Mark Haddon - The Red House

Something slightly footballer’s wife about Louisa. Angela couldn’t picture her going to the theatre or reading a serious book, couldn’t imagine the conversations she and Richard might have when they were alone. But his judgement of other people had always been a little wobbly. Ten years married to the Ginger Witch. The presents he bought for the kids when he last visited, so much effort aimed in the wrong direction. Benjy’s football annual, Daisy’s bracelet. She wondered if he was making a new version of the same mistake, whether she was simply not-Jennifer, and he was another rung on the social ladder.

I’m going to the loo . Benjy stood up. My bladder is so awesomely full .

Don’t get lost . She touched his sleeve.

You can’t get lost on a train .

A sick pervert could strangle you , said Alex, and throw your body out of a window .

I’ll punch him in the crutch .

Crotch , said Alex.

Critch, crotch, cratch… sang Benjy as he made his way up the carriage.

♦

Eventually we find that we no longer need silence. We no longer need solitude. We no longer even need words. We can make all our actions holy. We can cook a meal for our family and it becomes prayer. We can go for a walk in the park and it becomes prayer .

♦

Alex photographed a herd of cows. What was the point of being black and white, evolutionarily? He hated real violence. He could still hear the snap of Callum’s leg that night in Crouch End. He felt sick when he saw footage from Iraq or Afghanistan. He didn’t tell anyone about this. But Andy McNab tamed it by turning it into a cartoon. And now he was thinking about Melissa unzipping that black denim skirt. The word unzipping gave him an erection which he covered with the novel. But was it OK fancying your uncle’s stepdaughter? Some people married their cousins and that was acceptable, unless you both had recessive genes for something bad and your babies came out really fucked up. But girls who went to private school were secretly gagging for it, with their tans and their white knickers that smelt of fabric conditioner. Except she probably wouldn’t speak to him, would she, because girls only spoke to twats with floppy hair and skinny jeans. On the other hand, normal service was kind of suspended on holiday and maybe they’d be sharing a bathroom and he’d go in and open the shower cubicle door and squeeze her soapy tits so she moaned.

♦

A man is trapped in a hot flat above the shipyard, caring for a wife who will live out her days in this bed, watching this television. Twin sisters are separated at seven weeks and know nothing of one another, only an absence that walks beside them always on the road. A girl is raped by her mother’s boyfriend. A child dies and doesn’t die. Family , that slippery word, a star to every wandering bark, and everyone sailing under a different sky.

♦

And then there was her fourth child, the child no one else could see. Karen, her loved and secret ghost, stillborn all those years ago. Holoprosencephaly. Hox genes failing along the midline of the head. Her little monster, features melted into the centre of her face. They’d told her not to look but she’d looked and screamed at them to take the thing away. Then in the small hours, while Dominic slept and the ward was still, she wanted that tiny damaged body in her arms again, because she could learn to love her, she really could, but the points had switched and Karen had swerved away into the parallel world she glimpsed sometimes from cars and trains, the spiderweb sheds and the gypsy camps, the sidings and the breakers’ yards, the world she visited in dreams, stumbling through dogshit and nettles, the air treacly with heat, lured by a girl’s voice and the flash of a summer dress. And this coming Thursday would be Karen’s eighteenth birthday. Which was what she hated about the countryside, no distraction from the dirty messed-up workings of the heart. You’ll love it , Dominic had said. Inbred locals surrounding the house at night with pitchforks and flaming brands . Not understanding, in the way that he failed to understand so many things these days.

♦

Dominic wiped the sandwich crumbs from his lip and looked over at Daisy who smiled briefly before returning to her book. She was so much calmer these days, none of the unpredictable tears which spilt out of her last year, making him feel clumsy and useless. It was bollocks, of course, the Jesus stuff, and some of the church people made his flesh crawl. Bad clothes and false cheer. But he was oddly proud, the strength of her conviction, the way she swam so doggedly against the current. If only her real friends hadn’t drifted away. But Alex wouldn’t look up however long you stared. If he was reading he was reading, if he was running he was running. He’d expected more from having a son. That Oedipal rage between two and four. Stop hugging Mummy . Then, from seven to ten, a golden time, filling a buried cashbox with baby teeth and Pokémon cards, camping in the New Forest, that night the pony opened the zip of their tent and stole their biscuits. He taught Alex how to play the piano, theme tunes arranged in C Major with a single finger in the left hand. Star Wars, Raiders of the Lost Ark . But he grew bored of the piano and gave Benjy the key to the cashbox and went camping with his friends. Devon, the Peak District.

He wondered sometimes if he loved Daisy not because of the strength of her belief but because of her loneliness, the mess she was making of her life, the way it rhymed with his own.

♦

Behind everything there is a house. Behind everything there is always a house, compared to which every other house is larger or colder or more luxurious. Cladding over thirties brick, a broken greenhouse, rhubarb and rusted cans of Castrol for the mower. At the far end you can peel back the corner of the chicken-wire fence and slip down into the cutting where the trains run to Sheffield every half-hour. The tarry sleepers, the locked junction box where they keep the electricity. If you leave pennies on the rail the trains hammer them into long bronze tongues, the queen’s face flattened to nothing.

Pan back and you’re kneeling at the pond’s edge because your brother says there are tadpoles. You reach into the soup of stems and slime, he shoves you and you’re still screaming when you hit the surface. Your mouth fills with water. Fear and loneliness will always taste like this. You run up the garden, sodden, trailing weed, shouting, Dad…Dad…Dad… And you can see him standing at the kitchen door, but he starts to evaporate as you reach the cracked patio, thinning in waves like Captain Kirk in the transporter room, that same high buzzing sound, and the door is empty, and the kitchen is empty, and the house is empty and you realise he’s never coming back.

♦

Have you not got anything else to read? asked Angela.

Yep , said Daisy, but right now this is the book I would like to read if that’s all right by you .

There’s no need to be sarcastic .

Ladies …said Alex, which would have escalated the row to flashpoint if they hadn’t been interrupted by Benjy running down the carriage and pinballing off the seat backs. He’d been standing in the toilet when he remembered the werewolf from the Queen Victoria episode of Doctor Who . Eyes like black billiard balls, the heat of its breath on his neck. He squirrelled himself under Dad’s arm and rubbed the silky cuff of Dad’s special shirt against his upper lip. Dad said, You all right, Captain? and he said, Yeh , because he was now, so he took out his Natural History Museum notebook and the pen that wrote in eight colours and drew the zombies.