Mark Haddon - The Red House

Holy shit, Batman , said Benjy, and no one told him off.

♦

Beeswax and fresh linen. Louisa stood in the centre of the bedroom. A hum from deep underground, just on the limit of hearing, a chill in the air. Hairs stood up on the back of her neck. Someone had suffered in this room. She’d felt it since childhood, in this house, in that corridor. Then Craig bought Danes Barn and she couldn’t bear to be in there for more than five minutes. He told her she was being ridiculous. A week later she heard about the little boy who’d hidden in the chest freezer.

♦

Melissa walked down the cold tiles of the hall and into the bright rectangle of the day. She took her earphones out. That silence, like a noise all by itself, with all these other noises inside it, grass rubbing together, a dog yapping far off. She dried the rain from the bench with a tea towel and sat down with Enduring Love , but she couldn’t hang on to the words because she’d never spent more than five consecutive days in the countryside before. Kellmore in Year 11. Ziplines and Bacardi Breezers. Kasha’s epileptic fit in the showers. There really was absolutely nothing to do here. She had two joints at the bottom of her bag but she’d have to smoke them up there with the sheep. Richard stoned. Jesus. Imagine that. Goodness, I don’t think I’ve realised how amazing this Mozart Piano Concerto is. We haven’t got any more biscuits, have we? But it was beautiful, when you thought about it, this huge green bowl, clouds changing shape as they moved, the smell of woodsmoke. A banana-yellow caterpillar reared up like a tiny question mark on the arm of the bench. She was about to flick it away when she imagined it having a name in a children’s book, but suddenly there was a green taxi bumping through the gate and Alex and his little brother spilt from the door like clowns from a circus car.

♦

…stunning views of the Olchon Valley…Grade 2 listed…sympathetically restored…a second bathroom added…large private garden…shrubbery, mature trees…drowning hazard…mixer taps…a tumble dryer…no TV reception…£1,200 per week…all reasonable breakages…American Express…the septic tank…

♦

Dominic helped the driver unload while Benjy retrieved the briefcase hinge from a crumb-filled recess. Richard hugged Angela with one arm, his mug of tea at arm’s length. Post-rain sparkle and the dog still yapping far off. Daisy shook Richard’s hand and unnerved him slightly by saying, It’s good to see you again , as if she was a colleague, so he turned to Benjamin. And how are you doing, young man?

Melissa held Alex’s eye for two seconds and he forgot briefly about the nausea. Unzipping . Maybe normal service really was being suspended. But Melissa saw how much he wanted her and how naïve he was and the week seemed no longer empty. She walked slowly towards the front door, his gaze like sun on her back. Bitch , thought Angela, but Alex could see the first flurries of green snow and had to get to the bathroom. She had that glossy, thoroughbred look, thought Daisy. Hair you shook in slow motion. Leader of some icy little coven at school. But being fashionable and popular were shallow things which passed away. Daisy had to remember that. Shallow people were people nevertheless, and equally deserving of love.

The Vauxhall Insignia did a four-point turn and drove off scraping its manifold on the ruts and there was silence in the garden so that the red kite, looking down, saw only a large square of mown grass tilted towards the opposite side of the valley and, sitting confidently at its geometric centre, a house, stately and severe and adamantly not a farmhouse. Tall sash windows, grey stone laid in long, thin blocks, a house where Eliot or Austen might have lodged a vicar and his fierce teetotal sisters. A drystone wall ran round the boundary of the property, broken by two gates, one for walkers, one for carriages, both of ornate cast iron now thick with rust. A weather-vane in the shape of a running fox. There were rhododendrons and a shallow ornamental pond thick with frogspawn. There was the skull of a horse in the woodshed.

♦

Alex sluiced his mouth under the cold tap and felt his way back across the landing with his eyes closed. He lowered himself onto the bed, put the pillow over his head to cut out light and noise and curled into a ball.

♦

Angela had been trapped by Louisa in the kitchen with a glass of red wine. That expensive mildew taste. Melissa’s vegetarian. I’d happily give up meat as well, but Richard is a bit of a caveman .

Why did she dislike this woman? The cream rollneck, the way she held the measuring jug up to the light, for example, as if it were a syringe and a life hung in the balance. Onions fizzed in the pan. She thought about Carl Butcher killing that cat last term. They were swinging it against a wall, Miss . She’d recognised the policeman from Cycle Proficiency. Carl’s hard little face. All those boys, they knew the world didn’t want them, bad behaviour their only way of making some small mark. But people eat cows . Most intelligent thing he’d said all year.

God alone knows how she’s going to survive here , said Louisa. A hundred miles from the nearest branch of Jack Wills .

♦

A yellow tractor and the sun setting over Offa’s Dyke, tumbledown barns with corrugated iron roofs, the hill so steep Daisy felt as if she were looking out of a plane window, no noise but the wind. She could have reached out and picked that tractor up between her thumb and forefinger. This was Eden. It wasn’t a fairy story, it was happening right now. This was the place we were banished from. A bird of prey floated up the valley until it was swallowed by the green distance. The fizzy tingle of vertigo in the arches of her feet. The centuries would swallow us like the sky swallowing that bird. She and Melissa had passed one another on the landing earlier. She said hello but Melissa just stared at her as they moved around one another, spaghetti western-style, everything in slo-mo.

A red Volvo was zigzagging slowly up from Longtown, vanishing and reappearing with the kinks in the road. Down the hill she could see Benjy in the walled garden doing Ninja moves with a stick. Oof…! Yah…! No one could see her out here, no one could judge her. She looked at herself in the mirror and saw the animal that she was trapped inside, that grew and fed and wanted. She wished above all else to look ordinary so that people’s eyes just slid over her. Because Mum was wrong. It wasn’t about believing this or that, it wasn’t about good and evil and right and wrong, it was about finding the strength to bear the discomfort that came with being in the world.

Clouds scrolled high up. She couldn’t get Melissa out of her head. Something magnetic about her, the possibility of a softness inside, the challenge of peeling back those layers.

♦

Beers in hand, Dominic and Richard stood looking over the garden wall, gentlemen on the foredeck, a calm, green sea beyond. Angela tells me you’ve got yourself a job in a bookshop . Dominic had been unemployed for nine months, apparently. Bespoke or chain?

Waterstone’s , said Dominic. Best job I’ve ever done, to be honest . He looked up. No contrails because of the volcanic ash. The way the fields stopped halfway up the hill and gave way to gorse and bracken and scree, that darkness where the summit met the sky, Mordor and The Shire within fifty yards of one another.

Really? asked Richard. But how did one lose one’s job if one was self-employed? Surely one simply had more or less work coming in. A talented musician, too. Richard remembered visiting their house some years back and Dominic entertaining the children with a jazz version of ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star’ and the Blue Peter theme tune in the style of Beethoven. But he made his living composing music for adverts, washing powder and chocolate bars. Richard found it hard to comprehend anyone embarking upon a career without aiming for the top. Which applied to Angela as well, though she was a woman with children, which was different. And now he’d let it all slip through his fingers.