Mark Haddon - The Red House

But Dominic and Richard were talking about Raglan. And then I realised , said Dominic. It featured in The Song Remains the Same.

He’s improving my mind , said Louisa. He takes me to galleries. Museums, operas . She leant in close. Alex could smell her perfume and see her breasts inside her shirt. I’m not so keen on the opera .

Melissa stared at her plate but she had lost the power to influence the atmosphere in the room. Richard patted her forearm gently and she didn’t protest.

I felt rather deserted when you ran off across the road .

I’m sorry , said Daisy. The desire to save Melissa. It seemed laughable now.

What’s the most horrible way to die? asked Benjy.

Huntington’s disease , said Richard. You go insane and lose control of your body slowly over many years. You can’t sleep, you can’t swallow, you can’t speak, you suffer from epileptic fits and there’s no cure .

But Benjy had meant it to be a funny question.

♦

A young doctor had stood beside her bed and explained why the foetus was deformed. He seemed pleased with himself for knowing the biology behind such a rare syndrome. She got the impression that she was meant to feel pleased, too, for having won some kind of perverse jackpot. The following morning they took the lift to the ground floor and entered a world full of mothers and pregnant women. She felt angry with them for parading their prizes so brazenly, and relieved that she herself had not become the mother of that thing. She cried and Dominic comforted her but he never asked why she needed comfort, because it was obvious, surely. She combed her memory to discover what she’d done wrong. She’d smoked during that first month. She’d stumbled getting off a bus on Upper Street. If only she could find the fault then perhaps she could turn back time and do things differently and arrive at the present moment all over again but with a baby sleeping in the empty cot.

Dominic came back into the bedroom holding his toothpaste and brush. What’s the matter?

I look at people and I think they’re Karen .

He remembered his grandmother dying when he was eight, seeing her everywhere. All those old ladies with white hair.

I think she’s still alive. Out there. Watching. Waiting .

He was tired and this was scaring him. She’s not out there, Angela. She’s not watching . Had she ever been alive?

Don’t you think about her?

Sometimes . Though he rarely did.

I hear her voice .

How long have you been thinking like this?

Not so much before, but recently…

You’ve got a real daughter .

I know .

And you give her such a hard time .

Dom…

It’s not about the religion, is it?

Please, not now .

You’re angry with her . He felt the giddy excitement of climbing a great tower and seeing the shape of the maze through which he had stumbled for so long. She’s not a consolation prize. She’s a human being .

♦

Louisa sat on the edge of the bath, the little yellow tub of face cream in her hand. Melissa’s disappearance had rattled her, not so much the thought of what might have happened as what else she might do, what else she might or might not say. Hard to believe it now, the facts blurred by the alcohol she’d drunk to blunt the unexpected loneliness after Craig walked out. Fifteen men, or thereabouts. She wasn’t greatly interested in counting. One in the back seat of his BMW, with his trousers round his knees, his hand over her mouth, calling her a dirty bitch so she wondered if it counted as rape, though rape meant saying No , not just thinking it, which meant having some actual self-respect. One of them was a scaffolder. Blind drunk every time.

Annie had taken her to Raoul’s that first weekend and she could feel them circling now Craig’s scent was fading. Annie said she was punishing herself, but some things were just accidents. You took the wrong path and night fell. She never drank at home but the places she went for company were places where you drank, and if you were scared of going home you kept on drinking. Melissa encouraged her rebellion at first, then came back from a friend’s house one morning to find a man she didn’t recognise sitting at the breakfast table and said, Who the fuck is this? and Louisa couldn’t say anything because, in truth, she didn’t know who it was, not really. Even now she can’t bring a name to mind. Or a face.

She didn’t fall for Richard so much as grab him as she was swept past, fighting to keep her head above the water. They didn’t have sex for six weeks while she waited for the result of an AIDS test. He thought she was just being old-fashioned. She thought that if she let go of the past it would be carried away by that same flood, but it was dawning on her for the first time that she would have to tell him before Melissa did. Forgive and forget . She was beginning to understand what it meant. You couldn’t do the forgetting until someone else had done the forgiving.

♦

I was having a nightmare about the Smoke Men .

OK , said Alex. We’re on two mountain bikes . Because this was something he often thought about when he was falling asleep himself. We’re riding through a forest. It’s summer and I’ve got a picnic in a rucksack .

With bacon sandwiches , said Benjy, and a flask of tea and two KitKats .

We’re going faster and faster and suddenly we come out of the trees and we look down and see the tyres aren’t touching the ground any more .

Are they magic bikes?

They’re magic bikes and we’re flying and we’re getting higher and higher and we can see the fields and a river and a steam train and cars. There are birds flying underneath us and there’s a hot-air balloon and the people in the basket wave at us and we wave back and I say to you, ‘We can go anywhere in the world .’ He stroked Benjy’s hair. Where do you want to go, little brother?

I want to go home , said Benjy.

Richard slots the tiny Christmas tree of the interdental brush into its white handle and cleans out the gaps between his front teeth, top and bottom, incisors, canines. He likes the tightness, the push and tug, getting the cavity really clean, though only at the back between the molars and pre-molars do you get the satisfying smell of rot from all that sugar-fed bacteria. Judy Hecker at work. Awful breath. Ridiculous that it should be a greater offence to point it out. Arnica on the shelf above his shaver. Which fool did that belong to? Homeopathy on the NHS now. Prince Charles twisting some civil servant’s arm no doubt. Ridiculous man. Hello trees, how are you this morning? Pop a couple of Nurofen into the river at Reading to cure everyone’s headache in London. He rinses his mouth with Corsodyl.

The intolerable loneliness after Jennifer left. The noises a house made at night. Learning the reason for small talk at forty-two. Going to the pub . He’d always thought of it as wasting time.

He spits out the mouthwash, sluices his mouth with cold water and pats his face dry with the white towel from the hot rail.

He turns and sees himself in the mirrored door of the cabinet, face still puffy with the fluids that fatten the face in the night, waiting for gravity to restore him to himself. They say you’re meant to see your father staring back at you, but he never does. He pulls the light cord and heads to the bedroom to get dressed.