The Red House (37 page)

Only as they are returning upstairs do they realize how deftly she has sidestepped the question they have been asking for the last ten minutes. What happened down there? But Angela is right and they all do need sleep and perhaps some questions are best left unanswered.

He doesn’t get to take her shirt off, doesn’t get to feel her tits, let alone see them. She rolls backward onto the bed, he unbuckles his jeans and pulls down his boxers and leans over, left hand beside her head. He’s not exactly an expert when it comes to this kind of thing and she seems really dry so it takes a while to get his cock in. Her face still blank, like she’s looking through him. Fifteen, twenty seconds and he’s about to come. Then everything changes, like she’s woken up suddenly. She grabs his arm and shoves her free hand hard against his windpipe, a punch almost. He stumbles against the little dresser, regains his balance and slides onto the chair, trousers round his ankles, cock still hard, that weird tremor of being on the brink of coming, a big blunt pain in the small of his back. She slaps his face as hard as she can.
Now get the fuck out of here
.

Other people have hit him that hard, but no one has ever hit him with that venom. He raises one hand in a gesture of cease-fire and uses the other to pull up his jeans and boxers.

Really quiet this time.
Just fuck off
. Eyes narrowed.

Yeh. Don’t worry. I’m going
. He reaches down and retrieves his shirt. Trousers still undone and no time for checking the corridor before he steps out but that doesn’t seem like top priority right now. Then he’s gone and she holds it together long enough to hear his footsteps fade down the corridor, before rolling onto her side and holding the pillow against her face so that no one can hear her crying.

He doesn’t even have time to grab any toilet paper. Just drops his shirt and lets go of his belt and steps into the shower and brings himself off all over the tiling in a couple of strokes. Holy shit. Did that actually happen? He fucked Melissa. He actually fucked Melissa.

Angela slipped into the bedroom. Little bedside light still on, Dominic stirring briefly then becoming still again. She sat on the chair and waited for the others to use the bathroom and return to bed. Silence
at last. She leant over and took hold of the green plastic bag that lay scrunched on the floor beside the chest of drawers, a tuft of hair protruding from the top. She stood up and went back out onto the landing, quietly closing the door behind her. She avoided the creakier steps then turned in to the living room at the bottom of the stairs. The fire low but still burning. Bending down, she undid the little latch and eased the door open, slow as a second hand to prevent it squeaking. She took five pieces of kindling from the basket and laid them parallel in the single lazy flame. Little blond sleepers. She took the doll from the bag. A brief hesitation, letting the doubts graze her before spinning away. She laid the doll along the kindling, the dress catching immediately, a poisonous blue flame leaping up. Slowly, she shut the metal door. The tiny muffled thud of the webbing seal. Latch closed. The toddler on the sheepskin rug, the rainbow-colored windbreak,
OGDENS
. They were pictures of Daisy, weren’t they. Flames licking round the doll now, as if she were falling through air in a dress of sunset colors, violet, orange, green. A fierce little star.
And they cast her bound into the midst of the fire. And she had no hurt
.

A
lex wakes early for one final run, south to Hatterall Hill via the grouse butts and the little disused quarries, thinking how he will probably never come back here, looking around, storing it, another place to visit in his head. He has returned to the house and is squatting to untie his trainers on the lawn when he sees his father crossing to the shed with a big white rubbish bag for the bin. Alex realizes suddenly that he is going to do it. After last night he feels superhuman. He waits for his father to return then steps onto the path.

Dominic stops and raises his eyebrows because the body language is unequivocal.
What’s this about?

Benjy read the message on your phone
.

What message?

You know which message
.

No, I don’t know which message
. So it wasn’t Angela. Thank God for that.

The message from Amy
.

And what about it?

Who’s Amy?

Amy is an old friend of mine and I really don’t see what this has got to do with you
.

From where? An old friend from where?

From college. Alex, what are you suggesting?

You’re having an affair
.

Dominic laughed.
I think you need a bit more practice in the Sherlock Holmes department
.

Alex wants to quote the e-mail but he can’t remember the words. He should have planned this better.
What was she so upset about?

I really don’t think she’d want me discussing her personal problems with my teenage son
.

His father’s composure, the way he is almost laughing. Alex had got the wrong end of the stick, hadn’t he, made a twat of himself by jumping to conclusions. But that phrase,
my teenage son
, something offensive about it. He wants to punch his father for winning the argument with such bad grace. Pause, breathe … He has to extricate himself with some shred of dignity.
My mistake
. He starts to walk away, then stops and turns because, fuck it, he’s come this far.
So it’s OK if I ask Mum. About Amy
. He holds his father’s eye.

That’s not a good idea, Alex
.

You fucking …

Don’t talk to me like that
.

I’ll talk to you how the hell I like
. Grabbing two fistfuls of his father’s shirt and pushing him backward.

Alex, stop this
. Winded as he slams against the wall.

You sit around all day moaning, you get some shitty job in a bookshop while Mum goes out and works her arse off and all the time you’re fucking someone else
.

Alex. Keep your voice down
.

You coward
.

Something broken in his father’s eyes. He lets go. There are things he meant to say, promises he meant to extract, but something else is demanding his attention. Crouch End. The fear has gone and will never come back, he knows this with absolute certainty, but he had not realized the price he would have to pay. His father is lazy and weak and selfish but he stands between Alex and something that is cold and vast and dark and utterly inhuman. He realizes that when he dies his parents will no longer be there to hold him. He is genuinely alone for
the first time in his life. He turns away. He cannot bear to look at his father’s face. He steps out of his unlaced shoes, places them neatly by the door and walks into the house.

Benjy always loved packing a rucksack, the gathering and celebration of possessions, pearls running through the king’s fingers. The gladius with its handguard of plaited rope, the pen that wrote in eight colors, Mr. Seal and Mr. Crocodile, the metal thing, the Natural History Museum notebook, a piece of sheep poo in a ziplock freezer bag, a dog he had molded out of candle wax last night during supper. He was eager to get going. No one made you do homework or tidy your room or be constructive on a journey because the journey was the constructive thing and it looked after itself so you could do what you wanted while it was happening. But they weren’t setting off for two hours so he put their names in the guest book, adding ages for himself and Alex and Daisy.
I liked walking up the hill and the rain strom and the sheepherd’s pie at the grannery
. He then spent twenty minutes filling a double-page spread with an intricate drawing of the house and garden. The horse’s skull, the frog-spawn pond, the letters
G
and
F
interlaced in the rusted ornamental cast iron of the downhill gate. Everyone said what a wonderful drawing it was, better than a proper grown-up drawing somehow, the wonky lines, the weird scale, the eccentric detail, for this is how they will all remember the place, nothing quite as it was, elements added, elements removed. The stove will loom large for Angela, the shed for Alex. Everyone will forget the fox weather vane. And whenever Louisa thinks about the valley she will remember looking up from the garden to see a plane trailing smoke and flames from a burning engine, though this is something they will see when passing an airfield on their way home.

Angela fills a bowl with Shreddies and full-fat milk and sprinkles three spoons of soft brown sugar over the top before carrying it
through to the dining room. That weak washed-out feeling you get when recovering from flu. She sits down.
Alex?

There are five pieces of toast on his plate. He is shaking.
What?

Are you all right?

Yeh
. He wants to tell her why he is upset. He reaches out across the table to take his mother’s hand. Then he stops and picks up the marmalade instead because he remembers Daisy saying she’d had a weird turn in the middle of the night. She’s the one who needs protecting now.

Richard hobbles into the dining room and unplugs his iPhone from its little white charger in the socket by the window.
Packed and ready?

Ten minutes
, says Alex, and Angela thinks how her brother is returning to a life which is so much more solid and purposeful than the lives which await them. The hospital, the apartment on Moray Place.

Richard pours himself a coffee and stands sipping. He had expected something to be resolved or mended or rediscovered over the last few days. He wants to say to Angela that she and Dominic should visit Edinburgh sometime but he finds it hard to sound enthusiastic, so he says it to Alex instead.
Good hills for running and biking
. It won’t happen, of course. This makes him sadder than he expected.

Dominic walks upstairs to strip the bed and check the drawers and perform a rudimentary clean of the bathroom. When Alex grabbed hold of him he thought something would change. Revelation, turning point, but it doesn’t happen, it never happens. He pictures his life as a clumsy cartwheel down a long long hill, hitting this rock and that tree, a little more bruised and scratched with each successive impact till … what? Till the ground levels out? Till he finds himself airborne over some great ravine? He takes his phone out of his pocket. It is still turned off. God knows how many messages waiting. None maybe. He is not sure which is worse.

He squirts Jif onto the sink and scrubs it with the little yellow-and-green sponge, paying close attention to the taps, rinsing everything with clean water and drying it with a hand towel. He has no idea what Alex will do, no way of finding out and no way of stopping it.
Guests are kindly requested to leave the house in the condition they found it
. He squirts Domestos round the toilet bowl and scrubs it with the longhandled plastic brush. He lifts the thin white liner out of the flip-top bin. Tissues, disposable razor, waxy Q-tips.

Melissa swings into the dining room. Alex smiles at her, he actually fucking smiles. She pours herself a cup of coffee, stands drinking, makes herself look like Richard who is doing the same thing on the other side of the table, glances at her watch.
Twenty minutes left
. She tries to make it sound funny but no one laughs, because it’s not
Midsummer Night’s Dream
, is it. More like
Doctor Faustus
. A deal with the devil. She could make people do anything she wanted, but she had no idea what she wanted.
I need some fresh air
.

Alex thinks about last night all over again and it helps compensate for the Dad thing a little. He puts butter and jam on another two slices of toast.

Louisa and Daisy sit on the bench talking about Ian, the wayward years, the civil ceremony on Skye, the Staffordshire bull terrier. There is a bumpy mattress of gray cloud to the east but above the valley the sky is a flawless blue, a valedictory blessing, or maybe it’s just Daisy’s buoyant mood. Melissa comes out of the front door with a coffee, glances their way and body-swerves left.