The Red House (32 page)

I know
.

He wondered if he, too, had been damaged, by their father dying, by their mother drinking. He thought of himself as having put it all behind him, but his decision to marry someone who kept her distance, his failure to have children, his lack of interest in his own interior landscape … A sheep in the road. He slowed as it bounced and sprinted
ahead. Such stupid animals, you’d think they’d learn to stand on the verge until a car had passed. It squirted through a hole in the fence. Wrong field, probably. Angela closed her eyes and leant back against the headrest, dozing or faking sleep. He readjusted the rearview mirror. Benjy was playing a game on his little portable computer. Was he lonely or just self-absorbed? Both, maybe. Geometrical diagrams and the House of Hanover, 1972 in silver foil. Everyone in their little worlds.

They joined the main road and seven texts pinged onto Melissa’s phone.
ring me we’re so in the shit cal x … I’m really really really sorry. megan x … ring me megan has dumped us in it cally x …
She couldn’t face reading the others.

Being the man, Dominic had been voted into the front seat to converse with the taxi driver who was telling him a story about how his brother lost his farm outside Llandovery during the foot-and-mouth epidemic. Green numbers on the meter flicking over, the little map on the satnav twisting, though this was probably the kind of place up here where it led you up cattle tracks and into ravines. He was having trouble concentrating on what the taxi driver was saying. Stupidly he’d left his mobile in his coat pocket overnight. He was relieved at first to find no message, then he checked the in-box and found one sitting there unflagged. Had someone read it? He wished he were sharing a car with Angela so that he could see her face and hear her voice and stop this churning anxiety. Amy’s threat of last night.
I’m not letting you do this to me
. But what was his offense? They weren’t going to spend the rest of their lives together, he was saving them both from a terrible mistake. It had always been an experiment. If she’d wanted more she should have said so. He had never lied to her. But where was the tribunal one could take these matters to?
LOVE
and
HATE
tattooed on the man’s knuckles. Was that Hell’s Angels or Skinheads? Dominic couldn’t quite remember. The man seemed harmless now, pudgy, balding.

Louisa was sitting in the center of the backseat being a buffer
between the two girls, the place usually allotted to the smallest child. Daisy’s proximity made her feel uncomfortable, the way their hips touched as they went round corners, a slight sexual discomfort, a sense of having been watched in a way she hadn’t realized.

But Daisy was a thousand miles away, forehead against the window, a daydreaming child. Long stripes of fluffy cloud above the hill like something was in the process of being knitted. Dragonfly micro-light. A cluster of semi-derelict buildings at the bottom of the valley which she hadn’t seen last time, a moldy green caravan. You could imagine some crazy guy with a gun, dirty children with little hairy tails snarling over a bucket of peelings. Big trees like lungs, roots underground like the same trees upside down in the dark, worms swimming through their branches. This inexplicable abundance, you could see why people dreamt up animating spirits. Naiads, Zephyrs. But nowadays? Would the world look any different if there were no God? Could she believe that? It was an extraordinary thing to think, like tower blocks collapsing, like the touch of a feather.

Fine
. It was the same anger, wasn’t it, the anger she felt whenever Mum broached the subject of religion, the way she wanted Mum to say the wrong thing, the need to be offended, to be excluded. She liked it, didn’t she, more at home with that anger than she had ever felt in the church. Maybe it wasn’t equilibrium she was seeking.
Gemma’s Choice
. The lime-green cardigan. Maybe it was release. Maybe it was the ability to say
Fuck you
to everyone.

Angela told Benjy that the way to stop feeling nauseous was to look out of the window but he was in the middle of some game and she wasn’t in the mood for a fight. He held out till the car park at least, climbing out and vomiting copiously onto the tarmac, the tinny music of Mario at the Winter Olympics piping and chiming from the Nintendo at the end of his outstretched hand.

Richard hoisted himself upright using the cane and shut the car door behind him.

I told you
. Angela fished in her handbag for wet wipes.

Benjy just stood there, head forward, letting a drooly trail lengthen.

Angela shook out the little damp square.
Come here
.

Richard turned away and gazed over the fields. Blood he could handle, but feces, vomit, sweat … The smell of unwashed patients, stayed with you all day. The soothing green of the hills. He was upwind thankfully.

Drink some of that
. Angela handed Benjy a plastic bottle from her handbag.

Benjy swilled the water round his mouth and spat it onto the sick to help wash it away a bit. He hadn’t thrown up for seven months. Something reassuring about it once you’d got the taste out of your mouth, so long as it hadn’t gone up into the back of your nose, like sugar-and-banana sandwiches, or rubbing an old blanket. That nice sharpness on the back of your teeth where the acid had taken the plaque away.

They all regrouped at the top of the car park by the zebra crossing, waiting for Richard to negotiate the stone steps. Dominic and Benjy headed off to the Shop of Crap while Angela, Melissa and Daisy dispersed singly in various directions so that Richard and Louisa found themselves alone.
Coffee?
He liked the idea of sitting and talking.

Let’s walk
. Louisa took his arm in the old-fashioned way.
Keep mobile. Isn’t that what the doctors say?

And it was true, he did start to feel a little better for moving. Back-fold Books. Nepal Bazaar. An old lady with five dachshunds, looking like a maypole.
Last night. You said Daisy was gay, or was that a particularly vivid dream?

She tried to kiss Melissa
.

Why would she do that?
The surprise stopped him in his tracks.
That wasn’t meant to sound quite so insulting
.

I have trouble understanding why anyone would want to kiss Melissa. Bit like sticking your head in the lion’s mouth
.

Do Angela and Dominic know?

I have no idea
. They continued walking.
Melissa was horrible to Daisy about it. Predictably
.

He kept his own counsel and they walked past The Granary turning left toward the river. In the center of the bridge they stopped and leant against the balustrade so that he could rest and take the weight off his left foot completely. Daisy, Alex, Benjamin, he had managed to upset all of them. That shrew. He simply hadn’t thought. But he liked them, he really did like them. Water purling between the shallow rocks, weed under the surface like green hair in the wind. Carl and Douglas, they hadn’t come to the wedding.
We should visit your brothers
. They hadn’t come to the wedding. Too far, too expensive, Louisa hadn’t pushed and he hadn’t insisted.

Really. You’d have nothing in common
.

We have you in common
.

She used to picture it in bad dreams, Richard standing in that shabby room, ceiling tiles coming loose and that bloody dog yapping. TV left running at maximum volume since 1973. For the first time she could imagine him finding it simply funny, or interesting, or sad. Upstream a heron took off.

I’m going to go and talk to Ruth Sharne
.

Ruth …?

The girl in the wheelchair. The operation that went wrong
.

Is that advisable?

It’s not advised, not by the lawyers. But “unadvisable” …?

You’re not going to say it was your fault, are you
.

Nor Mohan’s, just that we very much regret what happened. I don’t think anyone’s said that, except on paper
.

Will it get you into trouble?

She comes into the OT unit. She must know that we’re over there in the main building, a couple of hundred yards away. Can you imagine how that must feel?

Richard …

If it comes to court then I want to walk into that room feeling honorable, not scared
.

Dominic picks up a cap gun, a proper old-fashioned cowboy pistol, dull sheen, sprung hammer, rotating chamber. Memories of childhood scooping him up and lifting him out of the troubled present. Yes. If you cracked it open at the hinge there was the housing where you placed the roll of caps and the ratchet which pushed the next cap into line. That smell, like nothing else. The little trail of smoke. Crawling through the long grass in the waste ground behind Fennell’s.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly
. Jumping out of trees onto cardboard boxes from the Co-op. Mr. Hines stabbing their football with a bread knife.
Benjy, look at this
. He holds out the gun, expecting Benjy to take it, but he seems downcast.
What’s the matter?

It’s nothing
.

He squats so their faces are level.
Tell me
.

Really, it’s nothing
.

But you were so looking forward to coming here
.

Really. It’s OK
.

Alex sat on the steps of the town clock eating two bananas from Spar, tired muscles buzzing, mind near empty. A blind man with a guide dog. Always golden retrievers, for some reason. Swallows overhead like little pairs of scissors. He closed his eyes and waited for the lime-green afterimage of the street to fade to black.

How was that?

He opened his eyes to find himself looking up at Dad and Benjy.
Really good. Hour fifty-five
. But there was something wrong with Benjy.
What happened, kiddo?

Nothing
.

Sometimes Alex didn’t notice Benjy because Benjy was eight. Then, sometimes, he remembered being eight himself and how hard it could be.
Why don’t you come with me
.

OK
, said Benjy. He smiled and Alex felt his heart lift a little.

She sits in Shepherd’s stealing glances at other girls, other women. Panic, fascination, guilt. A tired young mum in a shapeless gray tracksuit, unwashed hair scraped back, baby in a high chair, two older ladies straight out of a sitcom, all cake and bosom and jollity. In the corner a girl of sixteen, seventeen, with her family but not really
with
them. Long brown hair, bangles, black T-shirt with a skull that might be Goth or ironic, it’s hard to tell. That mix of sullenness and under-confidence, still not quite sure of who she is yet. She turns to look at Daisy, or something over Daisy’s shoulder, or maybe nothing at all. Daisy glances away feeling both utterly invisible and completely exposed. The girl turns back to her family. Is Daisy attracted to her? She imagines talking to her, imagines touching her. The long ripple of her backbone as she takes that T-shirt off. A little jolt of what? Desire? Fear? Disgust? But how did you know if someone returned your feelings? Was there a secret language? She feels unqualified, like she’s failed to prepare for a vital interview. She stares at the table’s plastic surface, tiny ticks and slashes, beige, brown, blue. Classic FM in the background, something orchestral and slushy. Because now that she thinks about it there’s a feeling, isn’t there, a feeling that’s always been there, so constant she never really notices it. When she looks at women. Not even sexual, really, just a rightness, a comfort in their presence. Melissa, of all people. Magnetism and self-assurance. Was it so wrong to want these things? Was it so wrong to want someone who had these things? Maybe it wasn’t God after all, maybe it was the heart which punished one with such exquisite accuracy.