Mark Haddon - The Red House

Amazing place , said Dominic, rotating slowly to take in the whole panorama.

You’re welcome , said Richard.

♦

Benjy pauses by the hall table and leafs idly through the Guardian . He is fascinated by newspapers. Sometimes he stumbles on things that terrify him, things he wishes he could undiscover. Rape, suicide bombers. But the pull of adult secrets is too strong. Four thousand square miles of oil drifting from the Deepwater Horizon rig…Thirty people killed by bombs in Mogadishu…Fifty tonnes of litter found in a whale’s stomach …He has been thinking a lot about death lately. Carly’s dad from school who had a heart attack aged forty-three. Granny’s funeral. There was a woman on the television who had anal cancer.

He puts the paper down and begins exploring the house, entering every room in turn and making a mental map of escape routes and places where enemies might be hiding. He can’t go into the bedroom because Alex is having a migraine so he heads downstairs in search of a knife to make a spear but Auntie Louisa is in the kitchen so he goes outside and finds a big stick in the log shed. He hacks off a zombie’s head and blood sprays from the neck stump and the head lies on the ground shouting in German until it is crushed under one of his horse’s hooves.

♦

Alex slid his legs over the edge of the bed and sat up slowly, shirt soaked in sweat. His head felt bruised and the colour of everything was off-key, as if he were trapped inside a film from the sixties. At least Melissa hadn’t seen him like this. When it happened at school he had to go and lie down in the sickbay. He tried to pass it off as an aggressive adversary he overcame by being tough and stoical, but he knew that some kids thought it was a spazzy thing like epilepsy or really thick glasses. He rubbed his face. He could smell onion frying downstairs and hear Benjy battling imaginary foes outside. Oof…! Yah…!

♦

Melissa popped open the clattery little Rotring tin. Pencils, putty rubber, scalpel. She sharpened a 3B, letting the curly shavings fall into the wicker bin, then paused for a few seconds, finding a little place of stillness before starting to draw the flowers. Art didn’t count at school because it didn’t get you into law or banking or medicine. It was just a fluffy thing stuck to the side of Design and Technology, a free A level for kids who could do it, like a second language, but she loved charcoal and really good gouache, she loved rolling sticky black ink on to a lino plate and heaving on the big black arm of the Cope press, the quiet and those big white walls.

♦

Daisy walked into the living room and found Alex sitting on the sofa drinking a pint of iced water and staring at the empty fireplace. How are you doing?

Top of the world . He held up his glass in a fake toast. The ice jiggled and clinked.

Always these stilted conversations, like strangers at a cocktail party. I went for a walk up the hill. It’s, like, Alex World up there .

He seemed confused for a moment, as if trying to remember where he was. Yeh, I guess so .

A couple of years back he’d been a puppy, unable to sit down for a whole meal, falling off the trampoline and using his plastered arm as a baseball bat. They’d played chase and snakes and ladders and hide and seek with Benjy and watched TV lying on top of one another like sleeping lions. He seemed like another species now, so unimpressed by life. Dad’s breakdown hardly touched him. She’d read one of his history essays once, something about the economic problems in Germany before the Second World War and the Jews being used as scapegoats, and she was amazed to realise that there was a person in there who thought and felt. What do you reckon to Melissa?

She’s all right .

He was talking rubbish. He obviously fancied her because boys couldn’t think about anything else. She wanted to laugh and grab his hair, start one of the play fights they used to have, but there was a forcefield, and the rules had changed. She reached out to touch the back of his neck but stopped a couple of centimetres short. See you at supper .

You will indeed .

♦

Richard opened the squeaky iron door of the stove. Ash flakes rose and settled on the knees of his trousers. He scrunched a newspaper from the big basket. PORT-AU-PRINCE DEVASTATED . A grainy photo of a small boy being pulled from the rubble. No one really cared until there were cute children suffering. All those little blonde girls with leukaemia while black teenagers in London were being stabbed every day of the week. He flirted with the possibility of a firelighter but it seemed unmanly, so he built a tepee of kindling around the crumpled paper. An image of the Sharne girl passed through his mind. She rowed for Upper Thames . Think of something else. He struck a match. Swan Vesta. The way they lay in the box reminded him of the stacked trunks by Thorpe sawmill. The paper caught and the flame was an orange banner in a gale. He closed the door and opened the vent. Air roared in. His knees hurt. He needed to do more exercise. He imagined making love with Louisa later on, the cleanness of her skin after a shower, the cocoa butter body wash that made her taste like cake.

♦

They’re hiding in the trees , said Daisy, with bows and arrows. And we’ve got the secret plans .

Secret plans for what?

She peeled a lump of moss off the edge of the bench. For a moon rocket .

This is boring , said Benjy.

She thought about the men with bows and arrows. They were really here, weren’t they, once upon a time. And mammoths and ladies in crinolines and Spitfires overhead. Places remained and time flowed through them like wind through the grass. Right now. This was the future turning into the past. One thing becoming another thing. Like a flame on the end of a match. Wood turning into smoke. If only we could burn brighter. A barn roaring in the night.

♦

Angela looked out of the bedroom window. Dominic and Richard chatting at the edge of the garden, the way men did, beer in one hand, the other hand thrust into a trouser pocket, both staring straight ahead. She wondered what they were talking about and what they were avoiding talking about. Forty-seven years old and she still felt a fifteen-year-old girl’s anger at the younger brother who had teamed up with Mum and frozen her out after Dad died. She took the Dairy Milk from the bottom of her case, tore back the paper and the purple foil, snapped off the top row of chunks and put them into her mouth. That nursery rush. Mum and Richard had visited Dad in hospital the day before he died. Angela wasn’t allowed to go and she was haunted for months afterwards by a recurring nightmare in which they had conspired somehow to cause his death. Someone banged a large pan downstairs and shouted, Dinner , like they were guests in a country house. Flunkeys and silver salvers. She’d better go and join the fray.

♦

Daisy, please . Angela reached out to grab her sleeve. Not now . But Dominic was standing in the way and she couldn’t reach.

What were you going to say? asked Richard.

Grace , replied Daisy. I was going to say grace .

The room snapped into focus, wine bottles green as boiled sweets, galleons on the table mats. Melissa let her mouth hang open comically.

Fire away , said Richard, who was accustomed to situations where other people felt uncomfortable.

Oh Lord …People drifted through life with their eyes closed. You had to wake them up. We thank You for this food, we thank You for this family and we ask You to provide for those who have no food, and to watch over those who have no family .