Mark Haddon - The Red House

He felt punched. It was true, wasn’t it?

I think she’s having trouble coming to terms with it . A little show of theatrically fake concern.

You… He had to leave before he lost control of himself. You shut your nasty little mouth .

He walked into the dining room. Everyone was gathered at the table. Alex raised a hand to beckon him. He turned and walked upstairs, two at a time. He went into the bathroom, locked the door and sat on the toilet. An old memory of hiding in the bathroom when he was a child, the comfort of the only lockable room in the house, the bar fire high up, two orange rods in their little silver cage, the green rubber suckers that bit the corners of wet flannels. It seemed so obvious, thinking about it. He should go and talk to Daisy. Would she be horrified or comforted that he knew? Perhaps it was better to say nothing, because underneath the confusion he felt a distaste he would never have expected, the unnaturalness of it, the same distaste he felt about the church, strangers coming to claim his daughter and take her away.

♦

The crumpled tissues, the fly crawling on the sill. Daisy had never thought of killing herself, even before she came to know it as a mortal sin. Now she could understand the seductive promise of oblivion. But what if one woke up in hell? A bowl of cold gluey risotto on the carpet by the bed. She’d left her coffee downstairs, hadn’t she? Why had no one come up to see her? She couldn’t be gay because being gay was a sin. She knew it seemed unkind but who was she to decide? The decrees of the Lord are firm, and all of them are righteous . You didn’t discover God’s love then argue about the small print. You submitted, you had to say, I am ignorant, I understand so little, I am only human . Surely she would have noticed before now, it wasn’t like an allergy to bee stings, something of which you were unaware until it put your life in danger. She should call her friends at church. She could go up to Alex and Benjy’s room and get a signal. Meg, Anushka. Lesley, maybe. They would understand in a way that no one here would understand. So why couldn’t she bring herself to do it?

She missed Lauren. She missed Jack. She needed someone who would simply be interested, someone who would say, Tell me more , not, This is what you have to do . But Lauren was somewhere in Gloucester and she lost the number when her old mobile was stolen. Just thinking about this caused a pain that made her grip the edge of the table till it passed. Jack. She took the mobile from her bag. Flat B, 47 Cumberland Street. She could ring directory enquiries. It was like a thin column of sunlight in the dark of the cell.

She knocked on Alex and Benjy’s door. No answer. So she went in and stood on the magic chair in the far corner of the room. Do you want the number texted directly to your phone? Her hands were shaking, as if the seconds mattered. Eight, seven, seven, zero…

The owner of this Orange mobile number is unavailable. If you’d like to leave a message…

She saw Jack getting up from the table in The Blue Sea. You fucking traitor . Everyone staring, squid rings and tomato ketchup, the bottle of spilt vinegar leaking. The hurt in his face, and something she couldn’t quite see, a figure on the edge of her field of vision that slid away every time she turned her head. She couldn’t do it, she clicked her phone off and sat down on the chair. It looked as if someone had burgled the room, one drawer had been removed and upended, Benjy’s dirty jeans lay on the carpet inside out, wearing a pair of red underpants, a crushed yoghurt drink carton, felt-tip drawings of carnage.

♦

He had judged it rather well, fifty paces running, fifty paces walking, alternating the whole way up. Thirty minutes, not bad going. He said he’d be out for an hour but he was loath to turn around now that he was able to stretch his legs. Twenty minutes more or less would make no difference and he’d be a good deal faster on the way back. His legs were going to hurt like hell tomorrow but he felt better than he’d done all week. A tracery of gritty paths along the spine of the hill, blusters of wind. They’d walked up here only two days ago but how different it felt now, a sense of having earned this altitude, the way one lost any sense of scale when one was no longer able to see a human object.

Shit and damn . His left foot was suddenly gone from under him and he was tumbling sideways, breaking his fall with his open left hand on a hard little stone. Damn and shit . He rolled over onto his back and waited for a powder of stars to finish passing across his retina. He looked at his hand, a ragged pebbly graze across the centre of his palm, already starting to bleed. It reminded him of school, skidding bikes and falling off climbing frames. He sat up slowly. He had twisted his ankle, hard to tell how badly yet. He waited for a minute then rotated himself onto all fours and stood up carefully using only his right leg. He put a little weight on his left foot and flinched: not good. He tried to walk and realised he could accomplish only a kind of lurching hop. An hour and a half back? two hours? He would not be popular.

♦

The drop in pressure. Bruised purple sky, wind like a train, the landscape suddenly alive, trees bent and struggling, swathes of alternating colour racing through the long grass, the sky being hauled over the valley like a blanket. An empty white fertiliser sack dances along the side of the hill. Windows hammer in their sashes, the boiler vent clatters and slaps. A tile is levered from the roof, cartwheels over the garden wall and sticks into the earth like a little shark fin. The bins chatter and snap in the woodshed, fighting the bungees that hold them down.

Then it comes, like a great grey curtain being dragged down from the hills, the fields smudged and darkened. A noise like wet gravel smashed against the glass. The guttering fills and bubbles and water gushes from the feet of downpipes. Drops fantail on the bench top and the stone steps and the polished roof of the Mercedes. Water pools and runs in the ruts of the drive, drips down the chimney and pings and fizzes on the hot metal of the stove; it squeezes through the old putty that holds the leaded windows fast to puddle on sills. The rain near-horizontal now, a living graph of the wind’s force. All external points of reference gone, no horizon, no fixed lines. The house is airborne, riding the storm, borne on something that is neither wholly air, nor wholly water, Kansas vanished long ago, borders crossed and broken, the ground a thousand fathoms below.

Benjy stands at the dining-room window, spellbound by the sheer thereness of it, the world outside his head for once louder and more insistent than the world inside. Drops scuttle down the gridded panes, marbling the world, everything green and silver, the clatter against the glass now softer, now louder, as the great bead curtain of falling liquid swings back and forth.

Noah’s Ark. And God said I will destroy the world because human beings are sinful . The animals went in two by two, marmosets and black widow spiders, Japhet and Daphet and Baphet. And everyone else was killed, like in the tsunami, cars and walls and trees pouring down the street, people ripped apart in a great wet grinding machine. And when the dove flew over the land there would have been bodies everywhere all bloated and black like in New Orleans. A sudden shadow and the smack of something thrown against the glass only inches from his face. He turns and runs, crying, Mum…Mum…Mum…

♦

Dominic stands in the hallway, water creeping in under the front door, a sound like the chaos between radio stations. He should go and talk to Daisy, tell her it’s all right, tell her they love her, that they will always love her. Why is he so scared of doing this? He has never thought about her as a sexual person. The idea disturbs him in a way he can’t quite identify. All those little waystations. Daisy, Alex, Benjy, the first time they read to themselves, the first time they walked to school on their own. He remembers holding Daisy as a baby, those tiny perfect fingers gripping his thumb, the eczema, the blonde quiff. He imagines someone else holding her now, the two of them naked, and the clash of these two kinds of tenderness is like chariot wheels touching. Out of nowhere he thinks of Andrew, lying in a hospital bed, Amy sitting beside him, head bowed, holding his hand. He feels ashamed for having ignored the message. He has never really solved a problem in his life, he has simply averted his eyes and left other people to do the dirty work. The creak of wood. He turns and sees Daisy coming down the stairs. How are you feeling?