The Red House

The digger’s caterpillar rollers stopped short of its target, a peach-coloured house with uncurtained windows and an unlocked door. Services had been disconnected; saleable materials had been salvaged. There was nothing left to do to prepare the building for razing. Erik was tempted to start the job today, to get a jump on things, but he hesitated.

Listless brown and grey rabbits dappled the field, dozens of them. They should have tensed as the digger’s vibration spread through the ground; the noise of it should have set them sprinting. But these rabbits – lumpy, swollen and blind – meandered. One headed towards the digger and Erik pitched forward in his seat as he stopped short of it.

It lolloped past, limp and with little spring.

It would have been a mercy to crush it, but
too fucking disgusting
Erik thought. Sweat slid from under his hard hat down the side of his nose. He jumped down from the
seat. From the boot of his car he got his shotgun.

He didn’t like to shoot rabbits. Healthy ones scampered off when approached, and that was good enough for him. His garden at home didn’t have anything in it that he didn’t mind sharing.

Myxi rabbits needed killing. They were dying already, but dying in pain.

Fucking Aussies,
he thought, loading a shell. They had purposely introduced myxomatosis for the express purpose of rabbit genocide. Then,
fucking French
. By the fifties it was in Britain and running wild.

The rabbits were stupid from pain and moved slowly. One even came towards him, labouring to push itself forward in awkward spurts. It was as if it wanted it.

The repeating noise of the gun covered the shouts. It was only in the pauses that he made out the words: ‘Stop it!’ and just ‘Stop!’ and, eventually, a wail.

Bitch should be grateful,
he thought.

It was her decision to remain. The other homeowners had given in and sold. If she wanted to hold out while construction cleared and drilled and poured and hammered around her, that was her choice. She’d been made a good offer. She refused to leave.

She continued shouting at him from a window in the bright red barn. He knew that no one was home in the white house beyond the barn; it was school hours and work hours. He continued shooting.

Her fence was meaningless to the rabbits. He counted six of them on her side. He loaded and took aim. The sick ones took their deaths gratefully; the few healthy ones scattered. One dived into the blackberry bushes at
the back of the barn, twisting between stems and thorns, then plunging into the soft earth, through groping roots, until it scrabbled against something hard: a pelvic bone. Nestled in that bone’s crook, a smaller, more curled skeleton was shifted upwards by the rabbit’s churning movements.

There was a flash of movement in a window of the barn, but Erik couldn’t see the old woman’s face. She must be tucked behind the curtain.

Afraid of me? Stupid cow
, he thought, tears tumbling down his cheeks. He hated to shoot anything. He’d kept a rabbit when he was a boy:
Milly
, he remembered. She’d been soft, long-haired, fat from treats, and glossy from brushing.

He replaced the shotgun in the boot of his car and returned to the digger’s seat. He ignored the furry bodies now under his treads and scooped into the bucket; they weren’t really rabbits any more, now were they. Like Milly, they were elsewhere. Peaceful.
Fuck streets of gold
, he thought. His heaven was all grass.

In the ground next to the red barn, the rabbit kept digging, nudging the bones up towards the surface.

The woman kept touching Maxwell. She was pretty, prettier than any other woman he’d been with, and more affectionate; she leant close and her shiny hair overlapped his shoulder. Muriel squirmed watching them.

The couple pressed their cheeks together, ostensibly to share the screen, but there was room enough around them to show the interior of his apartment behind: full bookshelves, a propped bicycle with a dangling helmet,
a busy, bright watercolour. No,
their
apartment now; no longer just his. The watercolour hadn’t been there the last time Muriel had visited. The bicycle was shaped for a woman. For
her
.

‘Mum,’ Maxwell said, grinning. The woman, Imogen, giggled, squeezing his shoulder.

Muriel knew what was coming. Maxwell had convinced her to install Skype for this call. He wanted to be face-to-face.
Not badly enough to visit,
Muriel noted, but that was supposedly excused by work.

‘We’re getting married,’ he said, as Muriel had guessed he would, even though she hardly knew the woman. It was only weeks ago that Muriel had learnt that Imogen had moved in with Maxwell months before.

Imogen echoed Maxwell just a beat behind: ‘Married!’

Muriel posed her face correctly. She said the right words: ‘I’m so happy for you.’ Her voice was a papery rasp, so she had to say it again, louder, if more briefly: ‘I’m happy.’

Maxwell nodded. The movement of his head must have tickled Imogen. She nodded too, not to agree, but to rub in response, like a cat. ‘We’re happy too,’ he said needlessly.

Muriel craved a cigarette, but Maxwell didn’t know that she’d started smoking again. She nudged the ashtray and lighter well out of sight of her computer’s camera, fingers twitching for the box in her handbag. ‘When?’ she asked. ‘You know I have that trip to the Galapagos next May …’

‘Maybe we’ll elope,’ Maxwell joked. At least, Imogen laughed, which turned it into a joke.

‘Of course not,’ Imogen corrected him. ‘We’re moving to Cambridge. Once we’re settled, we can make firm plans.’

‘Cambridge?’ Muriel asked, while at the same time Maxwell said, ‘Imogen, we’ll see if they want me.’

‘Who wants you?’ Muriel said, making herself heard.

‘There’s a possibility of a job at one of the colleges. But …’ He didn’t finish the sentence.

‘But what?’ persisted Muriel.

Imogen answered: ‘Mrs Gant, Maxwell’s just being modest. Of course they’ll want him. It’s a wonderful opportunity, a choir for girls. And Cambridge is a beautiful city. I used to live near there.’

‘That’s exactly the—’ Maxwell began, but Imogen intervened.

‘I lived in a village in a peach-coloured house. It was beautiful, tucked away with a handful of other houses, all different colours: lavender and yellow and red and white. Lots of grass and rabbits. All of it was beautiful, Caldecote and Cambridge.’ Imogen was incandescent with memory.

Maxwell cautioned her, ‘Things may not be the same now, Im.’

‘Cambridge has been there for eight hundred years. I should think that it’s doing just fine,’ Imogen snapped.

It was the first discord Muriel had observed between them, and it gave her a shudder of satisfaction that inspired genuine goodwill.

‘No sense arguing before you’re even married,’ she said lightly. ‘There’s plenty of time for that after.’

Maxwell looked embarrassed. ‘We’re not arguing, Mum, we’re—’

‘Don’t look so aghast, Maxwell. I know your father and I were no good example, but you don’t need to fear that a single disagreement will turn you into us. I’m simply advising not bickering. Imogen, are your parents still married?’ She took it for granted that they would have been married to start with.

‘My parents are dead,’ Imogen said. ‘But they were married when they died,’ she added, precisely, pathetically.

‘Mother, that was really unnecessary,’ Maxwell defended Imogen, stroking her hair.

Muriel stammered, ‘How was I to know? It was a question. I couldn’t have known until I asked, could I?’

Imogen said, ‘It’s all right, Mrs Gant. They died a long time ago. But they were special, very special, and I was incredibly lucky to have them for as long as I did. Eight years. I was eight years old when they died. That’s why I left Cambridgeshire. We all did. We—’

‘All?’

‘There were four of us. I—’

‘Mother, this is just about the wedding. That’s all this call is. Let’s talk about that.’

Imogen said, ‘No, it’s all right, Max, I don’t mind …’ But her expression had drooped.

Maxwell faced her. Their foreheads touched. Their noses overlapped. Maxwell spoke to Muriel, but his words breathed into Imogen’s mouth: ‘You’re the first one we told,’ Maxwell said, half flattering Muriel, but also half chastising her for her tepid response.

‘There’s someone at the door,’ Muriel announced. It was only half a lie; the cigarettes in her bag by the door were indeed calling her.

Imogen straightened and threw a bright smile across her face. ‘I’ll be good to him, Mrs Gant. I promise.’

‘Don’t take any shit, Imogen. That’s the advice I needed when I was younger. It took me years to learn that. Don’t take any shit, even from him.’

Maxwell and Imogen held their smiles politely, while his head tilted and her eyes squinted in surprise.

‘I won’t give her any shit, Mother,’ said Maxwell carefully. ‘You know I’m not like Dad,’ he added.

How would he know?
Muriel wondered.
He hasn’t seen the man in twenty years.
‘Sorry, the door, I said.’ She clicked the icon of a little red phone. The screen blanked.

She retrieved her bag, lit a cigarette and sucked on it. She opened a window. She closed the laptop, as if it too were a window, still connecting them; as if Maxwell could see her through it, guiltily smoking; as if she could see him – them – climbing all over one another on their cheap sofa.

‘No,’ she said out loud, putting the image firmly out of mind. She set herself a mental timer: for ten minutes she would pretend this wasn’t happening. It would be only a tiny respite, but she needed it.
One
, she counted, blowing smoke, as the minute hand on the clock flinched.

Detective Inspector Chloe Frohmann looked up from the file on her desk.
Today’s the day
, she thought, steeling herself.

She could see him across the room, the new face in a crowd of familiar ones.
Familiar, but not friendly.
Not to her, anyway. But this new man was already one of the boys.
Their heads were bent towards one another. Hands were shaken, and his back was clapped. He looked young; he was ginger-haired; he smiled quizzically when he noticed Chloe staring at him.

The man on his right said something close to his ear, nodded towards Chloe and laughed. The new man’s smile faltered. Smirks all around.

Chloe pushed back from the desk to heave herself to standing. Her pregnant belly preceded her, forcing a waddle. She resisted the urge to fulfil the stereotypical pose of hand-on-back, and kept her arms swinging by her sides.

The others drifted away as she approached. The new man tried smiling again, though more cautiously now. ‘DI Frohmann?’ he asked, as if the room were full of women detectives launching towards eventual maternity leave, as if his new partner could have been one of any number of them.

Chloe nodded and shook his hand. ‘DS Spencer?’ she confirmed. He was taller than Morris, just a bit, and leaner. He looked nervous, which she couldn’t imagine Morris ever having looked, not in such a puppy-like way, even on his first day.
It wasn’t nerves on his face when he left
, she recalled of their last case together.
It was
– she had to think carefully, grope for just the right word.
Grief
, she realised.
Mourning for his old self.

A bark of laughter from the other side of the room hit her in the back. She would have told herself it wasn’t necessarily aimed at her, but Spencer, who could see over her shoulder, looked embarrassed.

She leant close, flicked her glance towards their
colleagues round the coffee machine, and said, ‘Aren’t they a bunch of arseholes?’

Spencer hesitated, then his smile cracked wide open. ‘Fucking arseholes,’ he agreed.

Chloe nodded. ‘Let’s get to work.’

The shower water hits Morris Keene like needles. Every muscle aches; every reach and stretch is compromised. His new stab at exercise is supposed to make him stronger but he feels humbled, simultaneously childish and old. The months he’s spent sulking since leaving the job have only exaggerated his reasons for leaving in the first place: his body, his confidence, and any courage there once was, are all weaker now than then.

He turns the knob to raise the temperature. Gwen wanted to change it to a handle for him; she wanted to change everything around the house, like years ago when their daughter Dora had been learning to crawl and they’d put locks on all the cabinets and drawers, and tucked pads around sharp corners. Gwen put on a hurt look at his absolute refusal, but this challenge was his adjustment to make. If he can’t, he reasons, then he deserves to do without.

He manages. His left hand is fully functional, if clumsy in the normal way that non-dominant hands are, and his right hand isn’t as useless as it had seemed at first. The severed tendons prevent his fingers from curling in any
sort of grip, but his thumb still works. Sometimes, as with this shower knob, pressing his palm and hooking his thumb are enough. Despite his adaptations, everyone still focuses on the hand, to be polite, as if difficulties with driving and writing were enough to take him off a job that’s ninety percent thinking. It wasn’t the hand that took him down, he knows. It was the panic attacks, hesitation and cowardice. Those aren’t things you can proof a house against.

He turns off the water. He grabs a towel off the rail. Both of these actions are now effortless gestures. He’s had to insist that Gwen stop praising his little victories, otherwise she coos as if he should be proud that he can wash himself, that he can dress himself. He pulls clothes out of drawers and off hangers.

He allows accommodations in some areas. He doesn’t wear shirts with buttoned cuffs any more. He wears shoes without laces.
It’s not as if I have a job any more to dress properly for,
he thinks as he sits to pull socks on and to push his feet into loafers.

This is his side of the bed now; he and Gwen had switched so that his left hand is on top and free when they face one another.