Mark Haddon - The Red House

Daisy was wandering around Hay-on-Wye Booksellers looking for something a little more addictive than Dracula , something to hold her attention completely. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo ? There was a gay and lesbian section. She’d seen the sign. Scared to look, scared she might be revolted, or entranced, scared she might be accosted by some terrifying gatekeeper. Big netball coach, some flinty girl with Hitler hair.

Melissa was looking at a remaindered volume of watercolours by John Singer Sargent. She loved the cool clean heft of big art books. But these pictures frightened her, how good they were, as if the paint had simply fallen into place. Sailing boats, women blowing glass in a darkened room in Venice, fountains in a park in Paris. She would never be able to do this, would she, because to be an artist you had to run the risk of failing, you had to close your eyes and step into the dark. The feeling of her empty pocket where her phone should be. Being treated like a ten-year-old. Fuck.

♦

Sorry . Angela bumps into a second person. Little passages of blankness, like when you’re driving a familiar route and come round to find yourself at the wheel. The health food shop. She is staring at a cold cabinet of cheese and salami and bean sprouts. Are Richard and Louisa cooking tonight? Karen’s birthday. She keeps remembering then forgetting then remembering. She decides to go to The Globe early, fearing she might be carried off by the riptide unless she moors herself while she has the chance. Bohemian reclamation chic, an old chapel once, now a café-cum-gallery-cum-something else. She buys a cappuccino and a white chocolate muffin and sits down. There is a balcony made of scaffolding and some truly ghastly paintings. The pulpit still stands in the corner. Like being a student again. Foreign language films and patchouli and Spare Rib . She looks up and sees that Karen has walked in, that Daisy has walked in.

A second later and she would have turned tail but Mum has seen her now so she can’t beat a retreat without making it seem like an insult. She walks over. Pews and hippy cushions and old blankets.

Hello, love . Mum is eating a muffin and huddling slightly, like she’s cold, or hiding from someone.

Hiya . Daisy sits.

A long strange silence, as if Mum is a child and feels no pressing need to communicate with the adult world. It scares her. Are you OK?

Mum is using the tip of her index finger to move all the crumbs on her plate into a little central pile. I’m having a difficult day .

Mine’s not exactly been a barrel of laughs . But Mum doesn’t react. Another long strange silence. I might be leaving the church . She catches herself by surprise, saying this. Again Mum says nothing, just leans over and smiles and rubs Daisy’s forearm. She seems sad. Mum…?

I just want you to be happy .

Something in her voice. An echo of Gran during that last year. The weirdest suspicion that she doesn’t really know who Daisy is. Mum…?

It’s Karen’s birthday .

Who’s Karen? She assumes it is some girl at school. Then she remembers. Karen who… She isn’t sure of the word.

Not the day she died, but the day she would have been born .

But this was seventeen years ago .

Eighteen. It didn’t used to bother me. Then all of a sudden… She sits up and gives a little shake, as if trying to throw off this passing strangeness.

That farawayness. As if Daisy is simply someone she has met on the bus with whom she is passing time. Have you got some money for a coffee? She needs to step aside for a few moments.

Maybe I’m just allergic to this kind of holiday , says Mum.

What kind of holiday?

Countryside, rain . She digs her wallet out of her bag and hands it over.

By the time the stripy mug of coffee is placed on the counter in front of her, Daisy turns and sees that Dominic and Richard and Louisa have arrived, thank God.

♦

Phil the Fruit and Murder and Mayhem. The Great Outdoors (makers of fine leather goods). Teddy Bear Wonderland. Crusty loaves and Bakewell tarts. I had not thought death had undone so many . Like a mist around the living, the crush of ghosts, the ones we can’t let go. The outline in the bed, the empty place at the table. Siege Perilous. She crushes out the stub of her Silk Cut with the toe of her boot and fastens the top toggle of her green duffel coat. She stands on the bridge and watches the river flow to the sea. Silt and salmon, nitrates and mercury and human waste. Plynlimon to Monmouth, to the Severn Estuary, over the Welsh Grounds, down the Bristol Channel and out into the great downsweep of the North Atlantic Current.

♦

Dominic assumed that Angela had found the message, her distance, her muted distress, but they drifted into a dog-legging conversation about a friend from college who lived in a squat in Finsbury Park, and the German student next door who was murdered, and the German club at school, and he realised that she hadn’t found the message, had she? Something else was wrong, the way she was running on autopilot, radio silence and the cockpit windows frosting over. He was off the hook. His vow of, what? three days ago? Getting Angela back on track, making the family work, being a proper father and husband. He wasn’t sure he had the energy now. He looked around the table. Richard and Louisa rebonded, Melissa absent in one way, Angela in another, some kind of sibling huddle at the far end, Benjy deep in his book. How rarely people were together . Gaps in the chain of Christmas lights. But Daisy and the kiss…Perhaps they had already done the right thing by not making a song and dance about it, all part of life’s rich pageant and so on. He tried and failed to catch her eye. A sudden stupid sadness, the worry that he had lost all of them, the urge to go and pick Benjy up and tell him how much he loved him. But you couldn’t do that, could you, in the middle of a meal, just go and hug someone and tell them that you loved them.

Where’s Melissa? asked Richard.

Louisa angled herself so that no one could hear and said quietly, I got a call from school .

About?

Melissa and her friends bullied a girl who then tried to commit suicide . Saying it to Richard made it sound worse, if that were possible.

The girl. Is she all right?

It seems so .

What did they do to her?

Louisa stalled. They never talked about Melissa and sex. That delicate boundary.

You can tell me .

She felt implicated by her own transgressions.

I’ll keep my distance. I promise .

They took a photo of this girl, Michelle, at a party, having sex with some boy, then they sent it to everyone .

Charlie Lessiter. Those boys who force-fed him laxatives. Swallow, Fatty, swallow! Holding him in a headlock. You’re worried they’ll expel her?

I worry that this is not just a phase .

Children can be vicious . He wanted to talk to Michelle, find out how serious it was. Because killing yourself was easy if you meant it. He wanted to be the doctor, wanted to be the lawyer. He didn’t like this blurry view from the outfield.

She thinks she can slip out of it like she always does. A bit of charm here, a few lies there .

Perhaps I shouldn’t keep my distance .

Meaning?

Perhaps I should talk to her . The other man, the one who’d found her smoking in the woodshed forty-eight hours ago, he seemed like a stranger now. I won’t wear hobnailed boots this time .