The Red House

7: 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.

♦

They joined the main road and seven texts pinged onto Melissa’s phone. ring me we’re so in the shit cal x…I’m really really really sorry. megan x…ring me megan has dumped us in it cally x… She couldn’t face reading the others.

Being the man, Dominic had been voted into the front seat to converse with the taxi driver who was telling him a story about how his brother lost his farm outside Llandovery during the foot and mouth epidemic. Green numbers on the meter flicking over, the little map on the satnav twisting, though this was probably the kind of place where it led you up cattle tracks and into ravines. He was having trouble concentrating on what the taxi driver was saying. Stupidly he’d left his mobile in his coat pocket overnight. He was relieved at first to find no message, then he checked the inbox and found one sitting there unflagged. Had someone read it? He wished he were sharing a car with Angela so that he could see her face and hear her voice and stop this churning anxiety. Amy’s threat of last night. I’m not letting you do this to me. But what was his offence? They weren’t going to spend the rest of their lives together, he was saving them both from a terrible mistake. It had always been an experiment. If she’d wanted more she should have said so. He had never lied to her. But where was the tribunal one could take these matters to? LOVE and HATE tattooed on the man’s knuckles. Was that Hell’s Angels or Skinheads? Dominic couldn’t quite remember. The man seemed harmless now, pudgy, balding.

Louisa was sitting in the centre of the back seat being a buffer between the two girls, the place usually allotted to the smallest child. Daisy’s proximity made her feel uncomfortable, the way their hips touched as they went round corners, a slight sexual discomfort, a sense of having been watched in a way she hadn’t realised.

But Daisy was a thousand miles away, forehead against the window, a daydreaming child. Long stripes of fluffy cloud above the hill like something was in the process of being knitted. Dragonfly microlight. A cluster of semi-derelict buildings at the bottom of the valley which she hadn’t seen last time, a mouldy green caravan. You could imagine some crazy guy with a gun, dirty children with little hairy tails snarling over a bucket of peelings. Big trees like lungs, roots underground like the same trees upside down in the dark, worms swimming through their branches. This inexplicable abundance, you could see why people dreamt up animating spirits. Naiads, zephyrs. But nowadays? Would the world look any different if there were no God? Could she believe that? It was an extraordinary thing to think, like tower blocks collapsing, like the touch of a feather.

Fine. It was the same anger, wasn’t it, the anger she felt whenever Mum broached the subject of religion, the way she wanted Mum to say the wrong thing, the need to be offended, to be excluded. She liked it, didn’t she, more at home with that anger than she had ever felt in the church. Maybe it wasn’t equilibrium she was seeking. Gemma’s Choice. The lime-green cardigan. Maybe it was release. Maybe it was the ability to say Fuck you to everyone.

♦

Angela told Benjy that the way to stop feeling nauseous was to look out of the window but he was in the middle of some game and she wasn’t in the mood for a fight. He held out till the car park at least, climbing out and vomiting copiously onto the tarmac, the tinny music of Mario at the Winter Olympics piping and chiming from the Nintendo at the end of his outstretched hand.

Richard hoisted himself upright using the cane and shut the car door behind him.

I told you. Angela fished in her handbag for wet wipes.

Benjy just stood there, head forward, letting a drooly trail lengthen.

Angela shook out the little damp square. Come here.

Richard turned away and gazed over the fields. Blood he could handle, but faeces, vomit, sweat…the smell of unwashed patients, stayed with you all day. The soothing green of the hills. He was upwind thankfully.

Drink some of that. Angela handed Benjy a plastic bottle from her handbag.

Benjy swilled the water round his mouth and spat it on to the sick to help wash it away a bit. He hadn’t thrown up for seven months. Something reassuring about it once you’d got the taste out of your mouth, so long as it hadn’t gone up into the back of your nose, like sugar and banana sandwiches, or rubbing an old blanket. That nice sharpness on the back of your teeth where acid had taken the plaque away.

They all regrouped at the top of the car park by the zebra crossing, waiting for Richard to negotiate the stone steps. Dominic and Benjy headed off to The Shop of Crap while Angela, Melissa and Daisy dispersed singly in various directions so that Richard and Louisa found themselves alone. Coffee? He liked the idea of sitting and talking.

Let’s walk. Louisa took his arm in the old-fashioned way. Keep mobile. Isn’t that what the doctors say?

And it was true, he did start to feel a little better for moving. Backfold Books. Nepal Bazaar. An old lady with five dachshunds, looking like a maypole. Last night. You said Daisy was gay, or was that a particularly vivid dream?

She tried to kiss Melissa.

Why would she do that? The surprise stopped him in his tracks. That wasn’t meant to sound quite so insulting.

I have trouble understanding why anyone would want to kiss Melissa. Bit like sticking your head in the lion’s mouth.

Do Angela and Dominic know?

I have no idea. They continued walking. Melissa was horrible to Daisy about it. Predictably.

He kept his own counsel and they walked past The Granary, turning left towards the river. In the centre of the bridge they stopped and leant against the balustrade so that he could rest and take the weight off his left foot completely. Daisy, Alex, Benjamin, he had managed to upset all of them. That shrew. He simply hadn’t thought. But he liked them, he really did like them. Water purling between the shallow rocks, weed under the surface like green hair in the wind. Carl and Douglas, they hadn’t come to the wedding. Too far, too expensive. We should visit your brothers.

Really. You’d have nothing in common.

We have you in common.

She used to picture it in bad dreams, Richard standing in that shabby room, ceiling tiles coming loose and that bloody dog yapping, TV left running at maximum volume since 1973. For the first time she could imagine him finding it simply funny, or interesting, or sad. Upstream a heron took off.

I’m going to go and talk to Ruth Sharne.

Ruth…?

The girl in the wheelchair. The operation that went wrong.

Is that advisable?

It’s not advised, not by the lawyers. But ‘inadvisable’…?

You’re not going to say it was your fault, are you?

Nor Mohan’s, just that we very much regret what happened. I don’t think anyone’s said that, except on paper.

Will it get you into trouble?

She comes into the OT unit. She must know that we’re over there in the main building, a couple of hundred yards away. Can you imagine how that must feel?

Richard…

If it comes to court then I want to walk into that room feeling honourable, not scared.

♦

Dominic picks up a cap gun, a proper old-fashioned cowboy pistol, dull sheen, sprung hammer, rotating chamber. Memories of childhood scooping him up and lifting him out of the troubled present. Yes. If you cracked it open at the hinge there was the housing where you placed the roll of caps and the ratchet which pushed the next cap into line. That smell, like nothing else. The little trail of smoke. Crawling through the long grass in the wasteground behind Fennell’s. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Jumping out of trees onto cardboard boxes from the Co-op. Mr Hines stabbing their football with a breadknife. Benjy, look at this. He holds out the gun, expecting Benjy to take it, but he seems downcast. What’s the matter?

It’s nothing.

He squats so their faces are level. Tell me.

Really, it’s nothing.

But you were so looking forward to coming here.

Really. It’s OK.

♦

Alex sat on the steps of the town clock eating two bananas from Spar, tired muscles buzzing, mind near empty. A blind man with a guide dog. Always golden retrievers, for some reason. Swallows overhead like little pairs of scissors. He closed his eyes and waited for the lime-green after-image of the street to fade to black.

How was that?

He opened his eyes to find himself looking up at Dad and Benjy. Really good. Hour fifty-five. But there was something wrong with Benjy. What happened, kiddo?

Nothing.

Sometimes Alex didn’t notice Benjy because Benjy was eight. Then, sometimes, he remembered being eight himself and how hard it could be. Why don’t you come with me?

OK, said Benjy. He smiled and Alex felt his heart lift a little.

♦

She sits in Shepherd’s stealing glances at other girls, other women. Panic, fascination, guilt. A tired young mum in a shapeless grey tracksuit, unwashed hair scraped back, baby in a high chair, two older ladies straight out of a sitcom, all cake and bosom and jollity. In the corner a girl of sixteen, seventeen, with her family but not really with them. Long brown hair, bangles, black T-shirt with a skull on that might be goth or ironic, it’s hard to tell. That mix of sullenness and under-confidence, still not quite sure of who she is yet. She turns to look at Daisy, or something over Daisy’s shoulder, or maybe nothing at all. Daisy glances away feeling both utterly invisible and completely exposed. The girl turns back to her family. Is Daisy attracted to her? She imagines talking to her, imagines touching her. The long ripple of her backbone as she takes that t-shirt off. A little jolt of what? desire? fear? disgust? But how did you know if someone returned your feelings? Was there a secret language? She feels unqualified, like she’s failed to prepare for a vital interview. She stares at the table’s plastic surface, tiny ticks and slashes, beige, brown, blue. Classic FM in the background, something orchestral and slushy. Because now that she thinks about it there’s a feeling, isn’t there, a feeling that’s always been there, so constant she never really notices it. When she looks at women. Not even sexual, really, just a rightness, a comfort in their presence. Melissa, of all people. Magnetism and self-assurance. Was it so wrong to want these things? Was it so wrong to want someone who had these things? Maybe it wasn’t God after all, maybe it was the heart which punished one with such exquisite accuracy.

♦

Machine guns. Popguns. Potato guns. Cap guns. Bows and arrows. Axes. Tomahawks. Brooms. Dusters. J-Cloths. Nail brushes. Dog chews made of dried pigs’ ears. Kendal Mint Cake. Butter dishes. Lovespoons. Skipping ropes. Golf balls. Tennis balls. Squishy cow keyrings that moo and light up when you squeeze them. Squishy duck keyrings that quack and light up when you squeeze them. Little forks for indoor gardening. Rubber knee mats for outdoor gardening. Creosote. Weedkiller. Hanging baskets. Brillo pads. Orthopaedic pangrips and tin openers. Stanley 15-mm heavy-duty nails. Clout nails, galvanised, in ten sizes. Baby Bio. Itching powder. Whoopee cushions. Vampire teeth. Hoover bags. Alarm clocks with bells on top. Plastic farm animals. Videos of Mall Cop, Hannah Montana, Transformers. Fish food. Cafetières. Musical birthday cards. Peanuts in lard for overwintering birds. Wooden chocks to hold doors open. Ashtrays in the shape of tiny toilets. Sports whistles. Firedogs. Bootscrapers. Laces of assorted length. Postcards of hills. Postcards of sheep.

♦

Cally picked up the phone at the far end. Melissa.

What the fuck is going on?

You are not going to believe this.

Just tell me, all right?

Megan the genius. She texted Michelle.

Saying what?

Oh, something along the lines of, ‘You’re a bitch and a liar.’ Like, we’re being accused of bullying her, so she bullies her. Sends actual proof to Michelle’s phone. How fucking moronic is that?

Think, think. Over the road a fat man was stooping to pick up a piece of dogshit using a little pink plastic bag as a glove. Her brain wouldn’t work. I’ll be back tomorrow, right? We’ll have, like, a war cabinet. It was starting to rain, dark spots on the tarmac. What if they blamed everything on Megan? Megan the loose cannon, Megan the bully. A blue umbrella popping open on the far pavement. She wanted to lie down and curl up and sleep, she wanted someone to come along and pick her up and look after her. She wanted someone to be kind to her for once.

♦

Alex and Benjy were sitting on the bench at the side of the market square, just off the main drag so Mum and Dad didn’t catch Benjy eating the ice cream Alex had bought him. What’s up, kid?

Nothing.

This is a holiday and you’re meant to be having a good time.

I don’t want to say.

Was Dad horrible to you this morning?

No. But he had to tell someone and if he was going to tell anyone it was best to tell Alex. I found a message.

A message? It sounded like a rolled-up treasure map in a bottle on a beach.

It was on Dad’s phone. He felt silly now for getting so panicked. I went downstairs in the night, and there was a beep.

What did it say?

It said, ‘ Call me’. And it said, ‘I can’t bear this’. He could still see it blocking out the picture of them at Blakeney.

And who was it from?

It was from someone called Amy.

Alex let it sink in. A kind of satisfaction almost, as if he’d been waiting all along for Dad to fuck up properly and justify his disdain.

Who’s Amy? asked Benjy.

Amy… He had to take this slowly, he had to get this right. Amy works at Waterstone’s with Dad. She was stealing books. Yes, that was it. Dad caught her stealing books.

Will she go to prison?

Poor Benjy. He looked so sad on this woman’s behalf. She wants Dad to keep it a secret.

But he has to tell the truth.

Yeh, he has to tell the truth.

Benjy hated thinking of Dad being put in a difficult position like this, but he was flattered, too, by this brief view through the closed door of the adult world.

Spatters of rain out of a darkening sky. You’re wasting your ice cream, mate.

Benjy changed hands and stuck all four creamy fingers into his mouth. Alex leant back against the wall. What an arsehole, what a fucking amateur. It’s a secret, by the way. So don’t tell anyone, even Mum.

It’s OK. You can trust me.

Good man.

Can we go to the shop?

Which shop?

The Shop of Crap. I didn’t want to buy anything before, but I do now.

♦

What? Melissa guessed instantly but she was going to make Mum work for this.

That was your headmaster on the phone. Michelle tried to kill herself. After you, Cally and Megan bullied her.

We had an argument. Melissa tried to sound as if she were discussing a group of people in whom she had merely a passing interest. Michelle can get a bit over-dramatic sometimes.

Avison wants us to come in.

It’ll be fine. Trust me.

Trust you? Are you serious, Melissa? You knew all about this and you didn’t even think to tell me.

Because I didn’t want to mess up your holiday.

Tell me about the photograph.

I think you’re better off not knowing, frankly.

Stop patronising me.

OK, OK. Michelle was drunk. Possibly she’d taken a couple of her mum’s diazepam, to which she is, like, a bit partial. She described the blow job with mild disgust. So Megan grabs my phone and takes a picture.

You’re lying.

Hey. Chill out. We’re, like, standing in the rain in the middle of a road here.

Don’t treat me like a moron.

I’m bloody telling the truth.

I know you, Melissa. You’re a little operator. If someone else took that photo you’d have covered your back by telling me a week ago.

I’ll sort everything out when we get back.

You think you’re charmed. You think you’re a princess. You think it will just keep on coming, the money, the clothes, the friends, the easy life. My parents had nothing, your father’s parents had nothing. It can vanish like that. She clicked her fingers. No, be quiet. I’m having the last word for once. You are not going to blame anyone else. Give me your phone.

♦

The rain had stopped. Dominic stood on the raised pavement outside The Granary not knowing where to go or what to do. A need for something more central, cathedral, theatre, train station, but this was it, wasn’t it, the Seven Stars and Jigsaw World. He would kill himself after a month here. Ageing hippies and inbred farmers and geography teachers with their bloody hiking sticks, eating their bloody scones. He took out his iPod, put the headphones in and scrolled. Steve Reich. Variations for Wind, Strings and Keyboards. He let music wash over him. That little green sports car, the fat woman with her arm in a sling. The way music turned the world into television.

Benjy decided to buy a catapult. £7.99. Alex was pretty sure Mum and Dad would have vetoed it on account of it being a Weapon of Mass Destruction but he couldn’t give a fuck right now. Benjy could have it as a present from his big brother. They took it to the bottom of the car park and fired stones into the field.

Louisa held the earring against her cheek. Sunflowers, she supposed, alternating leaves of bronze and silver, hammered and cut. Different. But different good? She didn’t want to make the same mistake she made with those ridiculous china puffins.

Richard was leafing through second-hand CDs, Bernstein, Perahia, some unpronounceable Czech playing Debussy on Naxos. Just showing willing, really, because he wouldn’t actually purchase a second-hand CD. Also he was steering clear of books. The Complete SAS Fitness Training Handbook in a knotted bag at the bottom of the bin in the shed. Ah, but this…Hommage à Kathleen Ferrier. Looked rather good, 1950/51 recording, on Tahra, distributed by Harmonia Mundi, bit of Handel, bit of Purcell, Parry, Stanford, extracts from a Matthew Passion under Karajan.

Daisy was wandering around Hay-on-Wye Booksellers looking for something a little more addictive than Dracula, something to hold her attention completely. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo? There was a gay and lesbian section. She’d seen the sign. Scared to look, scared she might be revolted, or entranced, scared she might be accosted by some terrifying gatekeeper. Big netball coach, some flinty girl with Hitler hair.

Melissa was looking at a remaindered volume of watercolours by John Singer Sargent. She loved the cool clean heft of big art books. But these pictures frightened her, how good they were, as if the paint had simply fallen into place. Sailing boats, women blowing glass in a darkened room in Venice, fountains in a park in Paris. She would never be able to do this, would she, because to be an artist you had to run the risk of failing, you had to close your eyes and step into the dark. The feeling of her empty pocket where her phone should be. Being treated like a ten-year-old. Fuck.

♦

Sorry. Angela bumps into a second person. Little passages of blankness, like when you’re driving a familiar route and come round to find yourself at the wheel. The health food shop. She is staring at a cold cabinet of cheese and salami and bean sprouts. Are Richard and Louisa cooking tonight? Karen’s birthday. She keeps remembering then forgetting then remembering. She decides to go to The Globe early, fearing she might be carried off by the riptide unless she moors herself while she has the chance. Bohemian reclamation chic, an old chapel once, now a café-cum-gallery-cum-something else. She buys a cappuccino and a white chocolate muffin and sits down. There is a balcony made of scaffolding and some truly ghastly paintings. The pulpit still stands in the corner. Like being a student again. Foreign language films and patchouli and Spare Rib. She looks up and sees that Karen has walked in, that Daisy has walked in.

A second later and she would have turned tail but Mum has seen her now so she can’t beat a retreat without making it seem like an insult. She walks over. Pews and hippy cushions and old blankets.

Hello, love. Mum is eating a muffin and huddling slightly, like she’s cold, or hiding from someone.

Hiya. Daisy sits.

A long strange silence, as if Mum is a child and feels no pressing need to communicate with the adult world. It scares her. Are you OK?

Mum is using the tip of her index finger to move all the crumbs on her plate into a little central pile. I’m having a difficult day.

Mine’s not exactly been a barrel of laughs. But Mum doesn’t react. Another long strange silence. I might be leaving the church. She catches herself by surprise, saying this. Again Mum says nothing, just leans over and smiles and rubs Daisy’s forearm. She seems sad. Mum…?

I just want you to be happy.

Something in her voice. An echo of Gran during that last year. The weirdest suspicion that she doesn’t really know who Daisy is. Mum…?

It’s Karen’s birthday.

Who’s Karen? She assumes it is some girl at school. Then she remembers. Karen who… She isn’t sure of the word.

Not the day she died, but the day she would have been born.

But this was seventeen years ago.

Eighteen. It didn’t used to bother me. Then all of a sudden… She sits up and gives a little shake, as if trying to throw off this passing strangeness.

That farawayness. As if Daisy is simply someone she has met on the bus with whom she is passing time. Have you got some money for a coffee? She needs to step aside for a few moments.

Maybe I’m just allergic to this kind of holiday, says Mum.

What kind of holiday?

Countryside, rain. She digs her wallet out of her bag and hands it over.

By the time the stripy mug of coffee is placed on the counter in front of her, Daisy turns and sees that Dominic and Richard and Louisa have arrived, thank God.

♦

Phil the Fruit and Murder and Mayhem. The Great Outdoors (makers of fine leather goods). Teddy Bear Wonderland. Crusty loaves and Bakewell tarts. I had not thought death had undone so many. Like a mist around the living, the crush of ghosts, the ones we can’t let go. The outline in the bed, the empty place at the table. Siege Perilous. She crushes out the stub of her Silk Cut with the toe of her boot and fastens the top toggle of her green duffel coat. She stands on the bridge and watches the river flow to the sea. Silt and salmon, nitrates and mercury and human waste. Plynlimon to Monmouth, to the Severn Estuary, over the Welsh Grounds, down the Bristol Channel and out into the great downsweep of the North Atlantic Current.

♦

Dominic assumed that Angela had found the message, her distance, her muted distress, but they drifted into a dog-legging conversation about a friend from college who lived in a squat in Finsbury Park, and the German student next door who was murdered, and the German club at school, and he realised that she hadn’t found the message, had she? Something else was wrong, the way she was running on autopilot, radio silence and the cockpit windows frosting over. He was off the hook. His vow of, what? three days ago? Getting Angela back on track, making the family work, being a proper father and husband. He wasn’t sure he had the energy now. He looked around the table. Richard and Louisa rebonded, Melissa absent in one way, Angela in another, some kind of sibling huddle at the far end, Benjy deep in his book. How rarely people were together. Gaps in the chain of Christmas lights. But Daisy and the kiss…Perhaps they had already done the right thing by not making a song and dance about it, all part of life’s rich pageant and so on. He tried and failed to catch her eye. A sudden stupid sadness, the worry that he had lost all of them, the urge to go and pick Benjy up and tell him how much he loved him. But you couldn’t do that, could you, in the middle of a meal, just go and hug someone and tell them that you loved them.

Where’s Melissa? asked Richard.

Louisa angled herself so that no one could hear and said quietly, I got a call from school.

About?

Melissa and her friends bullied a girl who then tried to commit suicide. Saying it to Richard made it sound worse, if that were possible.

The girl. Is she all right?

It seems so.

What did they do to her?

Louisa stalled. They never talked about Melissa and sex. That delicate boundary.

You can tell me.

She felt implicated by her own transgressions.

I’ll keep my distance. I promise.

They took a photo of this girl, Michelle, at a party, having sex with some boy, then they sent it to everyone.

Charlie Lessiter. Those boys who force-fed him laxatives. Swallow, Fatty, swallow! Holding him in a headlock. You’re worried they’ll expel her?

I worry that this is not just a phase.

Children can be vicious. He wanted to talk to Michelle, find out how serious it was. Because killing yourself was easy if you meant it. He wanted to be the doctor, wanted to be the lawyer. He didn’t like this blurry view from the outfield.

She thinks she can slip out of it like she always does. A bit of charm here, a few lies there.

Perhaps I shouldn’t keep my distance.

Meaning?

Perhaps I should talk to her. The other man, the one who’d found her smoking in the woodshed forty-eight hours ago, he seemed like a stranger now. I won’t wear hobnailed boots this time.

Two sweetcorn chowders, a slightly disappointing goat’s cheese tart, two Stilton ploughmans…Alex and Daisy were sitting on either side of Benjy, conspicuously looking after him, showing their parents how to be parents. Benjy was reading Guinness World Records. Look, this man lifted 21.9 kg using his nipples.

Benjy, seriously, why would I possibly want to look?

Alex observes his father. It seems both impossible and completely obvious. They didn’t love each other, did they, Mum and Dad, didn’t like each other half the time. A little flash of sympathy for Dad, then he thinks of the dirtiness, the lying, the disrespect. He wants to tell someone, but who? Daisy has enough on her plate. He could tell Richard, perhaps, but there’s something unmanly about handing over the responsibility. He has to confront Dad. If he doesn’t then the knowledge is going to eat away at him, but every time he pictures this encounter his heart hammers and his palms sweat. Though it would resolve something, wouldn’t it? Something that has haunted him since the night in Crouch End.

Guess the record for the most underpants worn at the same time.

Benjy, just eat that potato.

One hundred and thirty-seven.

Benjy…

I’m a bit full actually.

Of what?

Nothing.

We had some ice cream.

Daisy looks at Mum who seems a little better now, more awake, more focused, stringing actual sentences together with Dad. That echo of Gran. Made her blood run cold. Though when she thinks about it maybe Mum deserves a bit of suffering. All the shit she’s given her over the past year. Schadenfreude. Is that a dreadful thing to think? Well, if she’s leaving the church then thinking dreadful things without feeling guilty has to be one of the compensations.

Banana split, treacle pudding, cappuccino…Richard picks up the bill.

♦

Daisy was waiting at the zebra crossing when she saw Melissa sitting on the stone wall across the road at the pre-arranged taxi rendezvous point. She bodyswerved rapidly towards The Shop of Crap and stood beside an aluminium dustbin full of brooms. No, wait. She was tired of feeling cowardly, feeling vulnerable. Fuck what Melissa thought, fuck what Mum and Dad thought. She turned and looked back across the road, Melissa still unaware of her presence. Spiteful and shallow. Like they always said about bullies. Underneath they’re frightened. Because she had her own bluebird tattoo now, didn’t she? And there were things she’d learnt in the church that remained true in spite of everything. Putting on the Armour of Christ, kneeling in the street, that drunk woman spraying them with a can of lager. If you believed with all your heart then none of it mattered. What doesn’t kill me only makes me stronger.

Gay. What a wet fucking word it was.

She waited for a Post Office van to pull up then walked over the road. Melissa seeing her now and something extraordinary happening. The glossy thoroughbred look, the slow-motion hair, it counted for nothing. It was this confidence, wasn’t it, the Armour of Christ. Melissa was shrinking just as she had shrunk in Melissa’s presence four days ago. Daisy sat down beside her.

What? said Melissa nervously.

Daisy closed her eyes. She could let this moment run forever.

♦

Once again, Dominic was deputed to sit up front and converse with the taxi driver. Young white guy in his twenties, polyester tracksuit top, tiny diamond earring, driving a little too fast, but not fast enough for Dominic to complain.

Five days and the landscape was fading already. The gash of gold and the green distance. How pleased we are to have our eyes opened but how easily we close them again. The barn owl on the telegraph pole. It was picturesque, then it wasn’t picturesque, then it was background.

Daisy stared through the window trying to discern a future that wasn’t clear yet. These were not her people, this was not her family.

The mobile was sitting right there in Mum’s bag. Melissa wanted to just grab it, have an all-out bitch fight, but Daisy would have loved that.

Louisa was remembering those family holidays in Tenby. Auntie May’s boarding house, though she wasn’t technically an aunt, of course. Deckchairs and slot machines, sharing a double bed with her brothers, the day Dougie smashed a crab with a rock and the time it took to die. There was an island out in the bay. She can’t remember the name now. There was a monastery on it and there were boat trips, but they never took one. It came back to her in dreams sometimes. Of course Richard should meet Carl and Dougie. Why had she been so frightened of this?

Outside the damp green world sliding by. Ash and poplar. Cord moss and hart’s tongue fern.

♦

Angela had offered Alex the front seat on the way back so that she could sit quietly with Benjy in the back without being quizzed by Richard who was giving Alex a brief lecture on CT scanning. Iodine, barium, how The Beatles helped because EMI used their profits to make the prototype.

What’s this? asked Benjy, dipping his hand into the green plastic bag that was squished between him and Mum.

Oh, said Angela, it’s something I bought.

Alex looked round and saw that Benjy was holding a Victorian doll, stained lacy dress, blank china face, too broken to be an antique, too weird to be a toy.

Who’s it for? said Benjy.

For me, said Angela. For someone.

Benjy slipped it carefully back into the bag, half believing that it might hiss and bite him if he treated it roughly. Can you put it on your side? He lifted the bag gingerly by the ends of his fingers. I don’t like it.

What’s that? Richard glancing into the rear-view mirror, now that they had exited the narrow chicane of high hedges. Alex caught his eye and gave the faintest shake of his head, meaning Don’t ask, because he, too, knew now that something was wrong.

♦

Louisa turned to him as he came into the bedroom. What do you think?

He scanned her top to toe. Hair? Clothes? The earrings. Metal sunflowers, bronze and silver. They make you look younger.

How much younger? Thirty is good. Sixteen is not.

Ten. Ten years younger. I like them. He swivelled and lay down with his head on the pillow. Sorry about this.

About what?

Family holiday. Not quite as restful as I had planned.

This is restful. She lay down next to him.

They stared at the ceiling, a king and queen on a tomb. The smell of cocoa butter. He liked Benjy, he liked Daisy, he liked Alex but he didn’t like Dominic. Something weak about him, insubstantial. And his own sister…? They had the same parents, they had lived in the same house for sixteen years but he had no idea who she really was.

Hey.

What?

You’re off duty. She checked her watch. One hour. She rolled onto her side and propped her head on her hand.

The spill of blonde hair, hips curved and creaturely. Desire coming back as strong as ever, that switchback of feelings. Wanting, not wanting. Anxiety, content. How fluid and unpredictable the mind was.

Wait. She put her finger to her lips, got to her feet and locked the door.

Are you sure this is a good idea?

I think it’s an excellent idea. She lay down beside him again.

What if someone hears us?

You can apologise publicly over supper.

He lifted her blouse and put his hand on that little bulge of warm flesh above her waistband. I’m afraid I can’t be too gymnastic in my present state.

Gymnastic? What were you planning?

♦

What happened? Mum looked as if she had been standing in an inch of foamy water for the last thirty minutes. The same vacant expression she’d had all day.

I think there must be a leak somewhere.

Warm damp air, that flooded cellar smell. Alex splashed across the floor and turned the machine off. Wet clothing slumped and levelled in the glass porthole. At home she’d be shouting and swearing. Go and get yourself a cup of tea and I’ll sort this out, OK?

Thank you, Alex. She walked off into the kitchen, the damp slap of her shoes receding.

Christ. He squatted and ran his hand round the front hatch. Dry. Something at the back, then, or underneath. He heaved on the big white box, rocking it gently from side to side so that it boomed and scraped out of its recess. He peered into the dark between the side panel and the plastered wall. Darkness, two disconnected pipe ends, a broken circlip lying in the suds.

My God. Dad was standing in the doorway, like a bloody lemon as usual, letting someone else get their hands dirty. Washing machine broken?

No. It’s on fire. He wanted to go over and punch his father. But the china doll…Did Mum know? Was that why she was acting so strangely? She seemed so fragile. He shouldn’t do anything to upset her. He reached into the recess and picked up the circlip. Tendrils of black slime, the little metal ridges sheared smooth where it had come free. He stood up. You find a mop and clean this place up. I’m going out to the shed.

♦

The little fold where the curve of her bottom met the top of her thighs. He ran his hand down her back. The most adult activity, yet it made you feel like a child again, at home with your own nakedness, touching another person, skin to skin.

Something hovering that he could almost touch, some secret which had eluded him for a long time. But the warmth of her body under his hand, the quiet of this room, distant voices in the garden. He let it drift away.

♦

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 harbour 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 towards the door.

Alex…?

♦

She didn’t know who she was any more, 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 favourite 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 anaesthetic 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 Armour 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? Louisa should have thought of that in the shop. She 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 of the window and saw Benjy and Daisy returning from a walk. It had happened this week, hadn’t it, Daisy realising? 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 behaviour, 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 grandad. 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 centre 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 towards 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 realised 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 on to its stand.

We went for a walk up Black Hill.

I didn’t mean that. Louisa dried her hands on the tea towel and looked at her. It’s like there was a big knot inside you. And someone’s untied it.

God, she stumbled through life failing to understand everyone. Louisa. Melissa. Jack. Lauren. Herself most of all. How did you know?

You’re a good daughter, said Louisa. I don’t think they’re proud enough. She halved the tea towel and hung it over the rail on the Aga. Now. What do you think? Shall we pull out the stops for the last night?

Good idea, said Daisy, because that was it, wasn’t it? Nothing more to be said, nothing more that needed to be said.

♦

There are no flowers so Daisy makes a collection of holly and grasses and a budding branch she can’t identify and arranges them in the handpainted Spanish jug which she places in the centre of the table. Paper serviettes folded and rolled, a bishop’s hat in every place. Two candles in wine bottles, flames multiplied in the wobbly glass of the leaded panes. Marks & Spencer’s Chablis, the salmon cut and shut so deftly on a fresh sheet of silver foil that no one notices, flecks of grass green in the white of the sauce, asparagus, beans and carrots.

Why does it make your wee smell funny? asks Benjy.

Methanethiol, said Richard, and some sulphides whose names temporarily escape me.

Fresh bread, half the loaf sliced so the slices curled away like in an advert. The little bone-handled butter knife stuck into the pale yellow slab. Whisper Not, Dominic’s choice. Keith Jarrett, Gary Peacock, Jack DeJohnette.

They’re both solicitors, said Alex. It probably counts as animal cruelty. The dogs are shut inside ten hours a day. I take them to the park and they go ballistic.

Angela is drinking too much in the hope that it will calm her, though she can see, too, that it is loosening her grip on the real world.

Once more, Benjy is picturing the centre of the table as a city on an alien planet, the condiments, the wine bottles, the handpainted Spanish jug transformed to towers and gun ports. The two candles become refinery flares, an empty wicker mat the landing stage for which he aims as he weaves through the heavy laser flak in the scout vehicle.

How often is Angela like this? asks Richard quietly, because he had learnt over twenty-five years of being a doctor that normal was a very broad church and pathological too easy a diagnosis.

Just forming the word never in his mind makes Dominic realise how serious this is. His silence speaks for him.

I suspect she needs to see someone.

You’re right, says Dominic, though he had lost the right to advise her on all but the most trivial matters after losing his job. As if one paid actual money for such rights. I’ll see what I can do.

Louisa and Daisy are talking about swimming. It was just a thing I was really good at.

But…?

In the end it’s just going up and down a pool. I think it’s better doing something actually fun that you’re not so good at.

Like?

How rarely she asked the question. Acting. I liked acting.

Louisa rested her knife and fork at half past six. And your friends in the church?

I’m not sure they’ll be friends any more. What would she do? Walk away, like she’d walked away from Lauren?

It might be good for them. She sipped her wine. There’s a lot of troubled people out there.

She was right, wasn’t she? Meg, Anushka. Who could tell? So many ways of being saved. So many cold dark places.

Richard turns to Melissa. I remember you saying you’d got a dodgy Oberon.

He is being kind, and this, she knows now, is the thing that scares her most of all. Kindness, her inability either to give it or receive it. I haven’t really been thinking about the play. It seemed the least of her problems. We’ll work it out. Down the other end of the table Mum and Daisy are gossiping, like she’s been usurped and they want her to know it. She needs distracting, but Richard is talking to Dominic again so she turns to Alex. Your dad said you were going to Wales. Because she can do it, too, she can be kind, she can be interested. It’s not hard. Mountain-biking, right?

He stares at her long and hard then laughs quietly. Utter disdain. You’d hate it.

And she thinks, fuck nice, fuck kind. Dust and tumbleweed. Her father’s daughter, because no one treats me like that, no one.

Fourteen hours to go, said Dominic. We seem to have made it without anyone killing anyone else.

Thank you, said Angela. For all this. For bringing us here. As if she were a little girl remembering to be polite.

You’re welcome.

A toast. To Richard.

And Louisa.

Cheers.

♦

Something provisional about the two hours between supper and bedtime. Everyone kicking their heels slightly before tomorrow’s departure. Daisy reads Tintin to Benjy. Flight 714 to Sydney. Two hours and every trace of you and your friends wiped from the surface of the earth!

Angela fills half a suitcase. Dominic means to say something, about her seeing someone, about her getting help, but he can’t work out how to do it. He takes the cardigan from her hands and offers to finish the packing and this seems enough to absolve him of the greater duty for the time being at least.

Angela wanders downstairs and makes a cup of tea. Richard is putting the food they won’t need for breakfast into a cardboard box. Flour, olive oil, two bags of cashews. He asks if she is all right. She summons enough self-possession to head him off at the pass because she is tired and a little drunk and not sure she could explain even if she wanted. He gives her a hug which feels clumsy because it catches her by surprise and she is not able to return it deftly enough. He holds her for a long time and she wonders if he is going to say something, about Mum, about Dad, about the two of them being brother and sister, perhaps, but he finally breaks the silence by saying simply, Look after yourself.

♦

Half-eleven. Alex comes out of his and Benjy’s room en route to the toilet. Something in the corner of his eye. Turning, he sees Melissa, standing at the end of the corridor watching him, leaning against the window sill, hair down, bare legs, man’s shirt. He tries to turn away but leaves it just a moment too long. She pushes herself lazily upright and walks down the landing, face blank. He can’t believe this is happening, all his previous opinions swept away by the fierceness of his wanting. She stands in front of him, arms hanging by her side, steps a little closer, angles her head and lets herself be kissed. He puts one hand round the back of her neck and pushes his tongue into her mouth. Pine fabric conditioner. Freakishly pliable. He lifts her shirt. White cotton knickers, the roundness of her arse under his hand. He pulls her towards him so that she can feel his erection, wanting to know what permissions he is being granted. She neither presses back nor pulls away but takes hold of his t-shirt, turns and begins leading him towards the bedroom. There is something about this that he doesn’t understand, but there are many things he doesn’t understand about Melissa. Perhaps this what she is like when she gets horny. He knows little and cares less.

♦

Angela puts her mug of tea on the side table and opens the creaky door of the stove to make herself a fire, balls of paper, kindling pyramid, small log. She lights the paper, shuts the door and spins open the little vent, sits back and waits for it to roar and bloom and settle, then spins the vent almost shut.

Fatigue and wakefulness warring with one another. If she can make it through tonight perhaps everything will be better in the morning, but if she goes to bed now she will lie staring at the ceiling. She feels ill at ease being down here as the house grows empty and quiet, but if she is upstairs she will worry that these rooms are neither wholly empty nor wholly quiet.

From the wood basket she extracts the remaining pages of the Observer. Melvyn Bragg on Gödel and Leibniz. Honeybees in terminal decline. The awful truth: to get ahead you need a private education. God, the amount you read in a lifetime and how shockingly little stayed with you. Getting back to school will be good for her. Those burdens that seem heavy till you put them down to lift your own. Karim’s impending statement. The creepy guy in the flat overlooking the Key Stage 1 playground. The Inclusion Unit closing and the Dillon twins coming back. Slipping away now. Rhubarb and Castrol. Behind everything there is always a house. You started the mower by pulling the plastic T on the end of the cord. She was never strong enough. The smell of greenhouse tomatoes, like nothing else. Almonds, bacon, nail varnish. Laughable, un-photographable. Sleep folds over her. Time passes. No real idea how much.

It is the cold that wakes her, the fire dying, the light off and only a dim glow from the landing upstairs seeping into the room. Karen is sitting in the armchair. A jolt of fear and relief. This will be over soon. But Karen is not Karen, not the Karen she had imagined. Bird bones and sunken cheeks, matted greasy hair. For a second Angela wonders if she is dead, then her glassy eyes open and turn. Such economy of movement, so little energy to spare. The unwashed stink of her, beyond animal, homeless all these years. Gypsy camps and the breakers’ yards. A sore at the corner of her mouth, that tramp smell, urine and faeces, raw papery skin. Five thousand nights in the open air. She looks eighty, not eighteen. She does not speak, perhaps she has never learnt to speak. Angela is terrified, she wants desperately to move but her arms and legs will not answer her commands. She is trapped inside her body. Instead it is Karen who is moving, bony hands on the arms of the chair, straining to lift such a small weight. This is not about apology or explanation or penance, this is punishment, and Angela will have no say in it just as Karen once had no say. On her feet, unsteady but determined. She fixes Angela with her eyes and does not look away. Angela can see now how truly frail she is, the way her clothes hang, greasy brown rags, all colour gone. Things moving in her hair. Three steps and she is standing in front of Angela, the stink overpowering now, leaning down, her face changing shape as it closes in to kiss her. A ragged fin of grey flesh rising through the hair, eyes narrowing to gashes in the wet clay. Teeth and claws. Mouth on Angela’s mouth, forcing it open, dry cracked lips. The dirty wet meat of her tongue. Angela hears shrieking from high on the jagged rocks, the splintering of timber and the roar of water rushing in.

Bright light suddenly. Karen vanished and a girl kneeling in front of her. Mum…?

Angela can’t remember how to speak.

The girl stands and says, Oh shit.

Daisy. It’s Daisy. This confusion. This is how her mother left the world. The nurses burning her hands. When will Richard come to see me?

But he’s here now, her brother, the doctor. He leans on the arm of the chair. Angela…? He clicks his fingers directly in front of her face, examines her eyes in turn. There’s a woman in the room. Jennifer. No, the other one.

Richard takes her earlobe between his thumb and forefinger and squeezes it hard. Ow. She pulls her head away from his hand. She can move again.

Angela…?

It feels like a very long time since she last talked. I fell asleep.

How are you feeling now?

It required thought. Leafing through memories of the last few days. What’s the time?

Half-two.

I heard something, said Daisy. So I came down.

Was it Karen she heard? She let the foolish question slide away.

We’ve been trying to wake you for some time, says Richard.

Louisa standing in the corner, watching. Angela wants to hear her speak, the suspicion that she might not actually be there. She catches Louisa’s eye. You scared us, says Louisa. So she’s real.

Daisy touches her hand. Seriously, how are you feeling?

Suddenly she sees the situation from their point of view. That she has done this to them. I’m really sorry.

There’s no need to apologise, says Richard.

She gets to her feet, a little unsteady at first. I think we all need some sleep.

Only as they are returning upstairs do they realise how deftly she has sidestepped the question they have been asking for the last ten minutes. What happened down there? But Angela is right and they all do need sleep and perhaps some questions are best left unanswered.

♦

He doesn’t get to take her shirt off, doesn’t get to feel her tits, let alone see them. She rolls backwards onto the bed, he unbuckles his jeans and pulls down his boxers and leans over, left hand beside her head. He’s not exactly an expert when it comes to this kind of thing and she seems really dry so it takes a while to get his cock in. Her face still blank, like she’s looking through him. Fifteen, twenty seconds and he’s about to come. Then everything changes, like she’s woken up suddenly. She grabs his arm and shoves her free hand hard against his windpipe, a punch almost. He stumbles against the little dresser, regains his balance and slides onto the chair, trousers round his ankles, cock still hard, that weird tremor of being on the brink of coming, a big blunt pain in the small of his back. She slaps his face as hard as she can. Now get the fuck out of here.

Other people have hit him that hard, but no has ever hit him with that venom. He raises one hand in a gesture of ceasefire and uses the other to pull up his jeans and boxers.

Really quiet this time. Just fuck off. Eyes narrowed.

Yeh. Don’t worry. I’m going. He reaches down and retrieves his shirt. Trousers still undone and no time for checking the corridor before he steps out but that doesn’t seem like top priority right now. Then he’s gone and she holds it together long enough to hear his footsteps fade down the corridor, before rolling onto her side and holding the pillow against her face so that no one can hear her crying.

He doesn’t even have time to grab any toilet paper. Just drops his shirt and lets go of his belt and steps into the shower and brings himself off all over the tiling in a couple of strokes. Holy shit. Did that actually happen? He fucked Melissa. He actually fucked Melissa.

♦

Angela slipped into the bedroom. Little bedside light still on, Dominic stirring briefly then becoming still again. She sat on the chair and waited for the others to use the bathroom and return to bed. Silence at last. She leant over and then took hold of the green plastic bag that lay scrunched on the floor beside the chest of drawers, a tuft of hair protruding from the top. She stood up and went back out onto the landing, quietly closing the door behind her. She avoided the creakier steps then turned into the living room at the bottom of the stairs. The fire low but still burning. Bending down, she undid the little latch and eased the door open, slow as a second hand to prevent it squeaking. She took five pieces of kindling from the basket and laid them parallel in the single lazy flame. Little blonde sleepers. She took the doll from the bag. A brief hesitation, letting the doubts graze her before spinning away. She laid the doll along the kindling, the dress catching immediately, a poisonous blue flame leaping up. Slowly, she shut the metal door. The tiny muffled thud of the webbing seal. Latch closed. The toddler on the sheepskin rug, the rainbow-coloured windbreak, OGDENS. They were pictures of Daisy, weren’t they? Flames licking round the doll now, as if she were falling through the air in a dress of sunset colours, violet, orange, green. A fierce little star. And they cast her bound into the midst of the fire. And she had no hurt.