The Red House

3: Sunday

Alex was running back along the ridge from Hatterall Hill, the ruins of Llanthony below, scattered tents in blue and orange. The map showed a path snaking down the other side so you didn’t have to turn back at the cairn, but it was invisible from up here. Fuck it. He headed down through the bracken and long grass. Two weeks and he’d be mountain-biking in Coed-y-Brenin. He’d made a tit of himself with Melissa, he could see that now. Slow learner, or what. He’d only had sex two times, like actually getting his cock in. He avoided Kelly Robinson for two weeks afterwards because they were pissed out of their heads and she was obese, though he thought about it quite often when he was having a wank. But there was someone walking along the road, down there where it flattened out on the way to Longtown, a girl with a bag over her shoulder.

♦

Louisa came round dreaming of Honk the Moose, thinking it was 1969 and her mother was sitting on the end of the bed reading to her, but it was Richard and he was wearing the stripy Boden pyjama bottoms that made him look like a pirate, except he wasn’t smiling and she wondered if he was about to deliver some bad news. I’m sorry about last night.

She hoisted herself up on to her elbows. It was her daughter who should apologise, surely.

She told me you smoked marijuana. And I just wanted to say…He slowed and redirected himself. You don’t have to keep secrets. A little laugh. Lower dependence and physical harm than alcohol or cigarettes according to Professor Nutt’s infamous Lancet paper. Oh dear. He rubbed his face. I do sound like the most awful prig.

She brushed the hair out of her eyes. Her mind was fuzzy. She could feel a pillow crease running down her cheek.

Anyway. He stood up. I shall keep my distance on the Melissa front.

She sat and swivelled her feet over the edge of the bed and distinctly heard a small boy, standing very close to her, saying, Dad…?

♦

‘I want to cut off her head and take out her heart. Ah! You a surgeon, and so shocked! You, whom I have seen with no tremble of hand or heart, do operations of life and death that make the rest shudder…’ But the words had stopped making sense, so Daisy closed the book and read the back of the Corn Flakes packet. Thiamin (B₁) 1.2mg, Riboflavin (B₂) 1.3mg. Did anyone ever ring the customer care line? Lonely old ladies making friends with young men in Calcutta.

The world felt fuzzy this morning, so hard to cling to. That nervous bubbling in her abdomen. She wanted her things around her, the battered life-sized cardboard Princess Leia Dad stole from a cinema when he was a student, the enamel signs from Great-Grandad’s shop in Manchester, Keener’s Kola and broken biscuits.

They’d made a film at school, Gemma’s Choice, about a girl getting pregnant at fourteen. Daisy played the mother. The thrill of putting on that lime-green cardigan, her own self vanishing, thinking, I could kiss anyone, I could kill anyone. She didn’t recognise herself on screen. She looked possessed. Now she was doing A-level economics. Adam Smith and production transformation curves. She reopened the book. ‘ The girl is dead. Why mutilate her poor body without need?’

Alex appeared at the door, in his socks, sweating. I think Melissa’s jumped ship.

In what sense?

Walking down the road with a bag over her shoulder.

She suddenly saw it all from Alex’s point of view. Oh, I’m sorry.

He was still getting his breath back. Bit of a relief, to be honest.

And she realised that it was her own heart that was sinking.

♦

Angela is dreaming. The creature is lying in a clean white towel, being offered up to her by a nurse who is unaware that anything is wrong. Mermaid Syndrome. Though what dark fairy tale would this monster inhabit? Eyes no more than slits in a head of wet clay, a ragged fin running across the top of the skull, wasted arms, the two legs fused into a stump. Sirenomelia. Those sweet voices calling from the jagged rocks. The thing is screeching. It wants to be held but she can’t touch it. She is terrified that it will cling and bite and rip. She has the dream every couple of weeks but never remembers it on waking. Baby birds make her cry, certain cuts of meat, the crippled fragment of Voldemort’s soul in The Deathly Hallows. She has no idea why this is. She never had amniocentesis, never even had a scan. She missed appointments, said there was a family crisis, she lied to the health visitor, to the GP, to Dominic. Her body knew something was wrong but she was going to be a good mother and a good mother would never reject a child.

♦

Melissa walked for twenty minutes, then her bag started to feel really heavy and there was no way she was turning back so she stuck her thumb out hoping an actual human being stopped and not some weird inbred rapist farmer. A tractor came past, a Post Office van, a removals lorry, a rusty Datsun, then a polished black Alfa Romeo slowed down and pulled over. Where are you going? The woman was wearing leather trousers and spoke with a Spanish accent, which was totally not what Melissa was expecting.

I’ll go anywhere, said Melissa, as if she were in a film.

Throw your bag into the back seat.

Stuck on the dashboard there was a toy camel with rubber legs which wobbled when the car went round corners. There was a diamanté cat collar in the footwell. So… The woman lit a cigarette. Are you running away from home?

…But when we were as far away as a man can shout, pushing rapidly onward, the Sirens saw our speeding ship and sang their high songs: ‘Come here, famous Odysseus, great glory of the Achaeans, tie up your ship and listen to our voices, for no one has ever rowed past this island in his black ship without listening to our honeyed mouths…’

♦

Angela walked into the kitchen and found Louisa making coffee and toast. A sudden memory of the shared house at college. Dahl and joss sticks, Carol getting scabies at the hostel. Are you all right?

Of course, said Louisa. Why?

Last night. Richard and Melissa.

It was nothing.

No fun stuck in the middle.

Really, it was nothing.

Neither of them were on their best behaviour though. On what planet was this a good thing to say?

Louisa turned and held Angela’s eye. Richard is a good man.

I wasn’t saying that. But she was saying precisely that, wasn’t she?

Louisa fitted the plunger into the mouth of the jug. Melissa is a good person, too.

I know she is. Another lie.

There are two slices in the toaster if you want. Louisa picked up the cafetière and swept out.

Was it jealousy, perhaps, this childish desire to drive a little wedge between the two of them, the knowledge that they possessed something she and Dominic had let slip through their fingers?

A sudden memory of 92 Hensham Lane. Donny getting drunk one night and cutting the lawn with a pair of scissors for a bet. That German girl putting a padlock on her room. Angela remembered the day she and Dominic moved into their own flat. There were earwigs in the bread bin and someone was playing ‘London Calling’ at stadium volume upstairs, but it was theirs, and she could feel the relief even now, nearly thirty years later.

♦

Dominic ate a spoonful of Shreddies. ‘ We believe this to be a tragic case of mistaken identity. We are calling on everyone in the local community to come forward with any information.’ Crack and genocide, then you turned the page and it was cloned sheep and solar power, everything going to hell in a handcart, and heaven just around the corner. It all levelled out in the end. People stopped smoking and got fat. Polio was cured and AIDS killed millions in Africa. When was the Golden Age, anyway? Child prostitution, gin epidemics, the Crusades…Alex sat down beside him with a bowl of Sugar Puffs and a mug of tea. How was the run?

Good. Yeh, it was good.

Don’t you ever just want to lie in bed?

Of course. But you can’t, can you?

He hadn’t crashed the car or got a girl pregnant, for which they should be thankful, but there was a distance. He thought at first it was genetic, the same self-containment he saw in Richard. But maybe it was just part of being a teenager. Your job is to be completely and utterly in the wrong. They didn’t need you in the end, generations like leaves, the young taking over a world you no longer really cared for.

All those photographs of Andrew in Amy’s house. Hospitalised seven times with asthma and chest infections. He was moved, at first, by the care with which Amy looked after him, and it was only gradually that he came to resent the way that this young man whom he’d never met intruded upon their most private moments and began to suspect that Andrew’s continual fallings-out with bosses, flatmates and girlfriends were not a symptom of his medical condition but scenes in a long drama of interdependence besides which Dominic was only a sideshow.

Incidentally, said Alex, I think I saw Melissa hitting the road.

♦

Richard’s father had died of testicular cancer at the age of forty. Richard was eight, Angela nine. 1972. Hewlett-Packard were making the first pocket calculator and Eugene Cernan was making the last moonwalk. His father was working for the police firearms unit at the time and Richard believed for some years that he had been killed during a shoot-out, though whether this was a lie his mother had concocted or one he had concocted himself and which his mother did not contradict, he never knew.

He still has his scrapbook of news clippings from that year, 1972 in silver foil on the front cover. Vietnam, Baader-Meinhof, Watergate. His father’s death goes unrecorded. Not even a pause in the weekly entries, because it was not his father’s death which divided his childhood in two, not directly.

His parents drank regularly, at home, in restaurants, at the squash club, so perhaps it didn’t seem unusual at first, but by the time he was ten he knew that other children’s mothers did not open a bottle of sherry in the afternoon and finish it before bedtime. He and Angela never discussed it. What they discussed was the cleaning and the washing-up and the household bills that fell increasingly to them to sort out. Within a couple of years he was signing his mother’s name perfectly on cheques, and even now when he loses the car keys he finds himself looking in the places where he hid them from his mother thirty years ago, the washing machine, the sugar jar. He was nervous of inviting friends to his house and equally nervous at their houses, wondering what might be happening at home, so that school rapidly became the refuge where the tasks were straightforward and the rewards immediate. Geometrical diagrams. The House of Hanover. He regularly cooked for his mother, put her to bed, bathed her sometimes, and the more intimate the task the more she resented the intrusion. At least when she lashed out she was drunk and uncoordinated and he was able to avoid the second blow.

Melissa’s gone. It was Louisa, standing behind his shoulder.

What do you mean, gone?

She’s taken her bag with all her stuff. Alex thinks he saw her walking down the road.

So, she hasn’t been abducted.

I’m being serious.

So am I. Professional habit. Consider all possibilities. He stood up. Let’s go inside and gather some information.

Alex came downstairs waving Louisa’s mobile as they stepped through the front door. You can get a couple of bars on Vodafone in our room when the wind’s in the right direction. He handed it back. I left a message.

Everyone had gathered in the dining room. The scene struck Richard as a little over-dramatic. She vanishes once a week at home.

But we’re in the middle of nowhere, said Louisa.

Which is a lot safer than a city centre on a Friday night. Richard’s voice was noticeably slower and softer than usual. She’ll be sitting in a café somewhere, enjoying the fact that we’re panicking. If we ring the police they’ll laugh and tell us to call back tomorrow. Louisa seemed short of breath. He rubbed her arm. She’ll let us worry for a while, then she’ll get in touch.

Angela was thinking, It’s your fault, and trying hard not to say so, but Dominic was impressed. How did Richard reassure everyone despite knowing nothing? Did all doctors do this?

If we haven’t heard anything, said Richard, we’ll ring her from Raglan.

OK, said Louisa, OK.

Except that she wasn’t OK, thought Angela, she was simply obeying orders, like a dog with a stern owner.

♦

Benjy stood on the flagstones of the utility space between the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom. It contained a chest freezer, a dishwasher and a deep china sink set into a long wooden draining board as thick as an old Bible. The chest freezer was made by Indesit. He picked up a battered octagonal tin from the window sill. On the lid it said Dishwasher Tablets in Dymo Tape and bore an orange sticker reading If ingested seek medical attention. The tin rattled as he turned it over. On the bottom the label said Praline Cluster and Coffee Cream and Turkish Delight.

♦

Angela announced that she’d skip the castle and take the bus into Hay. There’s a bus? Richard had said, incredulously. Possibly pulled by cows, she’d replied, a little too tartly and there was a sudden chill in the room. Daisy said softly, I’ll go with Mum, because she wasn’t any keener on Richard’s company than Mum was, which meant that Dominic had to go to Raglan to accompany Benjy who never knowingly turned down a castle.

So Angela and Daisy found themselves walking down the hill to the little stone bridge, just the scuff of their boots and the rustle of their waterproofs. A dirty white horse observed them from behind a gate. Angela was angry with Daisy for hijacking her solitary expedition and simultaneously relieved that she wasn’t going on her own. So much of one’s self depended on the green vase and the rotary washing line that turned in the wind and she was slipping her moorings a little. Daisy liked silence but Angela was used to the clatter and echo of four hundred children in one building. Richard’s Mercedes passed them en route to Raglan, Dominic, Alex and Benjy waving like passengers on a steam train.

Where do you think Melissa is? asked Daisy.

But Angela had forgotten about Melissa completely.

♦

Melissa stood on the corner paralysed. Where the fuck was she going to go? Dad wasn’t going to fork out for a plane ticket to France without an explanation. Donna in Stirling? She looked around. A shop selling windchimes. A shop selling green wellingtons and crappy silk scarves like the Queen wore when she took the corgis out for a shit. Scabby public toilets. People from London pretending to enjoy the countryside. She checked her wallet. £22.68 and a debit card that might very well get swallowed by the machine on the far side of the road. God, she was hungry.

♦

Do you think Benjy’s OK? asked Daisy.

I think Benjy’s fine, said Angela.

He seems lonely.

He’s good at being on his own, said Angela. The little bus growled up a steep and sudden incline. A tiny church with a garden shed for a tower. A woman hosing a Land Rover down in a muddy yard. If you can’t be alone you join a gang, you drink instead of going home, you marry the first person who comes along because you’re scared of going back to an empty house.

Daisy thought of her mother as stupid. What other reason could there be for the constant friction? Then she said something like this and Daisy remembered that she was a good teacher, and what Daisy felt wasn’t admiration or guilt but fear, because if her mother was in the right then she was in the wrong.

The bus idled while a red Transit reversed into a driveway for them to squeeze past. Farmhouses with roses and swingseats. Farmhouses with chained-up dogs and rusted cars. A hunchbacked woman at the front of the bus, so old and ragged she must surely have come from a gingerbread cottage up in the hills.

Are you and Dad all right? She meant to sound caring but she wanted her mother to admit some small compensatory failure.

We’re…OK, said Angela gingerly.

And it came to Daisy out of the blue. Her mother was a human being. How rarely she saw it. She wanted to reach out and hold her and make everything good again but the intervening years seemed suddenly like a dream and she was five years old, going into town with Mum to do the shopping. So she turned and looked out of the window and watched the bus rise above the trees and hedges onto a kind of moorland, the grey ribbon of the road and plantations of pine across the valley like scissored green felt.

I’m sorry about Richard, said Angela.

It’s all right, said Daisy. I can look after myself. This dance she and Mum did. Reaching out and pulling back. Stroking and snapping.

He was being a bully.

I can’t believe he’s your brother.

I’m having a bit of trouble myself in that department.

♦

People counted Dominic as their friend but no one counted him as their best friend. Angela thought of it as cowardice, though she tried not to think of it very often. A failure to engage properly with the world. The mortgage arrears, the car being towed to a scrapyard. Nothing mattered enough. (In the back seat, Benjy and Alex were playing Benjy’s version of Rock, Paper, Scissors called Wee, Poo, Sick). He thought of it as a blessing once, not being haunted by the terrible wanting that blighted so many lives, but he looked at Daisy’s screwed-up religion, Alex being carted away in an ambulance after that race, Angela trying to save some white-trash kid who’d end up in prison anyway, and he realised that all of them had reasons to be alive in a way that he didn’t.

♦

Raglan Castle was built in the mid-1430^s by Sir William ap Thomas, ‘The Blue knight of Gwent’, who fought alongside Henry V at the battle of Agincourt… (Richard is reading the free information pamphlet thoroughly)…but the castle was undermined after a long siege during the Civil War and what remains is largely a picturesque ruin… Consequently it takes a dedicated historical imagination to stand on the mossy cobbles of the Pitched Court and conjure up the falconers and the manchet bread and the clatter of billhooks, and what Louisa notices mostly is the absence of a café where she might sit in the warm with a cappuccino and a magazine and rid herself of the image of Melissa naked and broken in a ditch.

Alex walks the battlements of the Great Tower, which sits at the centre of its own moat and is connected to the main fortifications by a drawbridge. A little single-engined plane is flying overhead sounding like a lawn mower. He thinks about that flight last year in the Piper Cherokee with Josh’s uncle, being frightened during take-off, then feeling smug about not being frightened any more, then enjoying it, then being rather bored because basically there wasn’t much to do apart from sit in a cramped seat watching clouds. He glances down into the big stone box of the castle’s main hall and sees Louisa pacing. Now that Melissa has gone he is beginning to realise how fit she is. She’s nearly fifty, which makes it sound pervy if you say it out loud, but she’s in really good nick and he keeps imagining her taking off that cream rollneck jumper. Big tits. All that hair.

But Dominic is listening to Joe Pass. ‘Stella by Starlight’ from the first Virtuoso album. BbMa7…Em7b5…A7…Those incredible runs, just ragged enough to make them feel human. Ever since they arrived at the castle he has been experiencing a disturbing sense of déjà vu for which he is unable to account, having never been to Wales before, until he remembers Robert Plant’s swordfight in The Song Remains the Same. It was filmed here, wasn’t it? He’d owned a Welsh farm during his dungeons and dragons phase. ‘Bron-Y-Aur Stomp’ and so forth. But there’s no one here with whom he can share this satisfying pop trivia nugget.

Benjy can’t really concentrate on the castle because a weird ginger boy is trying to befriend him. We’re from Devon…Have you seen Pirates of the Caribbean…? My dad’s got a quad bike. He has a dolphin T-shirt and no eyebrows to speak of. Benjy wants to be left alone because if you concentrate and no one disturbs you the knights stand up from their stone tombs and a cornfield of spears rises beyond the moat.

Do you like football?

He still hasn’t quite got the politics of the playground, that low-grade scuffle over space and status. He expects more logic, better tactics. He’s spent too much time with his older siblings. He knows quite a bit about homosexuality and communism and income tax, and with Pavel it’s easy because they both like making potions and Lego massacre tableaux, but if Wayne Goodrich calls him a spaz…

That’s my dad, says the ginger boy, turning briefly, over there.

Benjy runs.

♦

The problem with Jennifer…Richard paused. He had never talked seriously about her with anyone except Louisa. She didn’t really care about other human beings. I’m not talking about the way she treated me. You make your bed and you have to lie in it. But friends, patients. The image of that girl in her wheelchair passed briefly through the headlights of his mind.

Dominic was transfixed by Richard wrestling with difficult ideas in real time. Why did you get married?

We were both ambitious, both somewhat unsentimental, neither of us wanted children. In the circumstances I think that was wise. She would have made a dreadful mother. I’m not sure I would have made the perfect father, but in my darker moments I feel a good deal of regret.

Dominic wondered if he could tell Richard about Amy, but he didn’t know whether clinical detachment would win out over fraternal loyalty.

Plus, Richard laughed, she was a very determined woman who was used to getting what she wanted.

Dominic had met Jennifer only twice, she had no small talk and she watched the children the way a snake might watch a cat. Yet if she had given him her undivided attention? If she had wanted him…? Benjy appeared out of nowhere and tugged at his sleeve. Can we go now?

♦

Do you remember that scary German woman? said Daisy. Or maybe she was Dutch. The one who used to throw her son into the water and shout, ‘Schwim! Schwim!’

You and Alex had a race.

And I won.

And he never swam again. Men. Honestly. Angela laughed. What was it? The carnival release of holiday? Being out of habit’s gravity? Why could they not do this at home?

They had this amazing toaster. At the hotel.

I’m not sure I remember the actual buffet details.

Benjy was totally in love with it. You put the bread on this conveyor belt and it came out the other side toasted. He called it the Wallace and Gromit toaster. He must have had, like, ten slices every morning.

She glanced over Daisy’s shoulder…Bandits at nine o’clock. Daisy turned round. Melissa, in the window seat of the café on the far side of the road, something hunched and beaten about her.

Daisy said, I’m going to talk to her.

What? Now? Had Daisy not noticed? Their two lives were changing course right now.

Perhaps you should give Louisa a ring, said Daisy, setting off across the road because her mother had become simply her mother again, the person you came back to after the adventure.

♦

Please? said Benjy, holding up a short wooden sword with a handguard of plaited rope.

Benjy. Dominic rubbed his eyes. You’ve already got six of them.

I’ve got five and they’re different. He had two broadswords, a katana, a cutlass and a dagger, whereas this was a gladius for stabbing in close combat with a groove down the centre of the blade to let air into the wound so you could easily pull it out without a sucky vacuum holding it in.

It’s the acquisition, isn’t it? Richard was holding a hardback book about the castle. Don’t you remember? He had slipped into a more casual register as if the Jennifer conversation had made them friends. The football cards which came with chewing gum? A part of you knew it was going to be another Peter Shilton, but that didn’t matter.

You promised, said Benjy. You said I’d get £10 holiday money.

I know, but…Ten pounds was a lot of money. Why don’t you wait for a few days and then decide what you want to spend it on?

On the far side of the window Louisa was examining the ground in front of her feet and hugging her coat tight around her.

But we won’t come back here again. Ever. Benjy was desperate now.

He wanted to say that no means no, but you couldn’t say that these days. You had to be friends with your children. He squatted. You know what always happens. You’ll go into another gift shop tomorrow or the day after…

I’ll get it for you, said Richard. My holiday present.

Dominic’s phone went off. The first ten bars of ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee’. He fished it out of his pocket. Richard was handing the sword to the woman behind the till. Hello?

Panic over. It was Angela. We found Melissa in a café.

He felt a vague disappointment. If she’d been murdered they could all go home. I’ll pass on the good news. Though when he did this Richard simply said Excellent, showing neither surprise nor relief so that Dominic wondered for a moment if you could shape the future by predicting things with sufficient confidence.

Thank you, Uncle Richard, said Benjy.

You’re welcome.

And he was off, through the glass door and out into the sunlight of the car park, thrusting and parrying. Oof…! Yah…!

♦

Melissa was listening to Cally’s phone ring at the far end when she saw Daisy come in. She was annoyed and relieved at the same time. She hung up.

Daisy sauntered over. I’m going to get a coffee. Do you want anything to eat or a drink? Super casual, like they were still back at the house. She should have left more theatrically, shouldn’t she? A flapjack would be good. She’d babysat a mug of cold tea for the last hour. And a black coffee.

She watched Daisy walk over to the counter. The steely thing made her uneasy. She had absolutely no idea what Daisy was thinking or feeling or planning. There were Christians at school but they kept their heads down, whereas Daisy…She wasn’t a moose either, she hadn’t got a big arse or a weird face. She knew it, too, something about the way she carried herself, deliberately choosing to make herself look shit, a provocation, almost.

Daisy returned to the table with two black coffees and two flapjacks. They always put the napkin under the food. Which misses the point, don’t you think? Like she was thirty-five. How are you doing?

I’m dandy. Just dandy.

And how’s Ian McEwan?

Melissa thought Daisy was talking about a real person until she remembered the closed novel lying under her hand. It’s OK. They were playing a game, but it was against the rules to say so. We’re doing it at school.

I’m reading about vampires.

Melissa took a swig of coffee and relaxed a little. Twilight?

Daisy took Dracula out of her bag. Jonathan Harker travels to Transylvania to do some work for a mysterious count and it all kind of goes downhill from then on.

OK, said Melissa, carefully.

Except that Daisy wasn’t playing a game. This was serious. Usually she became tongue-tied and foolish when she wanted someone to like her, but with Melissa…Was this a kind of acting, too? Putting on your best self and coming thrillingly alive? Was this the Holy Spirit? God be in my mouth, and in my speaking. Sorry about Alex.

Sorry in what way?

The slobbering.

Oh, I think I can handle Alex. Melissa wondered if she could make Daisy a sidekick for a few days. That would throw Mum and Richard. Her phone vibrated. CALLY. They watched it tango across the table. She looked at Daisy. What was her weak point? It wasn’t the religion, was it. But that first night, the way Angela reached across to stop her saying grace…Your mum thinks you’re stupid, doesn’t she?

We don’t exactly see eye to eye.

Your dad seems OK, but your mum…Is she, like, really unhappy or something?

That’s exactly it. Because Melissa was right, and no one else said it, did they? She doesn’t enjoy things, she doesn’t get excited. She bit off a piece of flapjack. Your mum seems pretty happy.

I’ll give it two years.

Yeh?

Tell me one thing they’ve got in common.

Daisy laughed. No one said this either. So…are you still running away, or are you coming back?

Melissa looked at her. Crazy hazy Daisy.

Daisy felt as if she was in a film. Something hypnotic about that gaze. The snake in The Jungle Book.

What do you think I should do? asked Melissa.

I think you should come back.

Then I shall come back.

♦

Angela finished her second Twix and put the scrunched wrapper into her pocket. Little canvases of dancing naked women, sheep made of welded nails. She wanted to buy the big bowl with ducks on because that’s what you did on holiday, bought stuff you didn’t need. Lovespoons and wall plates. Except they couldn’t afford it now. They’d stopped talking about money. He was sane again. Don’t look a gift horse. Five years of mortgage left, assuming they caught up with the payments. Then she could buy sheep made of welded nails. She tilted her head, as if taste were simply a matter of angle, but all she could think was, I like the ducks.

The china tramp. The Pineapple. She’d got it completely wrong. It wasn’t her house, was it? Like stepping out of a plane. It was Juliette’s house. She walked to the little wall and sat down beside an elderly couple eating cornets. She felt light-headed and shaky. It was Juliette’s dad who played Oscar Peterson. She tried to remember what music her father played, tried to remember her own bedroom. She realised for the first time that her parents had died taking secrets with them. Where was Juliette now? New Zealand? Dead? The pennies, the train to Sheffield, that was home, yes. But the doorway from which her father was always vanishing, what was in there? If only she could get closer and see into the dark.

She needed to tell someone, she needed to tell Daisy, and in her untethered state of mind it seemed entirely natural that the thought itself should conjure her daughter into being fifty yards further up the high street, but she was shoulder to shoulder with Melissa and they were laughing and Angela felt as if she had been slapped.

♦

Benjy loves being in the countryside, not so much the actual contents thereof, horses, windmills, big sticks, panoramas, more the absence of those things which press upon him so insistently at home. He occupies, still, a little circle of attention, no more than eight metres in diameter at most. If stuff happens beyond this perimeter he simply doesn’t notice unless it involves explosions or his name being yelled angrily. At home, in school, on the streets between and around the two, the world is constantly catching him by surprise, teachers, older boys, drunk people on the street all suddenly appearing in front of him so that his most-used facial expression is one of puzzled shock. But in the countryside things are less important and happen more slowly and you know pretty much exactly who might or might not appear in front of you. And his hunger for this calm is so strong that he keeps a little row of postcards along his shelf at home. Buttermere, Loch Ness, Dartmoor. Not so much windows on to places he would rather be but on to ways he would like to feel.

♦

Those first five years with Dominic were the first sustained happiness she had ever experienced. She worked in a travel agency, he played in two jazz groups and taught piano to private pupils. She can recall very little of what they did together, no romantic weeks in Seville, no snowed-in Christmases, finds it hard now to picture them doing anything together that isn’t recorded in a photo album somewhere, but that was the point, the ease of it, finally not needing to notice everything. Twenty-four years old and she was off duty at long bloody last. And nowadays when she thinks about her marriage, this is what depresses her, that she is back on duty again. Has Dominic changed? Or is his blankness precisely what she once found so consoling? She doesn’t mind the lack of love, doesn’t mind the lack of physical affection, doesn’t even mind the arguments. She wants simply to let go for once, wants not to have to think and plan and remember and organise. Cows like toy cows on the far hill. When she imagines the future, when she imagines the children leaving home, the truth is that she’s on her own. That dusty pink house sitting up there squeezed into the edge of the wood, for example, a little dilapidated. She can imagine living there, she can imagine it so vividly that it is like a taste in her mouth. Butterscotch. Marmalade. Job at a village school somewhere nearby. Tidy house, little garden, one day blissfully identical to the next and only herself to please.

♦

Daisy and Melissa are sitting in the back seat of the bus talking about Juno and Pete Doherty and Justin Bieber and the kid on crutches at Daisy’s school. Angela sits five rows forward feeling abandoned and petty for feeling abandoned, trying to read an article about the possibility of a coalition but being led astray by an interview with Gemma Arterton (they made a Lego figure of me).

The walk from the bus stop is twenty-five minutes and the girls chat the whole way, or seem content in one another’s silent company while Angela trails behind. She catches herself thinking Melissa is Karen. She wonders what Karen is like now, what Karen might be like now. Another Daisy but with Melissa’s confidence, perhaps, her physical ease. She remembers that line from the Year 12 poetry project. When I look ahead up the white road there is always another who walks beside you. Or something like that. Phantoms and guardian angels, like those people in the Twin Towers, trapped in a smoke-filled stairwell. Someone takes their hand and says, Don’t be afraid, and they walk through the flames and find themselves alone and safe.

She forgets completely about Melissa’s disappearance until they walk into the dining room and Alex and Louisa and Richard look up and Melissa and Daisy are visibly together which catches everyone by surprise and Melissa is clearly not planning to apologise or explain if she can possibly help it, and Angela realises the whole thing is one long performance. Melissa says, I’m going to freshen up and sweeps stairwards, bag over her shoulder and Angela can see Richard biting his tongue very hard.

♦

Dominic and Benjy go outside and sit together on the rusted roller beside the woodshed and Benjy uses Dominic’s Leatherman to whittle a stick. The knife is unwieldy and Benjy is ham-fisted but it’s a good stick because Benjy is an expert in these matters (Dominic will let him have his own penknife next birthday), neither too green so that the shaft is whippy nor too rotten so the wood crumbles. Dominic lets him do it without offering to take over, because he’s not a bad father. Indeed he’s able to enter Benjy’s world in a way that no one else in the family can, perhaps because the adult world holds him in a weaker grip, perhaps because there is a part of him which has never really grown up. And now Benjy has finished making the sword, stripping the bark and sharpening the point. There you are. Dominic takes it. The naked wood is the colour of margarine and waxy under his fingers. It makes him think of woodlice and Play-Doh and paper planes. En garde. Benjy dies four times, Dominic five. Afterwards they lie on the damp grass looking at the featureless grey sky because this is how Benjy likes to talk sometimes. I’ve been thinking about Granny.

In what way have you been thinking about Granny?

Because you said it was a good thing she died.

She wasn’t really Granny any more, was she?

She called him the little boy, but he liked Mum explaining who he was each time. He also liked the photo of the cocker spaniel and the cogs of the carriage clock moving silently in their glass box and the biscuits the nurses brought round on a trolley at four o’clock. I see her at night sometimes.

You dream about her?

Yes, it was a dream, Benjy supposed. But she’s standing in my room.

Are you worried that she might not be dead?

Is that possible?

No, it’s not possible.

He thought about Mum and Dad dying and being looked after by strangers and it was like someone standing on his chest. He rubbed the cuff of Dad’s shirt but it wasn’t the special shirt. Then they heard Melissa shouting, Fuck off, which was the second rudest thing you could say, so it made him laugh and Dad got up and said, Hang on, Captain.

♦

Melissa patted the bench beside her.

Daisy sat, obediently. You were telling me about Michelle.

She’s a drama queen is what actually happened.

Daisy had accepted a glass of wine so as not to seem like a prude and the world was a little fuzzed already. But still.

We were at this party. It was a relief telling someone who would vanish in five days. Michelle disappears upstairs with this skanky guy none of us have seen before.

That kind of party had always scared Daisy, the smell on your clothes the next day and something else that couldn’t be washed off.

We go into the bedroom and she’s sucking this guy off. She paused to gauge Daisy’s reaction, but it was hard to read. He looks at us and smiles. You know, come in, why not, like he’s making a sandwich. I take a picture and Michelle doesn’t even notice because she’s, like, way too busy down there.

Daisy was thinking about the giant cockroach at Benjy’s animal party, how the hard little segments of its body glowed like burnished antique wood.

There’s some stupid argument a couple of days later and Cally grabs my phone and waves the picture in Michelle’s face. Michelle goes apeshit, punching Cally, pulling her hair. So it’s knives out and Cally sends the picture to Uncle Tom Cobley and all.

I’m not surprised she tried to kill herself. Daisy felt soiled just hearing the story.

Had Melissa heard right?

That was a really horrible thing to do.

Whoa there. Was this what she got in return for her friendship? She stood up. Well, you can fuck off, then, Miss Goody Two-Shoes. She flounced grandly towards the house.

Everything in the garden became suddenly vivid as if some general membrane had been peeled away. The bootscraper, the ivy. Then Dad rose from behind the wall. Trouble at mill?

Daisy felt as if she were broadcasting the story wordlessly. Like he’s making a sandwich.

He sat down and put his arm around her. Hey.

She’s a nasty person.

Read all about it, said Dad. Do we need to take retaliatory action?

No. She was returning slowly to herself. I think being Melissa is punishment enough.

♦

Benjy, you crouch down at the front, said Alex, like you’re holding the football.

Perhaps you should take the apron off, said Louisa, but Richard liked the idea of being a modern man. The all-round provider. Where’s Melissa?

Don’t worry, said Dominic. Alex can Photoshop her in later. Little square in the top right hand corner. Like the reserve goalkeeper.

Which was good, thought Alex, because then he would have to take a picture of her on her own and you couldn’t wank over a photo that contained your parents. Hold still.

♦

People assumed Melissa was vegetarian out of cussedness, or maybe as an outlet for the empathy she didn’t expend on human beings, but it was sloppy thinking she hated. She cared little for the suffering of cattle or sheep but why eat them and not dogs? It wasn’t so much a belief as the obvious thing to do. She hated injustice without feeling much sympathy for those who had been treated unjustly. She thought that all drugs should be legal and that giving money to charity was pointless. And she liked the fact that these opinions made her distinctive and intelligent. In many respects she was like her father. Not the dirt under his nails, not the prickly pride in his under-education but the way his sense of self depended so much on other people being in the wrong.

♦

Ian’s been offered four hundred thousand for the business, said Louisa.

So he’d be an idiot not to take it.

But what’s he going to do? She put the milk back in the fridge. He’s fifty-one. Too young to retire, too old to start all over again.

Richard quartered an onion and laid it between a parsnip and a sweet potato. They’d keep him on as manager, surely. Or would that be beneath his dignity?

Angela came in with a glass of wine and sat herself on the window seat. Am I interrupting?

Not at all, said Louisa. She hoisted a stack of white plates from the shelf. I’ll set the table.

Angela gathered herself. Look. About Juliette. She realised how rarely she apologised, for anything, to anyone. You were right, I did spend a lot of time at her house. She explained, about The Pineapple, about Oscar Peterson.

It doesn’t matter now. It’s water under the bridge.

She felt herself bridle. But it does matter. He wasn’t giving enough weight to this. I’m saying sorry.

He stood to attention, clicked his heels and dipped his head like a tin soldier. Then I forgive you. He leant his weight on to the flat of a knife blade and crushed three cloves of garlic. Besides, I couldn’t wait to get out of there myself. But this is good, though, said Richard, us talking about it, laying ghosts to rest and so forth.

Except she had never got out of there, had she, not the way he had got out. The ease with which he sailed through his A levels, the confidence with which he strode off into the world. Was it childish to resent someone for being blessed with such good fortune? At sixteen she’d felt so much more skilled at the task of being human than her gauche and solitary brother. Then suddenly…

He arranged the crushed garlic. I should have visited Mum more. I realise that. How long was it since he’d used that word? Jennifer never liked me having a family. I don’t think that’s a revelation, is it? I didn’t really understand what family meant till I met Louisa. Even Melissa. Because that’s part of the package, isn’t it? You have to work at these things.

But she wasn’t really listening, because underneath it all ran the fear that it had nothing to do with good fortune, that he had earned this, and she resented him because she could have done it, too, if she’d applied herself properly, become a lawyer, moved to Canada, run a business, and what she saw when she looked at Richard was not his success but her own failure.

♦

Benjy is playing with his GoGos at the far end of the dining table, arranging them in colour-coded ranks. Gold, silver, red, orange, yellow. They have official names like Pop and Kimy and Kichi which you can look up on the website but Benjy and Pavel have given them names like Spotty Lizard and Pooper and Custard-Dog. They play a flicking game with them, like marbles, but when he’s on his own Benjy likes to arrange them in battle array.

Angela, Dominic and Daisy like them because they’re rather beautiful en masse and, refreshingly, not weapons, but when Louisa steps into the dining room laden with plates she feels only mild annoyance. She hasn’t really talked to Benjy yet this holiday and the guilty truth is that she doesn’t like him much. Clothes that don’t hang quite right, stained more often than not, flopping constantly as if he is operated by remote control by a person some considerable distance away. Benjy…?

♦

Louisa works for Mann Digital in Leith. They do flatbed scanning, big photographic prints, light boxes, Giclée editions, some editing and restoration. She loves the cleanness and the precision of it, the ozone in the air, the buzz and shunt of the big Epsons, the guillotine, the hot roller, the papers, Folex, Somerset, Hahnemühle. Mann is Ian Mann who hung on to her during what they called her difficult period because she’d manned the bridge during his considerably more difficult period the previous year. She started on reception, learnt how to do the accounts and now did most of the Photoshopping because the boys were just techies, really. Years back she’d started an art degree at Manchester but she hadn’t slept with another woman or been permanently stoned or proud enough of the working-class roots which she was trying to escape, frankly, and while her draughtsmanship was near-perfect the bottom was falling out of the painting and drawing market so she left halfway through the second year. Plus she had some real money because living in a shared house with a dirty fridge and peeling wallpaper held no romance and in truth she had felt uneasy with the idea of being an artist in the first place. Her father said going to university was getting above yourself and she hated him for it, not least because he was throwing her own suspicions back at her. And if Angela and Dominic assumed she didn’t have a job and spent her days, what? shopping? at the gym? then it was an impression she was happy to give because it might not be art, as such, but it was creative and it was hers and it was precious and she didn’t want it picked over by other people.

♦

When Melissa came into the dining room Mum was laying the table while the little boy loaded half a million plastic creatures into a rucksack.

You and Daisy seem to be getting along pretty well.

Melissa was going to duck the question and head into the kitchen but Angela was sitting on the window seat looking kind of intense so she did a comedy pirouette and leant against the radiator warming her hands. She felt like an idiot. Yeh, she’s OK. If only they hadn’t made such a Royal bloody Command Performance of marching into the dining room together.

She seems like a really genuine person.

Melissa examined the pattern of cracks in the flagstones because, much as it hurt to admit it, Daisy was right. They knew Michelle was crazy and perhaps she had meant to kill herself, and there was no one she could say this to. It was dawning on her, like the clouds parting and the angels singing and a great load of shit pouring down, that she didn’t actually have any real friends. Cally was probably stitching her up right now, and she could see Alicia and Megan laughing like a pair of fucking witches. She pushed herself upright and marched into the kitchen through the cloud of serious adult vibe and opened the fridge door. Medical necessity.

Are you OK? Richard was wearing oven gloves like a big pair of woolly handcuffs.

Hook Norton. Organic Fucking Dandelion. I’m right as rain, Richard. She grabbed an Old Speckled Hen, stood up, shut the fridge door, twizzled, clinked Angela’s wine glass with the beer bottle. Cheers, my dear. And exited.

♦

There were two shelves of books to the right of the chimney breast in the living room, so dulled by time and sunlight that most eyes slid over them as smoothly as they slid over the floral curtains and the walnut side table. Some were doubtless holiday reading left behind by the owners and their paying guests (A Sparrow Falls by Wilbur Smith, Secrets of the Night by Una-Mary Parker), some appeared to be gifts which had been banished to the second home (Debrett’s Cookbook, Fifty of the Finest Drinking Games), some must surely have been bought for amusement only (Confessions of a Driving Instructor by Timothy Lea, How to Be Outrageously Successful with Women by John Mack Carter and Lois Wyse), while other tattered paperbacks bore glorious noir covers that no one had seen for years (Fatal Step by Wade Miller, Plot it Yourself by Rex Stout). Eminent Victorians by Lytton Strachey and Wittgenstein’s On Certainty, however, had clearly slipped through some breach in the fabric of the universe and now sat waiting patiently for rescue.

♦

When you are speaking to an older person, said Alex, show that you are very alert and are paying due attention to what is being said to you.

What’s this? Dominic opened the fizzy water.

Pictorial Knowledge.

Benjy, mate, this is you, said Alex. To loll awkwardly, ask for sentences to be repeated, be inattentive and uninterested is sheer bad manners.

Can you clear some space, please? Richard bore the chicken aloft.

That looks delicious. Dominic rubbed his hands.

Broadly speaking we should take a bath every day whenever that is possible.

Alex…

In the absence of a bath, a quick sponge down and then a brisk rub with a rough towel does a great deal of good.

Daisy, said Richard, are you going to say grace?

It’s all right, I don’t have to.

Go on, said Richard, I’m getting rather fond of it.

Melissa looked at the chicken with disdain.

Dominic said, Worry not, it was smothered with a silk pillow after a long, fruitful and contented life.

It’s OK, said Benjy, because chickens aren’t very intelligent.

Some people aren’t very intelligent and we don’t eat them, said Melissa.

Mentally Handicapped Person Pie, said Benjy.

That is not funny, said Angela.

It is a bit funny, said Alex.

Richard returned with the roasted vegetables, borne similarly aloft.

I think it’s an amazing vocation, being a teacher, said Louisa.

Vocation, thought Angela. Maybe that was what she’d lost.

But Dominic and Richard were talking about Raglan. And then I realised, said Dominic. It featured in The Song Remains the Same.

He’s improving my mind, said Louisa. He takes me to galleries. Museums, operas. She leant in close. Alex could smell her perfume and see her breasts inside her shirt. I’m not so keen on the opera.

Melissa stared at her plate but she had lost the power to influence the atmosphere in the room. Richard patted her forearm gently and she didn’t protest.

I felt rather deserted when you ran off across the road.

I’m sorry, said Daisy. The desire to save Melissa. It seemed laughable now.

What’s the most horrible way to die? asked Benjy.

Huntington’s disease, said Richard. You go insane and lose control of your body slowly over many years. You can’t sleep, you can’t swallow, you can’t speak, you suffer from epileptic fits and there’s no cure.

But Benjy had meant it to be a funny question.

♦

A young doctor had stood beside her bed and explained why the foetus was deformed. He seemed pleased with himself for knowing the biology behind such a rare syndrome. She got the impression that she was meant to feel pleased, too, for having won some kind of perverse jackpot. The following morning they took the lift to the ground floor and entered a world full of mothers and pregnant women. She felt angry with them for parading their prizes so brazenly, and relieved that she herself had not become the mother of that thing. She cried and Dominic comforted her but he never asked why she needed comfort, because it was obvious, surely. She combed her memory to discover what she’d done wrong. She’d smoked during that first month. She’d stumbled getting off a bus on Upper Street. If only she could find the fault then perhaps she could turn back time and do things differently and arrive at the present moment all over again but with a baby sleeping in the empty cot.

Dominic came back into the bedroom holding his toothpaste and brush. What’s the matter?

I look at people and I think they’re Karen.

He remembered his grandmother dying when he was eight, seeing her everywhere. All those old ladies with white hair.

I think she’s still alive. Out there. Watching. Waiting.

He was tired and this was scaring him. She’s not out there, Angela. She’s not watching. Had she ever been alive?

Don’t you think about her?

Sometimes. Though he rarely did.

I hear her voice.

How long have you been thinking like this?

Not so much before, but recently…

You’ve got a real daughter.

I know.

And you give her such a hard time.

Dom…

It’s not about the religion, is it?

Please, not now.

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 back seat 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 recognise 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 KitKats.

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

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 a steam train 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.