The Red House (22 page)

The spine of the hill flattened out, the grass and mud giving way to a rough path weaving its way around little rocky outcrops, the slopes on both sides falling away so steeply that you could glance up and think for a moment that you were flying.

OK
, said Melissa.
This is as far as I’m going. End of argument
.

They turned round, breathing heavily. All that wheeling space. The cars were Dinky Toys. Miniature sheep and miniature cows.
There’s the house
, said Daisy, pointing. She imagined opening the hinged front so you could rearrange the furniture and the model people.

You win
, said Melissa.
This is pretty cool
.

Angela sat in Shepherd’s eating a bowl of ice cream with chocolate sauce. She hadn’t pictured herself alone at a table when she was at the counter and only when she sat down did she see herself from the point of view of customers at the other tables. Discomfort eating. She’d bought
Notes on a Scandal
but it refused to hold her attention. There was an exhibition of framed watercolors hung around the room which looked as if they’d been done by a talented child, a poppy field, a lighthouse. It was her, wasn’t it, the person who couldn’t be alone, who married the first person who came along because they were scared of going back to an empty house. At home she moaned constantly about the chores she had to do because everyone else did them badly or not at all.
For once I’d just like to put my feet up
. But she was doing that right
now and hated it. She looked up at the clock. Twelve minutes past two and sixteen seconds, and seventeen seconds, and eighteen seconds. She was in Maths with Mr. Alnwick again, each minute a rock to be broken.

She picked up the bag of books she’d bought for Benjy, to replace that terrifying
Gate Between Worlds
thing, and opened
Tintin
.

Blue blistering barnacles …

What is it, Captain?

We should be getting back
. Melissa puts her hands on her knees, preparatory to standing.

Wait
, says Daisy. She wants this moment to continue forever. She turns and looks at Melissa. Those freckled shoulders, sweat cooling in the wind. She can see it all so clearly now and she is both surprised and relieved. Her whole life has been leading toward this moment. She has turned a final corner and seen her destination at long last. Is time slowing down or speeding up? She puts her hand on Melissa’s forearm.
And with the juice of this I’ll streak her eyes
. Like being on a roller coaster, no way of getting off now. She puts her other hand around the back of Melissa’s neck and pulls her close. The barn roars in the night. Daisy kisses her, pushing her tongue into her mouth, but something is wrong because Melissa is pushing her away and shouting,
What the fuck …?
She’s on her feet now.
Get off me you fucking dyke
.

No
, says Daisy.
I didn’t mean …

What the fuck do you think you’re doing?

I only …
Crashing back into the bright light and the hard edges of the day.

Just …
Melissa takes four steps down the hill, backward, keeping her eyes on Daisy, as if she is holding a gun.
Just … stay the fuck away from me, OK?
She rips the shirt from round her waist and fumbles it on, covering her flesh as quickly as she can, then the Puffa jacket.
You’re weird and your clothes are shit and the only reason I was even spending time with you was because it is so fucking boring here
. She turns and strides away till she is swallowed by the curve of the hill.

Daisy sits rigid. For two, three seconds everything is very clear and quiet, as if she has dropped a china plate on a tiled floor. If she stays very still and concentrates hard she will be able to find the matching fragments and put them all together again. She got carried away. For the briefest moment she lost any sense of where she stopped and Melissa began. When Melissa has calmed down she will be able to explain everything.

Then she realizes that Melissa will tell Louisa and Richard, Louisa and Richard will tell Mum and Dad, Alex will find out, everyone at school will find out and they won’t understand that it was a mistake. Because it isn’t a china plate, it’s her life and there are too many fragments and they’re too tiny and they don’t match. A woman is standing in front of her wearing a blue cagoule.
Are you all right?
Daisy stands and turns and runs, farther up the ridge, away from the woman, away from Melissa, away from the car park, away from the house, hoping that if she runs far and fast enough she will find the edge of the world and the beginning of some other place where no one knows her and she can start all over again.

Economics, history and business studies
, says Alex.

Why history?
asks Richard.

Because I like it
, said Alex.
And because I’m good at it
.

Richard finds it reassuring, the swagger. It makes Alex seem like a boy again. Of course he’s flirting with Louisa. It’s only natural. Richard feels jealous, almost. Because he never had it, did he, the swagger. That sudden spurt of growth just after he arrived at university. Rugby, judo, four hundred meters. Turning suddenly into a person that was never quite him, waking in the night sometimes, convinced that he was trapped in someone else’s life, heart pounding and throat tight till he turned on the lights and found the family photographs he kept in the back of the wardrobe like passports, for the route out, the route back.

Dominic is sitting up front with Mike.
So what’s it like living out here?
Because he is still enchanted by the idea of the cottage and the
garden and the job in the bookshop. Mike bridles slightly at the metropolitan presumption of
out here
so Dominic tries to be more conciliatory and asks how easy it is to make a living. Mike sucks his teeth and says he does a bit of tree surgery in the winter,
and some other stuff
, in a tone which suggests that the other stuff might not be legal.

So do you live up in them thar hills?

And freeze my bollocks off?
They went over a bump and the trailer clanked and shook.
Got a flat in Abergavenny
.

Dominic realizes that he has misread the ponytail and the work boots. He isn’t Davy Crockett after all, just a chancer who props up a saloon bar and sells pills to bored kids on a Friday night.

Louisa is sitting next to Benjy.

Did you enjoy that?

Enjoy what?

Did you enjoy the canoeing?

Yeh
.

What did enjoy about it?

Just, you know …
He shrugged.
Being in a canoe
.

You’re not very chatty today, are you
.

No, not very
.

Sorry, that was a mean thing to say
.

It’s all right
.

How hard it was to talk to children. They made no effort to ease your discomfort. But it was hard to talk to Melissa sometimes and at least Benjy wasn’t going to swear at her.
What do you want to be when you grow up?

Don’t know
.

Boys always wanted to be train drivers when I was little
. What did girls always want? She can’t remember now. Married to one of the Bay City Rollers, possibly.

Some boys in my class want to be footballers, but I’m not very good at football
.

What are you good at?

He shrugs. Perhaps he wants to be left alone.
It’s because I don’t know you very well
.

What is?

Not being chatty. Even though I know you’re meant to be my aunt
.

The word moves her in a way that catches her by surprise.

Is it OK to be quiet?

Yes
, she says,
it’s OK to be quiet
.

Melissa wanted to walk back via the road but she had absolutely no idea where the road went so she had to retrace the path back through all the fucking mud. Christ. She wanted to ring someone at home. Tell them about Dyke Girl. Except they’d laugh, because if she told them about the kiss they’d be, like,
How did you let it happen?
And if she didn’t tell them about the kiss, then what was she being so horrified about? Just some girl fancying her. Which sounded like showing off. Because the truth was that it wasn’t the kiss that made her angry, it was the way she’d reacted. She was cool with people being gay, even getting married and having kids, and she rather liked the idea of another girl fancying her as long as the girl wasn’t ugly. So she kept rerunning the moment in her head except this time she gently pushed Daisy away and said,
Hey, slow down, I’m not into that kind of thing
. But she’d said all that other stuff, and now they were going to have to spend the next three days in the same house. Jesus, this fucking mud.

Daisy couldn’t run any farther. She came to a halt and fell to her knees, lungs heaving. She had sinned. She had wanted everything Melissa had. Now she was being punished with exquisite accuracy, that envy pushed to its poisonous extremity.
For I know my transgressions and my sin is always before me
. People would be disgusted. She would be mocked and reviled. She looked around. Bare and bleak, no fields visible now, just high empty moorland, the farther hills black under the massive off-white sky. Where was her coat? You could imagine hell being like this. Not the fire, nor the press of devils, but a freezing
unpeopled nowhere, the heart desperate for warmth and companionship, and the mind saying,
Do not be fooled, this is not a place
.

You’re weird and your clothes are shit
. Melissa, of all people. So vain, so nasty. But the fault was hers alone, Melissa merely an instrument. She had never pretended to be anything but what she was. It was Daisy who had deceived herself.

The image of Melissa telling Alex. She rolled over onto the wet grass, curling up, as if she had been punched in the abdomen.
Oh please, God, help me
. She was crying now, but God wasn’t listening, He had never been listening, because He knew, didn’t He. It was why the Holy Spirit hadn’t come. He had peered into her soul from the very first and seen the pretense and the false humility.

She was lying in muddy water.
Cursed is the ground
. Thorns and thistles and coats of skins. She rocked back and forth. She imagined stepping off a tall building or standing in front of an oncoming train, head bowed, eyes closed, and it was the sweet pull of these images which revealed her cowardice. She had to remember. The hurt was her only way out of this place, the long walk through the flames.

The taste of Melissa’s mouth, the freckles. Diamonds and pearls. How cruel time was. The future turning into the past, the things you’ve done becoming your testimony forever.
I think being yourself is punishment enough
. Where had she heard those words before?

Angela carries the shopping into the kitchen and starts to put everything away, sausages, cheese straws, pears. The house is silent. Melissa and Daisy must be out somewhere. Twenty-six pounds for the taxi, tiny round man, Punjabi Sikh. She didn’t catch his name. Talked about his sister being married to a drug addict, how he and his brothers were forced to
take him in hand
. She didn’t press him for details. Plastic Taj Mahal swinging on the mirror, Bon Jovi on the radio.

Half an hour later and the explorers return. Benjy runs for the living room, shouting,
Can I watch a video?
and vanishes before anyone
can countermand him.
So
, says Angela,
did you reach the source of the Nile?
Richard laughs.
Not at the speed we were going
. The blare of the
Robots
theme tune.
Benjy, can you shut that door, please?
Alex picks up the paper. Audrey Williamson has died. Silver in the two hundred meters at the London Olympics, 1948. Melissa sweeps into the room, cleansed and fragrant.
Where’s Daisy?
asks Dominic.
Oh
, says Melissa breezily.
I think she went out for a walk
.

One person looks around and sees a universe created by a God who watches over its long unfurling, marking the fall of sparrows and listening to the prayers of his finest creation. Another person believes that life, in all its baroque complexity, is a chemical aberration that will briefly decorate the surface of a ball of rock spinning somewhere among a billion galaxies. And the two of them could talk for hours and find no great difference between each other, for neither set of beliefs makes us kinder or wiser.

William the Bastard forcing Harold to swear over the bones of Saint Jerome, the Church of Rome rent asunder by the King’s Great Matter, the twin towers folding into smoke. Religion fueling the turns and reverses of human history, or so it seems, but twist them all to catch a different light and those same passionate beliefs seem no more than banners thrown up to hide the usual engines of greed and fear. And in our single lives? Those smaller turns and reverses? Is it religion which trammels and frees, which gives or withholds hope? Or are these, too, those old base motives dressed up for a Sunday morning? Are they reasons or excuses?

Benjy waited for his eyes to grow accustomed to the dark then approached slowly and quietly, because rats could run up your trouser leg, which was why thatchers tied string round their ankles. Except that it was not a rat, nor a mouse, but something halfway between the two, with a rounder body and a long pointed nose. Some kind of shrew
perhaps. It was clearly sick and not going to run anywhere fast, so he crouched down and was about to reach out and touch it when he saw that several flies were sitting on its fur. It moved again, just a twitch really. There was blood coming out of its mouth and out of its bottom. It was going to die if he didn’t do something, but if he went away some other animal might find it and kill it. A fox maybe, or a crow. He had to be quick.
Mum …? Dad …?