The Red House (11 page)

He was showing off
, said Louisa.
The way men do
.

I resent that
, said Alex.

You’ll be exactly the same
, said Louisa. It sounded almost flirtatious.

Dominic touched Daisy’s shoulder.
You OK?

I’m fine
. Though in truth she felt a little unsteady, like when you sliced a finger chopping vegetables.

Benjy all right?
asked Angela.

Out like the proverbial
. He surveyed the room.
Where’s Richard?

He thought, for a moment, that it was a minor hallucination, an orange firefly in the dark of the woodshed that vanished almost as soon as he saw it. He froze. That breathless adrenaline clarity. Someone was in there. The moonlight dimmed and brightened with the passage of clouds. A wisp of smoke trailed from the gable. He did a rapid calculation. Melissa. He should have let it go. Don’t ask, don’t tell. But his control over various things had slipped during the day and he disliked the idea of backing down. He walked round to the open side of the woodshed. He expected to see where she was sitting but the interior was filled with a sheer and impenetrable darkness.
Melissa?

Hello, Richard
. Her voice made him jump.
Fancy meeting you here
. Disembodied completely.

The orange firefly appeared.
You’re smoking
.

No shit, Sherlock
.

Smoking is not good for you
. He should have planned this better. But the smell … 
What’s in that cigarette?

She blew smoke toward him and it bloomed into the moonlight.
Want a drag?

Put it out
.

Go on
. That knowing voice, sexual almost.
Help you relax
.

I said …

Richard
, said Melissa, with amused patience. The effect of the marijuana, perhaps.
You are not in charge of me
.

It was obvious to both of them that he had already lost both the battle and any means of honorable retreat.
Let’s see what your mother says about this
. He turned away.

Oh, come on
, said Melissa,
she’s smoked enough of the stuff
.

I sincerely doubt that
.

Melissa laughed.
Jesus, Richard, there are so many things you do not know about my mother
.

He wanted to step into the dark and slap her face. The thought scared him. He moved slowly backward as if he were carrying a tray stacked with glasses.
We shall talk about this later
.

They have two orchestras
, said Louisa.
Swimming pool, climbing wall. But her friends live miles away. She needs a chauffeur, basically
.

The front door thumped shut and Richard walked into the room. He looked punch-drunk.
Melissa is smoking marijuana in the garden and there is absolutely nothing I can do about it, apparently
.

Louisa closed her eyes and breathed deeply. Angela and Dominic looked at one another. Were they allowed to find this funny?

So, anyway …
He had expected a bigger reaction. Then he saw Daisy and realized how dishonorably he had treated her and how this mattered more. He deflated visibly. Angela poured a coffee from the cafetière and slid it toward the space on the bench he had
vacated ten minutes earlier. He sat down.
I apologize for my behavior earlier
.

That’s all right
, said Daisy, though she was thinking mostly about Melissa, the drugs, the rudeness, how symbolic it was that she was sitting outside in a cold dark place. If only she were able to look up to the light then Daisy could reach down and take her hand.

It was very bad manners. I’m sorry
.

The front door clicked and thumped again. Melissa passed across the yellow rectangle of the lit hallway waving at them.
Nighty-night, campers
.

Louisa got to her feet.
I’m going to have words with that girl
. And she was gone.

Dominic patted Richard on the shoulder.
She’s a teenager. Your job is to be completely and utterly in the wrong
.

The Smoke Man ran toward him, roaring and swinging the spiked mace around his head. Benjamin pulled the flintlock out of his pocket and fired. The Smoke Man’s mask cracked and the brown gas hissed into the cold air. He screamed and fell to his knees.
Nizh … Nizh …
He grabbed the pipe from the breathing tank and shoved it directly into his mouth, sucking furiously.

No, Melissa, you listen to me. I know I can’t tell you what to do. You have made that abundantly clear. But if you try to drive Richard away … I was treated like a doormat by my parents. I was treated like a doormat by my brothers. I was treated like a doormat by your father. I am happy for the first time in my life. Richard loves me. Richard respects me. Richard is kind to me. If you destroy this, I swear to God …

My fairy lord, this must be done with haste
,

For night’s swift dragons cut the clouds full fast;

And yonder shines Aurora’s harbinger
,

At whose approach ghosts, wand’ring here and there
,

Troop home to churchyards. Damned spirits all

That in cross-ways and floods have burial
,

Already to their wormy beds are gone
,

For fear lest day should look their shames upon;

They wilfully themselves exil’d from light
,

And must for aye consort with black-brow’d night
.

He rolled over and lay there, watching her sleeping. The butter-colored hair, the pink of her ear. He touched her shoulder gently so that she didn’t wake.
There are so many things you do not know about my mother
.

Lord
, said Daisy,
make me an instrument of Your peace; where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy …

The witching hour. Deep in the watches of the night, when the old and the weak and the sick let go and the membrane between this world and the other stretches almost to nothing. The moon white, the valley blue. She stands on the hill. The animals sense something out of kilter and move away. Rabbits, mice, nightjars. She gazes down toward the house. The porch light comes on and goes off again. A lamp burns in a bedroom window. Stone walls still holding the heat of the sun. She begins to walk, the grass wet under her bare feet. She climbs a stile over a drystone wall and cuts diagonally across the field below. The lamp in the bedroom window goes out.

She pushes through a low stand of gorse to reach the track which curls around the house. Thorns rip her dress and when she steps onto the broken limestone there are gashes on her thighs and calves that drip and glitter. Someone turns and settles in their shallow sleep.

The lure of human things. She circles the house counterclockwise then steps under the porch. The door means nothing to her. She stands on the cold flags of the hallway, coats like bats on their brass hooks, the mess of shoes. She can feel it all, centuries of habitation, paint over paint over plaster over stone.

Her mother and father are sleeping in the room to her left. She moves down the corridor, puts her hand on the little metal dog’s head of the newel post and makes her way upstairs. The old planks are silent under her feet. Beeswax and camphor, little bouquets of lavender hung in wardrobes. At the top of the stairs there is a print of a bear and a dog fighting. That human smell. Musk, sweetness, rot. She walks along the landing and into the bedroom.

The Art of Daily Prayer
. Neutrogena hand cream. Jeans, knickers and navy smock folded on the seat of the chair. The girl turns on her pillow, hands fighting their way through imaginary cobwebs. She knows someone is in the room. She moans something that is not a word.

Does she hate this girl or love her? Perhaps everyone thinks that about their sister. Is this the girl who stole her life? Or is this the girl she would have been? She reaches down and lays her hand against the side of Daisy’s head. She struggles but Karen doesn’t take her hand away.

A
lex was running back along the ridge from Hatterall Hill, the ruins of Llanthony below, scattered tents in blue and orange. The map showed a path down the other side so you didn’t have to turn back at the cairn, but it was invisible from up here. Fuck it. He headed down through the bracken and long grass. Two weeks and he’d be mountain biking in Coed-y-Brenin. He’d made a tit of himself with Melissa, he could see that now. Slow learner, or what. He’d only had sex two times, like actually getting his cock in. He’d avoided Kelly Robinson for two weeks afterward because they had been pissed out of their heads and she was obese, though he thought about it quite often when he was having a wank. But there was someone walking along the road, down there where it flattened out on the way to Longtown, a girl with a bag over her shoulder.

Louisa came round dreaming of
Honk the Moose
, thinking it was 1969 and her mother was sitting on the end of the bed reading to her, but it was Richard and he was wearing the stripy Boden pajama bottoms that made him look like a pirate, except he wasn’t smiling and she wondered if he was about to deliver some bad news.
I’m sorry about last night
.

She hoisted herself up onto her elbows. It was her daughter who should apologize, surely.

She told me you smoked marijuana. And I just wanted to say …
He slowed and redirected himself.
You don’t have to keep secrets
. A little laugh.
Lower dependence and physical harm than alcohol or cigarettes according to Professor Nutt’s infamous
Lancet
paper. Oh dear
. He rubbed his face.
I do sound like the most awful prig
.

She brushed the hair out of her eyes. Her mind was fuzzy. She could feel a pillow crease running down her cheek.

Anyway
. He stood up.
I shall keep my distance on the Melissa front
.

She sat and swiveled her legs over the edge of the bed and distinctly heard a small boy, standing very close to her, saying,
Dad …?

“I want to cut off her head and take out her heart. Ah! You a surgeon, and so shocked! You, whom I have seen with no tremble of hand or heart, do operations of life and death that make the rest shudder …”
But the words had stopped making sense, so Daisy closed the book and read the back of the Corn Flakes packet.
Thiamin (B
₁
) 1.2g, Riboflavin (B
₂
) 1.3mg
. Did anyone ever ring the customer-care line? Lonely old ladies making friends with young men in Calcutta.

The world felt fuzzy this morning, so hard to cling to. That nervous bubbling in her abdomen. She wanted her things around her, the battered life-size cardboard Princess Leia Dad stole from a cinema when he was a student. The enamel signs from Great-Granddad’s shop in Manchester, Keener’s Kola and broken biscuits.

They’d made a film at school,
Gemma’s Choice
, about a girl getting pregnant at fourteen. Daisy played the mother. The thrill of putting on that lime-green cardigan, her own self vanishing, thinking,
I could kiss anyone, I could kill anyone
. She didn’t recognize herself on-screen. She looked possessed. Now she was doing A-Level economics. Adam Smith and production transformation curves. She reopened the book.
“The girl is dead. Why mutilate her poor body without need?”

Alex appeared at the door, in his socks, sweating.
I think Melissa’s jumped ship
.

In what sense?

Walking down the road with a bag over her shoulder
.

She suddenly saw it all from Alex’s point of view.
Oh, I’m sorry
.

He was still getting his breath back.
Bit of a relief, to be honest
.

And she realized that it was her own heart that was sinking.

Angela is dreaming. The creature is lying in a clean white towel, being offered up to her by a nurse who is unaware that anything is wrong.
Mermaid syndrome
. Though what dark fairy tale would this monster inhabit? Eyes no more than slits in a head of wet clay, a ragged fin running across the top of the skull, wasted arms, the two legs fused into a stump.
Sirenomelia
. Those sweet voices calling from the jagged rocks. The thing is screeching. It wants to be held but she can’t touch it. She is terrified that it will cling and bite and rip. She has the dream every couple of weeks but never remembers it on waking. Baby birds make her cry, certain cuts of meat, the crippled fragment of Voldemort’s soul in
The Deathly Hallows
. She has no idea why this is. She never had amniocentesis, never even had a scan. She missed appointments, said there was a family crisis, she lied to the health visitor, to the GP, to Dominic. Her body knew something was wrong but she was going to be a good mother and a good mother would never reject a child.