The Red House (35 page)

In the corner of the shed, a crumbling wooden workbench, toy piano in sun-bleached red plastic, fishing net, spark plugs, filthy webs over everything. He picked up a coil of rusty garden wire thin enough to cut with the kitchen scissors. Red electrical tape. He wiped the roll clean on the leg of his jeans. Three-inch nail. Use it like a tourniquet. He sat down on the roller, light-headed suddenly. He hated being trapped inside other people’s problems. He kept his life simple. Do your work, choose good friends and keep your promises. He didn’t deserve this crap. He’d been dreaming about Coed-y-Brenin for weeks, nothing to do but cycle and eat and sleep. It scared him now, something happening to Mum while he was away. The idea that he might not have a home to come back to.

Are you making something?
It was Benjy.

Washing machine’s bust
.

He’s being a man
, said Daisy.

He didn’t want to be a man. He wanted to run away with them. But he couldn’t say it. This gulf between them, a sudden flash of what Dad might be going through, of what he might have been going through for years. Fear and disgust, thinking how similar they might be after all.

See you later, yeh?
Daisy laughed.
Send out the helicopter if we’re not back in two hours
.

Little princess
. She really did believe it on some level, the old dream, not that her real parents would come to claim her one day, purring Bentley, chauffeur, paint like a mirror. Nothing that naïve, simply that they were out there somewhere. Because she looked at Mum’s brothers and the word
uncle
made her skin crawl. Three years since she last saw them. Never again, hopefully. Fat and badly dressed, smelling
of cigarette smoke and fried food. That awful dog with the patch of hair shaved off and the stitches crusty with dried blood, sleeping on the sofa. At least Dad wanted to be rich. You looked at Grannie and Gramps and you saw where it came from, polish on the table every day, antimacassars and family photos and the row of china figurines. But she was Mum’s daughter, too. The fear that something genetic might rise and up and claim her if she wasn’t strong enough. That period when Mum was fucking everything in sight, echoes of that shitty estate, people with nothing to live for.

It takes twenty-five minutes to attach one stupid bit of plastic to another but there’s no way Alex is going to ask Dad for help. The inane conversation behind him stops eventually, thank goodness.
It’s great for a few days but I think I’d kill myself after a month in a place like this
. Fuckwit. The splash of the mop and the scrape of the bucket, the rhythm just slow enough to show that he wasn’t putting any effort in. Will he make everything worse or better if he confronts Dad? He wants someone older and wiser to tell him what to do, but there is no one. He is out of the harbor mouth now and he can feel the long sway of the ocean proper. One more turn of the nail. He unrolls a length of electrical tape and bites it off with his teeth. Leaning into the recess he tapes the nail to the body of the pipe to keep his makeshift tourniquet tight. Round once, three, seven times. It’s not pretty but it looks serviceable. He stands up. Soiled wet elbows, soiled wet knees.

Done?
His father opens the back door and pours another bucket of dirty water into the stone gutter.

Alex twists the big dial to
DRAIN
and restarts the machine. The drum turns over a few times, then picks up speed, juddering. He looks into the recess. The makeshift junction holds without leaking. Result.

As he’s leaving the room, Dominic touches his arm.
Alex
.

Alex fixes his attention on the light switch.

What’s the matter?

Alex steps back very slowly to disengage from his father’s touch.
Like two spacecraft undocking. If he says anything now he will explode. He walks slowly toward the door.

Alex …?

She didn’t know who she was anymore, that was the truth of it. The newel post, her fairy-tale father, “My Funny Valentine.” She had given up trying to remember her own bedroom. It was like moving to the edge of a cliff and gazing down through miles of empty air. You thought you were anchored by the tick of the clock, the sound of your children in the garden, these hands gripping the arms of this chair. Reality. It meant nothing. It was the story that mattered, the story that held you together, the satisfaction of turning those pages, going back to favorite scenes over and over, a book at bedtime, the reassurance of it. Saying,
This happened … Then that happened …
Saying,
This is me
. But what is her story?
Losing the plot
. The deep truths hidden in the throwaway phrase. She was coming, wasn’t she. Karen was coming. Her vengeful little angel.

Kick
, says Daisy.
Kick your legs right up
. And he manages it, just, despite gymnastics totally not being his forte. She holds his ankles and yanks them higher to straighten his knees.

And the world is suddenly upside down, his face fat with blood, a delicious wobble in his arms. He’s like Atlas, carrying the planet on his upturned hands. And then he can’t hold it any longer. His arms give way and he crumples onto the grass, shrieking and laughing and rolling down the hill. But he lands on a stiff little thorn branch.
Shit bugger bloody, shit bugger bloody
.

Benjy …?

He gets to his feet and does a little anesthetic dance. The pain is going down. But then he takes his hand away and sees the four red lines cut into the soft flesh of his underarm, tiny red drops blooming. He starts to cry and Daisy holds her arms open.
Hey, action man
. So he comes and slumps in between her legs and she hugs him.

Shit shit shit
.

She rocks him gently. She remembers how this used to feel, how it still feels. Nothing you can do, just wait for the time to pass. The armor of Christ. She’s not angry now, nor as confident, just exhausted, mostly. Thinking and feeling too many things in too short a time.

But Benjy is crying not just about the wound on his arm, he is also crying about the woman who is being mean to Dad. He doesn’t like to see adults suffering. He still believes that when he reaches the age of twenty-one he will no longer be sad, he will no longer be afraid, he will no longer be bullied. It is a hard clear star he can fix his quadrant on. But if that woman at work can bully Dad …

My turn
, says Daisy.

Benjy dries his eyes and rolls away so that she can stand up. She finds a little pillow of grass. Forehead down, hands planted. A little push and her legs rise into the blue. Like diving into the earth. Absolutely vertical. The tiniest splash and little waves of earth spreading away from the spot where you vanished into the dark. Limestone, granite, basalt.

Mum bought a weird doll
, says Benjy.

What kind of weird?
She wondered how long you’d have to stay like this before it started feeling normal, till it looked right.

She said it was for someone, then she said it was for her
.

Daisy thought about the baby who died, those scary thoughts you got sometimes. What if I were someone else? What if I never reached the world?
It’s something for school
. Just to reassure him.
A project
. Though God alone knows what Mum was up to.

That’s all right, then
.

Yeh, that’s all right
.

Can we go back now?

Of course
. A few more precious seconds then she gave in to gravity.

Say it began with shadows, that it was shadows always. The sun above us, below us a dark figure that is ourselves and not ourselves. Look how it follows me, see how we dance in time. Narcissus, all of
us, right from the beginning. Trace your hand on the rock wall of this cave, using flint, using charcoal. Now the ghost of you will live on after you have gone. Draw lines in the dirt. This is the wolf and that is the river. There are the hills and the men who live beyond them. This is how we can trap the wolf. This is how we can kill the men. Imagined futures breeding and branching.
We are, I know not why, double within ourselves
. So many different things to want and fear. Ghosts fighting for possession of a body.

Gather round the fire
, says the old man.
Once upon a time …
And suddenly we are transported to a world that seems both strange and familiar. Angels and demons, wolves and shadows, the men who live beyond the hills.

The salmon wasn’t going to fit into a single baking tray, was it. She should have thought of that in the shop. Louisa would have to rearrange it after baking, cut and shut, like a crashed car. She placed the jar of honey and the jar of olives on opposite corners of the cookbook to hold it open. Foil, peppercorns, mustard. Open the fridge. Sour cream, dill. Amazing you could get it here. She looked out the window and saw Benjy and Daisy returning from a walk. It had happened this week, hadn’t it, Daisy realizing. Suddenly it was obvious, now that she thought about it. The way she held herself, some tension gone. Memories of that ghastly funeral, the way she sang the hymns, trying so hard to put her heart into something. She hadn’t told her parents, had she. Or perhaps she’d told them and it had gone down badly. Angela’s weird behavior, perhaps it had nothing to do with the baby dying, or not that kind of baby dying.

She should have had two children. Or three. Or four. Melissa would have been a different person, surely. Sixteen years of ruling the roost, it couldn’t be good for anyone. Forty-four. She wasn’t old, was she. She could still have a child, with Richard. Was that an absurd thought?

Richard sat down on the bench and handed Melissa a mug of tea. That ridiculous cane. Like someone’s granddad. She took the tea only because it would have seemed childish to refuse. He let the silence run for ten seconds.
You want to be successful, you want to be rich, you want to have a good job
.

And …?
She didn’t need any more of this stuff, not today.

You can offend some people. In fact you have to offend some people if you’re going to get things done
. He should have talked to her like this a long time ago. He should have done many things a long time ago.
But you have to admit when you’re wrong
.

I haven’t done anything wrong
. He refused to answer.
She told you, didn’t she. Thanks, Mum
.

People are scared of you, Melissa. That’s how you get them to do things. And you can do that at school but it doesn’t work in the long run. You have to learn how to make people like you
.

It caught her off guard. She was waiting for a lecture about knuckling down and toeing the line, but she was holding her shield in the wrong place and he had slipped a blade in under her ribs, because the shameful truth was that she wanted to be like him. The salary, the respect, the achievement.

A little column of midges rose and fell in the center of the lawn as if contained in a big glass tube.

Richard rubbed his face.
You have to find something you really care about, then everything else falls into place. But I’m not sure you’ve found anything you really care about
.

I care about …
But what did she care about? Out of nowhere she was crying. Sailing boats and women blowing glass. She would never be an artist, she would never love someone, she would never be loved.

Melissa …?

But she was standing up and running toward the house, her spilt tea dripping through the slats in the bench.

Daisy was passing through the kitchen when Louisa held out a glass of wine in a way that clearly meant,
You’re staying
.

So Daisy clinked the glass against the chunky handle of the big knife Louisa was holding.
What happened in there, by the way?

Washing machine
. Louisa swept the carrot peelings into the bin.
Alex fixed it. Your dad mopped the floor
.

Sounds about right
.

I’m sorry Melissa was horrible to you
.

So everybody knew.

I ought to come up with some sort of excuse, her being my daughter, but she can be an utter shit sometimes
.

It was my fault, really
.

Many boys have made the same mistake
.

Daisy realized that they were talking about the kiss.

She should carry a government health warning, that girl
. The kettle clicked off and Louisa poured the boiling water into the biggest pan.

Like it was the most ordinary thing in the world. And Louisa was on her side, Louisa of all people, Louisa who picked tiny pieces of fluff off Richard’s jumper. The jar of honey and the jar of olives.

It happened this week didn’t it
. Louisa slotted the kettle back onto its stand.