Mark Haddon - The Red House

I think we all should be more grateful for the things we have .

I think we should also be more considerate of other people’s feelings .

Oh, like you’re considerate of my feelings?

Don’t answer me back .

So, what? Just be quiet and do what you say?

You were showing off, and you were patronising people. I don’t care what you believe in private…

That’s rubbish. You hate what I believe in private .

I don’t care what you believe in private but I don’t think you should force it down other people’s throats .

You’re just jealous because I’m happy .

I’m not jealous, Daisy. And you’re not happy .

Well, maybe you’re not the expert when it comes to what I’m actually feeling .

♦

We’ll buy some second-hand books , said Richard. Get some lunch. Stop for a walk on the way back .

That sounds like the most excellent fun , said Melissa.

Then it’s your lucky day . He remained poker-faced. We can only fit seven in the car .

Good .

Will you be all right on your own? asked Louisa.

Melissa flopped her head to one side and rolled her eyes.

Can we walk up Lord Hereford’s Knob? asked Benjy.

He’ll stop finding it funny eventually .

I’ll duck out, too , said Dominic. If that’s OK .

Angela briefly wondered if he had arranged some kind of liaison with Melissa and came close to making a joke about it before realising how tasteless and bizarre it would have been.

♦

Melissa was coming up the stairs when Alex emerged from the bathroom, a sky-blue towel around his waist. Post-exercise fatigue. He made her think of a tiger, that slinky muscular shamble. There was a V of blond hairs on the small of his back. She wanted to touch him. The feeling scared her, the way it rose up with no warning, the body’s hunger. Because she loved the game, the tension in the air, but she found the act itself vaguely disgusting, André’s eyes rolling back like he was having a seizure, the greasy condom on the carpet like a piece of mouse intestine. Alex turned and looked at her. She smiled. Hello, sailor . Then turned away.

♦

Dominic sat beside Angela on the bench. There was a scattering of crumbs on the lawn, a couple of sparrows picking at them, and another bird he didn’t recognise. This’ll be good for us, I think. Being here .

It’s a lovely place .

That’s not what I meant .

I know .

He remembered a time when they really talked, sitting by the river, lying in that tiny bedroom naked after making love, faded psycheledic wallpaper and the Billie Holiday poster. Both eager to know more about this other life of which they’d become a part. But now? They weren’t even friends any more, just co-parents. He wanted to tell her about Amy, to relieve the pressure in his chest, because he was scared, because he had begun to notice the frayed curtains and the smell of cigarettes in Amy’s house and the need in her voice. He had assumed at first that the whole thing was no more than a distraction from lives lived elsewhere, but this wasn’t a distraction for her, was it? This was her life, this dimly lit bedroom in the middle of the afternoon, and the secret door was in truth the entrance to a darker dirtier world from which he wouldn’t be able to return without paying a considerable price. But was it really so bad to have looked for affection elsewhere? They had both been unfaithful in their way. To have and to hold, to love and to cherish. When had they last done these things? He wouldn’t tell Angela, would he? He would live with it until the discomfort faded and lying became normal.

Poor Benjy . She examined the inside of her mug. He was talking about us dying. You know, who would get all the stuff in the house .

He seems to like it here, though . Because this was what they did. They acted like a real family. Perhaps it was what most people did. How are you and your brother bonding?

He remembers everything . She threw the dregs of her coffee into the grass. The birds flew away. It scares me. Makes me wonder if I’m losing my mind. Like Mum .

Who’s the prime minister?

I’m being serious…He could be making it up for all I know .

Don’t we always make them up, our childhood memories? His own mother had slept with another man, the dapper little dentist with the soft-top Mini. Or was it just a spiteful rumour?

They sat for several minutes looking at the view. They had this at least, the ability to sit beside one another in silence.

I have difficulty believing that Richard and I are actually related . The birds were reconvening around the crumbs.

Maybe you were adopted. That might solve a problem or two .

Another of his jokeless punchlines. But Richard was calling, Wagons roll .

♦

Countryside like an advert on TV, for antiperspirant, for butter, for broadband, a place to make us feel good inside, where everything is slower and more noble, cows and hayricks and honest labour. Somewhere out there, hard by a stand of beech, commanding an enviable prospect of the valley, the house where the book will be written and the marriage mended and the children will build dens and the rain when it comes is good honest rain. How strange this yearning for being elsewhere doing nothing. The gift of princes once, its sweet poison spreading. Lady Furlough surveying the desert of the deer park, the monsters coiling in the ornamental lake, that terrible weight of hours, laudanum and cross-stitch. What every child knows and every adult forgets, the glacial movement of the watched clock, pluperfects turning slowly into cosines turning slowly into the feeding of the five thousand. School holidays of which we remember only mending bikes and Gary Holler killing the frog, the featureless hours between gone forever.

And now you must do nothing for a week and enjoy it. Days of rest long past the point when we’re rested, holidays without the holy, pilgrimage become mere travel, the destination handed to us on a plate, the idleness of the empire in its final days.

♦

Melissa had been sitting at the dining-room table reading when Dominic walked through and said he was going for a walk. The door banged and she became aware of how quiet the house was. She stuck her iPod on. ‘Monkey Business’, Black Eyed Peas, but the inability to hear someone approaching from behind made her feel vulnerable so she took the earphones out again. She stepped into the garden, wanting the minimal reassurance of Dominic’s shrinking silhouette, but he was gone and the valley was empty. She went back into the living room and rifled through the stack of DVDs. Monsters Inc ., Ice Age 2, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban . There was a Simpsons case but it contained a PlayStation disc for Star Wars: Battlefront .

A whirr and clang behind her. She spun round. The grandfather clock chimed again. Fuck . She needed to talk to a normal human being. Megan, Cally, Henry, anyone. She grabbed her phone and headed for the hills.

♦

He’d been looking forward to it for the last couple of weeks. A town of books. All this learning gathered in and offered up. Trawling, browsing, leafing . But now that he was standing in the bowels of The Cinema Bookshop…That smell. What was it, precisely? Glue? Paper? The spores of some bibliophile lichen? Catacombs of yellowing paper. Every book unwanted, sold for pennies or carted from the houses of the dead. Battersea Books Home. The authors earned nothing from the transaction. Salaries less than binmen, he’d read somewhere. He thought about their lives. No colleagues, no timetable, no security, the constant lure of daytime television. The formlessness of it all made him feel slightly ill, going to work in their dressing gowns. So much risk and so little adventure.