The Red House Read Free

he was a child he kept a horse’s tooth in a Golden Virginia tobacco tin, and Mum said, For Christ’s sake . But Dad came back carrying the metal thing with seconds to spare and gave it to Benjy and said, Guard it with your life . And as they were pulling out of the station Benjy saw an old lady with long gray hair being arrested by two policemen in fluorescent-yellow jackets. One of the policemen had a gun. Then there was another train traveling beside them at almost exactly the same speed and Benjy remembered the story about Albert Einstein doing a thought experiment, sitting on a tram in Vienna going at the speed of light and shining a torch straight ahead so the light just sat there like candyfloss.
    You hate Richard because he swans around his spacious Georgian apartment on Moray Place four hundred miles away while you perch on that scuffed olive chair listening to Mum roar in the cage of herbroken mind. The nurses burn my hands. There was an air raid last night . You hate him because he pays for all of it, the long lawn, the low-rent cabaret on Friday nights, Magic Memories: The Stars of Yesteryear . You hate him for marrying that woman who expected your children to eat lamb curry and forced you to stay in a hotel. You hate him for replacing her so efficiently, as if an event which destroyed other people’s lives were merely one more medical procedure, the tumor sliced out, wound stitched and swabbed. You hate him because he is the prodigal son. When will Richard come to see me? Do you know Richard? He’s such a lovely boy .
    In spite of which, deep down, you like being the good child, the one who cares. Deep down you are still waiting for a definitive judgment in which you are finally raised above your relentlessly achieving brother, though the only person who could make that kind of judgment was drifting in and out of their final sleep, the mask misting and clearing, the low hiss of the cylinder under the bed. And then they were gone.
    M6 southbound, the sprawl of Birmingham finally behind them. Richard dropped a gear and eased the Mercedes round a Belgian chemical tanker. FRANKLEY SERVICES 2 MILES . He imagined pulling over in the corner of the car park to watch Louisa sleeping, that spill of butter-colored hair, the pink of her ear, the mystery of it, why a man was aroused by the sight of one woman and not another, something deep in the brain stem like a sweet tooth or a fear of snakes. He looked in the rearview mirror. Melissa was listening to her iPod. She gave him a deadpan comedy wave. He slid the Eliot Gardiner Dido and Aeneas into the CD player and turned up the volume.
    Melissa stared out of the window and pictured herself in a film. She was walking across a cobbled square. Pigeons, cathedral. She was wearing the red leather jacket Dad had bought her in Madrid. Fifteenyears old. She walked into that room, heads turned and suddenly she understood.
    But they’d want her to be friends with the girl, wouldn’t they, just because they were the same age. Like Mum wanted to be friends with some woman on the till in Tesco’s because they were both forty-four. The girl could have made herself look all right but she hadn’t got a clue. Maybe she was a lesbian. Seven days in the countryside with someone else’s relatives. It’s a big thing for Richard . Because keeping Richard happy was obviously their Function in Life. Right.
Shake the cloud from off your brow ,
Fate your wishes does allow;
Empires growing ,
Pleasures flowing ,
Fortune smiles and so should you .
    Some idiot came past on a motorbike at Mach 4. Richard pictured a slick of spilt oil, sparks fantailing from the sliding tank, massive head trauma and the parents agreeing to the transplant of all the major organs so that some good might come of a short life so cheaply spent, though Sod’s Law would doubtless apply and some poor bastard would spend the next thirty years emptying his catheter bag and wiping scrambled egg off his chin.
    Dido and Aeneas