The Radleys (2 page)

If that feeling grew, it might become a fear that would make you want to leave the scene and run away, but you probably wouldn’t. You would observe the nice house and the moderately expensive car parked outside and think that this is the property of perfectly normal human beings who pose no threat to the outside world.

If you let yourself think this, you would be wrong. For 17 Orchard Lane is the home of the Radleys, and despite their very best efforts, they are anything but normal.

The Spare Bedroom

“You need sleep,” he tels himself, but it is no good.

The light on at three o’clock this Friday morning belongs to him, Rowan, the elder of the two Radley children. He is wide awake, despite having drunk six times the recommended dose of Night Nurse.

He is always awake at this time. If he is lucky, on a good night, he wil drop off to sleep at around four to wake again at six or shortly after. Two hours of tormented, restless sleep, dreaming violent nightmares he can’t understand and arranging and rearranging his lanky frame into increasingly less sleepworthy positions. But tonight it’s not a good night, with his rash acting up and that breeze blowing against the window, and he knows he wil probably be going to school on no rest whatsoever.

He puts down his book: Byron’s
Collected Poems
. He hears someone walking along the landing, not to the toilet but to the spare room.

There is a slight rummaging around, and a few moments of quiet before she can be heard leaving the room. Again, this isn’t entirely unusual. Often he has heard his mother get up in the middle of the night to head to the spare bedroom with some secret purpose he hasn’t ever asked her about.

Then he hears her go back to bed and the indistinct mumble of his parents’ voices through the wal .

Dreaming

Helen gets back into bed, her whole body tense with secrets. Her husband sighs a strange, yearning kind of sigh and nuzzles into her.

“What on earth are you doing?”

“I’m trying to kiss you,” he says.

“Please, Peter,” she says, a headache pressing behind her eyes. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“As opposed to al those other times, when you would want to be kissed by your husband.”

“I thought you were asleep.”

“I was. I was dreaming. It was quite an exciting one. Nostalgic, real y.”

“Peter, we’l wake the children,” she says, although she knows Rowan stil has his light on.

“Come on, I just want to kiss you. It was such a good dream.”

“No. You don’t. You want more. You want—”

“So, what are you worried about? The sheets?”

“I just want to go to sleep.”

“What were you doing?”

“I needed the toilet.” She is so used to this lie she doesn’t think about it.

“That bladder. It’s getting weaker.”

“Good night.”

“Do you remember that librarian we took home?”

She can hear the smile in his question. “Jesus, Peter. That was London. We don’t talk about London.”

“But when you think about nights like that, doesn’t it make you—”

“No. It was a lifetime ago. I don’t think about it at al .”

A Sudden Tweak of Pain

In the morning, shortly after waking, Helen sits up and sips her water. She unscrews the jar of ibuprofen tablets and places one on her tongue, as delicately as a communion wafer.

She swal ows, and right at that moment as the pil washes down her throat, her husband—only a few steps away in the bathroom—feels a sudden tweak of pain.

He has cut himself shaving.

He watches the blood glistening on his damp, oiled skin.

Beautiful. Deep red. He dabs it, studies the smear it has made on his finger and his heart quickens. The finger moves closer and closer to his mouth, but before it gets there he hears something. Rapid footsteps rushing toward the bathroom, then an attempt at opening the door.

“Dad, please could you let me in . . . please,” says his daughter, Clara, as she bangs hard against the thick wood.

He does as she asks, and Clara rushes in and leans over the toilet bowl.

“Clara,” he says, as she throws up. “Clara, what’s wrong?”

She leans back. Her pale face looks up at him, from above her school uniform, her eyes desperate through her glasses.

“Oh God,” she says, and turns back toward the bowl. She is sick again. Peter smel s it and catches sight of it too. He flinches, not from the vomit but from what he knows it means.

Within a few seconds, everyone is there. Helen is crouching down next to their daughter, stroking her back and tel ing her everything is al right. And their son Rowan is in the doorway, with his Factor 60 sunblock stil needing to be rubbed in and causing his dark bangs to stick to his skin.

“What’s happening to her?” he asks.

“It’s fine,” says Clara, not wanting an audience. “Honestly, I’m okay now. I feel fine.”

And the word stays in the room, hovering around and changing the air with its own sick-scented falseness.

Proper Milk

Clara does her best to keep up the routine al morning, getting herself prepared for school just like normal, despite the rotten feeling in her stomach.

You see, last Saturday Clara upped her game from vegetarian to ful -time, committed vegan in an attempt to get animals to like her a bit more.

Like the ducks who wouldn’t take her bread, the cats who didn’t want to be stroked, the horses in the fields by Thirsk Road who went crazy every time she walked past. She couldn’t shake that school visit to Flamingo Land where every flamingo panicked and fled before she reached the lake. Or her short-lived goldfish, Rhett and Scarlett—the only pets she had ever been al owed. The total horror that first morning when she found them floating upside down on the water’s surface, with the color drained from their scales.

Right now, she feels her mother’s eyes on her as she pul s the soya milk out of the fridge.

“You know, if you switched to proper milk you’d feel a lot better. Even skimmed.”

Clara wonders what part of “no more meat or dairy products” her mother doesn’t understand, but she does her best to smile. “I’m fine. Please, don’t worry.”

They are al there now, in the kitchen—her father drinking his fresh coffee, and her brother devouring his morning smorgasbord of deli meats.

“Peter, tel her. She’s making herself il .”

Peter takes a moment. His wife’s words have to swim through the wide red river of his thoughts and heave themselves out, dripping and weary, onto the narrow bank of fatherly duty.

“Your mother’s right,” he says. “You’re making yourself il .”

Clara pours the offending milk onto her Nuts and Seeds muesli, feeling queasier by the second.

She wants to ask for the radio to be turned down but knows if she does she wil only make herself appear more il .

At least Rowan is on her side, in his weary way. “It’s soya, Mum,” he says, with his mouth ful .

“Not heroin.”

“But she needs to eat meat.”

“I’m
okay
.”

“Look,” says Helen, “I real y think you should take the day off from school. I’l phone them for you if you want.”

Clara shakes her head. She’d promised Eve she would be going to Jamie Southern’s party tonight and so she’l need to go to school to stand a chance of being al owed out. Besides, a whole day of listening to pro-meat propaganda isn’t going to help her. “Honestly, I’m feeling a lot better. I’m not going to be sick again.”

Her mum and dad do their usual thing of swapping coded eye messages Clara can’t translate.

Peter shrugs. (“The thing about Dad is,” Rowan once commented, “he couldn’t real y give two shits about pretty much anything.”)

Helen is as defeated as when she placed the soya milk in the cart a few nights ago, under Clara’s threat of becoming anorexic.

“Okay, you can go to school,” her mum says, eventual y. “Just please,
be careful
.”

Forty-six

You reach a certain age—sometimes it’s fifteen, sometimes it’s forty-six—and you realize the cliché you have adopted for yourself isn’t working. That is what is happening to Peter Radley right now, chewing away at a piece of buttered multigrain toast and staring at the crinkled transparent plastic that contains the remainder of the loaf.

The rational, law-abiding adult with his wife and his car and his kids and his direct debits to the Red Cross.

He had only wanted sex, last night. Just harmless, human sex. And what was sex? It was nothing. It was just a hug in motion. A bloodless piece of body friction. Okay, so he might have wanted it to lead somewhere else, but he could have contained himself. He
has
contained himself for seventeen years.

Well, fuck it
, he thinks.

It feels good, swearing, even in his thoughts. He had read in the
British Medical Journal
that there was new evidence to suggest the act of swearing relieves pain.

“Fuck it,” he mumbles, too quiet for Helen to hear. “Fuck. It.”

Realism

“I’m worried about Clara,” Helen says, handing Peter his lunch box. “She’s only been vegan a week and she’s clearly getting il . What if it triggers something?”

He has hardly heard her. He is just staring downward, contemplating the dark chaos inside his briefcase. “There’s so much flaming crap in here.”

“Peter, I’m worried about Clara.”

Peter puts two pens in the trash. “
I’m
worried about her. I’m very worried about her. But it’s not like I’m al owed to offer a solution, is it?”

Helen shakes her head. “Not this, Peter. Not now. This is serious. I just wish we could try and be adult about this. I want to know what you think we should do.”

He sighs. “I think we should tel her the truth.”

“What?”

He takes a deep breath of the stifling kitchen air. “I think it is the right time to tel the children.”

“Peter, we have to keep them safe. We have to keep everything safe. I want you to be realistic.”

He buckles up his briefcase. “Ah, realism. Not real y us, is it?”

The calendar catches his eye. The Degas bal erina and the dates crowded with Helen’s handwriting. The reminders for book group meetings, theater trips, badminton sessions, art classes. The never-ending supply of Things to Do. Including today:
“Felts—dinner here—7:30—

Lorna doing appetizer.”

Peter pictures his pretty neighbor sitting opposite him.

“Look, I’m sorry,” he says. “I’m just feeling tetchy. Low iron. I just sometimes get fed up with al these lies, you know?”

Helen nods. She knows.

Noting the time, Peter heads down the hal way.

“The recycling needs taking out.”

Recycling.
Peter sighs and picks up the box ful of jars and bottles.
Empty vessels waiting to be
born again.

“I’m just worried the longer she goes without eating the stuff she should be eating, the more likely it is she’l crave—”

“I know, I know. We’l work something out. But I’ve real y got to go. I’m late as it is.”

He opens the door and they see the ominous blue sky, gleaming its bright warning. “Are we nearly out of ibuprofen?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“I’l get some on my way back. My head’s bloody terrible.”

“Yeah, mine too.”

He kisses her cheek and strokes her arm with a fleeting tenderness, a microscopic reminder of how they used to be, and then he is gone.

B
e proud to act like a normal human being. Keep daylight hours, get a regular

job, and mix in the company of people with a fixed sense of right and wrong.

The Abstainer’s Handbook
(second edition), p. 89

Fantasy World

On the map, Bishopthorpe resembles the skeleton of a fish. A backbone of a main street with thin little lanes and cul-de-sacs threading off to nowhere. A dead place, leaving its young people hungry for more.

It’s quite big, as vil ages go, with various shops on its main street. But in the daylight they look like what they are—an eclectic mix of niche enterprises which don’t real y belong together. The very refined deli, for instance, is positioned next to Fantasy World, the novelty costume shop, which, if it wasn’t for the outfits in the window, could easily be mistaken for a sex emporium (and which does in fact have a room in the back sel ing “novelty adult toys”).

The vil age isn’t real y self-sufficient. It has no post office anymore, and neither the pub nor the fish-and-chip shop do the business they once did. There is a drugstore, next to the clinic, and a children’s shoewear shop, which like Fantasy World mainly caters to customers traveling in from York or Thirsk. But that is it.

To Rowan and Clara it feels like a half place, dependent on buses and internet connections and other escape routes. A place that fools itself into believing it is the epitome of a quaint English vil age but which like most places is real y just one large costume store, with more subtle outfits.