Mark Haddon - The Red House

♦

Ariel Gel Nimbus 11. Ridiculous names they gave these things. Richard loved the smell, though, plasticky and factory-clean. He laced the left shoe up and leant round to take the right from its tissued box. He felt bruised by the conversation with Angela, less by her feelings than by his failure to predict them. It had never occurred to him that she would feel embittered. His mother had hated him for looking after her, then hated him for leaving. Five years living with an alcoholic woman and no one had thanked him. If there was such a thing as the moral high ground it was surely he who occupied it. From the corner of his eye he saw, through the shop’s front window, a rat’s nest of black downpipes emerging from the upper storey of the house opposite. He rotated his body a little further towards the rear of the shop.

How much?

£79.99 .

Reassuringly expensive .

The assistant seemed oblivious to his irony. But you had to have the best. Save £20 now and you regretted it later. He stood up and examined himself in the mirror.

How do they feel? The young man was ginger and plump and ill nourished with one of those increasingly popular asymmetrical fringes so that he was forced to lean his head to one side in order to see properly.

Good. They feel good . He squatted and stood up again. He remembered the day he left for Bristol, his mother yelling at him as he walked down the street with his rucksack, curtains twitching, like a scene from a cheap melodrama. Ideally he should have gone outside and run up and down but he wasn’t sure he had the confidence to carry it off. He jogged on the spot for ten seconds. I’ll take them .

♦

Angela stayed in the car. She needed time away from Richard and she couldn’t imagine another two hundred feet improving the view. A young Indian woman was fighting an orange cagoule. A little further away a man and two teenage boys were tinkering with an amateur rocket, three, four foot high, red nose cone, fins. The man knelt briefly beside it then stepped backwards and… Jesus Christ . A fizz like Velcro and the thing just vanished upwards. The boys whooped and waited but it simply didn’t come down. They swivelled, scanning the distance. Carried off by the wind, no doubt, but something magical about it still, a story for later. She looked back up the hill. Her family were dots.

Was he lying about Juliette? Or had he misremembered to alleviate his guilt? If only she could retort with hard facts, bang, bang, bang, but she had never really looked back, never thought these details might need preserving.

God, she wanted something to eat. Toffee, sweets, biscuits. She opened the glove compartment and a strip of passport photos fell out. She picked them up and turned them over. Melissa smouldering, Melissa blowing a kiss, Melissa flicking her hair. They were oddly touching. She thought of all those pictures of Karen. Two years old, playing with wooden blocks on a sheepskin rug. Nine years old, in front of a rainbow-coloured windbreak. Fourteen years old, in a green duffel coat at some steam fair, the word OGDENS in Victorian funhouse lettering on a green boiler behind her head. And for a few giddy seconds they were real, in a leather album on the shelf above the telly. Then the wind shook the car and she was in the world again.

♦

Alex looked back and saw Daisy and Benjy throwing lumps of sheep shit at one another. Only the dry ones , shouted Daisy. At school he got the piss ripped for being her brother, Eddie Chan singing ‘Like a Virgin’ forty thousand times. Nastier stuff, too, especially after the anti-drug assembly, like she wanted people to hate her. He could shut most things out but not this. Was she fucked up or just being a smug twat? Should he protect her or leave her to get what she deserved? It was a puzzle and it bugged the hell out of him that he couldn’t solve it.

That went in my hair, you little…

He wondered if she might flip back sometime. Not that they’d be friends or anything. But still.

Louisa moved out of range. A teenage girl playing a little boy’s game. It didn’t quite compute. Maybe if she’d had boys, if she’d had the brood she’d once dreamt of. Though sometimes, when Melissa was really tired and Richard was out, she curled up on the sofa and laid her head on Louisa’s leg and sucked her thumb, which was what one wanted ultimately, wasn’t it, that connection.

Goal . Benjy pulled his shirt over his head and ran around in circles.

Daisy shook a wet lump off her jeans. You are so going to die .

Richard felt a hand tighten round his heart. He had never done this. He would never do this.

Daisy wrestled Benjy onto the grass. He yelled, That’s cheating , but it wasn’t a serious protest because he loved this. No one gave him piggy-back rides or picked him up any more. You could ask for hugs if you were feeling sad or you’d hurt yourself, but when it happened spontaneously it made you feel so warm inside.

Is Angela all right? Louisa was looking down the hill to the higgledy-piggledly cars.

He loved her for thinking about these things. The funeral hit her harder than I expected .

You bought some running shoes .

I saw Alex coming back this morning .

Don’t break an ankle .

Trust me, I’m a doctor .

She laughed and he remembered when he’d first said those words to her and how she’d laughed that time too. He wanted suddenly to be on holiday alone, just the two of them, making love in the middle of the day, seeing her body in sunlight through the curtains.

And Daisy and Benjy were lying on their backs. Look. You can see the sky moving . And Alex was further up the hill, shouting, Come on .

♦

Two crows abandoned something dead in the road as they drove past. A postbox in a wall. Ruinsford Farm. Three Oaks Farm. Upper House Farm. A crazy dog chased them for half a mile. Being in the back of the car made Alex twitchy, too far from the steering wheel, being taken somewhere by someone else. Next year he’d arrange his own holiday. Dolomites, maybe. Next year he’d start to arrange everything. Economics, History, Business Studies. Brighton, Leeds, Glasgow. Travel for a couple of years. Start his own business. Not ambitions, just facts about the world. You knew where you wanted to go, you worked out the route and set off. He didn’t understand why so many people made such a bloody hash of it. Then they were pulling in through the gate and Melissa was sitting reading on the low wall at the back of the house and he felt that little surge of panic, like at the beginning of a race, or when you were about to do some stupid vertical drop on the bike. But you couldn’t turn back.

He got out of the car and walked over. She was wearing tight jeans and boots and a little black jacket over a lacy Victorian dress. She didn’t acknowledge his presence until he was really close and when she turned to him her face was blank. She hooked her hair behind her ear like her mum did.

Here it comes, she thought. Because this was what she liked, this tension in the air, the way you could play someone.

What’s the book?

She flipped it over.

Good? He sat and swung his legs like a little boy.

Uh-huh . You had to say as little as possible and let the other person fill the gaps.

So . He looked down at his swinging feet. Did he look casual and relaxed? It was hard to see yourself from the outside. How do you like it here?

About one out of ten .

So what’s the one?

He wanted her to say it was him. Peace and quiet, time to think . She lifted the fizzy little glass of gin and tonic. No lemon. But needs must, right?