The Red House (5 page)

How do you remember this stuff?
But why had she forgotten? That was the real question.

He closed his eyes as if running a slide show in his mind’s eye.
The tapestry cushion covers. God Almighty. Cats, roses, angels …

She felt obscurely violated. This was her past too, but he had stolen it and made it his own.

Fuck
. Melissa leapt to her feet, tomato sauce all over her trousers.
You little shit
.

Hey, hey, hey
. Louisa raised her hands but Melissa swept out.

I’m sorry
, said Benjy.
I’m really really sorry
. He was crying.

Come here, little man
. Dominic hugged him.
You didn’t mean to do it
.

But Alex felt a weight lift. No more sexual interference messing with his head.

Teenage girls
, said Richard to the table in general, his tone neutral, as if he were opening the subject up for discussion.

Yes, she remembered now. The dead squirrel. So perfect, the tiny claws, as if it had simply laid down to sleep.

Can I have some more wine?
asked Benjy.

This tastes good
.

Morrisons in Ross-on-Wye, amazingly
.

Nine weeks we had the builders in
.

He went to Eton
.

Ouch
.

There’s plasters in my toilet bag
.

Twenty stone at least
.

You got blood in the Parmesan
.

She had a fractured skull
.

Fifty press-ups
.

Apple crumble
.

A quarter of a million people
.

Brandy? Cigars?

Dizzee with a double
e …

And then the Hoover blew up. Literally blew up
.

Sit down. I’ll do the washing up
.

I’m stuffed
.

Bedtime, young man
.

Up in them thar hills
.

Good night, Benjy
.

Daisy, will you read to him?

Teeth. Remember what the lady said
.

Night, Benjy
.

Night-night
.

She sat on the floor between the bedside table and the wall. Laughter downstairs. She pushed the point of the scalpel into the palm of her hand but she couldn’t puncture the skin. She was a coward. She would never amount to anything. That fuck-wit little boy. She should walk off into the night and get hypothermia and end up in hospital. That would teach them a lesson. God. Friday night. Megan and Cally would be tanking up on vodka and Red Bull before hitting the ice rink. The dizzy spin of the room and Lady Gaga on repeat, Henry and his mates having races and getting chucked out, pineapple fritters at the Chinky’s afterward. Christ, she was hungry.

Paolo’s father died and he went back to Italy
. Dominic handed Louisa a wet plate.
And I discovered that I wasn’t very good at selling myself
. He
tipped the dirty water out of the bowl and refilled it from the hot tap.
I was in a band at college. I thought I’d be famous. Sounds ridiculous now. We were into Pink Floyd. Everyone else was listening to the Clash
.

I was listening to Michael Jackson
. She held up her hands, begging forgiveness.

Eventually you realize you’re ordinary
.

Melissa appeared at the door and Louisa pressed the Start button on the microwave. Dominic saw that there was a bowl of apple crumble already in there, waiting. While it turned and hummed in the little window Louisa laid her hand on Melissa’s forearm for three or four seconds as if performing some kind of low-grade spiritual healing. She took a pot of yogurt from the fridge, a spoon from the drawer and laid them neatly beside one another on the work surface.
Thanks
, said Melissa quietly and for a fraction of a second Dominic saw the little girl under the veneer.

The trees were thinning up ahead and Joseph could see gashes of sunlight between the trunks. He picked up speed and ten seconds later he stumbled out from between the pines into a space so big and bright that he stood on the little beach, stunned, trying to take it in
. (Daisy shifted position to make her back more comfortable.)
They were looking at a lake, rippled and silver under the gray sky. They had been living underground for so long it felt like the ocean. Mellor opened the map. “We’ve arrived,” he said
.

“What do you mean?” asked Joseph
.

(Benjy’s eyelids were getting heavy.)

Mellor pointed out across the water. “The house is out there.”

Joseph’s heart sank. “The map has to be wrong.”

“Ssshh …” Mellor put his finger to his lips
.

In the distance Joseph could hear the faint barking of dogs. The Smoke Men were coming
.

(Benjy closed his eyes and turned over.)

Mellor stuffed the map hurriedly into his rucksack. “Quick. Take off your boots.”

Richard pulled his shirt over his head.
She has to learn some manners
.

She’s sixteen
.

I don’t care how old she is
.

You can’t force children to do anything
.

So you let them do exactly what they want?

Richard, you are not her father. Sorry. I didn’t mean that …

No, I’m sorry
. He shook his head like a dog coming out of water.
It’s the Sharne case. It’s getting to me
.

You did nothing wrong
.

Being innocent is not always enough
.

Come here
.

But he wouldn’t come.
I’m going outside to clear my head
.

Dominic stared at the black grid of the uncurtained window. If only he could fly away. How had he not seen the danger when Amy came into the shop that day? Blond eyebrows, albino almost. They’d talked in the playground six years before. Two boys a couple of years above Daisy. She lingered at the till and he wondered if she was flirting but it had been so long that he found it hard to be certain. Then she mentioned her address in a way that was clearly an invitation which could be ignored without embarrassment and he dreamt that night of her long pale body with a vividness he had not felt since he was twenty. They slept together three weeks later in the middle of the afternoon, something he and Angela had never done, and this in itself was thrilling. She made a great deal of noise so that he wondered, briefly, if she were in actual pain. They lay afterward looking up at the big Japanese paper lantern turning in the dusty curtained glow and Amy said,
Thank you, kind sir
. He turned onto his side and ran his fingers over her hip bones and her little breasts and into deep dints above her collarbones and realized there was a secret door in the house where he had been trapped for so long.

Angela was two hundred miles and thirty-five years away, trying to conjure the hallway of the house where she’d grown up, the newel post they called
The Pineapple
, the china tramp that lay on the carpet smashed one morning as if a ghost had brushed past in the night, the Oscar Peterson Trio on the gramophone. Dominic climbed into bed and the bounce of the mattress woke her briefly. She listened to the silence and thought of Benjy and felt the old fear. Was he still breathing? A cracked wooden beam ran across the ceiling, splinted with a rusty iron spar. She was slipping away a little now. Sherbet Dabs and Slade singing “Cum on Feel the Noize.” Briefly she saw Karen sitting in the darkness somewhere farther up the hill, looking down on the sleeping house, like a rabbit or an owl. Then she let go.

Daisy opened the book and put the Monet postcard to one side.

I sat down beside her, and presently she moved uneasily. At the same moment there came a sort of dull flapping or buffeting at the window. I went over to it softly, and peeped out by the corner of the blind. There was a full moonlight, and I could see that the noise was made by a great bat, which wheeled around, doubtless attracted by the light, although so dim, and every now and again struck the window with its wings
.

Fingernail moon. The Sea of Rainbows. The Sea of Tranquility. Richard had never really got the space thing. It worried him, the possibility that his imagination wasn’t strong enough to get past the earth’s atmosphere. Neil Armstrong’s heart rate staying under seventy during takeoff.
All brave men are slightly stupid
. He and Mohan had sat opposite each other at the table by the window. He can see it as clear as day. Mohan was eating a container of M&S salad with a white plastic fork.
It could be an abscess
. Of course he should have put it in the report, that was precisely why he had tracked Mohan down, to make sure. Now
the girl was in a wheelchair and Mohan was pretending the conversation never happened. Everyone knew the man was a shit, sleeping with two nurses and his poor bloody wife without a clue, which counted for nothing in a court of law, of course, just gossip and hearsay. The way the lawyer stared at him during that meeting. He half expected his eyelids to slide in from the side. Bloody hell, it was freezing out here.

With a little grunt, Alex came messily into the cone of toilet tissue in his right hand then leant back against the door, breathing heavily. That sudden disinterest, pictures of Melissa naked blowing away like mist. He wiped the splash from the wooden floor with the toe of his sock. He was thinking about canoeing on Llyn Gwynant. Then he was thinking about how quiet the house was and whether anyone had heard him. Richard’s shaving brush glared from the windowsill. He imagined it containing a little camera. Richard sitting at the dining table replaying the grainy footage, saying,
Angela, I think you should see this
. He dropped the tissue into the toilet bowl, pulled the flush and smelt his fingers. Seasidey. Nice.

You run your hand along the bumpy magnolia wall. Paint over paint over plaster over stone, smooth, like the flank of a horse. Something alive in the fabric of the house. Earlier today, in Caffè Ritazza at Southport, Richard had put his hands behind his head and stretched out as if he owned the place. Polo shirt, TAG Heuer watch. A young mum was staring from a nearby table, pink tracksuit, scraped-back hair. He looked through her like she was furniture. But Melissa does have to learn some manners, and maybe you haven’t been strict enough. You remember yourself at fourteen. The Hanwell flat. You and Penny standing on the outside of the balcony rail, seven floors up, one Sunday afternoon, leaning over that woozy drop, hearts pounding and the scary tickle in the back of your knees. Dogs in the park, the traffic on the ring road, a scale model of the world. You whoop as
loud as you can and your voice bounces off the block opposite. There’s a little crowd gathering now. Someone shouts,
Jump
. You look around and it occurs to you that this isn’t real, this is only a memory, that you could let go and topple into that great windy nothing and it wouldn’t matter. What frightens you is that for a couple of seconds you can’t remember where the present is and how to get back there.

The click of the Mercedes cooling. A barn owl on top of a telegraph pole, eyeballs so big they rub against one another as they revolve. Bats slice the air above the garden. Limestone freakishly white under the moon. The sheep lie beside an old bath, still gathered against the wolves which haven’t hunted them for two hundred years. The deep quiet under the human hum. Bootes, Hercules, Draco. Eight thousand man-made objects orbiting the earth. Dead satellites and space junk. The asteroid belt. Puck, Miranda, Oberon. To every moon a fairy story. The Mars Rover squatting near the Husband Hills. The Huygens probe beside a methane lake on Titan. The Kuiper belt. Comets and centaurs. The scattered disc. The Oort cloud. The Local Bubble. Barnard’s Star. The utter cold warmed only by starlight.