The Red House (28 page)

I’ll talk to her
. But what if they were wrong? What if loving God was easier than loving other human beings? Was an easy life such a bad thing to want?
Later on, maybe. When things have calmed down a little
.

She looked into the flames. It was meant to be relaxing, warmth in the darkness, keeping the wolves away, but the heatproof glass made her think of some infernal substance caged at the reactor’s core, a little fiend on a treadmill. Those photographs, her hunger to see them is so strong. She is reading a magazine or watching a film sometimes, she sees someone and wonders for an instant if it’s him. Big men, strong men, flawed but honorable, men you can rely on when the chips are down, this righteous anger they keep to hand, like a holstered weapon, ready to use as a last resort. The opposite of Dominic. All those presumptions you carry with you your whole life about what a family should be. What a husband should be. What a father should be.

Louisa wrestled the door open and they spilled clumsily into the hallway dragging several coats to the floor and tearing one of the pegs from the wall.
Oh my God. Richard?

I’m OK
. He sounded drunk.

She threw her arms around him but Alex gently peeled her away.
Downstairs bathroom. Take his other arm
. Mum and Dad were sitting in the living room doing absolutely bugger all. Jesus.
Richard. You’ve got to help us
.

I should call an ambulance
.

He’ll be OK. We just need to warm him up
. Would he though? Alex wasn’t sure. But an ambulance wouldn’t get here for, what, an hour on these roads.
Whoa
. Richard stumbled sideways again, Alex just managing to keep him upright this time.
Get the bath running
. Louisa ran ahead through the kitchen. Relief and panic, about what might have happened, about what might still happen.
Almost there
. He maneuvered Richard through the kitchen. Up ahead he heard the twist and thunder of the hot tap. An image of Callum rocking back and forth on the pavement weeping, the broken end of the shin bone pushing up under the skin. Across the utility room, Richard unstable on the bumpy stone floor, like a child or an old man, the onion smell of his sweat. They negotiated the chicane of the bathroom door, into the steamy air, Louisa’s hands literally flapping. How were they going to do this? He lowered Richard onto the toilet seat, put a hand behind his neck and removed the hat and the yellow jacket.
Shoes
. Louisa yanked them off. No way he was going to be able to remove Richard’s other clothes but it didn’t matter. This would not be elegant. He heaved Richard onto his feet, sat him on the edge of the bath then stepped in behind him, muddy trainers turning the water brown. He pulled Richard backward and let him slip, arse-down, into the water, legs flopping in after, spraying brown water up the wall and all over Louisa’s shirt. Result. Alex stepped out and tentatively let go. Richard held himself upright.
Go and get a hot drink. I’ll stay here
. Louisa stepped out of the bathroom. The hot water continued to rise.

Richard is frightened, endorphins spent way back, cold at the base of his spine, in his pelvis, under his ribs. His teeth are still chattering. Alex says something but Richard is not sure what. He has an abscess, he needs to tell someone this before they put him under.
Come away, fellow sailors, your anchors be weighing
. His father stands in the doorway, arms crossed, that surly expression, letting the tension mount. Richard wonders if he is going to be picked up and slapped across the legs. The smell of cigarette smoke and Old Spice. God, this hot water stung.

The ping of the microwave and the clicky slam of the plastic door and Louisa reappeared with what looked like a mug of warm milk. Made Alex think of waking up in the night when he was a child. He can smell honey, Louisa doing her folded napkins and hospital corners even now. She kneels and offers it to Richard. He takes it in his hands, which is a good sign, though he clearly can’t move his fingers independently. Christ, what a strange picture. Richard in his clothes in a bath of oxtail soup, Louisa leaning over in a flowery shirt, muddy footprints over the white fluffy mat, like some grubby dogskin carpet. He sees the bloody graze on Richard’s hand and looks down at his own scabbing knuckles. Louisa takes the mug and puts it down on the corner of the bath and starts to remove Richard’s running vest. The bath almost full now. It feels uncomfortably intimate, watching her do this, the hair on Richard’s chest, pudgy man breasts, the sheer bulk of him, pathetic and threatening at the same time. Alex feels he should leave but he can’t. He imagines Louisa on top of Richard, naked. Is it stupid not to ring an ambulance? He turns and sees Mum and Dad in the doorway. Louisa is oblivious but Angela says, quietly,
How is he?
Alex simply shrugs to punish them for being so fucking useless.

Can we do anything?

Food
, says Alex. He remembers an episode of
Born Survivor. Have we got any chocolate? Something soft and sugary
. Though his intention mostly is to get them out of the bathroom because he has earned his place here in the center of the drama and they haven’t.

I’m on it
, says Dominic.

It never occurred to Melissa that Richard might be in any kind of danger, him being the person who sorted out other people in danger,
but when she came downstairs to make herself a mug of coffee she found Dominic heating a tin of soup and Angela said,
He’s in the bath
, and Melissa wondered who the hell she was talking about.

Alex brought him back
, said Dominic.

He’s going to be all right
, said Angela.

We hope
.

And then it dawned on her, but Alex had appeared in the doorway, sopping wet, still wearing his trainers.
We’re out of the woods, I think
. He went to the bread bin and cut himself a two-inch doorstep.
I need a shower. Melissa, can you go and grab some warm clothes for Richard?

She bridled but now was clearly not the time.
Sure
. Sweetness and light. She turned and headed back into the dining room.

Alex took a large bite of bread.
Give me a shout if you need help, yeh?

Then he, too, was gone and Dominic felt proud of his son. The young taking over the world, maybe it wasn’t so bad after all.

Daisy stepped onto the landing and saw Melissa disappearing like a hotel chambermaid bearing a folded pile of clothes. Then Alex appeared in his towel, with a chunk of bread in his mouth.
Bit of an adventure downstairs
.

Yeh?

Twisted his ankle. Touch of hypothermia. He’s in a hot bath
. He gently moved her aside.
Now I need a shower or I’m going to go the same way
.

Suddenly she couldn’t bear the idea of being alone any longer.
Can I come into the bathroom with you?

He raised his eyebrows.
If you really want, I guess
. Because after all, it was the kind of day when the normal rules had been temporarily suspended, so they went in, she shut the door behind her and sat on the toilet. Vosene, Miracle Moist, Louisa’s checkered pink wash bag. He turned the shower on, took another bite of bread, placed the remaining crust on the rim of the sink then dropped the towel and stepped behind the big plastic panel, turning away from her to protect his modesty. Dints in the side of his bottom, the muscles in his back, unexpectedly at home without his clothes. She remembered how
she felt about her body when she was swimming, not caring what it looked like, just enjoying the way it worked. They felt like
the children
, again.

So you’re a bit of a hero, then?

I wouldn’t go that far
. But she could hear the pride in his voice.
God, this feels good
. His pleasure in the hot water oddly more intimate than the sight of his body.

She liked being in here together, hiding almost, comforting and secret.
But he’s all right now?
His silhouette blurred and fogged behind the steamy plastic.

I think so
. He bent down to clean the mud off his ankles.
He was pretty far gone when I got him back to the house
. Squirting shampoo onto his hair.
What a pillock
.

I saw he’d bought loads of new running kit
.

Not looking very new now
.

She sat quietly for a while. He turned the shower off and stepped out, turning away from her to pick up his towel and dry himself. Like a model, but like a little boy, too. He put the last piece of bread in his mouth and said,
Right. I need to pee at this point in time, which feels kind of weird so you might want to, like, stand over there and look the other way
.

I think I might be gay
. As if someone else had spoken on her behalf, as if someone had pushed her off that top board. Time stuck, rippled banners of light on the water’s surface way below, the ring of cold and the blue silence.

You think?
He really had knitted his brows, as if he were struggling with a crossword puzzle.

Does that sound totally insane?

A bit
. Lesbian. Christ. He’d never met a lesbian, never really thought about them outside porn, except they weren’t really lesbians. Too good-looking. Or was that being prejudiced?
Does this mean you’re not a Christian anymore?

I’m scared, Alex
. She was going to cry.
And now you have to say something. Please?

He had to think about this and it was complicated. If she was male it would freak him out, trying not to picture the sex part. But this? He
imagined her having a girlfriend which would be sort of like having two sisters. Unless the girlfriend was horrible, or ugly.

Please?

He tried to sit down on the toilet seat beside her but it was too small, plus he was half naked, so he knelt beside her and gave her an inelegant hug.

I kissed Melissa
.

What?

I kissed Melissa
.

Holy shit. Is she a lesbian, too?

It was kind of an accident
. She ripped off four squares of toilet paper and blew her nose.

He moved to the edge of the bath.
I kissed her, too. She wasn’t too keen on that, either
. He expected Daisy to laugh but she didn’t seem to have heard.
She is pretty fit, though
.

She called me a fucking dyke
.

And suddenly he got it, why she was terrified. The shit she was going to get. Losing all her friends because of the church, those sanctimonious arseholes kicking her out, maybe. He wanted to slap Melissa’s face.
Is this, like, a new thing?

No. Yes. I feel like such an idiot
.

They were silent for a few moments. This flatness. Surely the moment deserved more, mariachi trumpets, a thunderbolt striking her dead.
I told Mum
.

And …?

She was crap. As usual
.

Christ
, said Alex.
This is one bizarre day
. Daisy looked offended.
Bizarre in a good way. You know, Richard not being dead after all, and you …
What? You not being dead either?

Alex?
Dominic was calling from downstairs.

Alex stood up.
OK, now I really have to pee. Go and tell Dad I’ll be down in a couple of minutes, yeh?

She didn’t move. He felt it, too, a sense that the event should be marked in some way. But how?

Dad shouted again.
Alex …?

He lay on the sofa, big jumper, mug of sweet tea, left leg up on Louisa’s lap. She put the bag of frozen peas aside and began winding the elderly bandage around his ankle. First-aid box under the sink from circa 1983. The door of the fire was open so that he could feel the heat on the side of his face. Franck in the background, the violin and piano sonata, Martha Argerich and Dora Schwarzberg.
There, that should do it
. He felt a little queasy on account of the Mars Bars Alex had forced him to eat in the bath, that jittery fatigue and joint ache like when you had flu. Louisa fastened the bandage with a safety pin. Little waves of anxiety rose and fell, the body’s alarm system, saying,
This is not right
, though he knew, objectively, that he was recovering. Just clipped the edge of severe hypothermia, if he remembered the textbooks correctly. Louisa lifted his ankle and slipped a cushion under it to raise it a little higher. Paradoxical undressing and terminal burrowing in the final stages. Always unnerved him that image, the body of the old man naked in the cupboard. Bit of a shock to find that dying might be unpleasant after all. He’d always assumed that the brain shrank to fit the little door you left by, Montaigne being knocked off his horse and so on. Die in a hospital, that was the lesson. Decent morphine driver. But it felt good, being looked after like this. Louisa lay the frozen peas back over his ankle and picked up her Stephen Fry. Ridiculous that it should take such a big adventure to make them do this, simply sit next to each other doing nothing. But that pillbox, the one behind his father. They went inside, didn’t they. He and Angela. He can remember the smell of urine and a smashed Coca-Cola bottle. Camping or caravan? Chips out of newspaper, trying to surf on a blue lilo.