The Red House (16 page)

You’re angry with her
. He felt the giddy excitement of climbing a great tower and seeing the shape of the maze through which he had stumbled for so long.
She’s not a consolation prize. She’s a human being
.

Louisa sat on the edge of the bath, the little yellow tub of face cream in her hand. Melissa’s disappearance had rattled her, not so
much the thought of what might have happened as what else she might do, what else she might or might not say. Hard to believe it now, the facts blurred by the alcohol she’d drunk to blunt the unexpected loneliness after Craig walked out. Fifteen men, or thereabouts. She wasn’t greatly interested in counting. One in the backseat of his BMW, with his trousers round his knees, his hand over her mouth, calling her a
dirty bitch
so she wondered if it counted as rape, though rape meant saying
No
, not just thinking it, which meant having some actual self-respect. One of them was a scaffolder. Blind drunk every time.

Annie had taken her to Raoul’s that first weekend and she could feel them circling now Craig’s scent was fading. Annie said she was punishing herself, but some things were just accidents. You took the wrong path and night fell. She never drank at home but the places she went for company were places where you drank, and if you were scared of going home you kept on drinking. Melissa encouraged her rebellion at first, then came back from a friend’s house one morning to find a man she didn’t recognize sitting at the breakfast table and said,
Who the fuck is this?
, and Louisa couldn’t say anything because, in truth, she didn’t know who it was, not really. Even now she can’t bring a name to mind. Or a face.

She didn’t fall for Richard so much as grab him as she was swept past, fighting to keep her head above the water. They didn’t have sex for six weeks while she waited for the result of an AIDS test. He thought she was just being old-fashioned. She thought that if she let go of the past it would be carried away by that same flood, but it was dawning on her for the first time that she would have to tell him before Melissa did.
Forgive and forget
. She was beginning to understand what it meant. You couldn’t do the forgetting until someone else had done the forgiving.

I was having a nightmare about the Smoke Men
.

OK
, said Alex.
We’re on two mountain bikes
. Because this was something
he often thought about when he was falling asleep himself.
We’re riding through a forest. It’s summer and I’ve got a picnic in a rucksack
.

With bacon sandwiches
, said Benjy,
and a flask of tea and two Kit Kats
.

We’re going faster and faster and suddenly we come out of the trees and we look down and see the tires aren’t touching the ground anymore
.

Are they magic bikes?

They’re magic bikes and we’re flying and we’re getting higher and higher and we can see the fields and a river and steam trains and cars. There are birds flying underneath us and there’s a hot-air balloon and the people in the basket wave at us and we wave back and I say to you, “We can go anywhere in the world.”
He stroked Benjy’s hair.
Where do you want to go, little brother?

I want to go home
, said Benjy.

R
ichard slots the tiny Christmas tree of the interdental brush into its white handle and cleans out the gaps between his front teeth, top and bottom, incisors, canines. He likes the tightness, the push and tug, getting the cavity really clean, though only at the back between the molars and premolars do you get the satisfying smell of rot from all that sugar-fed bacteria. Judy Hecker at work. Awful breath. Ridiculous that it should be a greater offense to point it out. Arnica on the shelf above his shaver. Which fool did that belong to? Homeopathy on the NHS now. Prince Charles twisting some civil servant’s arm no doubt. Ridiculous man.
Hello trees, how are you this morning?
Pop a couple of Nurofen into the river at Reading to cure everyone’s headache in London. He rinses his mouth with Corsodyl.

The intolerable loneliness after Jennifer left. The noises a house made at night. Learning the reason for small talk at forty-two.
Going to the pub
. He’d always thought of it as wasting time.

He spits out the mouthwash, sluices his mouth with cold water and pats his face dry with the white towel from the hot rail.

He turns and sees himself in the mirrored door of the cabinet, face still puffy with the fluids that fatten the face in the night, waiting for gravity to restore him to himself. They say you’re meant to see your father staring back at you, but he never does. He pulls the light cord and heads to the bedroom to get dressed.

Alex hoists himself up and stands on the trig point. He is the highest thing for, what? Fifty miles? A hundred? He turns slowly as if he is spinning the earth around him like a wheel, the ridges of the Black Mountains receding to the south, Hay down there in the train-set valley to the north. The wind buffets him. He imagines fucking Louisa against the bathroom door. Her ankles locked behind him, saying,
Yes, harder, yes
, the door banging and banging and banging.

They’ve created the largest fiscal deficit in recent history
.

Dominic regretted broaching a subject about which Richard seemed to know rather too much and Dominic too little, for whenever he ventured into the financial section of the newspaper a dullness stole over him as if the subject were protected by a dark charm woven to dispel intruders.
So we elect a man who won’t admit to having any actual policies?
But he was bowling uphill in fading light.

Down the table Angela was reading
The Observer
travel section. A message had slipped over the hill during the night.
Missing U. Love Amy XX
. If he never told her about Amy then he would always be the better parent, the better person, because he loved Daisy unreservedly. And there she was, coming in holding a bowl of cereal.
People are greedy and selfish
, she said, sitting down as far away from Melissa as possible, though it was only Dominic who noted the geometry.
They just vote for people who promise to give them exactly what they want. It’s like children with sweets
.

But she wasn’t talking about
people
. She was talking about Richard and she was talking about Melissa, wasn’t she.

But things improve
, said Richard, carefully.
It’s a messy process but things do get better
.

For who?
said Daisy.

None of them were greatly interested in the election except as a national soap opera in which the closeness of the result was more exciting than the identity of the winner. Individually, they were passionate about GP fundholding, academy schools, asylum, but none of them trusted any party to keep a promise about any of these issues. Louisa struggled to believe that she could change herself, let alone the world, and saving lives seemed to absolve Richard of any wider duty. Angela and Dominic had once marched in support of the miners in Doncaster and the printers in Wapping, but their excitement at Blair’s accession had changed rapidly to anger then disappointment then apathy about politics in general. Alex was planning to vote Tory because that was how you voted when you were the kind of person he wanted to be. Melissa affected a disdain which felt like sophistication and Daisy affected an ignorance which felt like humility. Benjy, on the other hand, was interested mostly in the fate of the tiger, the panda and the whale, and consequently more concerned about the future of the planet than any of them.

Daisy had never really talked to Lauren till they were swimming for the school, up at six for seventy lengths at the Wheelan Centre before lessons. She was five foot eleven at sixteen, as graceful in the water as she was clumsy out of it, hunching her shoulders and speaking in a tiny voice to compensate, not quite a girl but not a woman either. She wore baggy clothes to deflect attention but when she was in her green Speedo, Daisy was mesmerized by the length and whiteness of her legs and neck, the way you couldn’t stop looking at someone with a missing arm or a strawberry birthmark. She attached herself to Daisy with an eagerness that no one had shown since they were six or seven so that they inhabited a kind of tree-house world together. Something about Lauren’s size that made Daisy feel tucked away like a precious thing. Boys called Lauren a freak and kept their distance, though it was clear to Daisy that when she was older and more confident and they were less concerned about the opinions of their peers
they would see that she was beautiful. Lauren responded by pretending they didn’t exist, even Jack who hated being ignored by someone who still read novels with wizards in them, a scorn she returned in equal measure so that Daisy grew rapidly tired of being the prize in a pointless competition.

But Lauren was the only person who wasn’t fazed when Daisy joined the church. She should have been grateful, but … what was it? Lauren’s smugness about having won the competition by default? The unshakable puppyish loyalty? So she pushed Lauren away and when Lauren clung on she pushed harder, for surely it was insulting if a friend refused to react to your feelings. She gave up swimming, stopped calling, stopped answering her phone. Lauren knocked on the door once and Daisy asked Mum to say that she was out, and she wasn’t sure which felt worse, the way she was behaving or Mum’s delight at her unchristian hypocrisy.

Lauren’s height and divorcing parents and the fact that she too had stopped swimming meant that it took a long time for anyone to notice her anorexia. Daisy didn’t believe it had anything to do with her, for that would have been self-centered. But neither did she get in touch to offer help or support. Lauren was in hospital briefly, but Daisy didn’t visit, and when Lauren’s mother moved to Gloucester taking Lauren with her, Daisy felt a relief that was no relief at all.

Benjy poured three centimeters of vinegar into the big plastic tub.

Now
, said Richard,
fill the eggcup with bicarbonate of soda
.

This is going to be brilliant
. Benjy filled it clumsily.
Did you do this when you were little, Uncle Richard?

I was far too well-behaved
. He tried not to think about the children he might have had.
I’ll do this next bit myself
.

Do you think it will go over the roof?

Let’s see
. Gingerly, he lowered the eggcup into the vinegar. The rim of the eggcup sat just proud of the liquid. Perfect. He pressed the top back onto the tub.

Can I do it?
asked Benjy.

One shake and then step back quickly
.

Ten, nine, eight …
Benjy crouched down
 … two, one … Blast off
. He shook the tub and sat his teddy bear on top and forgot to stand back so Richard grabbed his shoulder and pulled him away. And nothing happened.
Perhaps we should do it again
, said Benjy, but Richard could see the plastic lid bulging under the bear.
Wait
. There was a creak like a ship trapped in ice and the
POP
was considerably louder than Richard had expected, there was foam all over his trousers and a flatulent smell in the air (sodium acetate?) and whilst the bear didn’t quite go over the roof it did get stuck in the climbing rose just under the first-floor window. Benjy was whooping and Richard could see it all from his point of view and it really was the funniest thing he’d seen in a long time and Benjy was saying,
Again, again, again
, which was when Angela appeared from the front door.
I thought a bomb had gone off
.