Mark Haddon - The Red House

♦

Angela was two hundred miles and thirty-five years away, trying to conjure the hallway of the house where she’d grown up, the newel post they called The Pineapple, the china tramp that lay on the carpet smashed one morning as if a ghost had brushed past in the night, the Oscar Peterson Trio on the gramophone. Dominic climbed into bed and the bounce of the mattress woke her briefly. She listened to the silence and thought of Benjy and felt the old fear. Was he still breathing? A cracked wooden beam ran across the ceiling, splinted with a rusty iron spar. She was slipping away a little now. Sherbet Dabs and Slade singing ‘Cum on Feel the Noize’. Briefly she saw Karen sitting in the darkness somewhere further up the hill, looking down on the sleeping house, like a rabbit or an owl. Then she let go.

♦

Daisy opened the book and put the Monet postcard to one side.

I sat down beside her, and presently she moved uneasily. At the same moment there came a sort of dull flapping or buffeting at the window. I went over to it softly, and peeped out by the corner of the blind. There was a full moonlight, and I could see that the noise was made by a great bat, which wheeled around, doubtless attracted by the light, although so dim, and every now and again struck the window with its wings .

♦

Fingernail moon. The Bay of Rainbows. The Sea of Tranquillity. Richard had never really got the space thing. It worried him, the possibility that his imagination wasn’t strong enough to get past the earth’s atmosphere. Neil Armstrong’s heart rate staying under seventy during take-off. All brave men are slightly stupid . He and Mohan had sat opposite one another at the table by the window. He can see it as clear as day. Mohan was eating a container of M&S salad with a white plastic fork. It could be an abscess . Of course he should have put it in the report, that was precisely why he had tracked Mohan down, to make sure. Now the girl was in a wheelchair and Mohan was pretending the conversation never happened. Everyone knew the man was a shit, sleeping with two nurses and his poor bloody wife without a clue, which counted for nothing in a court of law, of course, just gossip and hearsay. The way the lawyer stared at him during that meeting. He half expected his eyelids to slide in from the side. Bloody hell, it was freezing out here.

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With a little grunt, Alex came messily into the cone of toilet tissue in his right hand then leant back against the door, breathing heavily. That sudden disinterest, pictures of Melissa naked blowing away like mist. He wiped the splash from the wooden floor with the toe of his sock. He was thinking about canoeing on Llyn Gwynant. Then he was thinking about how quiet the house was and whether anyone had heard him. Richard’s shaving brush glared from the window sill. He imagined it containing a little camera. Richard sitting at the dining table replaying the grainy footage, saying, Angela, I think you should see this . He dropped the tissue into the toilet bowl, pulled the flush and smelt his fingers. Seasidey. Nice.

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You run your hand along the bumpy, magnolia wall. Paint over paint over plaster over stone, smooth, like the flank of a horse. Something alive in the fabric of the house. Earlier today, in Café Ritazza at Southport, Richard had put his hands behind his head and stretched out as if he owned the place. Polo shirt, TAG Heuer watch. A young mum was staring from a nearby table, pink tracksuit, scraped back hair. He looked through her like she was furniture. But Melissa does have to learn some manners, and maybe you haven’t been strict enough. You remember yourself at fourteen. The Hanwell flat. You and Penny standing on the outside of the balcony rail, seven floors up, one Sunday afternoon, leaning over that woozy drop, hearts pounding and the scary tickle in the back of your knees. Dogs in the park, the traffic on the ring road, a scale model of the world. You whoop as loud as you can and your voice bounces off the block opposite. There’s a little crowd gathering now. Someone shouts, Jump . You look around and it occurs to you that this isn’t real, this is only a memory, that you could let go and topple into that great windy nothing and it wouldn’t matter. What frightens you is that for a couple of seconds you can’t remember where the present is and how to get back there.

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The click of the Mercedes cooling. A barn owl on top of a telegraph pole, eyeballs so big they rub against one another as they revolve. Bats slice the air above the garden. Limestone freakishly white under the moon. The sheep lie beside an old bath, still gathered against the wolves which haven’t hunted them for two hundred years. The deep quiet under the human hum. Bootes, Hercules, Draco. Eight thousand man-made objects orbiting the earth. Dead satellites and space junk. The asteroid belt. Puck, Miranda, Oberon. To every moon a fairy story. The Mars Rover squatting near the Husband Hills. The Huygens probe beside a methane lake on Titan. The Kuiper belt. Comets and Centaurs. The Scattered Disc. The Oort Cloud. The Local Bubble. Barnard’s Star. The utter cold warmed only by starlight.

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Richard made his way down the dark stairs. He couldn’t use the bathroom on the landing because of the tangled pipes under the sink. Tubing, plumbing, large-bore wiring. Phobia never quite described it. A discrete period of intense fear or discomfort in which at least 4 of the following 13 symptoms develop abruptly …The four in his case being a choking sensation, feelings of unreality, abdominal distress and a fear of going insane. He couldn’t use Car Park E at work because it meant walking past the ducts at the back of the heating block. Last year he’d been standing on the Circle Line platform at Edgware Road en route to a conference in Reading. The brickwork on the far side of the tracks invisible behind a great rolling wave of sooty cables. He came round with a gash on his head looking up at a ring of people who seemed to have gathered to watch a fight in the playground.

He unbuttoned his pyjama fly and aimed just left of the water to minimise the noise. He should get his prostate checked. The floor was cobbled and cold and the walls smelt of damp but the sink down here was enclosed in a wooden cabinet and the ribbed white shower flex was single and therefore benign. He flushed the toilet and washed his hands. Bed.

Daisy made herself a mug of sugary tea then went outside in her coat and scarf to watch the dawn come up. A great see-saw of light balanced on the fulcrum of Black Hill, the sun rising on one end, the other end sweeping down the flank of Offa’s Dyke and switching the colours on as it went. The beauty kept slipping through her fingers. The world was so far away and the mind kept saying, Me, me, me . Petty worries rose and nagged, Benjy so distant, Mum angry with her all the time, the horrible graffiti in the changing rooms at school. But the valley…wasn’t this amazing? Look , you had to say to yourself, Look .

The truth was that she hadn’t been able to sleep. She’d tried reading Dracula but what seemed ridiculous in the daylight seemed like documentary before dawn. She felt so lost. You changed at sixteen everyone said, and changing was hard. But this wasn’t normal, it came out of the blue, the unshakeable conviction that while she looked like a human being and acted like a human being there was nothing inside, just slime and circuitry.

Eighteen months ago she found herself talking to Wendy Rogan, the science TA from Year 12. She can’t remember why. Providence, perhaps. Wendy suggested a coffee after school over which she listened in a way that no one else had, not friends, not Mum, not Dad. The following weekend she was having supper in Wendy’s flat when Wendy suggested putting a video on. Daisy thought for several horrified seconds that it was going to be something pornographic, so when it turned out to be a promotional video for the Alpha Course she was initially relieved. A footballer scoring a goal, a model sashaying down the catwalk, a mountaineer climbing a cliff-face, each of them turning to the camera and saying, Is there more to life than this? All camera sparkle and soft rock. She felt ambushed and soiled.