel back the corner of the chicken-wire fence and slip down into the cutting where the trains run to Sheffield every half hour. The tarry sleepers, the locked junction box where they keep the electricity. If you leave pennies on the rail the trains hammer them into long bronze tongues, the queen’s face flattened to nothing.

Pan back and you’re kneeling at the pond’s edge because your brother says there are tadpoles. You reach into the soup of stems and slime, he shoves you and you’re still screaming when you hit the surface. Your mouth fills with water. Fear and loneliness will always taste like this. You run up the garden, sodden, trailing weed, shouting,
Dad … Dad … Dad …
And you can see him standing at the kitchen door, but he starts to evaporate as you reach the cracked patio, thinning in waves like Captain Kirk in the transporter room, that same high buzzing sound, and the door is empty, and the kitchen is empty, and the house is empty and you realize he’s never coming back.

Have you not got anything else to read?
asked Angela.

Yep
, said Daisy,
but right now this is the book I would like to read if that’s all right by you
.

There’s no need to be sarcastic
.

Ladies …
said Alex, which would have escalated the row to flashpoint if they hadn’t been interrupted by Benjy running down the carriage and pinballing off the seat backs. He’d been standing in the toilet when he remembered the werewolf from the Queen Victoria episode of
Doctor Who
. Eyes like black billiard balls, the heat of its breath on his neck. He squirreled himself under Dad’s arm and rubbed the silky cuff of Dad’s special shirt against his upper lip. Dad said,
You all right, Captain?
, and he said,
Yeah
, because he was now, so he took out his Natural History Museum notebook and the pen that wrote in eight colors and drew the zombies.

When he reentered the world they were changing trains at high speed, sprinting to another platform to catch a connecting train which left in two minutes. Halfway across the footbridge he remembered that he’d forgotten to pick up the metal thing.
What metal thing?
said Mum.
The metal thing
, he said, because he hadn’t given it a name. It was a hinge from a briefcase and later on Mum would call it
a piece of rubbish
but he loved the strength of the spring and the smell it left on his fingers.

Dad said,
I’ll get it
because when he was a child he kept a horse’s tooth in a Golden Virginia tobacco tin, and Mum said,
For Christ’s sake
. But Dad came back carrying the metal thing with seconds to spare and gave it to Benjy and said,
Guard it with your life
. And as they were pulling out of the station Benjy saw an old lady with long gray hair being arrested by two policemen in fluorescent-yellow jackets. One of the policemen had a gun. Then there was another train traveling beside them at almost exactly the same speed and Benjy remembered the story about Albert Einstein doing a thought experiment, sitting on a tram in Vienna going at the speed of light and shining a torch straight ahead so the light just sat there like candyfloss.

You hate Richard because he swans around his spacious Georgian apartment on Moray Place four hundred miles away while you perch on that scuffed olive chair listening to Mum roar in the cage of her
broken mind.
The nurses burn my hands. There was an air raid last night
. You hate him because he pays for all of it, the long lawn, the low-rent cabaret on Friday nights,
Magic Memories: The Stars of Yesteryear
. You hate him for marrying that woman who expected your children to eat lamb curry and forced you to stay in a hotel. You hate him for replacing her so efficiently, as if an event which destroyed other people’s lives were merely one more medical procedure, the tumor sliced out, wound stitched and swabbed. You hate him because he is the prodigal son.
When will Richard come to see me? Do you know Richard? He’s such a lovely boy
.

In spite of which, deep down, you like being the good child, the one who cares. Deep down you are still waiting for a definitive judgment in which you are finally raised above your relentlessly achieving brother, though the only person who could make that kind of judgment was drifting in and out of their final sleep, the mask misting and clearing, the low hiss of the cylinder under the bed. And then they were gone.

M6 southbound, the sprawl of Birmingham finally behind them. Richard dropped a gear and eased the Mercedes round a Belgian chemical tanker.
FRANKLEY SERVICES 2 MILES
. He imagined pulling over in the corner of the car park to watch Louisa sleeping, that spill of butter-colored hair, the pink of her ear, the mystery of it, why a man was aroused by the sight of one woman and not another, something deep in the brain stem like a sweet tooth or a fear of snakes. He looked in the rearview mirror. Melissa was listening to her iPod. She gave him a deadpan comedy wave. He slid the Eliot Gardiner
Dido and Aeneas
into the CD player and turned up the volume.

Melissa stared out of the window and pictured herself in a film. She was walking across a cobbled square. Pigeons, cathedral. She was wearing the red leather jacket Dad had bought her in Madrid. Fifteen
years old. She walked into that room, heads turned and suddenly she understood.

But they’d want her to be friends with the girl, wouldn’t they, just because they were the same age. Like Mum wanted to be friends with some woman on the till in Tesco’s because they were both forty-four. The girl could have made herself look all right but she hadn’t got a clue. Maybe she was a lesbian. Seven days in the countryside with someone else’s relatives.
It’s a big thing for Richard
. Because keeping Richard happy was obviously their Function in Life. Right.

Shake the cloud from off your brow
,

Fate your wishes does allow;

Empires growing
,

Pleasures flowing
,

Fortune smiles and so should you
.

Some idiot came past on a motorbike at Mach 4. Richard pictured a slick of spilt oil, sparks fantailing from the sliding tank, massive head trauma and the parents agreeing to the transplant of all the major organs so that some good might come of a short life so cheaply spent, though Sod’s Law would doubtless apply and some poor bastard would spend the next thirty years emptying his catheter bag and wiping scrambled egg off his chin.