The Red House (6 page)

Richard made his way down the dark stairs. He couldn’t use the bathroom on the landing because of the tangled pipes under the sink. Tubing, plumbing, large bore wiring.
Phobia
never quite described it.
A discrete period of intense fear or discomfort in which at least four of the following thirteen symptoms develop abruptly …
The four in his case being a choking sensation, feelings of unreality, abdominal distress and a fear of going insane. He couldn’t use car park E at work because it meant walking past the ducts at the back of the heating block. Last year he’d been standing on the Circle Line platform at Edgware Road en route to a conference in Reading. The brickwork on the far side of the tracks invisible behind a great rolling wave of sooty cables. He came round with a gash on his head looking up at a ring of people who seemed to have gathered to watch a fight in the playground.

He unbuttoned his pajama fly and aimed just left of the water to minimize the noise. He should get his prostate checked. The floor was cobbled and cold and the walls smelled of damp but the sink down here was enclosed in a wooden cabinet and the ribbed white shower flex was single and therefore benign. He flushed the toilet and washed his hands. Bed.

D
aisy made herself a mug of sugary tea then went outside in her coat and scarf to watch the dawn come up. A great seesaw of light balanced on the fulcrum of Black Hill, the sun rising on one end, the other end sweeping down the flank of Offa’s Dyke and switching the colors on as it went. The beauty kept slipping though her fingers. The world was so far away and the mind kept saying,
Me, me, me
. Petty worries rose and nagged, Benjy so distant, Mum angry with her all the time, the horrible graffiti in the changing rooms at school. But the valley … wasn’t this amazing?
Look
, you had to say to yourself,
Look
.

The truth was that she hadn’t been able to sleep. She’d tried reading
Dracula
but what seemed ridiculous in the daylight seemed like documentary before dawn. She felt so lost. You changed at sixteen, everyone said, and changing was hard. But this wasn’t normal, it came out of the blue, the unshakable conviction that whilst she looked like a human being and acted like a human being there was nothing inside, just slime and circuitry.

Eighteen months ago she found herself talking to Wendy Rogan, the science TA from Year 12. She can’t remember why. Providence perhaps. Wendy suggested a coffee after school over which she listened in a way that no one else had, not friends, not Mum, not Dad. The following weekend she was having supper in Wendy’s flat when Wendy suggested putting a video on. Daisy thought for several horrified
seconds that it was going to be something pornographic, so when it turned out to be a promotional video for the Alpha Course she was initially relieved. A footballer scoring a goal, a model sashaying down the catwalk, a mountaineer climbing a cliff face, each of them turning to the camera and saying,
Is there more to life than this?
All camera sparkle and soft rock. She felt ambushed and soiled.

A week later she remembered why the mountaineer seemed familiar. He was Bear Grylls, the guy Alex loved, who climbed Everest and ate maggots and drank his own urine on television. She googled him and found herself watching, with a sickly mix of fascination and disgust, a video on YouTube in which he was stuck on a tropical island.
When you get the chance to be saved, you have to take it
. He swung on vines and swam across a bay and built a fire on the beach and signaled to a helicopter using the silver cross on the front of his Bible. It was laughable. But she was crying.

The valley almost full of light now, dew drying, everything washed in our absence. Melissa hated her. There was a kind of reassurance in that. Nothing to lose. No chance of feeling pleased with herself.

Be patient
, David had said.
The spirit will come
. And there was a warmth in that room that she felt nowhere else, being lifted by those soaring voices, but the spirit hadn’t come, only that constant sniping voice.
I’m more intelligent than these people
. Which was what it meant to be tested, of course, the pressure always at your weakest point. Faith was a belief in the impossible. Of course it looked ridiculous from the outside.
Jesus loves you, bitch
. Scratched into the metal of her locker door so it couldn’t be washed off.

Suddenly there was a fox. Real orange, not the dirty brown of urban foxes, trotting through the gate, cocksure and proprietorial, like the ghost of a previous owner. Two different times were flowing though the garden. The fox stopped. Had it seen her? Had it smelt her? She didn’t breathe. The gap closed between herself and the world. She was the grass, she was the sunlight, she was the fox. Then she wondered if it was some kind of sign and the spell broke and the fox trotted off round the far side of the house and she was shivering.

Dominic stands under the shower, eyes closed, water pouring onto the crown of his head. Hot water. How amazing to be alive this late in human history. Miners in their tins baths, a kettle on the coals, Queen Elizabeth I taking three baths a year. But showers were never quite hot enough or strong enough on holiday, were they. That crappy plastic box. Down the corridor Benjy unlocks the mini-kit on the second Captain Brickbeard level and gets the wizard, while Melissa rises through that turbulent region of half sleep, part of her still at primary school, everything in slo-mo, a tiger padding slowly between the desks. Beams creak and pipes rattle as the house comes to life. A scurry in the roof space, the same dog far off. Alex pees noisily. The whir of an electric toothbrush. A cockerel. Daisy pours a small portion of Marks & Spencer’s Deliciously Nutty Crunch into a bowl.

Alex squatted on the flagstones by the front door to lace his trainers then stretched his hamstrings on the ivy-covered sill. The faintest smell of manure on the bright damp air. He set his watch then jogged along the track to the main road, stones crunching and slipping under his trainers. He loved wild places. He felt at home among lakes and mountains in a way he never did at home or school. Every other weekend he and Jamie would pile into Jamie’s brother’s Transit, bikes on the back, canoes on top, and Josh would drive them to the South Downs, Pembrokeshire, Snowdonia. Put up the tent in darkness and wake in that igloo glow. He climbed the stile and began the long haul to Red Darren, his mind shrinking with the effort and the altitude, this precious trick he had learnt, doubts and worries falling away at four, five, six miles, the fretting self reduced to almost nothing, only the body working like an engine.

Dominic and Daisy asked him about it sometimes and assumed his inability to explain was evidence of an inability to feel, but on Llyn Gwynant, on Nine Barrow Down, he experienced a kind of swelling contentment for which they yearned but never quite attained, and the
fact that Alex couldn’t explain it, the fact that it was beyond words, was part of the secret.

Because you’ll burn yourself
. Angela handed him two eggs.
Crack these into the bowl
.

What would happen if you and Dad died at the same time?

What would you like to happen?
She scraped mushrooms into the pan.

I’d like to go and live with Pavel
.

I’d have to check that with Pavel’s mum
.

But what will happen to my toys?

She handed him a fork.
You’d take them with you
. She thought how small Pavel’s house was.
Now add some milk and whisk it
.

What about the television?

Hasn’t Pavel already got a television?

But what about our television?
He was on the verge of tears.

You can have the television
.

I’ve changed my mind. I want to go and live with Daisy
. Something broke inside him and he was choking back the sobs.

She turned the gas down and wrapped him in her arms.

Benjamin was crying and Richard didn’t want to intrude so he poured a mug of coffee from the cafetière and walked outside where he found Alex doing press-ups on the lawn, proper press-ups, knees and back rigid, locking his elbows, touching the grass with his nose, a great eagle of sweat on his back.
Deltoids, teres major, rotator cuff
. He still thought of himself as a sportsman, cross-country at school, the four hundred meter at college, but in the last year he’d done nothing more than play a few games of squash with Gerhardt and cycle to work for a fortnight after the car was stolen. Alex stood up.
Wondering if I should have a go myself
.

Alex put a foot on the bench to unlace his trainer.
It’s a big hill
.

Daisy had very nearly done it with her friend Jack. She was never quite sure whether they were going out or not. He had three earrings and a pet snake and some invisible barrier that only Daisy was allowed to cross. They’d drunk two large glasses of some poisonous green liqueur his dad had bought in Italy. He put a hand under the hem of her knickers and she was suddenly aware of how angular he was, all bones and corners, and she was going to let him do it because she couldn’t think of an alternative, because this was the door everyone had to pass through. But with this thought came a scrabbling panic. She didn’t want to go through that door, she didn’t want to be like everyone else and she was having real trouble breathing. She pushed him away, and he seemed relieved mostly, but the near miss had scared them both, so they finished the bottle and the embarrassment was obscured by the memory of a hangover so bad that its retelling became a party piece. For six months they were best friends, then Daisy joined the church and he called her a
fucking traitor
and vanished from her life.

Alex wasn’t trying to put Richard down. It was a stab at friendliness he failed to pitch quite right. He had always rather admired his uncle and felt that Mum’s complaints were unjustified. Or perhaps admiration was the wrong word, more a kind of genetic bond. He recognized nothing of himself in Mum and Dad, her distractedness, the lack of care she took in herself, his father sitting around the house feeling sorry for himself, doing the cleaning and the shopping and Benjy’s school pickups like it was the most natural thing in the world. When friends visited he felt embarrassed by the air of defeat which hung around him and part of the attraction of mountains and lakes was their distance from both of his parents. But the way Richard carried himself, his air of efficiency and self-possession …