Mark Haddon - The Red House

♦

Melissa walked for twenty minutes, then her bag started to feel really heavy and there was no way she was turning back so she stuck her thumb out hoping an actual human being stopped and not some weird inbred rapist farmer. A tractor came past, a Post Office van, a removals lorry, a rusty Datsun, then a polished black Alfa Romeo slowed down and pulled over. Where are you going? The woman was wearing leather trousers and spoke with a Spanish accent, which was totally not what Melissa was expecting.

I’ll go anywhere , said Melissa, as if she were in a film.

Throw your bag into the back seat .

Stuck on the dashboard there was a toy camel with rubber legs which wobbled when the car went round corners. There was a diamanté cat collar in the footwell. So… The woman lit a cigarette. Are you running away from home?

… But when we were as far away as a man can shout, pushing rapidly onward, the Sirens saw our speeding ship and sang their high songs: ‘Come here, famous Odysseus, great glory of the Achaeans, tie up your ship and listen to our voices, for no one has ever rowed past this island in his black ship without listening to our honeyed mouths… ’

♦

Angela walked into the kitchen and found Louisa making coffee and toast. A sudden memory of the shared house at college. Dahl and joss sticks, Carol getting scabies at the hostel. Are you all right?

Of course , said Louisa. Why?

Last night. Richard and Melissa .

It was nothing .

No fun stuck in the middle .

Really, it was nothing .

Neither of them were on their best behaviour though . On what planet was this a good thing to say?

Louisa turned and held Angela’s eye. Richard is a good man .

I wasn’t saying that . But she was saying precisely that, wasn’t she?

Louisa fitted the plunger into the mouth of the jug. Melissa is a good person, too .

I know she is . Another lie.

There are two slices in the toaster if you want . Louisa picked up the cafetière and swept out.

Was it jealousy, perhaps, this childish desire to drive a little wedge between the two of them, the knowledge that they possessed something she and Dominic had let slip through their fingers?

A sudden memory of 92 Hensham Lane. Donny getting drunk one night and cutting the lawn with a pair of scissors for a bet. That German girl putting a padlock on her room. Angela remembered the day she and Dominic moved into their own flat. There were earwigs in the bread bin and someone was playing ‘London Calling’ at stadium volume upstairs, but it was theirs, and she could feel the relief even now, nearly thirty years later.

♦

Dominic ate a spoonful of Shreddies. ‘ We believe this to be a tragic case of mistaken identity. We are calling on everyone in the local community to come forward with any information .’ Crack and genocide, then you turned the page and it was cloned sheep and solar power, everything going to hell in a handcart, and heaven just around the corner. It all levelled out in the end. People stopped smoking and got fat. Polio was cured and AIDS killed millions in Africa. When was the Golden Age, anyway? Child prostitution, gin epidemics, the Crusades…Alex sat down beside him with a bowl of Sugar Puffs and a mug of tea. How was the run?

Good. Yeh, it was good .

Don’t you ever just want to lie in bed?

Of course. But you can’t, can you?

He hadn’t crashed the car or got a girl pregnant, for which they should be thankful, but there was a distance. He thought at first it was genetic, the same self-containment he saw in Richard. But maybe it was just part of being a teenager. Your job is to be completely and utterly in the wrong . They didn’t need you in the end, generations like leaves, the young taking over a world you no longer really cared for.

All those photographs of Andrew in Amy’s house. Hospitalised seven times with asthma and chest infections. He was moved, at first, by the care with which Amy looked after him, and it was only gradually that he came to resent the way that this young man whom he’d never met intruded upon their most private moments and began to suspect that Andrew’s continual fallings-out with bosses, flatmates and girlfriends were not a symptom of his medical condition but scenes in a long drama of interdependence besides which Dominic was only a sideshow.

Incidentally , said Alex, I think I saw Melissa hitting the road .

♦

Richard’s father had died of testicular cancer at the age of forty. Richard was eight, Angela nine. 1972. Hewlett-Packard were making the first pocket calculator and Eugene Cernan was making the last moonwalk. His father was working for the police firearms unit at the time and Richard believed for some years that he had been killed during a shoot-out, though whether this was a lie his mother had concocted or one he had concocted himself and which his mother did not contradict, he never knew.

He still has his scrapbook of news clippings from that year, 1972 in silver foil on the front cover. Vietnam, Baader-Meinhof, Watergate. His father’s death goes unrecorded. Not even a pause in the weekly entries, because it was not his father’s death which divided his childhood in two, not directly.

His parents drank regularly, at home, in restaurants, at the squash club, so perhaps it didn’t seem unusual at first, but by the time he was ten he knew that other children’s mothers did not open a bottle of sherry in the afternoon and finish it before bedtime. He and Angela never discussed it. What they discussed was the cleaning and the washing-up and the household bills that fell increasingly to them to sort out. Within a couple of years he was signing his mother’s name perfectly on cheques, and even now when he loses the car keys he finds himself looking in the places where he hid them from his mother thirty years ago, the washing machine, the sugar jar. He was nervous of inviting friends to his house and equally nervous at their houses, wondering what might be happening at home, so that school rapidly became the refuge where the tasks were straightforward and the rewards immediate. Geometrical diagrams. The House of Hanover. He regularly cooked for his mother, put her to bed, bathed her sometimes, and the more intimate the task the more she resented the intrusion. At least when she lashed out she was drunk and uncoordinated and he was able to avoid the second blow.

Melissa’s gone . It was Louisa, standing behind his shoulder.

What do you mean, gone?

She’s taken her bag with all her stuff. Alex thinks he saw her walking down the road .

So, she hasn’t been abducted .

I’m being serious .

So am I . Professional habit. Consider all possibilities. He stood up. Let’s go inside and gather some information .

Alex came downstairs waving Louisa’s mobile as they stepped through the front door. You can get a couple of bars on Vodafone in our room when the wind’s in the right direction . He handed it back. I left a message .

Everyone had gathered in the dining room. The scene struck Richard as a little over-dramatic. She vanishes once a week at home .

But we’re in the middle of nowhere , said Louisa.