by Mark Haddon
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 mesmerised 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 treehouse 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, 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 unshakeable 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-centred. 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 centimetres of vinegar into the big plastic tub.
Now, said Richard, fill the egg cup 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 egg cup into the vinegar. The rim of the egg cup sat just proud of the liquid. Perfect. He pressed the top back on to 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 while 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.
I can add you in later, said Alex. Like the reserve goalkeeper. She had no idea what he was talking about, but she ran a quick mental check of her outfit. Ugg boots, patterned tights under denim shorts, lumberjack shirt … She didn’t know whether to be flattered or disgusted but it seemed like the wrong time to piss off yet another person. Smile. Click. Turn towards the house. Click. She knew she looked good. Her only worry sometimes was that she didn’t look different enough, that people mistook her for part of a crowd. She’d see a girl in patterned Docs or with a dyed red pixie cut and wish she had the balls. Click. Now sit on the wall. Like some sleazy old guy. Click. You should be a model, love. Give us some arse. I think we’re finished now.
Cheers, said Alex. That’s great.
Except he probably wouldn’t wank over the photo because he was becoming aware of a nastiness in Melissa that clung to her even in his sexual fantasies, though it didn’t matter now because he fancied Louisa instead, and he was proud of the fact that his taste was maturing.
* * *
It’s not far. Richard leans over the Ordnance Survey as if he is planning an aerial assault on northern France. A couple of miles at most.
Louisa brushes toast crumbs from her sweater. Those little brown lines are very close together.
Daisy is sitting in the window seat reading Dracula (We need have no secrets amongst us. Working together and with absolute trust, we can surely be stronger than if some of us were in the dark).
Angela appears in the kitchen doorway. Any more sandwich orders? I’ve got mozzarella and tomato, cheddar and pickle, jam, ham …
Can you bring those pears and bananas?
Benjy enters, absent-mindedly singing ‘Whip-Crack-Away!’.
Did you flush the toilet?
He turns sullenly and retraces his steps.
Angela hasn’t walked more than a mile in the last ten years but she doesn’t want to abandon ship for a second day running and she is determined to prove Dominic wrong, to be a real part of the family.
Alex is reading the Observer sports section (Bowyer received a gift of a cross inside the six-yard box but headed it wide).
Distantly, the toilet flushes.
Where’s Melissa? Richard finds himself worrying about her in a way that he hasn’t done before. These vague thoughts of fatherhood, perhaps. She hasn’t made a second bid for freedom, has she?
She’s upstairs, says Alex. Beautifying herself. It’s something his father might say.
Louisa thinks about going into the kitchen to help out but she is still uneasy around Angela. She still can’t picture her as a teacher. She had expected more warmth, more openness.
Daisy turns the page (When the terrible story of Lucy’s death, and all that followed, was done, I lay back in my chair powerless).
Dominic looks at Benjy’s feet. You are not walking up that hill in sandals.
* * *
Click. Everyone briefly gathered and posed and smiling at their future selves. Beaches and cathedrals, bumper cars and birthday parties, glasses raised around a dining table. Each picture a little pause between events. No tantrums, no illness, no bad news, all the big stuff happening before and after and in between. The true magic happening only when the lesser magic fails, the ghost daughter who moved during the exposure, her face unreadable but more alive than all her frozen family. Double exposures, as if a little strip of time had been folded back on itself. Scratches and sun flares. Photos torn post-divorce, faces scratched out or biroed over. The camera telling the truth only when something slips through its silver fingers.
If we could rest for a bit longer. Angela’s lack of fitness scared her. Luminous protozoa swam in her eyes.
Richard clicked his phone off and shook his head wearily. You’d think at twenty-five you could arrange for someone to cover for you when you were on holiday. Actual human lives in their hands. I despair sometimes.
Can we have a snack? asked Benjy.
You can have a banana.
But that’s only fruit.
Monkeys like them.
Monkeys eat fleas.
Cool grey air. Angela looked back down the hill towards the shrunken house. So much effort to get, what? a hundred feet up? two hundred? It made you realise that we lived on the surf
ace of a planet, moving backwards and forwards and round in circles, but forever trapped between earth and sky. She pictured the view as a papier mâché model in the school hall. Gold Book for Seacole Class. She thought of the kids who’d never actually seen the countryside. Kaylee, Milo. Mikela’s dad found the whole countryside thing utterly perplexing. ‘Let’s go for a nice walk’, it should be written on the Union Jack. Though the only time she and Dominic had stayed in a National Trust cottage it had slave trade prints on the walls. Black men in chains being canoed out to a waiting ship.
Daisy sat herself down beside Melissa and offered her the second half of her coffee. Sorry about yesterday. She wanted to tell Melissa about Lauren, but it was too long a story and she didn’t want to give her any leverage. Melissa was saying nothing. Daisy got to her feet. Forgiven or not, she felt lighter for having apologised.
Do you have lots of friends?
Daisy wondered if Melissa was being sarcastic.
You know, like, other Christians?
We are allowed to have friends who aren’t Christians.
Sorry, that was stupid.
Though Dad was right, her old friends had indeed drifted away, and what had seemed at first a kind of cleansing left a hole more painful than she’d expected. She knew it had been there all the time, that her friends had been a bandage over a wound she was now able to heal, but still she couldn’t bring herself to answer the question, so she flipped it round. You must have loads of friends.
Melissa just laughed. I fucking hate all of them. She took a deep breath and turned to Daisy. Sorry about all the swearing.
We’re allowed to swear, too. Though Tim had told her off for saying Shit.
I get so fucking lonely. A brief pause in the turning of the world. There I go again. Fuck-fuck-fuckity-fuck. She squeezed her eyes shut but couldn’t stop the tears.
OK, people, said Dominic, let’s saddle up and move out.
Daisy gazed at the ground between her feet. A little archipelago of yellow moss on a speckled grey stone.
Are you coming or not? shouted Dominic.
Melissa’s got a splinter. We’ll catch you up. She watched her mother get to her feet and realised that she was in some pain.
Thanks, said Melissa quietly.
* * *
New Leaves split from the Vineyard church in 1999. Tim and Lesley Canning were feeling increasingly alienated by the direction the church was taking. Rock music, the Toronto Blessing, speaking in tongues. They held meetings in their kitchen, spreading out to other prayerhouses as the membership grew, then taking out a lease on a hall vacated by a judo club. They were near the university and provided a safe harbour for young people who were often a very long way from home. Singapore, Uganda, the Philippines. They had a stall at the Freshers’ Fair and ran weekly Frisbee and Donut afternoons during the summer. Most church members went out onto Lever Street for a couple of hours every week as part of the Healing Project. Tim had always disliked banner-waving street evangelism, for surely the Lord saved souls not crowds, so they struck up conversations with people who seemed lonely or broken in some way, many of whom were desperate for help. They formed a circle and prayed and often you could feel the presence of Jesus wheeling around that ring of hands like electricity. One man’s cancer went into remission. A man possessed by demons was exorcised and no longer heard voices in his head.
Daisy found it preposterous at first, but the preposterousness would later became part of the appeal, the sheer distance between the church and the world which had served her so poorly. She accepted the invitation to that first service as proof of her own broadmindedness and needed a great deal of it to get through the sixty minutes. Embarrassment, mostly, at the way these people spoke and sang like over-excited children, and mild disgust when everyone was invited to hug their neighbour and she found herself briefly in the arms of a man who, frankly, smelt. Which would have been her remaining impression had not her beeline for the door been intercepted by a tiny Indian woman with bangles and a surprisingly red dress and a smile which seemed to Daisy to be the only genuine thing she had experienced since her arrival. She held out her hand. Anushka. You must be Daisy.
* * *
I’ve done bad things. They were sitting apart from the others, far enough away to feel private but near enough to prevent Richard shouting or storming off. That bell-jar feeling, everything muffled and far off. She really did think she might vomit.
Are we talking about a criminal record of some kind? He laughed, not hearing the crack in her voice.
No, not that.
He heard it now, but didn’t think of Louisa as someone who had done anything of great significance, either good or bad, rather as someone who had put herself at the service of others so that they could do things of significance. Tell me.
She closed her eyes. There was no way back. After Craig and I split up I slept with a lot of men.
How many? The doctor talking.
Ten. Ten men. A little white lie. Did it sound that bad? Only if you knew the dates, perhaps. I was drinking a lot at the time. It didn’t seem so awful now that it was out there. She’d been lonely. She’d made mistakes. Say something. Please.
I’m thinking about it. He wanted to know the details and didn’t want to know them.
If only he would reach out and hold her. I took an AIDS test. But it didn’t sound reassuring when she said it out loud … Blood and semen. I’m really sorry. Why was she apologising to him? Why hadn’t he saved her sooner?
He couldn’t think of what to say. Was he being a prude? Of course he was, but how did one change?
Richard …?
It disturbs me a little.
What? Her anger surprised her. He was disgusted. She tried to keep her voice down so that Dominic or Angela didn’t hear.
I’m just trying to be honest.
I trusted you completely. The girl. The one who ended up in a wheelchair. I never for one moment doubted you when …
That’s different.
Why is it different, Richard …?
Because it wasn’t my fault.
You think I deliberately set out to be …?
He couldn’t stop himself. You don’t sleep with ten men by accident. He wasn’t trying to be unkind, it seemed to him to be simply a fact.
Do you actually love me, Richard? Or do you just like having me around as long as I don’t cause any problems?
Of course I love you. Something perfunctory about his answer. They both heard it but he couldn’t change the tone retrospectively.
I’m not sure you know what love means. She had never spoken like this before, not to Richard. There was a sickly thrill in riding the wave.
I know what love means.
So tell me.
It means … but what could he say? It wasn’t something you put into words.
She got to her feet. You come and tell me when you’ve worked out the answer.
The priory, fixed amongst a barbarous people in the Vale of Ewyas, is now a hotel with four bedrooms, each one leading off the spiral staircase of the tower. We advise guests to arrive during bar opening times so as to avoid waiting outside. Ruined arches striding away like the legs of a great stone spider. Transepts, triforium, clerestory. Eight hundred years of wind and rain and theft. Sir Richard Colt Hoare sees the great west window fall in 1803. Banks of mown green baize. Holly Hop and Brains Dark in the cool of the vaulted bar. Snickers and tubs of Ben & Jerry’s with wooden spoons under the plastic lids. Traffic making its way up the valley to Gospel Pass against the flow of the ghost ice, stopping for lorries to reverse, idling behind cyclists. Four pony-trekkers. A steel, a bay roan, two chestnuts. A brief Jacob’s ladder of sunlight, as if heaven were searching for raiders moving over the earth.
Benjy peels the sandwich apart and licks the jam from each slice in turn.
Smile, says Alex. Click.
Hey. Dominic sits down beside Angela. He loves her again. Not loves, maybe, but feels a comfort in her presence which h
e has not felt for years. He is the one who cares. This does not need to be said. He can spend his forgiveness at his leisure. He’d gone to the toilet in the hotel and texted Amy, Thinking of you must keep this short love D xx. He wonders if Angela is actually sick, psychiatrically. This, too, is a consolation. What do you make of that? He nods towards Daisy and Melissa who are sitting on a ruined buttress, talking.
Her calves ache and she has a blister on her left heel. Perhaps Melissa’s leading her astray. Yesterday, when she walked off, Angela had seen it all from her own point of view. Which was Dominic’s point, wasn’t it? Maybe it will be good for her.
Why does the religion thing upset you so much?
She didn’t want to talk about this now. Because she thinks she’s right and everyone else is wrong.
Doesn’t that cover pretty much every teenager in the world?
Angela felt Karen’s presence.
Actually, said Dominic, I think she’s scared that she’s wrong and everyone else is right. He could hear himself play-acting the wise man, but that didn’t stop it being true.
And suddenly Louisa was walking past them towards the bar, staring straight ahead. Dominic thought she might have been crying, but Angela was throwing a wet wipe at Benjy, saying, You have jam all over your face, young man.