Mark Haddon - The Red House

♦

He is in serious trouble, that body shiver, guts and chest. He can’t believe this is actually happening, he is two miles away from the house and he is getting hypothermia, not halfway up K2 or on the Ross Ice Shelf but in bloody Herefordshire. He is a doctor, and it is no longer wholly out of the question that he might die, not in a heroic way, but in a stupid way almost within actual sight of the house where there is a hot shower and a mug of coffee. He wonders if he should head straight down left off the hill to get out of the wind, but if he does that he stands even less chance of bumping into other runners or walkers, nor is he sure if he has the energy to clamber through hedges and over fences should he lose the path. The two options do a little back and forth dance in his head. Stay up, go down, stay up, go down. He realises that he is losing the ability to think clearly. Dying will sort out the Sharne case, if nothing else. He wonders if this is a kind of punishment, though that would be arrogant, thinking atmospheric pressure systems might be arranged in order to impact on his own life, and maybe the idiotic randomness is a more fitting punishment, but what is he being punished for? The rain has turned to hail. He can’t remember precisely what he has done wrong. Shit . He snags his foot on a stone and the pain is both intense and suspiciously far away. He looks down and sees that his ankle is heavily swollen.

♦

The owners? You didn’t want to think about them too much. The idea that all this belonged to someone else. The suspicion that a wealthy family had over-reached itself and had been forced to rent the family silver. They came in the summer and at Christmas, then packed their more personal possessions into a locked cupboard on the half-landing, a stuffed owl under a glass dome, a box of tarnished spoons in purple plush. There was a clipframe of thirty-one collaged Polaroids, fading like photos of hairstyles in a barber’s window, a student rowing eight hurling their cox into the Isis, a black retriever, Barbours and pearls, court shoes and ironed rugby shirts, faces rhyming from picture to picture, the plump girl with the laugh and the Charlie’s Angels hair, the ginger man thickening over the years, playing tennis, posing in front of a Stalinist carbuncle in some Eastern European capital. But the London flat had been burgled during their last stay so they’d left in a hurry forgetting to lock the cupboard.

♦

Alex jogs down the staircase wearing his running clothes and a woolly hat and his luminous yellow cycling jacket. Benjy closes the cupboard quickly, thinking he will be in trouble but Alex doesn’t take any notice because he’s going out for a run in the pouring rain. See you later, Smalls . Benjy waits until the front door bangs behind him and gently lifts the glass-domed owl out of the dusty dark. He is instantly in love with it. Serendipitously, he has already chosen a name for the owl he would have if he were a character in Harry Potter . Tolliver. This is Tolliver. He imagines writing, Dear Pavel …, rolling the paper tight as a cigarette, binding it with red ribbon and giving it to Tolliver who takes it in his sharp little beak and lifts his wide white wings and rises from the sill of the open window, the whole sky full of criss-crossing owls, knitting together a world of which muggles remain utterly unaware.

♦

How eloquently houses speak, of landscape and weather, of builders and families, of wealth, fears, children, servants. Hunkering in solitude or squeezed upwards by the pressure of their neighbours, proudly facing the main road or turning towards the hill to keep the wind and rain out of their faces. Roofs angled to shuck off, walls whitewashed to reflect the sun. Inner courtyards to save the women of the house from prying eyes. Those newfangled precious cars, Austin Morris, Ford Cortina, in little rooms of their own till they were bread and butter and banished to the kerb. The basement kitchen and the attic bedrooms where the servants worked and slept. Bare beams plastered and exposed again when they no longer said poverty . The front room that contains only the boxed tinsel Christmas tree and the so-called silver, where no one ever goes, and where you will lie for two days before your funeral. The new toilet replacing the privy in the garden that now holds only rusted tricycles and soft dirty footballs. Pipes and wires leading to reservoirs and power stations, to telephone exchanges and sewage farms. Water from Birmingham, power from Scotland. Voices from Brisbane and Calgary.

Time speeds up. A day becomes an hour, becomes a minute, becomes a second. Planes vanish first, cars are smeared into strings of coloured smoke then fade to nothing. People disappear, leaving only bodies that flicker on and off in beds in time with the steady toggle of the dark. Buildings inhabit the earth, growing like spores, sending out tubers, seeding new towns, new villages, new cities till drowned in sand or jungle. Girders and chimneys turning to mulch and rubble. Two thousand years, two hundred thousand years, two million years and a severe and stately house that once sat at the geometric centre of its square garden looking across the valley is now a ghost in the soil a mile below the surface of a snowball earth.

♦

Daisy walks to the window seat at the other end of the kitchen and stares out into the rain. She tries to worry about Richard but can’t do it. How grey the world is. So many words for red. Carmine, scarlet, ruby, burgundy, cherry, vermilion. But grey? She turns and glances into the living room and sees that Melissa has gone at last. The pressure in her chest builds. Mum?

What, love? Angela turns and touches her arm. You look dreadful .

Can we talk?

A momentary pause while Angela absorbs the oddity and intimacy of this. Of course we can .

♦

Alex loves this weather, loves all bad weather, snow, rain, hail, mud, darkness, failing light, becoming a part of the landscape instead of simply observing it. Thoughts cycle as he runs. Song lyrics, conversations he’s had or wished he’d had, sex he’s had or wished he’d had. The encounter with Richard is on repeat as he runs up the road to Red Darren. You’re making me look like an idiot . He thinks instead of Richard lying unconscious in the rain, a big wheeling pan from a film. He is not sure if he still fancies Louisa or not, the way she’s so pathetically worried about Richard. The higher he gets the colder it becomes, the rain turns to hail and for the first time he starts to wonder what will happen if Richard is in actual deep shit and he realises that if he fails to find Richard then everyone will blame him even though he is the only one doing something to find him. Plus, of course, something might have happened which has nothing to do with the weather. Broken leg, heart attack, fallen down some bloody hole. But if he finds Richard and he’s dead by the time he gets there Alex won’t actually be blamed at all. He’ll be the person who found the body .

He’s up on the top now and, Jesus, it is fucking freezing running through this stuff, and it is entirely possible that Richard took another route and turned up at the front door five minutes after Alex left, which will really piss him off. He’s having to pretty much close his eyes on account of the hail. Grey background and white dots coming straight at him like that old Windows screensaver. Was Richard wearing a waterproof? Should have grabbed a spare one from the hallway. Too late to worry about that now. Give Richard his own and earn bonus points. Who would win a fight between the two of them? Alex presumes it would be a smackdown. Richard had a few inches in height and reach but he also had that pudgy middle-aged look men got when they stopped looking after themselves. Fuck. And there he is, up ahead, limping like someone coming out of a war zone.