The Red House

by Mark Haddon

  He’s wearing one of those check shirts, thin brown stripes on a cream background. He’s enjoying this. You have thirty seconds to remember all the objects on the tray. His sleeves are rolled up, he’s smoking, he’s smoking in all three photos, actually. God knows how long he would have survived if the testicular cancer hadn’t got him.

  His casualness grates, but she knows that they are navigating through strong currents and she must keep the tiller straight.

  Number two. He’s leaning on the bonnet of the car, green Hillman Avenger, that long radiator grille with the square headlights at each end. Looks like he’s just polished it. I think there’s a shammy leather on the roof. He’s wearing a short-sleeved white shirt.

  Tell me about him. Not his clothes but him.

  There is something disturbing about her intensity. Do you really not remember?

  Just tell me.

  Thick black hair, sideburns, big man, big biceps. He doesn’t like this. It conjures his father a little too vividly. Rusted metal and sheer bulk and sea spray. Blood in his hair. He wonders whether it was not the gull, he wonders whether it was his father who hit him, whether he has misremembered. Why do you want to know so badly?

  He’s my father. Wasn’t it obvious? If it was me who had the photographs and if you’d never seen them, wouldn’t you be curious?

  No. I really don’t think I would.

  Why not?

  Because he was not a very nice man.

  She shakes her head. Not disagreement, but disbelief.

  Do you really not remember?

  She is trying to work out a solution which will allow them to disagree diplomatically. We all look back and see things differently. She says this quietly, amused almost, as if it is he who needs to be calmed down.

  That’s true. He sits back and takes a sip of wine. He wants to let it go, send her the photographs, have done with it, but this is more than simply seeing things differently. Do you not remember him hitting us?

  Everyone hit their kids back then. Though she is unsure precisely what Richard means by hitting.

  I remember you being sick in the car. We were driving to Hunstanton one summer. You kept asking to pull over but he wouldn’t, as per usual. So you were sick and then he swerved into this gateway and took you out and put you over his knee and slapped your legs. He was so angry, he just kept on hitting you. The memory upsets him more than he expects.

  Why are you doing this? Why are you trying to mess this up for me?

  Because you are ill. The thought suddenly clear and sharp. He veers away. I think you were scared of him, too. And I think you’ve forgotten.

  Dad was not a monster.

  I’m not saying he was a monster.

  Then what the hell are you saying?

  I’m saying he got angry. I’m saying he didn’t care much about other people. I’m saying he didn’t know how to deal with children. And he scared me and I don’t particularly like looking at the photographs because it makes me remember what that felt like.

  Is this what Mum told you? Is this her version?

  I don’t remember Mum saying a single thing about him after he died. The grieving process, 1970. He wonders if he should reach out and hold Angela’s hand but he is not very good at judging these things.

  You and Mum, she says. You visited Dad in hospital, the day before he died. I wasn’t allowed to go. I hated you for that. I had this recurring dream in which you’d both killed him. She tries to make it sound like a joke but she can’t, because she still has the dream sometimes.

  You didn’t want to go.

  What?

  Why on earth would you not be allowed to go?

  Because that’s what Mum was like, because she enjoyed manipulating people, because she never wanted other people to be happy.

  After he died, after she started drinking, when she realised she was pouring her life away, then she was difficult, then she enjoyed manipulating people. He pauses and readjusts his focus. I think it was the only power she had left.

  Why wouldn’t I go to the hospital? He was my father.

  He shrugs. He still can’t quite grasp why this is so important to her. I guess the extraordinary thing is that I wanted to go myself. He is looking for a way of saying this which isn’t accusatory. Why would anyone want to see their father dying. Me …? I don’t know. Maybe there was a doctor waiting to get out even then. He wonders, on some deep level, if he did indeed want his father to die, whether he went to make sure it was happening, to say good riddance, to be certain he wasn’t coming back.

  Stop. Wait. This is too much.

  Sorry. He holds up his hands.

  She wants him to be wrong, but he’s not inventing it, is he? He has no axe to grind, and she has no story of her own to pit against his. She stands clumsily. I need to be on my own for a while.

  Going upstairs her legs feel weak. Is Dominic still out on his walk? The room is empty. She sits on the edge of the bed. The blankness again. What year is this? That woman on the train, red string, liver-spotted hands. I can’t quite … Dad slapping her in the lay-by, a picture half forming on the wet grey surface of the shaken photo. If she has the past wrong, does she have the present wrong, too? Her father is vanishing again. The empty doorway. Stems and slime. Another figure materialising in the dark rectangle. Thickening in waves. A high buzzing sound. Karen. She has betrayed her, forgotten her, let her slip away. Rainbow-coloured windbreak, flicking the hair out of her eyes. She’s laughing and it is not a kind laugh. Her birthday. It’s tomorrow. In all the excitement over the photographs Angela had forgotten. She is going to be punished for this.

  How are you doing?

  Richard was sitting up in bed with Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad closed on his lap. Better. Significantly better. He should have bought something trashy to read, though that was even harder work in his experience, like listening to someone play an instrument badly.

  She sat on the bed and took her earrings out, leaning her head first to one side then the other.

  I’m worried about Angela.

  I never told you. She laid the earrings carefully in the lacquered Indian box with all the others. Elephants and jasmine flowers. I found her in the kitchen the other night.

  Found in what sense?

  She was standing in the dark, eating a bowl of cereal.

  Why didn’t you tell me?

  Because I was angry with you and I wasn’t sure that Angela wanted the fact broadcast.

  He laid Stalingrad aside. Are you still angry with me?

  When you said it wasn’t a binding contract …

  I don’t appreciate you enough.

  Is this a crappy roundabout way of saying you don’t love me?

  I think … He shifted up a little straighter in bed. I think actually it’s a crappy roundabout way of saying I’m not terribly keen on myself.

  Richard …

  Wait. Downstairs the front door boomed shut. Dominic coming back from his late-night ramble. When you asked me whether I loved you or not …

  Stop. Listen. Do you enjoy being with me?

  I do.

  Do you want me to be happy?

  Very much so.

  Do you find me attractive?

  I think you know the answer to that.

  What would you do if I left and you were on your own?

  I’d think I’d very possibly fall to pieces, not immediately maybe, but …

  Would you risk your life for me?

  I’d risk my life for many people. A small child running into the road, a woman drowning in a river. Correction. I think I would actually give my life for you. If it were me or you. Lifeboat, burning building. He had never thought about this before.

  Bloody hell, Richard. If that’s not love … She sounded genuinely annoyed.

  I’ve never really loved anyone, or been loved, come to think of it, as an adult, I mean. He looked at his hands as if the notes written on his palm no longer made sense. Dear God, that was breathtakingly mawkish, wasn
’t it? The other men, by the way. Am I allowed to feel a little jealous?

  They were horrible and I was having a shitty time. She laid her head on his lap. Incidentally, Daisy’s a lesbian. Apparently.

  He looked at the ceiling. He felt suddenly exhausted. You’re going to have to tell me that again in the morning.

  Daisy wants happiness, of course, to belong, to be loved, but more than this she wants her life to have some kind of shape, not just this pinball zigzag from one accident to another. Even tragedy will do, so long as she can say, I see now what it means. This is who I am.

  Has she discovered the truth or lost her way? What will happen at church, at school, at home? Jack hasn’t rung back and she doesn’t know what this means. She has no idea what Mum or Dad really feel, no idea, in truth, what she feels herself, except for a yearning so intense and nameless that she doesn’t know if it is a longing for a girlfriend, or for God, or simply for those everyday discomforts which now seem in retrospect a blessing. She can’t read, can’t even lie down, so she paces, now staring out of the window into the dark, now squatting in the corner of the room, now sitting on the chair and rocking gently back and forwards. Do not be fooled, this is not a place.

  Benjy lay for a while looking at the inverted cream pyramid of the lampshade. It reminded him of a film in which someone was wheeled into an operating theatre and the camera was looking up at the ceiling from their point of view. This, in turn, made him think of Carly’s dad from school having his heart attack which made him think about Granny’s funeral and he was scared that he might have one of those dreams that wasn’t quite a dream. He looked at the clock. 11:30. Mum and Dad might still be awake. He went out on to the landing, walked to the top of the stairs, looked over the banisters and saw that the lights were on in the dining room. When he went down and stood in the hall, however, he could hear no one. Mum …? Dad …? He was afraid of stepping through the door for fear that someone was behind it holding their breath.

  He was going to turn and walk silently back upstairs when he heard a beep and saw a light come on briefly in the pocket of a coat hanging by the door. It made him jump at first but it was a text message arriving on a mobile phone and this made the house seem more modern and humdrum. The phone was in Dad’s coat. Mum allowed him to play the games on her phone, but he was never allowed to play on Dad’s. So he invented a story in which Dad was receiving a vital message from someone who was in grave danger and who needed help. He would look at the message and take the phone up to Dad who would be cross at first then really grateful. He paused beside the coat, listening again to the silence. If it wasn’t a message calling for help he could simply put the phone back and no one would know. He slipped his hand into the pocket and extracted it. He wanted a mobile of his own, not really for making calls, but for the way it felt so right in the palm of his hand, like a gun or a dagger. He pressed the main button and the face lit up. In the background was the photograph of him and Daisy and Alex on the big pebbly beach near Blakeney, and in the centre of the screen was a little blue square saying Message. He tapped it. Blakeney vanished and the message said, call me I can’t bear this any longer amy xxx and he didn’t know whether this was an emergency or a secret, only that he had done something very wrong.

  Thursday

  LOUISA LIES ON her pillow, watching Richard sleep. Something first date about it, that shiver, not knowing whom you’re inviting into your life.

  Dominic shits in the half-light, blind down, opening the window afterwards to clear the smell.

  Daisy almost wakes, senses something dangerous at the cave’s mouth and turns back to the furs and embers and smoke.

  Benjy thinks he has had a bad dream, except it’s not a bad dream, is it, because it happened last night. He gets up, hoping to outrun the memory, makes himself a breakfast of Bran Flakes and red grape juice, plays Super Mario and reads Mr Gum, but when his mind’s eye wanders he sees it watching him, like a hooded figure from an upstairs window.

  Angela lies looking at the little rose-coloured lamp on the bedside table, knowing that something bad is going to happen, not knowing how to prepare for its arrival. Every day she finds out more and understands less. This lostness? Do other people feel this? Do other people live with this?

  A tremor as Alex ran past the point where he’d found Richard. The narrowness of the escape. They’d come close on occasions, him, Jamie, Josh, slipping on Crib Goch, going over that weir with Aaron during one of the Watersides, but they were funny afterwards, whereas this upset him, the weird feeling that he had made it happen in some way. But it was fucking amazing up here, like a different place today, like being inside the sky. Sad to leave it behind. As if he owned it in some small way. He checked his watch. 10:15. Clocktower at 12:30, no problem. Last third pretty much downhill all the way. Almost disappointed by the good weather. Two thermals and a waterproof in the zip pocket of his bottle belt, cash, mobile, Twix. Quite liked the idea of running through another storm like yesterday, showing everyone how to do it. Plus the other disturbing thing was that he’d had a wank that morning thinking about Melissa kissing another girl, but the other girl kept turning into Daisy so he had to have one of those really quick wanks where you just went for it and didn’t think about anything at all.

  Daisy came down late hoping at least that she would be able to sit and eat alone, but when she was pouring herself a bowl of cereal Dad walked into the kitchen wearing his pyjamas and yawning. Morning, you. She was angry that he was intruding, that he knew, or didn’t know, angry that he was going to say something stupid. He took a mug off the shelf, added a teabag and set it down next to hers. Mum told me, about you and Melissa.

  It’s not about me and Melissa.

  I know, I know. He folded his arms and leant against the sink and looked at the floor, trying to take up as little space as possible. Like a dog cowering, she thought. I just wanted to say that it’s fine.

  Fine? As if she’d dyed her hair or got a Saturday job.

  What I meant was, it doesn’t change the way I think about you.

  She put her hands on the worksurface and breathed deeply. One, two. The room was unsteady, because it wasn’t fine, because it changed the way she thought about everything. So why was everyone else so fucking calm? Why was everyone else so fucking pleasant? At least Melissa reacted. Daisy wanted it to spin through their lives like a typhoon, ripping stuff apart.

  He stood up. I’ll make my tea later. He touched her shoulder lightly but the skin under his fingers felt like it was going to burn and blister.

  They had decided to go to Hay again, like they were circling a black hole and no longer had the fuel to reach escape velocity. Richard was having trouble walking without the polished wooden cane they’d found in the umbrella stand and they knew what they were getting in Hay, whereas Abergavenny might turn out to be a disappointment, goat’s hair periwigs and Rudolf Hess notwithstanding, and only Benjy was voting for the falconry centre. Plus, like Dominic said, this wasn’t a Michelin Guide holiday, Palazzo Vecchio and the Boboli Gardens, this was the kind of holiday where you appreciated the things you really should have been appreciating at home, walks, conversation, communal meals, the passing of time itself. Also Louisa had seen that little jewellery shop as they were leaving last time and when Angela reminded Benjy about The Shop of Crap the falconry centre was dropped like a hot potato.

  Richard was adamant that he could still drive, the Mercedes being automatic, and it seemed politic not to undermine his manhood any further. Louisa said she’d take a taxi and anyone else was free to join her, so that she could pay without it seeming like charity. Richard asked Angela to come with him because he wanted to continue the conversation of last night. He didn’t say as much but Dominic, Daisy and Melissa all sensed the seriousness of something unsaid and opted for the taxi, whereas Benjy sensed nothing at all and said he’d go with them because the Mercedes was a really cool car and sometimes taxis smelt funny.

  Is this OK? Handel Orchestral Works,
Trevor Pinnock. Generic compilation stuff.

  It’s fine, said Angela.

  The tyres slipped on the gravelly mud as he negotiated a tight little hairpin. His ankle hurt, but it was a good pain, like a bruise after a game of rugby. I apologise for last night.

  It doesn’t matter. Angela couldn’t remember immediately what they had talked about last night. Then it came back, the imaginary father she never actually had.

  But it does matter, said Richard. I upset you.

  Really, said Angela. It wasn’t your fault. She wanted to be left alone.

  I’m not saying it was anyone’s fault. What I’m saying is …

  The way the road twisted and dipped and rose, thought Angela. It was like being in a film of your own life.

  What I’m saying is that I’m worried about you.

  Why? Not even a question, really, just knocking the ball back over the net.

  Louisa said that today was … that today would have been her birthday. He glanced in the rear-view mirror to check that Benjy was immersed in a game on his little portable computer thing, then lowered his voice. The baby you miscarried.

  Angela nodded. Strange that it didn’t upset her, Richard not knowing her name. She felt numb, a heavy curtain between her and the world. I’ll be fine.

  He pulled into a gateway to let a muddy quad bike past, bale of hay tied to the back, young farmer at the wheel, wearing what looked like a comedy Christmas jumper, red, green and white, reindeer and zigzags. Maybe he should back off. But he’d been backing off for thirty years and he wanted to be a proper brother. But how did you help someone if they refused to ask for help? He reached over and touched her forearm. You know you can talk to me if you want. I’ll shut up and just listen this time.

  I know.

  He wondered if he, too, had been damaged, by their father dying, by their mother drinking. He thought of himself as having put it all behind him, but his decision to marry someone who kept her distance, his failure to have children, his lack of interest in his own interior landscape … A sheep in the road. He slowed as it bounced and sprinted ahead. Such stupid animals, you’d think they’d learn to stand on the verge until a car had passed. It squirted through a hole in the fence. Wrong field, probably. Angela closed her eyes and leant back against the headrest, dozing or faking sleep. He readjusted the rear-view mirror. Benjy was still playing his game. Was he lonely or just self-absorbed? Both, maybe. Geometrical diagrams and the House of Hanover. 1972 in silver foil. Everyone in their little worlds.