The Red House Read Free Page A

. Groper Roper made them listen to it at school. Pearls before swine . Probably in prison by now. Don’t let him get you in the instrument cupboard . It was a joke back then. Interfering with children . Looking back, though, it’s Roper who feels like the victim, the taunts, those damp eyes, the kind of man who hanged himself in isolated woodland.
    Louisa was slowly coming round. Classical music and the smell of the cardboard fir tree on the rearview mirror. She was in the car with Richard, wasn’t she. So often these days she seemed to hoverbetween worlds, none of them wholly real. Her brothers, Carl and Dougie, worked in a car factory and lived six doors away from each other on the Blackthorn Estate. Not quite cars on bricks and fridges in the grass, not in their own gardens at least. When she visited they faked a pride in the sister who had bettered herself but what they really felt was disdain, and whilst she tried to return it she could feel the pull of a world in which you didn’t have to think constantly of how others saw you. Craig had reveled in it. The two-worlds thing, Jaguar outside the chip shop, donkey jacket at parents’ evening.
    Wales. She’d forgotten. God. She’d only met Richard’s family once. They liked you and you liked them . Had they? Had she? She’d trumped them by wearing too much black. Benjamin, the little boy, was wearing a Simpsons T-shirt of all things. She overheard him asking his father what would happen to his grandmother’s body in the coming months . And the way the girl sang the hymns. As if there might be something wrong with her.
    Richard had been seated next to Louisa at Tony Caborn’s wedding, on what she correctly referred to as the divorcées’ table in the corner of the marquee, presumably to quarantine the bad voodoo. Someone’s discarded trophy wife, he thought. He introduced himself and she said, Don’t chat me up, OK? She was visibly drunk. I seem to be giving off some kind of vibes today . He explained that he had no plans in that particular direction and she laughed, quite clearly at him rather than with him.
    He turned and listened to a portly GP bemoaning the number of heroin users his practice was obliged to deal with, but his attention kept slipping to the conversation happening over his shoulder. Celebrity gossip and the shortcomings of Louisa’s ex-husband, the wealthy builder. She was clearly not his kind of person, but the GP clearly was his kind of person and was boring him to death. Later on he watched her stand and cross the dance floor, big hips but firm, something Nordic about her, comfortable in her body in a way that Jennifer had never been. No plans in that particular direction . He’d been a pompous arse.When she sat down he apologized for his earlier rudeness and she said, Tell me about yourself , and he realized how long it had been since someone had said this.
    Mum was smiling at Richard and doing the flirty thing where she hooked her hair behind her ear. It made Melissa think of them having sex, which disgusted her. They were in a traffic jam and Mika was singing “Grace Kelly.” She took out a black biro and doodled a horse on the flyleaf of the Ian McEwan. How bizarre that your hand was part of your body, like one of those mechanical grabbers that picked up furry toys in a glass case at a fair. You could imagine it having a mind of its own and strangling you at night.
Mine with storms of care opprest
Is taught to pity the distrest .
Mean wretches’ grief can touch ,
So soft, so sensible my breast ,
But ah! I fear, I pity his too much .
    He was thinking about that girl who’d turned up in casualty last week. Nikki Fallon? Hallam? Nine years old, jewel-green eyes and greasy blond hair. He knew even before he’d done the X-rays. Something too malleable about her, too flat, one of those kids who had never been given the opportunity to disagree and had given up trying. Six old fractures and no hospital record. He went to tell the