Mark Haddon: The Red House

Cooling towers and sewage farms. Finstock, Charlbury, Ascott-under-Wychwood. Seventy miles per hour, the train unzips the fields. Two gun-grey lines beside the river’s meander. Flashes of sun on the hammered metal. Something of steam about it, even now. Hogwarts and Adlestrop. The night mail crossing the border. Cheyenne sweeping down from the ridge. Delta blues from the boxcar. Somewhere, those secret points that might just switch and send you curving into a world of uniformed porters and great-aunts and summers at the lake.

Angela leant against the cold window, hypnotised by the power lines as they sagged and were scooped up by the next gantry, over and over and over. Polytunnels like silver mattresses, indecipherable swirls of graffiti on a brick siding. She’d buried her mother six weeks ago. A bearded man in a suit with shiny elbows playing ‘Danny Boy’ on Northumbrian pipes. Everything out of kilter, the bandage on the vicar’s hand, that woman chasing her windblown hat between the headstones, the dog that belonged to no one. She thought her mother had left the world a long way back, the weekly visits mostly for Angela’s own benefit. Boiled mutton, Classic FM and a commode in flesh-coloured plastic. Her death should have been a relief. Then the first spade of earth hit the coffin, a bubble rose in her chest and she realised her mother had been…what? a cornerstone? a breakwater?

♦

The week after the funeral Dominic had been standing at the sink bottle-brushing the green vase. The last of the freak snow was still packed down the side of the shed and the rotary washing line was turning in the wind. Angela came in holding the phone as if it was a mystery object she’d found on the hall table. That was Richard .

Dominic upended the vase on the wire rack. And what did he want?

He’s offered to take us on holiday .

He dried his hands on the tea towel. Are we talking about your brother, or some entirely different Richard?

We are indeed talking about my brother .

He really had no idea what to say. Angela and Richard had spent no more than an afternoon in each other’s company over the last fifteen years and their meeting at the funeral had seemed perfunctory at best. Where’s the exotic location?

He’s rented a house on the Welsh border. Near Hay-on-Wye .

The fine sandy beaches of Herefordshire . He halved the tea towel and hung it over the radiator.

I said yes .

Well, thanks for the consultation .

Angela paused and held his eye. Richard knows we can’t afford a holiday of our own. I’m not looking forward to it any more than you, but I didn’t have a great deal of choice .

He held up his hands. Point taken . They’d had this argument way too many times. Herefordshire it is, then .

♦

Ordnance Survey 161. The Black Mountains/Y Mynyddoedd Duon . Dominic flipped up the pink cover and unfolded the big paper concertina. He had loved maps since he was a boy. Here be monsters. X marks the spot. The edges of the paper browned and scalloped with a burning match, messages flashed from peak to peak using triangles of broken mirror.

He looked sideways at Angela. So hard to remember that girl on the far side of the union bar, her shoulders in that blue summer dress. She disgusted him now, the size and sag of her, the veins on her calves, almost a grandmother. He dreamt of her dying unexpectedly, rediscovering all those freedoms he’d lost twenty years ago. Then he had the same dream five minutes later and he remembered what poor use he’d made of those freedoms first time round and he heard the squeak of trolley wheels and saw the bags of fluid. All those other lives. You never did get to lead them.

He gazed out of the window and saw a narrowboat on the adjacent canal, some bearded pillock at the tiller, pipe, mug of tea. Ahoy there, matey . Stupid way to spend a holiday, banging your head every time you stood up. A week in a boat with Richard. Think of that. They were in the middle of nowhere, thank goodness. If it all got too much he could walk up into the hills and yell at the sky. To be honest, it was Angela he was worried about. All that hard-wired sibling friction. Do not return once lit and so forth.

Richard’s hair, yes. Now that he thought about it that was where the evil was located, this luxuriant black crest, like the tusks of a bull walrus, a warning to beta males. Or like a separate creature entirely, some alien life form that had pushed suckers into his skull and was using him as a vehicle.

♦

The children sat opposite. Alex, seventeen, was reading Main Force by Andy McNab. Daisy, sixteen, was reading a book called The Art of Daily Prayer . Benjy, eight, had swivelled so that his feet were on the headrest and his head was hanging over the edge of the seat, eyes closed. Angela poked his shoulder with the toe of her shoe. What on earth are you doing?

I’m on horseback beheading Nazi zombies .

They looked like children from three separate families, Alex the athlete, all shoulders and biceps, off into the wide blue yonder every other weekend, canoeing, mountain-biking, Benjy a kind of boy-liquid which had been poured into whatever space he happened to be occupying, and Daisy…Angela wondered if something dreadful had happened to her daughter over the past year, something that might explain the arrogant humility, the way she’d made herself so ostentatiously plain.

They plunged into a tunnel and the windows thumped and clattered. She saw an overweight, middle-aged woman floating out there in the dark for several seconds before she vanished in a blast of sunlight and poplars, and she was back in her body again, dress pinching at the waist, beads of sweat in the small of her back, that train smell, burning dust, hot brakes, the dull reek of the toilets.

♦

Carter placed his boot on the man’s shoulder and rolled him over. This couldn’t be happening. He’d killed Bunny O’Neil. They’d trained together in the Cairngorms ten years ago. What was an ex-SAS captain doing in the middle of Afghanistan, armed with a black-market Soviet rifle, trying to assassinate a billionaire head of an international construction company?

♦

Further down the carriage the ticket collector was squatting beside a bird-frail woman with long grey hair and spectacles on a red string. So you’ve come on the train with no ticket and no means of payment? Shaved head, cloudy blue tattoo on his meaty forearm.

Angela wanted to pay for her ticket and save her from this bullying man.

She was trying to pick something invisible from the air with her tiny liver-spotted hands. I can’t…

Is someone meeting you at Hereford? A tenderness in his voice which she hadn’t heard the first time. He touched the woman’s arm gently to get her attention. A son, maybe, or a daughter?

The woman clawed at the air. I can’t quite…

Angela felt a prickle at the corner of her eye and turned away.

♦

Richard had remarried six months ago, acquiring a stepdaughter into the bargain. Angela hadn’t gone to the wedding. Edinburgh was a long way, it was term time and they’d never felt like brother and sister, just two people who spoke briefly on the phone every few weeks or so to manage the stages of their mother’s decline. She’d met Louisa and Melissa for the first time at the funeral. They looked as if they had been purchased from an exclusive catalogue at some exorbitant price, flawless skin and matching black leather boots. The girl stared at her and didn’t look away when Angela caught her eye. Bobbed chestnut hair, black denim skirt almost but not quite too short for a funeral. So much sheen and sneer at sixteen. Melissa’s directing a play at school . A Midsummer Night’s Dream.