The Red House

8: Friday

Alex wakes early for one final run, south to Hatterall Hill via the grouse butts and the little disused quarries, thinking how he will probably never come back here, looking around, storing it, another place to visit in his head. He has returned to the house and is squatting to untie his trainers on the lawn when he sees his father crossing to the shed with a big white rubbish bag for the bin. Alex realises suddenly that he is going to do it. After last night he feels superhuman. He waits for his father to return then steps onto the path.

Dominic stops and raises his eyebrows because the body language is unequivocal. What’s this about?

Benjy read the message on your phone.

What message?

You know which message.

No, I don’t know which message. So it wasn’t Angela. Thank God for that.

The message from Amy.

And what about it?

Who’s Amy?

Amy is an old friend of mine and I really don’t see what this has got to do with you.

From where? An old friend from where?

From college. Alex, what are you suggesting?

You’re having an affair.

Dominic laughs. I think you need a bit more practice in the Sherlock Holmes department.

Alex wants to quote the text but he can’t remember the words. He should have planned this better. What was she so upset about?

I really don’t think she’d want me discussing her personal problems with my teenage son.

His father’s composure, the way he is laughing. Alex had got the wrong end of the stick, hadn’t he, made a twat of himself by jumping to conclusions. But that phrase, my teenage son, something offensive about it. He wants to punch his father for winning the argument with such bad grace. Pause, breathe…He has to extricate himself with some shred of dignity. My mistake. He starts to walk away, then stops and turns because, fuck it, he’s come this far. So it’s OK if I ask Mum. About Amy. He holds his father’s eye.

That’s not a good idea, Alex.

You fucking…

Don’t talk to me like that.

I’ll talk to you how the hell I like. Grabbing two fistfuls of his father’s shirt and pushing him backwards.

Alex, stop this. Winded as he slams against the wall.

You sit all around all day moaning, you get some shitty job in a bookshop while Mum goes out and works her arse off and all the time you’re fucking someone else.

Alex. Keep your voice down.

You coward.

Something broken in his father’s eyes. He lets go. There are things he meant to say, promises he meant to extract, but something else is demanding his attention. Crouch End. The fear has gone and will never come back, he knows this with absolute certainty, but he had not realised the price he would have to pay. His father is lazy and weak and selfish but he stands between Alex and something that is cold and vast and dark and utterly inhuman. He realises that when he dies his parents will no longer be there to hold him. He is genuinely alone for the first time in his life. He turns away. He cannot bear to look at his father’s face. He steps out of his unlaced shoes, places them neatly by the door and walks into the house.

♦

Benjy always loved packing a rucksack, the gathering and celebration of possessions, pearls running through the king’s fingers. The gladius with its handguard of plaited rope, the pen that wrote in eight colours, Mr Seal and Mr Crocodile, the metal thing, the Natural History Museum notebook, a piece of sheep poo in a Ziploc freezer bag, a dog he had moulded out of candlewax last night during supper. He was eager to get going. No one made you do homework or tidy your room or be constructive on a journey because the journey was the constructive thing and it looked after itself so you could do what you wanted while it was happening. But they weren’t setting off for two hours so he put their names in the guest book, adding ages for himself and Alex and Daisy. I liked walking up the hill and the rain strom and the sheepherd’s pie at the grannery. He then spent twenty minutes filling a double page spread with an intricate drawing of the house and garden. The horse’s skull, the frogspawn pond, the letters G and F interlaced in the rusted ornamental cast iron of the downhill gate. Everyone said what a wonderful drawing it was, better than a proper grown-up drawing somehow, the wonky lines, the weird scale, the eccentric detail, for this is how they will all remember the place, nothing quite as it was, elements added, elements removed. The stove will loom large for Angela, the shed for Alex. Everyone will forget the fox weathervane. And whenever Louisa thinks about the valley she will remember looking up from the garden to see a plane trailing smoke and flames from a burning engine, though this is something they will see when passing an airfield on their way home.

♦

Angela fills a bowl with Shreddies and full-fat milk and sprinkles three spoons of soft brown sugar over the top before carrying it through to the dining room. That weak washed-out feeling you get when recovering from flu. She sits down. Alex?

There are five pieces of toast on his plate. He is shaking. What?

Are you all right?

Yeh. He wants to tell her why he is upset. He reaches out across the table to take his mother’s hand. Then he stops and picks up the marmalade instead because he remembers Daisy saying she’d had a weird turn in the middle of the night. She’s the one who needs protecting now.

Richard hobbles into the dining room and unplugs his iPhone from its little white charger in the socket by the window. Packed and ready?

Ten minutes, says Alex, and Angela thinks how her brother is returning to a life which is so much more solid and purposeful than the lives which await them. The hospital, the apartment on Moray Place.

Richard pours himself a coffee and stands sipping. He had expected something to be resolved or mended or rediscovered over the last few days. He wants to say to Angela that she and Dominic should visit Edinburgh sometime but he finds it hard to sound enthusiastic, so he says it to Alex instead. Good hills for running and biking. It won’t happen, of course. This makes him sadder than he expected.

Dominic walks upstairs to strip the bed and check the drawers and perform a rudimentary clean of the bathroom. When Alex grabbed hold of him he thought something would change. Revelation, turning point, but it doesn’t happen, it never happens. He pictures his life as a clumsy cartwheel down a long long hill, hitting this rock and that tree, a little more bruised and scratched with each successive impact till…what? till the ground levels out? till he finds himself airborne over some great ravine? He takes his phone out of his pocket. It is still turned off. God knows how many messages waiting. None maybe. He is not sure which is worse.

He squirts Cif into the sink and scrubs it with the little yellow and green sponge, paying close attention to the taps, rinsing everything with clean water and drying it with a hand towel. He has no idea what Alex will do, no way of finding out and no way of stopping it. Guests are kindly requested to leave the house in the condition they found it. He squirts Domestos round the toilet bowl and scrubs it with the long-handled plastic brush. He lifts the thin white liner out of the flip-top bin. Tissues, disposable razor, waxy Q-tips.

Melissa swings into the dining room. Alex smiles at her, he actually fucking smiles. She pours herself a cup of coffee, stands drinking, makes herself look like Richard who is doing the same thing on the other side of the table, glances at her watch. Twenty minutes left. She tries to make it sound funny but no one laughs, because it’s not A Midsummer Night’s Dream, is it? More like Doctor Faustus. A deal with the devil. She could make people do anything she wanted, but she had no idea what she wanted. I need some fresh air.

Alex thinks about last night all over again and it helps compensate for the Dad thing a little. He puts butter and jam on another two slices of toast.

Louisa and Daisy sit on the bench talking about Ian, the wayward years, the civil ceremony on Skye, the Staffordshire Bull Terrier. There is a bumpy mattress of grey cloud to the east but above the valley the sky is a flawless blue, a valedictory blessing, or maybe it’s just Daisy’s buoyant mood. Melissa comes out of the front door with a coffee, glances their way and bodyswerves left.

I hope she’s OK.

Louisa spins the last of her orange juice around the base of her glass. She’s like her father. She’ll be hugely successful and make vast amounts of money and never stop being angry.

Alex showers and packs, stuffing everything haphazardly into his one sports bag. Dry, damp, clean, dirty.

Angela finds Richard trying to lug a suitcase downstairs and forces him to sit down while she wheels it outside and hoists it into the boot.

Dominic walks into the shed. Spark plugs, the horse’s skull. In the corner a tub of old paint, four litres, Dulux magnolia. He finds a big screwdriver, jams it under the lip and heaves. The lid squeaks and bends and finally pops open, spraying tiny orange flakes of rust in his face. The paint separated but still liquid, dishwater grey with snotty lumps. Hard to believe it would turn white if you mixed it. He takes his phone out of his pocket, touches the surface of the liquid and lets go. He expects it to clunk faintly against the bottom of the tin but it simply vanishes. He imagines it falling slowly down a tube that carries on till it reaches the centre of the earth.

Dominic? Angela is calling.

Louisa puts her hand on the bumpy wall and listens. Paint over plaster over stone. Nothing. Complete silence.

Benjy comes out of the house carrying his rucksack and the taxi pulls into the drive simultaneously, as if this whole holiday has been his own personal arrangement and everyone else is merely tagging along.

One last photo, says Richard. So Dominic balances the camera on the wall, a wedge of flint under the lens to get the elevation right. He presses the timer release then scoots across the grass and slots himself in beside Melissa. Just before the shutter clicks Daisy catches sight of something moving up there on the hill and turns to look, so that when Alex plugs it into Photoshop later that same evening she will be a blur, unreadable, but more alive than all her frozen family. They will look at this photograph many years later and realise that the camera saw something more clearly than any of them.

It’s the same Viking guy with the scar who brought them at the beginning of the week, but he’s driving a people carrier this time, which strikes Richard as odd because they always seem permanently attached to one vehicle, like centaurs. Everyone apart from Benjy and Melissa turns to one another, trying to gauge the expected warmth of the parting, but it’s Louisa who breaks the spell and hugs Daisy and says, We’re going to visit you, both of us, soon. It’s obvious to everyone that she hasn’t mentioned this to Richard and equally obvious that she doesn’t need to.

The hug takes Angela by surprise. A little jag of shame, though she is glad that Daisy and Louisa can act as deputies for each family, displaying the familiarity that she and Richard do not feel and probably never will. She shakes Richard’s hand, clasping it between both of hers to prevent the gesture seeming too formal. Thanks. It was really generous of you. It sounds like an apology, which it is, of course.

Alex tries to catch Melissa’s eye but she is staring adamantly elsewhere. He wants someone else to know what happened last night, someone who knows Melissa, someone who understands how extraordinary it was. He wonders whether he can tell Daisy.

Goodbye, Benjamin. Richard squeezes his shoulder, but he has never had children of his own and doesn’t understand that vacant look in Benjy’s eyes, the way he disengages while adults do their tricky dances of arrival and departure.

Benjy? Dad is looking at him with raised eyebrows.

He returns briefly to the moment. Thank you, Uncle Richard. The vinegar rocket was really good. Then he is gone again.

You’re welcome.

So… Dominic blows into his hands as if he’s cold.

Two, three, seconds of discomfort then some silent signal releases them. They climb in to the taxi, into the Mercedes. Doors slide and thunk shut. The taxi does a four-point turn and bumps through the gate onto the rutted stony mud of the track, the Mercedes in its wake. A single pane of glass rattles. The brief scent of exhaust, the noise of engines fading as they circle the house and head towards the main road.

So little of them left, the faintest smell of cocoa butter, dirty sheets and pillowcases, muddy towels, a purple GoGo behind the radiator in the dining room, a yellow GoGo under the fridge, the makeshift circlip behind the washing machine. I liked walking up the hill. The burnt and cracked head of a china doll in the ashes of the stove.

Cloud moving in from the east and thickening. Specks of rain. A red Datsun making its way up from Longtown. Joan and her daughter, Kelly, who come every Friday to clean the house during the holiday season and make it ready for the next guests who will arrive later in the afternoon, though Kelly will spend most of the time sitting in the little window seat in the kitchen, rocking gently back and forth, tapping her chin with her fist and singing a song that has no words.

Framed watercolours of mallow and campion. Secrets of the Night. A Sparrow Falls. The banknote. The brass spoons. Brother, my Lungs are not Goode. The pattern of ancient paths. Hay Bluff, Lord Hereford’s Knob. Heather and purple moor-grass and little craters of rippling peaty water. High up, a red kite weaving its way through the holes in the wind.

EOF